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narratives unfolding
McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History
Martha Langford and Sandra Paikowsky, series editors

Recognizing the need for a better understanding of Canada’s artistic culture both at home
and abroad, the Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation, through its generous support, makes
possible the publication of innovative books that advance our understanding of Canadian
art and Canada’s visual and material culture. This series supports and stimulates such schol-
arship through the publication of original and rigorous peer-reviewed books that make sig-
nificant contributions to the subject. We welcome submissions from Canadian and inter-
national scholars for book-length projects on historical and contemporary Canadian art and
visual and material culture, including Native and Inuit art, architecture, photography, craft,
design, and museum studies. Studies by Canadian scholars on non-Canadian themes will
also be considered.

The Practice of Her Profession Museum Pieces

Florence Carlyle, Canadian Painter in Toward the Indigenization of
the Age of Impressionism Canadian Museums
Susan Butlin Ruth B. Phillips

Bringing Art to Life The Allied Arts

A Biography of Alan Jarvis Architecture and Craft in Postwar Canada
Andrew Horrall Sandra Alfoldy

Picturing the Land Rethinking Professionalism

Narrating Territories in Canadian Essays on Women and Art in Canada,
Landscape Art, 1500 to 1950 1850–1970
Marylin J. McKay Edited by Kristina Huneault
and Janice Anderson
The Cultural Work of Photography
in Canada The Official Picture
Edited by Carol Payne and The National Film Board of Canada’s
Andrea Kunard Still Photography Division and the
Image of Canada, 1941–1971
Newfoundland Modern Carol Payne
Architecture in the Smallwood Years,
1949–1972 Paul-Émile Borduas
Robert Mellin A Critical Biography
François-Marc Gagnon
The Codex Canadensis and the Writings Translated by Peter Feldstein
of Louis Nicolas
The Natural History of the New World, On Architecture
Histoire Naturelle des Indes Occidentales Melvin Charney: A Critical Anthology
Edited and with an Introduction by Edited by Louis Martin
François-Marc Gagnon, Translation
by Nancy Senior, Modernization by
Réal Ouellet
Making Toronto Modern
Architecture and Design, 1895–1975
Christopher Armstrong
Negotiations in a Vacant Lot
Studying the Visual in Canada
Edited by Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton,
and Kirsty Robertson
Visibly Canadian
Imaging Collective Identities in
the Canadas, 1820–1910
Karen Stanworth
Breaking and Entering
The Contemporary House Cut, Spliced,
and Haunted
Edited by Bridget Elliott
For Folk’s Sake
Art and Economy in Twentieth-
Century Nova Scotia
Erin Morton
Spaces and Places for Art
Making Art Institutions in Western
Canada, 1912–1990
Anne Whitelaw
Narratives Unfolding
National Art Histories in
an Unfinished World
Edited by Martha Langford

Family Ties
Living History in Canadian
House Museums
Andrea Terry

Picturing Toronto
Photography and the Making
of a Modern City
Sarah Bassnett

Architecture on Ice
A History of the Hockey Arena
Howard Shubert
N A R R AT I V E S
UNFOLDING
National Art Histories in an
Unfinished World

E D I TE D BY
MA RT H A L A NGFO RD

McGill-Queen’s University Press

Montreal & Kingston | London | Chicago
© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2017

ISBN 978-0-7735-4978-4 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-7735-4979-1 (paper)
ISBN 978-0-7735-5081-0 (ePDF)

Legal deposit third quarter 2017

Bibliothèque nationale du Québec

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the
Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through
the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided
by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Funding has also been received from Concordia University’s Faculty
of Fine Arts and Aid to Research Related Events (ARRE ) Program.

McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the

Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also
acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada
through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

L ibr a ry and A rch iv es C ana da C ata lo guing

in Pub li c at io n

Narratives unfolding : national art histories in an unfinished world /

edited by Martha Langford.

(McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art

history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-0-7735-4978-4 (cloth). – ISBN 978-0-7735-4979-1 (paper). –
ISBN 978-0-7735-5081-0 (ePDF)

1. Art--Historiography. I. Langford, Martha, author, editor II. Title:

National art histories in an unfinished world. III. Series: McGill-
Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history

N7480.N37 2017  701’.18 C2017-900771-8

C2017-900772-6

Set in 10.5/14 Sina Nova with Gill Sans Nova and Caecilia LT Std
Book design & typesetting by Garet Markvoort, zijn digital
 co nte nt s

Illustrations | ix

Acknowledgments | xiii

Preface | xv

1 Introduction | 3
Martha L angford

2 Playing Out the “Differences” in “Turkish” Art-Historical Narratives | 42

Ceren Özpinar

3 Race, Irishness, and Art History: Margaret Clarke’s Bath Time at the
Crèche (1925), Motherhood, and the Matter of Whiteness | 62
Fionna B arber

4 Problems of Translation: Lyonel Feininger and Gaganendranath Tagore

at the Fourteenth Annual Indian Society of Oriental Art Exhibition,
Kolkata, India | 81
Martin Beattie

5 Some Notes on Applying Postcolonial Methodologies to Architectural

History Research in Israel/Palestine | 100
Inbal Ben -A sher Gitler

6 “Draw Me a Sheep!” Contemporary Responses to the Histories of

Art Education, Surrealism, and Psychoanalysis in Egypt | 123
Tammer El-Sheikh

7 Historical Archives and Contemporary Art: The Case of the Umm

el-Fahem Gallery in Palestine/Israel | 147
Merav Yerushalmy
 8 Dalriada, the Lordship of the Isles, and the Northern Rim:
Decentralizing the Visual Culture of the Highlands and Islands
of Scotland | 167
Lindsay Blair

9 New Maps for Networks: Reykjavík Fluxus – A Case

of Connections | 189
ÆSA SIGURJÓNSDÓT TIR

10 Hitching a Ride: American Know-How in the Engineering of

Canadian Photographic Institutions | 209
Martha L angford

11 Migratory Affiliations: Contemporary Romanian Art | 231

Corina Ilea

12 Maraya’s Sisyphean Cart: Twinned Visions of Vancouver

and Dubai | 249
Alice Ming Wai Jim

13 Urban Art Histories (in Canada) | 271

Johanne Sloan

14 A Stranger in New York | 288

Ste ve Lyons

15 Mending Walls: Imagining the Sovereign Subject in

Contemporary Exhibition Practices | 305
Erin Silver

16 Embodying Sovereignty: Indigenous Women’s

Performance Art in Canada | 325
C arla Taunton

Notes | 355

Bibliography | 393

Contributors | 417
content s

Index | 423

viii
 illustratio ns

Every effort has been made to identify, credit appropriately, and obtain publi-
cation rights from copyright holders of illustrations in this book; these credits
appear as captions below the images on their respective pages. Notice of any
errors or omissions in this regard will be gratefully received and corrections
made in any subsequent editions.

1.1 Hans Haacke, Condensation Cube, 1963–65 | 33

2.1 Sarkis Zabunyan, My Room on Krutenau Street, l’Ancienne Douane de

Strasbourg, 1989 | 46
2.2 Sarkis Zabunyan, kriegsschatz Boots, 1983 | 50
2.3 Halil Altındere, Dance with Taboos ii , 1997 | 52–3
2.4 Şener Özmen (with Erkan Özgen), Road to Tate Modern, 2003 | 54
2.5 View of Füsun Onur’s retrospective exhibition Through the Looking
Glass, 2014 | 57
2.6 Hale Tenger, Being a Turk (Between 26˚ West–45˚ East Meridians and
36˚ South–42˚ North Parallels), 2002 | 59
2.7 Gülsün Karamustafa, An Ordinary Love, 1984 | 60

3.1 Margaret Clarke, Bath Time at the Crèche, c. 1925 | 63

3.2 Beatrice Elvery, Eire [or Virgin and Child], 1907 | 71
3.3 Margaret Clarke, Mary and Brigid, 1917 | 71
3.4 Margaret Clarke, rha , The Foundling, c. 1925 | 73
3.5 Jack B. Yeats, Would You Sooner Arrive at 4pm? 1912 | 75
3.6 Joshua Reynolds, The Temple Family, 1780–82 | 77
3.7 William Mulready, The Toy-seller, 1857–63 | 78
3.8 Thomas Augustus O’Shaughnessy, book cover design for Seumas
MacManus, The Story of the Irish Race, 1921 | 78

