Decolonizing Art History

When, in 2015, students at the University of Cape Town in South Africa demanded the removal of a statue of British colonial and diamond merchant Cecil Rhodes from their campus, they initiated what was to become a global call to 'decolonize the university'. In the same year, students at University College London began to ask the question: why is my curriculum white? Other public sector cultural institutions soon joined the chorus in an overdue acknowledgement that unspoken colonial legacies had for too long upheld and promulgated white privilege. The role of public sculpture as a catalyst for political debate and change has a long tradition within art's histories. It serves to remind us of the centrality of the discipline in promoting and maintaining dominant cultural values; and yet it also enables us to interrogate them as historically located and subject to inevitable temporal mutation. Whilst postcolonial studies and critical race studies have been informing and challenging the shape of art history for several decades, new generations of students, scholars, critics, curators, collectors, artists and audiences are seeking radical re-evaluations of the academy and those cultural institutions who hold themselves up as standard-bearers of our collective cultural heritage. But, what, if anything, is specific about the current moment's demands to reassess how universities, museums, and galleries teach, research, collect and exhibit? How can art historians, curators, collectors, museum directors, artists and writers respond to the call to decolonize art history? How can we draw from the rich legacy of postcolonial, feminist, queer and Marxist perspectives within art history, and what are the new theoretical perspectives that are needed? Writing these questions within the context of the UK, the backdrop of Brexit cannot be ignored, along with the impact of austerity and precarity in the university and museum sectors, and the rise of nationalism and xenophobia in response to both economic and political migration. There is a sense of instability in the political landscape, and conversations are often harder to hear than accusations, condemnation or dismissal. This is coupled with an increasing sense of art history being an embattled discipline, an unnecessary luxury for many students faced with tens of thousands of pounds of student debt. Yet conversely some of the loudest voices in the conversations around decolonizing art and its histories have been from young artists, scholars, curators and students, demanding that the institutions from which they feel excluded start to listen. For many of us working within (and alongside) the discipline of art history, these calls have asked us to reckon with what we do as teachers, scholars and curators. In order to continue this conversation, we have asked a range of art historians, curators and artists