Atreyee Gupta book talk on her two recently published titles 10/8/25:
Postwar – Towards a Global Art History (coedited with Okwui Enwezor, Duke 2025)
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Non-Aligned: Decolonization, Modernism, and the Third World Project in India (Yale, forthcoming Nov 2025).
Oct 8 at 4:45pm, Goldwin Smith Hall G22
Sponsored by the Institute for Comparative Modernities
Cosponsored by the Department of History of Art
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.
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.