4.1 Lyonel Feininger, Gelmeroda, 1920 | 89

4.2 Lyonel Feininger, Houses in Old Paris, 1919 | 90
4.3 Lyonel Feininger, Cruising Sailing Ships, 2, 1919 | 91
4.4 Gaganendranath Tagore, Untitled, 1925 | 93
4.5 Gaganendranath Tagore, Reverie (date unknown) | 95
 5.1 Austen St Barbe Harrison, Government House, Jerusalem,
1928–31 | 106
5.2 Austen St Barbe Harrison, Central Post Office, Jerusalem,
1934–39 | 108
5.3 Austen St Barbe Harrison, Government Printer Building, Jerusalem,
1934–35 | 109
5.4 Al Mansfeld and Dora Gad, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1959–65 | 112
5.5 Ada Karmi-Melamede, Faculty of Health Sciences, Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev, Be’er Sheva, 1999 | 117
5.6 Avi Tzarfati, Tomb of Rabbi Israel Abuhatzeira, Netivot, 1987 | 120

6.1 Hassan Khan, 17 and in auc , performance shot, 2003 | 127

6.2 Hassan Khan, this is a dream (drawing based on a gesture seen in a
dream and commissioned from Mohamed Nour, a commercial artist based
in Midan El Abbassia), 2013 | 131
6.3 Hassan Khan, A glass object photographed as a way of collecting the world
around it, 2013 | 133
6.4 Hassan Khan, My Mother (a photograph of my mother shot on my
cell phone on August 4, 2013, after six years of thinking about it and
hesitating), 2013 | 135
6.5 Mahmoud Khaled, Proposal for a Romantic Sculpture, 2012 | 138
6.6 Mahmoud Khaled, A Memorial to Failure, 2013 | 140

7.1 General view of the exhibition Photography in Palestine in 1930s &

1940s, 2000 | 156
7.2 Photographer unknown, A camel caravan at Wadi A’ra Road (Musmus
Crossing), 1925 | 159
7.3 Photographer unknown, The Wadi A’ra route before the road was
paved, 1935 | 159
7.4 Azaria Alon, Wadi A’ra Road, Musmus Crossings, 1962 | 160
7.5 Fritz Cohn, Widening the Wadi A’ra Road, east of Musmus, 1963 | 160
7.6 Asrar al-Wad, Wadi A’ra Road, Musmus Crossing, 2008 | 161
7.7 Amiran Arev, The Shikun (housing project) neighbourhood, Umm
el‑Fahem west, 1967 | 162
7.8 Khader Oshah, Yassin, 2007 | 165

8.1 Calum Colvin, Vestiarium Scoticum ii , 2005 | 174

ill u s tration s

8.2 Jon Schueler, Snow Cloud over the Sound of Sleat, 1959 | 178
8.3 Marian Leven, Flux, 2012 | 179
8.4 Richard Demarco, Joseph Beuys exploring the shoreline of Loch Awe in
the act of making his first art work in Scotland – entitled “The Loch Awe
Piece” – as a gift to Richard Demarco, 1970 | 181
x
8.5 Helen MacAlister, A Participant Observer, 2011 | 182
8.6 Daniel Reeves, I Have This One Afternoon, 1999 | 184
8.7 Will Maclean and Marian Leven, An Sùileachan, 2013 | 186

9.1 Dieter Roth, Postkarte an Emmet Williams, after 1975 | 196

9.2 Dieter Roth, Wind-Harp. Front page of the daily Tíminn, 1961 | 198
9.3 Dieter Roth, poster for the súm i exhibition in Reykjavík, 1965 | 199
9.4 Róska (Ragnhildur Óskarsdóttir), poster for her first solo show in
Reykjavík, 1967 | 201
9.5 Robert Filliou with students from the College of Arts and Crafts,
Reykjavík, 1978 | 205

10.1 Cover of Camerart. Montreal: Galerie Optica, 1974 | 210

10.2 Hubert Hohn, Untitled, 1973 | 214
10.3 Karen Wilkin, ed., Summer ’74 at the Edmonton Art Gallery | 214
10.4 John Phillips, Laura Jones, and Morgan Jones Phillips, Baldwin Street
Gallery of Photography, Toronto, 1973 | 218
10.5 Laura Jones, Rita’s Mom in her favourite spot, c. 1972 | 219
10.6 Fletcher Starbuck, ed., image nation 9 (n.d.) | 221
10.7 “A Photography Show at Nightingale Galleries, June–July 1970” | 222
10.8 Fletcher Starbuck, Untitled, n.d. | 223
10.9 Alvin Comiter, Untitled, n.d. | 226
10.10 Cover of Photo Communiqué 1, 6 (January/February 1980) | 230

