Spring 2021 (Graduate): City College New York, City University of New York*

*Course taught (online) as part of my postdoctoral appointment at the Graduate Center, CUNY

Course Description:

To mark the republication of Geeta Kapur’s When Was Modernism (2000, 2020), this course unpacks Kapur’s vast contribution to modernist art theory—to questions of art, nationalism, and internationalism; leftism and third world politics; gender and queerness; abstraction and figuration; canonical theories of the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde; and contemporary art’s globalization. Despite the importance of her work, Kapur’s writing can be a challenge for readers unfamiliar with South Asian art history. This course will therefore serve as a chronological survey of South Asian modernism from the colonial period to the contemporary and a study of Kapur’s major texts. This dual approach situates key movements in South Asian modernism within framework that can be mobilized for a comparative approach to modernist art history globally and throughout Asia, as we will see in selected comparative readings and images in class.

Students will:

• Gain an understanding of key artistic movements in South Asia (1850 to the present) and their global and pan-Asian connections.
• Learn to formally evaluate key works in Indian art and dismantle the analytical tropes including belatedness, derivativeness, primitiveness, etc., that have been used to dismiss or marginalize those works in the past.
• Gain an understanding of important social and political events in South Asian history including Partition; the emergence of the “Third World”; the 1962, 1965 and 1971 wars; the Emergency; and 1990s economic liberalization.
• Grasp Kapur’s theoretical project in relation to canonical theories of modernism: the avant garde and the neo-avant garde; abstraction versus figuration; identity and postmodern culture; and the “global contemporary,” among others.