As we initiate our series of blog posts “Art as Archives of Decolonisation”,here is a short note on the key propositions of ENTANGLED FREEDOMS
How did 20th-century artistic modernisms visualize, entangle, and transform plural visions of freedom across and beyond geographies of Cold War and decolonization?
Between the 1940s and 1980s, as retreating European colonial empires from Africa and Asia intersected with new Cold War geopolitical alignments, such ideas of freedom predominantly included: western ‘First World’ ideas of universalism and freedom from ideology; Socialist ‘Second World’ visions of freedom as utopian horizons of continued, revolutionary class struggles; and emerging ‘Third World’ visions of anti-colonial, anti-imperial freedoms. While segregated by the political geographies of the Iron Curtain and the Colour Curtain that marked out the ‘coloured peoples’ of Afro-Asia, such freedoms did intersect in the cultural field.
ENTANGLED FREEDOMS works with the premise that First and Second World cultural binaries of freedom/ideology, universal/particular experiences were challenged in the artistic fields and aesthetic thought of the decolonizing Third World of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. There, such binaries entangled with ideas of Third World liberation amidst the ruptures of partitions, displacements, genocides and wars that trailed 20th-century decolonial transfers of power to new post-colonial nation-states. Without studying this entanglement, we not only risk succumbing to or reinforcing Cold War big power binaries but, more importantly, miss the core address of decolonization – the Third World desire for freedom (both political and cultural, individual or collective) to exist, to engage, and to intervene without colonizing subjugation.
While the idea of freedom has often been collapsed with the liberal self-perception of the United States, it was shared, in scale, across Cold War geographies, and, in semantics, across resonant vocabularies of independence, emancipation and liberation unique to the 1940s-1980s. While similar in meaning, these vocabularies carried different accents: while independence often connoted transfers of political power from empire to post-colonial nation-states, emancipation and liberation implied struggles for freedom via activism and war (emancipation from structural oppression like slavery; or liberation from class war/occupation), and were widely used across the Third World, gaining by the 1970s, distinct connotations of Maoist revolutionary politics.
Freedom carried a fluid meaning: it combined, in critically ambivalent ways, questions of individual and cultural/political sovereignty, commitment to aesthetic purity and utopian politics. This fluid scope of ‘freedom’ was a generative field where cultural (artistic and imaginational) and political (revolutionary and utopian) visions interacted. ENTANGLED FREEDOMS will read visual art and artistic discourse from the decolonizing worlds of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East in the 1940s-1980s as archives of such plural and contesting visions of freedom.