11.1 Matei Bejenaru, Travel Guide, 2007 | 240

11.2 Matei Bejenaru, Travel Guide, detail, 2007 | 242
11.3 Matei Bejenaru, Travel Guide, kuba Exhibition,
installation, 2006 | 244
11.4 Matei Bejenaru, Impreuna / Together, London, 2007 | 245

12.1 Maraya, Maraya Sisyphean Cart (False Creek), 2014 | 250

12.2 Maraya, Untitled (Diptych), 2011 | 255
12.3 Maraya, Portal (Dubai Marina), 2010 | 258
12.4 Maraya, Portal (False Creek), 2010 | 259
12.5 Maraya, Maraya Halliburton Case, 2011 | 260
12.6 Maraya, Maraya Sisyphean Cart (Dubai), 2014 | 265
12.7 Maraya, Maraya online platform (screenshot), 2012 | 268
ill u s tration s

12.8 Maraya, Maraya Sisyphean Cart (still), 2015 | 269

13.1 Posters for La Biennale de Montréal, 2014–15 | | 276

13.2 The artist-run centre Dare-Dare’s caravan in downtown
Montreal, 2014 | 278
xi
 13.3 Cover of My Winnipeg exhibition catalogue, 2011 | 279
13.4 Eleanor Bond, The Spectre of Detroit Hangs over Winnipeg, 2007 | 282
13.5 Ken Lum, Felicia Maguire Moves Again, 1991 | 283
13.6 Announcement for the exhibition Intertidal: Vancouver Art & Artists
in Antwerp, 2006 | 284

14.1 Steve Lyons, Approximate floor plan of Sixteen Beaver on

11 October 2013 | 295
14.2 Steve Lyons, Approximate floor plan of e-flux headquarters on
22 September 2013 | 295
14.3 Garments from the series Marx 4 Kids, modelled by children in
Rainer Ganahl’s COMME des MARXISTS , 2013 | 297
14.4 Rainer Ganahl, COMME des MARXISTS , installation view, 2013 | 298

15.1 Maggie Groat, Fences Will Turn Into Tables, 2010–13 | 306
15.2 Adrian Blackwell, Circles Describing Spheres in Getting Rid of
Ourselves, 2014 | 313
15.3 Tiziana La Melia, Dust selves, reflect and flex, 2012. Installation view of
A Problem So Big It Needs Other People | 316
15.4 Maggie Groat, Fences Will Turn Into Tables, 2010–13; Basil AlZeri, Pull,
Sort, Hang, Dry, and Crush; Tanya Lukin Linklater, Slow Scrape – So
it goes like this – map of syllabics – we spark the spongy wood, 2013;
A Problem So Big It Needs Other People, sbc Gallery of Contemporary
Art, Montreal, 2014 | 318
15.5 The stag Library (Aja Rose Bond and Gabriel Saloman) and Gina
Badger, with cheyanne turions and Eric Emery, Brew Pub 3: “Relanding
with Mugwort,” 2014 | 321
15.6 The stag Library (Aja Rose Bond and Gabriel Saloman) and Gina
Badger, with cheyanne turions and Eric Emery, Brew Pub 3: “Relanding
with Mugwort,” 2014 | 321

16.1 Rebecca Belmore, Vigil, video still, 2002 | 330

16.2 Rebecca Belmore, Fountain, performance still, 2005 | 331
16.3 Lori Blondeau, CosmoSquaw , 1996 | 333
16.4 Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Cistemaw Iyiniw Ohci, photographic document of
the performance, 2001 | 338–9
16.5 Lori Blondeau, Asiniy Iskwew, performance stills, 2009 | 343
ill u s tration s

