Cosmopolitan Modernisms

'Cosmopolitan Modernisms is animated by the reappearances of forgotten conjunctions and overlooked characters that should command whole volumes in their own right'
Kodwo Eshun, Frieze, April 2006 

'It's about time the next step was taken in cross-cultural discourse around art. Cosmopolitan Modernisms is a detailed, often brilliant examination of what lies beneath the opaque surface of modernist art history. I read it with growing excitement about all the possibilities it suggests for future scholarship.'
Lucy R. Lippard
author of Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America

'This is exactly what we have been waiting for ... These essays ensure that cultural difference and social place are not optional add-ons but the very stuff of the expanded history of artistic practice and interpretation'
Griselda Pollock
Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art, University of Leeds

Co-published by Iniva and The MIT Press, Cosmopolitan Modernisms explores various moments in 20^th-century art where the encounter between different cultures has produced something distinctive and revealing about the lived experience of modernity. Distinguished art historians and emerging scholars are brought together in this book by a critical dialogue that pushes beyond separate areas of study to arrive at a more connective approach to the history of art.

Travelling through a variety of historical contexts, from colonial India and pre-war Germany, to post-1945 Brazil, and the Caribbean and African American spaces of the black Atlantic diaspora, this unique collection re-defines the ‘cosmopolitan' as a critical aspect of the questioning attitude that artists adopted throughout the world.

ISBN: 1-899846-41-7
208pp, softback with flaps, 235 x 180mm, 28 illustrations
Published by Iniva and The MIT Press, 2005

Trade sales in UK & Europe: http://www.cornerhouse.org/books/instituteofinternationalvisualarts

Table of Contents available below as a download

Essays by: Michael Asbury, David Craven, Ann Eden Gibson, Kobena Mercer, Partha Mitter, Paul Overy, Michael Richardson, Lowery Stokes Sims

Book design: Untitled

Annotating Art's Histories series
Featuring internationally renowned scholars and curators at the critical edge of current research in art history, visual culture, and the humanities, Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures is the third volume in the Annotating Art's Histories series. Newly-comissioned writings are presented alongside bibliographies, translations, and selected reprints of key texts. Building up a richer understanding of cultural difference as a dynamic feature of 20th-century art, this acclaimed series is essential reading for students, practitioners, and anyone curious about cross-cultural interaction in the visual arts.

The Annotating Art's Histories series is supported by The Getty Foundation.

Other books in the series
Cosmopolitan Modernisms
Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures
Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers