The Decolonizing Art History Companion

The first global, comprehensive text to explicate, theorize, and propose decolonial methodologies for art historians, museum professionals, artists, and other visual culture scholars, teachers, and practitioners is The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History. Art history as a discipline and its associated institutions - the museum, the art market - are not only products of colonial legacies but also active agents in the consolidation of empire and the construction of the West. This companion joins the growing critical discourse around the decolonial through an assessment of how art history may be rethought and mobilized in the service of justice - racial, gender, social, environmental, restorative, and more.

Engaging with disrupting master narratives and forging new directions, often within a hostile academy or an indifferent art world, this book draws attention to the work of artists, art historians, and scholars in related fields. It unpacks the assumptions projected onto objects of art and visual culture, as well as the discourse that contains them. The volume equally addresses the complexities around representation as visual and discursive praxis through a range of epistemologies and metaphors originated outside or against the logic of modernity.

Organized into four thematic sections: Being and Doing, Learning and Listening, Sensing and Seeing, and Living and Loving, this companion will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, museum studies, race and ethnic studies, cultural studies, disability studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.

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