16.6 Rebecca Belmore, Ayumee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their

Mother, performance still, 1991 | 345
16.7 Shelley Niro, The Shirt, video still, 2003 | 348
16.8 Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Treaty Card, web-based installation, 2004 | 350

xii
 a ckno wle d gme nt s

My research on Canadian photographic history and the historiography of

national art histories has been funded by the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky
Institute for Studies in Canadian Art. Three contributors to this volume have
been collaborating as part of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada under the Insight-funded team research project Networked
Art Histories: Assembling Contemporary Art in Canada, 1960s to the Present (Jo-
hanne Sloan, principal investigator; Alice Ming Wai Jim and Martha Langford,
co-applicants). Contributor Steve Lyons is completing doctoral work that has
been funded by a Canada Graduate Scholarship, and his research in New York,
which is the basis of his chapter, was funded by a Michael Smith Foreign Study
Supplement. Alice Jim’s chapter in this volume is an updated and expanded
version of an earlier article, “The Maraya Project: Research-Creation, Inter-
reference and the Worlding of Asian Cities.” Her research was supported by the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds de
recherche du Québec – Société et culture.
The 2014 Association of Art Historians conference at the Royal College of
Art in London hosted the all-day session that was the genesis of this volume,
for which I thank conference convenor Jane Pavitt and coordinator Cheryl
Platt. Among the participants, I particularly want to thank Maria Brown, Uni-
versity of Western Australia, and Fintan Cullen, University of Nottingham, for
their valuable contributions. The discussions at the conference were inspira-
tional and foundational to the collection as a whole. Even if not all the confer-
ence participants may be present in this volume, this book is better because
of them.
The contributors to Narratives Unfolding have generously put up with the
attentions of their editor. I am so grateful to have had the chance to work with
these remarkable scholars who have taught me so much. As for the images in
this book, credit lines and copyright notices simply do not cover the debt that
we owe workers in our custodial institutions and, especially, the artists who
responded to our direct requests with interest and alacrity.
At McGill-Queen’s University Press, I am most fortunate to work with Jona-
than Crago, editor in chief, whose stewardship miraculously combines intel-
lectual breadth, critical rigour, and unabated enthusiasm for scholarly work.
 His management of the peer review process produced two excellent reports,
whose implementation has greatly strengthened the volume overall. We are
greatly indebted to those anonymous readers. My history with the press goes
back to the last century! I particularly want to thank Philip Cercone, executive
director of MQUP , for leading an academic press whose commitment to schol-
arship and beautiful books is unparalleled. The McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook
Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History exemplifies those standards, and
I am very grateful to Sandra Paikowsky, co-editor of the series for her accept-
ance of the volume and her sound suggestions. Jane McWhinney copy-edited
the book, and so sensitively that every writer sent her a personal message of
thanks. On the MQUP team, I thank Elena Goranescu and Ryan Van Huijstee,
and for the exquisite design of this volume, I again thank Garet Markvoort.
The production of Narratives Unfolding has been supported by the Federa-
tion for the Humanities and Social Sciences’ Awards to Scholarly Publications
Program – a very precious source of support for academic work for which all
Canadians should be grateful. The Office of the Vice-President, Research and
Graduate Studies, and the Faculty of Fine Arts of Concordia University gener-
ously contributed to this project through the Aid to Research-Related Events
program, and for this I want to thank Vice-President Graham Carr; Dean of Fine
Arts Rebecca Duclos; Associate Dean of Research, Fine Arts, Anne Whitelaw;
Research Facilitator, Fine Arts, Lyse Larose; and Jarislowsky Institute Admin-
istrator Brenda Dionne. Within the Department of Art History, this project has
developed under two Chairs, Cynthia Hammond and Elaine Cheasley Pater-
son, who champion both research and teaching.
By dedicating this volume to my husband, Donigan Cumming, I mean to
acknowledge the loved ones of every contributor to this volume, those humans
and non-humans who make it all worthwhile.
ac k nowledgment s

