Iftikhar Dadi presents keynote at the CUNY Graduate Center
The CUNY Inter-Asian Perspectives Work Group’s first graduate conference, “When is Asia Modern? Negotiating Borders of Modernisms,” was held at the James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center on May 1, 2026. Iftikhar Dadi’s presentation was titled, “Art and Temporality in the Western Indian Ocean.”
Asian modern art has long been framed through a Western art-historical chronology, locating its "beginning" in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century—precisely the moment of intensified encounters with the West and the imposition of Eurocentric models of modernity onto Asia. Recent scholarship across the humanities has begun to unsettle this timeline: some push the chronology backward to examine early articulations of Asian modernity in mercantile networks and imperial formations; others push it forward to engage shared global histories of the post, i.e., postcolonial, post-imperial, post-socialist.
To propose an alternative approach to thinking about Asia Modern, we ask: how do Asian modernisms emerge through the negotiation of borders? Here, borders may be understood as Cartographic Borders—those drawn and redrawn in nation-building, imperial expansion, or decolonization; Cultural Borders—those that define, delimit, or delegitimize certain formations of groups, ideas, practices, etc.; and/or Aesthetic Borders—the negotiations of style, medium, and form that highlight, contest, or blur distinctions and affinities within and across artistic traditions.
Rather than recasting the Euro-American centers as the primary axis through which these borders are negotiated, papers considered intra-Asian encounters as sites of emerging Asian modernisms. By examining how these different borders are made, crossed, and reconfigured, we collectively explore alternative imaginaries of the Asia Modern.
https://www.gc.cuny.edu/events/when-asia-modern
