L’histoire de l’art aux États-Unis et le tournant vers la mondialité

From deeply provincial beginnings, art history in the US has now become a primary purveyor of the global in books, pedagogy, and exhibitions. Reflecting on earlier dreams of "trans-nationalism" and cosmopolitan worldliness emerging at the dawn of the twentieth century, we argue that the current obsessions with the global are not merely the outcome of economically-driven consensus in a Western-dominated art world, but offer real challenges to a discipline founded on "national" schools and linguistic segmentation. The global art history we argue for takes full advantage of post-structural and post-colonial critique, positioning the Euro-American narrative of art's progression as one among many potential stories of the movement of peoples and cultures in the long history of the developing world. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]