The Routledge Companion to Global Art Histories

‘This vital volume offers the much-needed particularity to the sometimes sweeping claims of global art history. Through finely focused reflection on dynamic material, it affords readers not so much explanation or conclusion but an initiation into other modes of expressive practice, alongside a different technique of inquiry. Here is a proposition too important to miss, as it begins to at last speak of the global from other places.’

- Patrick Flores, Chief Curator, National Gallery Singapore

‘This volume does more than merely chart the rise of “global art history” – it interrogates what that shift actually demands of us. Moving decisively past reductive paradigms of inclusion and exclusion, its comparative framework pushes at deeper knowledge structures, and asks what an expanded geography truly means for historiography, pedagogy, methodology, theory and curatorial practice. A timely and substantial addition to the Routledge Art History & Visual Studies Companion series, it offers scholars and students a vital resource for reimagining art history beyond its Eurocentric roots.’

- Saloni Mathur, Professor of Art History, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

‘Rather than approaching the global as simply a larger map of art history, The Routledge Companion to Global Art Histories considers how art-historical knowledge is produced, circulated, and authorised. Across classrooms, archives, museums, journals, and cultural networks, an extraordinary range of leading scholars shows how far the field has come in 20 years: beyond correcting the canon’s geographical exclusions to critiquing the infrastructures that produced them. In its intellectual range and sheer diversity, this is the book many of us wish had existed when we began working in global art histories.
Bringing together such an immense diversity of scholarship while sustaining a coherent argument about the field is an intellectual and editorial coup. This Companion is a major contribution to global art history.’

- Alice Ming Wai Jim, Research Chair in Critical Curatorial Studies and Decolonizing Art Institutions, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

‘This timely Companion offers compelling meditations on the labour of making global art history otherwise. Its essays press on art history’s settled pedagogic, methodological and conceptual forms, attentive to what inclusion simplifies, brackets and leaves intact – and to where decolonising begins.’

- Krista Thompson, Mary Jane Crowe Professor of Art History, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA

"This expansive collection of texts broadens the range of art historical perspectives while offering a sorely needed redress of the cultural and disciplinary silos around art historical analysis and writing. Each writer’s assessment of image-making, in terms of material conditions and translation, across a networked global majority make this an essential reference for thinking through all contemporary art practices."

- Denise Ryner, Andrea B. Laporte Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), University of Pennsylvania, USA