"Partisan Aesthetics explores art's entanglements with histories of war, famine, mass politics and displacements that marked late-colonial and postcolonial India. Introducing "partisan aesthetics" as a conceptual grid, the book identifies ways in which art became political through interactions with left-wing activism during the 1940s, and the afterlives of such interactions in post-independence India. Using an archive of artists and artist collectives working in Calcutta from these decades, Sanjukta Sunderason argues that artists became political not only as reporters, organizers and cadre of India's Communist Party, or socialist fellow travelers, but through shifting modes of political participations and dissociations. Unmooring questions of Indian modernism from its hitherto dominant harnesses to national or global affiliations, Sunderason activates, instead, distinctly locational histories that refract transnational currents. She analyzes largely unknown and dispersed archives - drawings, diaries, posters, periodicals, and pamphlets, alongside paintings and prints - and insists that art as archive is foundational to understanding modern art's socialist affiliations during India's long decolonization. By bringing together expanding fields of South Asian art, global modernisms, and Third World cultures, Partisan Aesthetics generates a new narrative that combines political history of Indian modernism, social history of postcolonial cultural criticism, and intellectual history of decolonization."--taken from publisher web site
Contents:
Illustrations -- Preface -- Introduction. Partisan aesthetics : Configurations -- Part I. Dialogues and Dissonances -- Chapter 1. "Political potentiality" : Jamini Roy and the formations of progressive art criticism -- Chapter 2. "As agitator and organizer" : Socialist realism and artist-cadres of the Communist Party of India -- Chapter 3. "Concrete contextuality" : Realism and its discontents in the art of the Calcutta Group -- Part II. Postcolonial Displacements -- Chapter 4. "All the more real for not being preached" : Forms and futures of socialist art in Nehruvian India -- Chapter 5. "Revolution in the Tropics, love in the Tropics" : Arts of displacement in the post-colony -- Postscript. Toward an aesthetics of decolonization -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
Summary:
"This book is a critical social history of art in colonial and postcolonial Bengal. Sanjukta Sunderason examines continuity and change in artistic practice between these historical periods in order to highlight the porous boundaries of left-wing art and the complex aesthetics and politics of decolonization."-- Provided by publisher
