Mapping the Decolonial Avant-garde

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We will look together at twelve artworks from around the world—two from each continent—focusing on the early twentieth century.

Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde tied the emergence of the avant-garde to a European aesthetic reaction against l’art pour l’art. But this creates an origin myth that locates the avant-garde almost exclusively in France and Western Europe, obscuring how modernist and avant-garde practices emerged elsewhere.

This salon will suggest a different approach: understanding the avant-garde as a product of global capitalism and modern travel—colonialism, diaspora, tourism, and cultural encounter. From this perspective, the avant-garde emerges not in one place, but across many, through collisions and exchanges between traditions. African masks transformed Picasso, Arabic motifs reshaped Paul Klee, Indian elites read Romanticism through their own multilingual traditions, and Nigerian modernists like Chinua Achebe and artists around him developed what Chika Okeke-Agulu calls a “compound consciousness of African subjectivity.”

Drawing on writers such as Fredric Jameson, Paul Gilroy, Ruth Vanita, and Chika Okeke-Agulu, we will reimagine the avant-garde as a global, hydrarchical phenomenon: multiple-headed, entangled, and encyclopaedic.

To ground this, we will look together at twelve artworks from around the world—two from each continent—focusing on the early twentieth century. These works will help us map a global, decolonial avant-garde, complicating simple stories of imitation and origin.

Rather than seeing modernism as a one-way flow outward from Europe, this session asks: what if we reframe it as a network of crossings, borrowings, and reinventions? And what happens when we map these crossings visually, as part of an experiment in thinking and diagramming global modernity?