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Productive failure
Writing queer transnational South Asian art histories
Alpesh Kantilal Patel
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Productive failure
Writing queer transnational South Asian art histories
Alpesh Kantilal Patel
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This monograph provides novel methods for writing transnational South Asian art history outside of genealogy.
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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 â Lâessentiel est invisible pour les yeux (âWhat is essential is invisible to the eyeâ). (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, âthe supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude [ ⊠] But the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace.â3
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 âphilosophical agent provocateursâ 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 âparadoxâ â a word I use in my first sentence in this introduction â 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, âThe Paradoxes of Criticismâ, 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 â against and/or beside â 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 âagainst and/or besideâ the normative or âreceived wisdomâ. In this way â and slightly reworking what he writes â I work against the âconstantive, reportive dimensions of ⊠[hegemonic art] historical inquiryâ.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 â rather than be â 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 âArt history ⊠should less define itself on the ground of what it is, than of what it doesâ.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 âfavors radical contingencyâ 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 â[n]ot arguing against ethnological or post-colonial approachesâ 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 âradical contingencyâ as a polemical point is perhaps too general and âthus in itself not contingentâ 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 âBrown Atlanticâ
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 âBrown Atlanticâ 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 âin motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbeanâ to theorize black diasporic identities and to âfocus attention on the middle passageâ.15 Gilroy refers to this âmiddle passageâ as the âBlack Atlanticâ, which he argues avoids the implications of the classical notion of âdiasporaâ. According to him, in an interview with philosopher Timmy Lott, the latter assumes an âobsession with origins, purity and invariant samenessâ.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 â such as the âLusophone Black Atlanticâ, the geographical area bound by the slave routes between Portugal, Brazil and Africa.17 In connection to a âBrown Atlanticâ, Gopinath writes, âSuch 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.â18 The âBrown Atlanticâ 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 âroots and routesâ, 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 âqueerâ 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...