75. Provincialising Art History: Rethinking Art Historiography in the Postcolonial World

This session responds to the expanding body of scholarship that has sought to globalise and decolonise art history by challenging the Eurocentric foundations of the discipline. The work of scholars such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Mitter, James Elkins, David Carrier, Monica Juneja and others has fundamentally reshaped discussions of world art histories, multiple modernities and the place of the Global South in art historical discourse. These interventions have transformed the geographical and conceptual terrains of the discipline, while also raising important questions about its methods, categories and narratives.

By building upon these debates, this session turns attention to art historiography as a critical site of enquiry. The session asks how art historical knowledge itself is produced in postcolonial contexts rather than asking only how neglected artists, regions or traditions may be incorporated into existing histories. What alternative understandings of archives, temporality, artistic categories and intellectual genealogies emerge through vernacular scholarship, regional institutions, exhibition histories, print cultures, oral traditions and interdisciplinary methods? How might these practices challenge inherited assumptions about evidence, chronology and the disciplinary boundaries of art history?

We welcome papers that examine historiographical practices across postcolonial contexts through archives, biography, translation, museums, exhibition histories, regional art writing, Indigenous epistemologies, digital methodologies and other approaches that rethink the production of art historical knowledge. The session seeks to foster comparative conversations on the plurality of historiographical traditions shaping art history today.

Themes: Art historiography, Decolonial discourses, Vernacular histories

Additional format comment: The session will consist of four 20-minute papers, each followed by five minutes of discussion, with concluding remarks by the convenor to draw together the key historiographical themes.

Lead Convenor: Amalu Shaji, Research Scholar, India

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.