ENTANGLED FREEDOMS: Decolonial Modernisms as Transnational Relations of Resistance, 1940s-1980s

ENTANGLEDFREEDOMS studies how practices and discourses of artistic modernism from the decolonizing worlds of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East entangled with plural and contesting notions of freedom during 20th-century decolonization and Cold War.

Taking scopes of ‘freedom’ out of hegemonic Cold War binaries of western ‘First World’ vs. socialist ‘Second World’ values, I read it instead, in dialogue with its resonant global vocabularies of independence/liberation/emancipation, and via visual art.

I argue that during Cold War decades of 1940s-1980s, decolonial modernisms from ‘Third World’ contexts of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East – with their visions of freedom as anti-colonial independence and liberation movements – both engaged with and resisted ‘First World’ notions of freedom as universalist individualism and socialist ‘Second World’ notions of freedoms as revolutionary struggle.

Drawing from the Caribbean theorist Édouard Glissant, I call these ‘relations’ of resistance, whereby decolonial modernisms relate with First/Second World ideas of freedom via difference – not in unilinear assimilation or resistance, or in pure refusals via ‘non-alignment’.

In ENTANGLEDFREEDOMS, I lead a Project Team to answer collectively a research question not yet asked in the expanding fields of global (art) histories, postcolonial studies or even 21st-century decolonial theories: How did 20th-century decolonial modernisms visualize, entangle, and transform plural visions of freedoms across and beyond geographies of Cold War and decolonization?

With its empirically rooted historical and relational methods, and a theoretically generative research plan for comparative decolonial aesthetics from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East – in relation with Euro-American histories – ENTANGLEDFREEDOMS is an ambitious, transnational project that puts entangled artistic and political imagination from the decolonizing world at the heart of a potential global historiography of art and freedoms.