A revealing look at modernism in India, exploring the role of art in decolonization and aesthetic discourse throughout the Global South.

The peak of modernism during the interwar and postwar decades coincided with the explosion of anti-fascist and decolonization movements worldwide, including the International Union against Empire, the Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung, and the Non-Aligned Movement. Through the lens of artistic practices and the radical intellectual possibilities these revolutionary events sparked, Atreyee Gupta uncovers an internationalism of modernism that is incompatible with Western cultural hegemonies. Modernism, she shows, cannot be separated from the notions of freedom and autonomy born out of the political struggles of the Global South.

Gupta mobilizes concepts such as liberation, anti-imperialism, development, and modernization as crucial analytical categories for art history, redefining our understanding of both global modernism and Indian art.

A link between art history and liberation, aesthetics and decolonization, and intellectual practices and political revolution in the Global South, or as it is known today, the Global South Generation, the Non-Aligned follows the distant networks of the interwar and postwar periods involving Indian artists and thinkers such as Mulk Raj Anand, Dhanraj Bhagat, Francis N. Souza, Jagdish Swaminathan, and Abanindranath and Gaganendranath Tagore, alongside contemporaries like W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Octavio Paz, André Malraux, and Le Corbusier in Asia, Africa, Europe, and America.

This compelling narrative is beautifully illustrated with rare published artworks.

Pages: 208, Year of Publication: 0330, Dimensions: 20.3x20.3cm