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  • Transnational Voices in National Art Histories
  • Carmen Victor (bio)
A review of Langford, Martha, ed. 2017. Narratives Unfolding: National Art Histories in an Unfinished World. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

This substantive publication is a result of a conference panel convened by Canadian photo historian Martha Langford that took place in 2014 at the scholarly association for art history and visual culture in the UK, the Annual Association of Art [End Page 212] Historians at the Royal College of Art in London. The resulting publication, Narratives Unfolding: National Art Histories in an Unfinished World (2017) seeks to situate global and transnational art histories as dissociated from centres of political power, cultural influence, and the historical avant-garde urban centres that have largely dominated Western narratives of art history; London, Paris and New York. This wide-ranging publication includes several perspectives revolving around Canadian art histories and aspects of visual culture. It also includes non-mainstream perspectives from other diasporic practices, transnational encounters (Langford 2017, 3), engagements and interventions in the art world within the cultural ecologies of Egypt, Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Romania, Scotland, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as one Montrealer’s account of an alternative fashion show New York City. However, it is the Canadian content that is the most resonant and thorough. As a nation of many Indigenous cultures as well as one that is dominated by an influx of Eurocentric setters and immigrants, we share commonalties with other countries that rely on immigration and their artistic contributions in trying to both articulate and maintain distinct cultural identities apart from the dominant US. There is a sustained impulse to develop cultural expression that is distinct from prevailing colonial cultural narratives. What this volume aims to do, is not so much to revisit tautologies of centre and periphery, but rather to re-examine mobilization and transnational exchange (xvi). This collection of accounts of trans-national cultural production is deployed by a group of national specialists1 interested in differencing and de-centring old metropolises, aiming to retrace cultural trade routes and hybridize cultural networks of circulation (xvi, xvii).

The term Unfinished in the book’s title refers to a multitude of things simultaneously. It “captures the microscopic unit that is the field of art history...as well as the macrocosm, a set of supranational conditions...reflected in specific events of cultural practice...and abstracted over space and time to demarcate the new virtual commons” (xvii). Despite that the pendulum has, perhaps temporarily, moved away from a free trade-obsessed, hyper-globalized world, and toward a much more nationalistic, protectionist mode emanating from modern, colonial and capitalist empires.2 Globalization has been tempered by a resurgence of a particular type of populist protectionism. For example, the recent US President’s phrase ‘America first’ ignores the contribution of enslaved peoples and the eradication of Indigenous cultures on the North American continent, as well the withdrawal of the UK from the European Union is based on misplaced xenophobic blame for deficits in industrial productivity and job losses. Canada is not immune from practical and ideological attempt to fortify the nation against the perpetually demonized Other, in Ontario the election of an ultra-right wing conservative government in 2018 has eroded supports for everything that does not directly service the accumulation of capital.3 In the preface Langford notes how shifts and changes in global politics “cause ripples in cultural activity” (xvii) but more importantly, Langford questions whether as artists, spectators and interpreters of art, do we ask enough of ourselves in terms of social and political engagement (4). Field-specific distinctions between [End Page 213] nationalism through artistic expression, global art history and transnational art history have been in circulation for some time.

Yet this edited volume is not interested in staking out ideological and epistemological distinctions between global art history and world history, for example. Instead of engaging in polemical debates over the differences between visual culture and art history, or transnational and global art histories, Langford suggests that energies be directed toward dismantling notions of national art histories altogether while seeking to “develop innovatory methodologies and participatory structures for an expanded field...[while] caution...

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