Partisan Aesthetics

Modern Art and India's Long Decolonization

Sanjukta Sunderason (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

344 Seiten

2020 | New edition
Stanford University Press (Verlag)
978-1-5036-1299-0 (ISBN)

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Partisan Aesthetics explores art's entanglements with histories of war, famine, mass politics and displacements that marked late-colonial and postcolonial India. Introducing "partisan aesthetics" as a conceptual grid, the book identifies ways in which art became political through interactions with left-wing activism during the 1940s, and the afterlives of such interactions in post-independence India. Using an archive of artists and artist collectives working in Calcutta from these decades, Sanjukta Sunderason argues that artists became political not only as reporters, organizers and cadre of India's Communist Party, or socialist fellow travelers, but through shifting modes of political participations and dissociations. Unmooring questions of Indian modernism from its hitherto dominant harnesses to national or global affiliations, Sunderason activates, instead, distinctly locational histories that refract transnational currents. She analyzes largely unknown and dispersed archives—drawings, diaries, posters, periodicals, and pamphlets, alongside paintings and prints—and insists that art as archive is foundational to understanding modern art's socialist affiliations during India's long decolonization. By bringing together expanding fields of South Asian art, global modernisms, and Third World cultures, Partisan Aesthetics generates a new narrative that combines political history of Indian modernism, social history of postcolonial cultural criticism, and intellectual history of decolonization.

Sanjukta Sunderason is Assistant Professor at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies, the Netherlands.

Postscript: Toward an Aesthetics of Decolonization
Introduction: Partisan Aesthetics: Configurations
Chapter 1: "Political Potentiality": Jamini Roy and the Formations of Progressive Art Criticism
Chapter 2: "As Agitator and Organizer": Socialist Realism and Artist-cadres of the Communist Party of India
Chapter 3: "Concrete Contextuality": Realism and Its Discontents in the Art of the Calcutta Group
Chapter 4: "All the More Real for Not Being Preached": Forms and Futures of Socialist Art in Nehruvian India
Chapter 5: "Revolution in the Tropics, Love in the Tropics": Arts of Displacement in the Post-colony

Erscheinungsdatum	04.06.2020
Reihe/Serie	South Asia in Motion
Zusatzinfo	31 halftones
Verlagsort	Palo Alto
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Kunstgeschichte / Kunststile
	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Geschichte / Politik ► Allgemeines / Lexika
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
ISBN-10	1-5036-1299-6 / 1503612996
ISBN-13	978-1-5036-1299-0 / 9781503612990
Zustand	Neuware