ICM NEW BOOK SERIES
Fall 2025
ATREYEE GUPTA (University of California, Berkeley)
Non-Aligned: Art, Decolonization, and the Third World Project in India + Postwar Revisited: A Global Art History
Wednesday, October 8, 2025
Goldwin Smith Hall G22
4:45 p.m. — 6:15 p.m.
Co-sponsored by Department of History of Art
This talk brings into dialogue two recent book projects by Atreyee Gupta: Postwar – Towards a Global Art History (coedited with Okwui Enwezor, Duke 2025) and Non-Aligned: Decolonization, Modernism, and the Third World Project in India (Yale, forthcoming Nov 2025). Casting the years between 1945 and 1965 onto a broad intellectual canvas, Postwar assembles a global constellation of scholarly perspectives to interrogate the entanglements of art and politics in a period when the aftermath of the Second World War and the eclipse of colonial empires spurred efforts to reimagine the world in a future tense. Traversing an expansive terrain, Postwar challenges Westernist art historical paradigms to situate modernism within broader processes of decolonization and global realignment.
Non-Aligned turns to India to reconcile globally expansive postwar histories with the specificities of South Asian modernism. Beginning with the anti-fascist movements of the 1930s, it traces the emergence of an anti-imperialist aesthetic imagination that was elaborated in India during the Cold War era and within the decolonizing Afro-Asian context of the Non-Aligned Movement. Together, these books ask how the cultural politics of decolonization might reshape our understanding of twentieth-century modernism and its afterlives. Collectively, they advance a methodology for global art history that is attentive to the entangled genealogies of aesthetics and politics, one that does not simply add new geographies to existing narratives but reimagines the very terms of modernism and world-making.
BIO
Atreyee Gupta is Associate Professor of Art History at UC Berkeley. Gupta’s area of expertise is Global Modernism, with a special emphasis on the aesthetic and intellectual flows that have cut across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America from the twentieth century onwards. She is the author of Non-Aligned: Art, Decolonization, and the Third World Project in India, ca. 1930–1960 (Yale University Press, forthcoming in 2025), which focuses on the artistic and intellectual resonances of the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War era and the interwar anti-colonial Afro-Asian networks that preceded it. With the late Okwui Enwezor, she has also edited Postwar—Towards a Global Art History, 1945–1965 (Duke University Press, forthcoming in 2025). Her current book, tentatively titled One Hundred Years in Present Tense: Art in South Asian America, ca. 1893–1993, links Third World political, artistic, and cultural currents to the long diasporic arc of South Asian art in the United States.
