ARTMargins Vol. 12.2

ARTMargins Vol. 12.2
Special Issue: Art History, Postcolonialism, and the Global Turn

Introduction
Art History, Postcolonialism, and the Global Turn
Joshua I. Cohen, Foad Torshizi, Vazira Zamindar

Articles
Ch'ixi Epistemology and The Potosí Principle in the 21st Century
Alexander Alberro

Southern Lights: Octavio Paz's “Glimpses of India” and the Art of Relation
Sonal Khullar

Counting Quality, Seeing Patterns
Ijlal Muzaffar

What Does Art History Have to Say About a Lebanese Sasquatch? The Body of Decolonial Struggle in Amanda Boulos's Art
Tammer S. El-Sheikh

This Past Must Address Its Future: Uses of African Noncontemporaneity in Contemporary Art from the French Borderscape
Jennifer Bajorek
This Past Must Address Its Future: Uses of African Noncontemporaneity in Contemporary Art from the French Borderscape

On the Aspirations of Architecture and Design in 20th-Century South Asia
Vishal Khandelwal

Artist Project
Color Charts
Bani Abidi

When taken as a conglomerate, the postcolonial, the global, and the decolonial might signal a coordinated “decolonizing” action—one of breaking with the Eurocentric, patriarchal, and nationalist foundations of art history. Yet from a disaggregating perspective, these three terms and their respective domains cannot be seen as synonymous or entirely harmonious. What particularly demands scrutiny is the tendency to dismiss the postcolonial, or announce its demise, by claiming it has been superseded by other paradigms, namely the global and the decolonial. This introductory essay, and its accompanying special issue of ARTMargins, seeks to trace the postcolonial, global, and decolonial as they have intersected with scholarship in art history over the past five decades, and to challenge postcolonialism’s presumed obsolescence in the wake of the global turn. Postcolonial thought, we argue, has given rise to a generative series of critical interventions in art history at least since the 1970s and 1980s, and has proven to be nuanced and self-reflexive. Postcolonial lines of inquiry not only continue to offer ways of critically exploring colonial-era and subsequent artistic practices, but also allow for interrogations of formations of art and the discipline of art history as colonial forms of knowledge. As such, postcolonialism still vitalizes debates within the discipline regarding the constitution of its own objects, lineaments, and methods.

by Joshua I. Cohen, Foad Torshizi, Vazira Zamindar

June 2023.