HART0172 Art & Visual Culture in Modern South Asia - Indicative Weekly Topics and Suggested Reading

Indicative Weekly Reading

1.    Decentering Modernism in South Asia

2.    Karkhana and Collaboration

3.    Unmaking the “Miniature”

4.    Power and the Picturesque: British Artists in India

5.    A(uto)nonymity: Company School Painting and Artistic Agency 

6.    Kalighat Painting and the Art of the Bazaar 

7.    Photography and the Colonial Gaze

8.    Art/School/Infrastructure

9.    Raja Ravi Varma, A National Artist?

10.    “Swadeshi” and Aesthetic Discourse in South Asia 

11.    The Bengal School 

12.    The Bengal School and its Critics

13.    Santiniketan, Sculpture, and the Subaltern

14.    Feminism, Subalternity, and Retakes

15.    Gendered Iconographies of the Nation

16.    Midnight’s Children: The Progressives

17.    The Crisis of Partition

18.    1947/Now

19.    Architecture, Nation-Building, and the Nehruvian Ideal

20.    Bhuphen Khakhar: You Can’t Please All at Tate Modern

Suggested Reading

Monica Juneja, “Global Art History and the ‘Burden of Representation,’” Global Studies: Mapping Contemporary Art and Culture (2011): 274-297.

Partha Mitter, “Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garden Art from the Periphery,” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 90, No. 4 (Dec. 2008): 531-574.

Tapati Guha-Thakurta, “The Period of Colonialism and Nationalism, c. 1757-1947,” in Art of India: Prehistory to the Present, Rick Asher, ed. (2003), pp. 109-128.