Art History Library

Check out Art History faculty Atreyee Gupta’s new publication Non-Aligned: Art, Decolonization, and the Third World Project in India. (Yale University Press, 2025) 

From Yale University Press:

“A revelatory look at modernism in India, exploring art’s role in decolonization and aesthetic discourse across the Global South

Modernism’s peak in the interwar and postwar decades coincided with the eruption of antifascist and decolonization movements globally, including the League against Imperialism, the Bandung Asian-African Conference, and the Non-Aligned Movement. Viewing artistic practices through the lens of the radical intellectual possibilities that these epoch-making events prompted, Atreyee Gupta uncovers a modernist internationalism incongruous with Westernist cultural hegemonies. Modernism, she shows, cannot be separated from concepts of freedom and autonomy generated by Third World political struggles. Gupta mobilizes concepts including liberation, anti-imperialism, development, and modernization as essential analytic categories for art history, reorienting our understanding of both global modernism and Indian art.

Intertwining stories of art and liberation, aesthetics and decolonization, and intellectual practices and political revolution in the Third World, or what is now known as the Global South, Non-Aligned follows the far-flung interwar and postwar networks in which Indian artists and intellectuals such as Mulk Raj Anand, Dhanraj Bhagat, Francis N. Souza, Jagdish Swaminathan, and Abanindranath and Gaganendranath Tagore participated alongside interlocutors like W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Octavio Paz, André Malraux, and Le Corbusier in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. This riveting account is beautifully illustrated with rarely published artworks.”

Check out Lineages of the Global City, the new publication by new faculty member, Shiben Banerji.  It is available to view online through UC Library Search.

From University of Texas Press:

This is a beautifully researched and realized work of scholarship, which unveils a remarkable archive of urban images that connect occultism, modernism, globality, and architecture. It will be of great value to historians, architects, planners, and scholars of cultural modernity due to its powerful argument for the cosmological underpinnings of modern urban thought.

~Arjun Appadurai, New York University, author of The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition

In the contemporary era of climate crisis, growing concerns about the exploitation of nature, resurgent nationalism, and what is looking to be a new global political and economic order that will impact not just nations but also cities, this provocative book will spark considerable debate about what kinds of urban habitats we want to build and whether historical models relegated to the dustbin of twentieth-century architectural history can indeed offer new food for thought in these turbulent times.

~Diane E. Davis, Harvard Graduate School of Design; CIFAR Fellow and Project Co-Director, Humanity’s Urban Future

You can read the abstract here.