Asian Modernisms: Art, Nation and World, c.1860-1970

This course introduces students to the development of modern visual art in India, Indonesia and Japan in relation to process of colonisation and decolonisation. Students will be offered an understanding of how modernism in these countries follows regionally and culturally specific trajectories, responding to political, technological and social transformations. Particular emphasis will be placed on understanding the formation of national consciousness in the context of imperialism, and on the relationship between national belonging and cosmopolitanism. While dominant discourses in art history tend to consign non-western modernist art to a marginal status and/or treat it as derivative or Euro-American innovations, this course highlights complex interrelations between these non-western modernisms and the development of Euro-American modernism. Concentrating on a century of artistic practices from the later nineteenth century onwards, the course will offer students an introduction to visual practices, historical approaches and theoretical formulations that deal with modernism, across national and international perspectives. The course will address colonial and postcolonial histories of art, as well as relations between art practice and national traditions.