Sanjukta Sunderason

Partisan Aesthetics

Modern Art and India's Long Decolonization

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Partisan Aesthetics explores art's entanglements with conjunctural and climactic histories of late-colonial and postcolonial India, to foreground political, social, and intellectual formations of modern art during India's long decolonization.

Produktdetails

• South Asia in Motion
• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 344
• Erscheinungstermin: 21. Juli 2020
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 228mm x 156mm x 22mm
• Gewicht: 538g
• ISBN-13: 9781503612990
• ISBN-10: 1503612996
• Artikelnr.: 57639899

Autorenporträt

Sanjukta Sunderason is Assistant Professor at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies, the Netherlands.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Postscript: Toward an Aesthetics of Decolonization
Introduction: Partisan Aesthetics: Configurations
chapter abstract
The introductory chapter configures the book's foundational concept of
"partisan aesthetics." Entering through historical conjuncture of the
Bengal famine of 1943 and the longue durée shadows of the climactic 1940s,
it explores how art became political, not through deterministic political
content but through mediations of experiences, displacements, and memory
via art's aesthetic dimensions. It shows how early twentieth-century
aesthetic conflict between "Indian-style" and "western-style" art generated
new values and vocabularies of realism, the modern, the social, the
popular, and the progressive, and how these artistic dynamics converged
with a growing left-wing cultural movement beginning in the late 1930s.
Partisan aesthetics developed both through dialogues and dissonances
between art and the left in the 1940s, and the sociopolitical and
ideological displacements of this moment in post-partition India.
Chapter 1: "Political Potentiality": Jamini Roy and the Formations of
Progressive Art Criticism
chapter abstract
The first chapter studies a series of essays on the art of Jamini Roy
written between 1937 and 1944, not by art critics but by modernist poets,
writers, academics, and socialist fellow-travelers, who gathered around the
Bengali critical review journal Parichoy. The essays interpreted Roy's
folk-modern idiom of pat or scroll paintings from modernist, sociological,
and, increasingly, quasi-socialist vocabularies. In the process, they
generated a hitherto unknown discursive space for "progressive" art and art
criticism that captured an early socialist assimilation of modernist art,
and values of formalism with socialism. They reveal, in otherwise dispersed
ways, a "passive participation" of art in a growing left-wing culture,
where critics were keen on identifying the political "potentiality" of
artistic form rather than its active political commitment as the
underground Communist Party of India (CPI) allowed for more informal and
ambiguous forms of political affiliations.
Chapter 2: "As Agitator and Organizer": Socialist Realism and Artist-cadres
of the Communist Party of India
chapter abstract
The second chapter studies the artists committed to the Communist Party of
India during war, famine, and popular resistance in the 1940s, and the
"active authorship" of socialist visual reportage that they pioneered. In
their works, a peculiarly late-colonial formation of socialist realism can
be traced, one that combined expressionistic images of hunger with
revolutionary potentialities of labor. As artist-cadres of the party like
Chittaprosad and Somnath Hore visually documented the Bengal famine,
peasant movements, party conferences, and peasant congresses, the party
developed a complex and contradictory cultural policy: it deployed its
artist-cadres as collectors of "raw material," while seeking to assimilate
via art critical writings, artists outside the party fold within an
expanding scope of socialist realist art.
Chapter 3: "Concrete Contextuality": Realism and Its Discontents in the Art
of the Calcutta Group
chapter abstract
The third chapter focuses on an artist collective outside the fold of the
Communist Party of India that the party sought to draw into its fledging
cultural movement in the 1940s. The Calcutta Group of artists came into
being during the year of the Bengal famine, 1943, with a self-proclaimed
mission of developing a modern idiom of art rooted in social reality. In
their decade-long tenure, they both aligned with and deviated from the
left's rhetoric of socialist art, while carving out a new dialogical field
of modernism and realism. These "vacillating affiliations" of the group to
ideas of the social and the socialist, along with the shifting art
discourse around them, particularly after Indian independence in 1947,
reveals both the left's anxious trysts with modern art and ideological
subtexts of the de-radicalization of vocabularies of progressive art at the
arrival of Nehruvian political modernity.
Chapter 4: "All the More Real for Not Being Preached": Forms and Futures of
Socialist Art in Nehruvian India
chapter abstract
The fourth chapter follows the afterlives of left-wing cultural movement of
the 1940s in Nehruvian India. What happened to the visual rhetorics of this
radical aesthetics once the anti-imperial struggle was transformed? What
forms did socialist art take once the high noon of the cultural movement
had passed? In the late 1940s, as the left's cultural movement dissipated
under a change of guard within the Communist Party, art discourse in
Nehruvian India reformulated the radical vocabulary of socialist art into
new, de-radicalized values of democratic art and the citizen-artist.
Studying new forms of socialist art and art discourse as well as conflicted
reception of the values of humanism, democratic art, and socialist realism
during the 1950s and early 1960s, this chapter makes critical connections
between the communist aesthetic, the Nehruvian national-popular aesthetic,
and Cold War cultural values in the post-colony.
Chapter 5: "Revolution in the Tropics, Love in the Tropics": Arts of
Displacement in the Post-colony
chapter abstract
The postscript returns to the key propitiations of the book that constitute
the parameters of the concept of partisan aesthetics. It reiterates the
methodological significance of locational analysis to nuance the
historicities and possibilities of the political in the artistic modernity
of the post/colony. It proposes that from the "irregular" histories of art
and the left during India's long decolonization, two potential directions
in historiography can be pursued: first, trans-border histories of artistic
modernities in post-1947 South Asia via questions of history, memory, and
the locational trails of decolonization; and second, a transnational
connected history of art and decolonization across the Global South via the
artistic negotiations of displacements that a retreating empire produced.
The book closes with an open-ended question: What histories emerge if
twentieth-century Indian art is examined through its contradictions and
out-of-sync moments?