Productive failure

Writing queer transnational South Asian art histories

Alpesh Kantilal Patel

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526113153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Asian Art

This monograph provides novel methods for writing transnational South Asian art history outside of genealogy.

1
Introduction: towards creolizing transnational South Asian art histories

Even the History of Art at the End of the Universe is not as far out as its proponents have claimed … Not every artwork made … is visible, and it is possible that there are many more that have not been counted, even by their curators or by art historians, simply because they have never been seen. When considering anything in deep space it is essential to remember a fundamental maxim of inter-planetary travel – L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux (‘What is essential is invisible to the eye’). (Raqs Media Collective)¹

This book project pivots around a seeming paradox or contradiction: my desire to construct the unwritten history of artworks by artists of South Asian descent produced in the transnational space bound by British colonialism and the impossibility and even problematic nature of such a project, however well intentioned. I have begun to provisionally map out a history of artworks by such artists in the post-1980s period who remain marginalized in the American and British context, but does making them visible achieve the inclusivity that is implied in such a project?² French philosopher Jacques Derrida's conceptualization of the supplement is instructive in this regard. He writes, ‘the supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude [ … ] But the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace.’³

Supplementing hegemonic art history, then, can never fully deliver on its promise of inclusivity; it will always fall short of becoming complete. New Delhi-based artists, curators and self-described ‘philosophical agent provocateurs’ Raqs Media Collective insinuate just as much.⁴ In the extract from a presentation they gave as part of the conference Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn, with which I begin this chapter, they suggest that there always will be artworks that are invisible to the art historian.⁵ Rather than suggesting that histories attempting inclusivity should be avoided merely because they are implicitly unfinished, this project aims to move away from only considering genealogy and writing art histories (plural) and thereby to make apparent their inherent supplementarity.

Visual culture and queer studies scholar Gavin Butt meditates on the word ‘paradox’ – a word I use in my first sentence in this introduction – in relation to art criticism; I want to consider this idea in the context of writing art histories. In his introduction to his edited volume of essays, ‘The Paradoxes of Criticism’, Butt writes:

This book considers criticism, then, in a defining relation to the paradoxical. Not paradox as in the strict sense of being logically contradictory … Rather that criticism, in order that it remain criticism, of necessity has to situate itself para – against and/or beside – the doxa of received wisdom.⁶

Art history is not art criticism, but I do want it to remain critical in the manner Butt describes: to situate itself ‘against and/or beside’ the normative or ‘received wisdom’. In this way – and slightly reworking what he writes – I work against the ‘constantive, reportive dimensions of … [hegemonic art] historical inquiry’.⁷ Indeed, I am not reporting facts but arranging them as evidence to create palpable fictions as history.⁸ In this way, paradox can be productive and generative: it can open up the multiple histories of art.

I approach art history as a performative doing rather than understanding it as the creation of stable, inviolable narratives that reveal the truth of the past. Precisely by not succeeding in producing conventional art historical narratives, a redefinition and reorientation of what art history can do – rather than be – is possible. German art historian Michael F. Zimmermann ends his introduction to the edited volume The Art Historian: National Traditions and Institutional Practices (2003) by similarly noting that ‘Art history … should less define itself on the ground of what it is, than of what it does’.⁹ His statement is meant as a rebuttal to what he describes as the endless claims of the death of art history. He writes that he ‘favors radical contingency’ for the discipline.¹⁰ In this way, it is constantly in a state of becoming knowledge. Aware that the death of art history has at least partially to do with its xenophobia and racism (among other issues), Zimmermann cautions that he is ‘[n]ot arguing against ethnological or post-colonial approaches’ to art history. Rather, he implies that these approaches are themselves part of the radical contingency that marks the discipline at its best.¹¹ Interestingly, he further notes that his particular notion of ‘radical contingency’ as a polemical point is perhaps too general and ‘thus in itself not contingent’ at all.¹² Given my specific interest in writing transnational South Asian art histories, this project can be seen as enacting the radical contingency of art history about which Zimmermann compellingly writes.

Defining transnational South Asia as the ‘Brown Atlantic’

To theorize the space of my analysis, I invoke British sociologist Paul Gilroy's theory of the Black Atlantic. Gilroy's theory draws upon and makes more specific French philosopher Michel Foucault's theories of genealogy, discourse and heterotopia through the specific optic of theories of black identity. My reworking of Gilroy's theory here is more of a lateral move to another space bound by a different set of power dynamics: it is the ‘Brown Atlantic’ to which both Asian American studies and film scholar Jigna Desai in her Beyond Bollywood (2004) and queer and South Asian cultural studies scholar Gayatri Gopinath in her Impossible Desires (2005) loosely refer in their scholarship.¹³

As Gilroy describes in his now epochal The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), his intercultural theorization of the Black Atlantic is not tethered to identitarian notions of ethnicity or nationalism.¹⁴ He famously invokes the metaphor of slave ships ‘in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean’ to theorize black diasporic identities and to ‘focus attention on the middle passage’.¹⁵ Gilroy refers to this ‘middle passage’ as the ‘Black Atlantic’, which he argues avoids the implications of the classical notion of ‘diaspora’. According to him, in an interview with philosopher Timmy Lott, the latter assumes an ‘obsession with origins, purity and invariant sameness’.¹⁶ Instead, the Black Atlantic is a theoretical model that underscores identity as always in flux.

The post-structuralist underpinnings of the Black Atlantic have allowed it to be reworked and adopted by scholars to theorize other more focused spaces – such as the ‘Lusophone Black Atlantic’, the geographical area bound by the slave routes between Portugal, Brazil and Africa.¹⁷ In connection to a ‘Brown Atlantic’, Gopinath writes, ‘Such a mapping of South Asian diasporic movement suggests the differences and similarities between the experiences of racialization of South Asian immigrations in North America and the UK.’¹⁸ The ‘Brown Atlantic’ could refer to a broad range of nations beyond the latter, such as Pakistan and the Caribbean (Jamaica, Trinidad, Tobago and Guyana) as well as former British colonies such as Fiji, South Africa and Mauritius to which South Asians migrated in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, I deal here primarily with the transnational space including the United Kingdom, United States and India which is bound by British colonialism.¹⁹

My own ‘roots and routes’, as Gilroy pithily refers to his Black Atlantic model, approximates the space of my analysis: I am a UK-born, US-raised and currently Miami, Florida-based subject whose family emigrated originally from Gujarat, India.²⁰ Also, much of the second half of this book was researched while I lived in Manchester, England. The case studies reflect these routes in that I focus largely on the United States and England with some attention to India. At the same time, my identification as ‘queer’ has added traction to a simplistic mapping of my personal history onto the space I have otherwise sketched out. In the next section, I expand on how I approach my authorship as well as how I attempt to prevent it fr...