Introduction

When African and Asian writers from thirty-six countries gathered in Tashkent in October 1958 for the first time, they hailed the meeting as ‘a step towards the reunification of the disrupted soul of mankind’. This extraordinary claim was rooted in the universally shared struggles of decolonization and emancipation after World War II. Afro-Asian intellectuals looked upon literature and the arts as a source of power to fight violence, divisiveness, and injustice as they sought to transform the world. After six decades, what can we learn from their experiences of solidarity? Will the idea of the Global South recuperate their moral vision? In her lecture, Liu will try to reopen that history and ask some new questions about geopolitics, temporality, and competing universals.

Lydia H. Liu is the Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Her publications include The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (2010), The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (2004), and Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity (1995). More recently, she published a co-edited volume called The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (2013) with Rebecca Karl and Dorothy Ko.

The afternoon session at the ICI Berlin addresses the lived entanglements of the global that are not adequately theorized by notions of the global and the local, which bifurcate experiences that are necessarily co-constituting. It will take up the question of how artworks, artists, cultural producers, art historians, historians, and theorists who simultaneously exist on multiple and intertwining scales, co-constitute the global in relation with one another through meaning making/world-making processes of (critical) interconnecting, social networks, transnational/transcultural historiography, the circulation of objects, and imagined communities.

We aim to address methodological challenges in the study of art history that reimagines its possible narratives by simultaneously holding account of art’s global resonances and its local, national, and regional frameworks. The papers on this panel are situated at the intersection between diaspora, postcolonial, and global (art history) studies. They seek to decolonize and deimperialize new top-down narratives of so called ‘global art’, that often identify global capitalism as the universal condition and will instead shed light on the multiperspectival polyphony that co-constitutes the global.Programme

15:30-17:30 Panel
Birgit Hopfener, Carleton University
Devika Singh, Cambridge University
Francesca Tarocco, NYU Shanghai/Cà Foscari University, Venice
David Teh, National University of Singapore
Ming Tiampo, Carleton University

17:30-18:00 Discussion/Q&A
moderated by John Tain

18:00-18:15 Coffee Break

18:15-18:45 Book Launch
for Sarah Dornhof, Nanne Buurman, Birgit Hopfener, Barbara Lutz (eds.) Situating Global Art: Topologies, Temporalities, Trajectories (Bielefeld 2018).

18:45-19:00 Break

19:00 Keynote
Lydia H. Liu (Columbia University)