xiv
 Preface
M a rtha L an g f o r d

T his collection of essays is a contribution to the ongoing intra- and inter-

disciplinary debate over the legitimacy and function of national art hist-
ories. The challenge has been posed before. It arises fitfully in the first quarter
of the twenty-first century in relation to three nested factors: globalization,
disciplinary redefinition, and methodological restlessness. Art historians in
general, and national specialists in particular, are sensitive to arguments that
the game has changed. New networks of ideation and exchange have de-
veloped different senses of belonging, or imagining community, within and
without national borders. Notions of hybridity and fluidity, developed in
terms of individual and collective subject-formation, turn borders into inter-
stitial spaces that are much larger, conceptually, than the zones they imper-
fectly divide. Institutional boundaries, organizing the academy, the museum,
the archives, the art market, and both corporate and state funding, have been
redrawn accordingly.
At conferences and in the classroom, a kind of deprogramming is taking
place: the national frame, once amorphous and available to the grassroots, has
been outed as an instrument of state control, another form of bread and cir-
cuses. Nationalism being tainted, ideas form around periodization: national
art history is a late-modern construct that has outlived its usefulness – an evo-
lutionary approach sometimes stopped cold by the realization that all societies
are not on the same clock.
The development of this collection began with a one-day workshop organ-
ized as a session of the 2014 Association of Art Historians conference in Lon-
don, England. Its original pretext was an intentionally saucy call for papers:
“Networking National Art Histories, or, [insert nationality] specialist seeks re-
lationships with like-minded persons.”

A bitter joke, much repeated by second-wave Feminists, was that the rec-
ognition of women as cultural producers seemed strangely to coincide
with the “death of the author.” Something similar is occurring with
 the writing of national art histories in the postcolonial/post-Cold-War
period: their relevance is being questioned, even deemed parochial, as
part of the disciplinary turn toward global and world art histories. Both
hegemonic history and counterhistory are in trouble, as Terry Smith
reported in Art Bulletin (December 2010), adding that: “Globalization
has recently reached the limits of its hegemonic ambitions yet remains
powerful in many domains. The decolonized have yet to transform
the world in their image.”1 In the current economic crisis, with severe
cultural and educational shrinkage, gains for counterhistories and
other budding histories might seem unlikely, if not impossible. At this
moment, Stuart Hall’s Thatcher-era call for coalition-building (extended
in Homi K. Bhabha’s “act of negotiation”)2 rebounds within a discipline
extended by the digital humanities, but also defined by the digital econ-
omy – its creation of have- and have-not institutions.

A very rich session coalesced to examine current approaches to local,

regional, and national projects of researching, writing, and mobilizing art
historical knowledge. Unifying themes, or what pessimists call “problems,”
developed during our discussions, the most interesting, or vexatious, coming
down to “who cares?”: To whom are we speaking? Is the history of [insert
nationality] art of any real interest or concern to people of other nations? It
quickly became obvious that it was when certain kinds of conditions were rec-
ognized and theoretical parallels were drawn: coalitions might form among
art historians interpreting art in the aftermath of revolutionary moments,
or exchanging observations about the manifestation of difficult knowledge;
affiliations might form among re-examiners of mobilization, with episodes of
transnational exchange compared to movements between “centre” and “per-
iphery”; tellers of diasporic histories found common cause with researchers of
internally fragmented or persecuted communities; and there were many other
bonds besides.
As interpretations veered into matters of identity, language, and socio-
political formations, issues that mattered in one case (or place) were tested
in the imaginary of another. These were not all tragic stories – not by any
means – but even the triumphs of canonical national histories seemed more
open to interrogation within an ad-hoc network of specialists interested in
ac k nowledgment s

systems of validation behind international recognition; the import-export of

cultural movements; and the rootedness of certain forms and philosophies
within imagined communities, traditional territories, or cartographic designa-
tions. Thinking together about art produced under, or construed as having im-
plications for, a national art-historical framework was most productive, leading
to a plan to consolidate our findings in an edited collection and providing

xvi
sufficient structure and strands to interest other scholars working on the back-
stories and missing pieces of national puzzles.
While spanning the globe was never our intent, we find that our collection
is contributing to the histories of Canada, Egypt, Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel/
Palestine, Romania, Scotland, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. Global
exchanges are differencing and decentring the old metropolises – London,
Paris, and New York – while performing the same operations on the new
global art centres and the “art cities of the future.”3 Entering this traffic stream,
we are retracing cultural trade routes and networks of circulation. In-country
geopolitical conditions of conquest, colonization, decolonization, and decom-
munization complicate the identities of works that can be seen as doubly or
multiply circumscribed, as expressions of hybridity that exceed hyphenation,
as signs of assimilation now insufficiently “authentic.” Mindful of border cross-
ings and digital technologies, we have attended to the charisma of strangers
and the seduction of novelty. For our parts, as national specialists in a world
of transnational and global writings, our aim was never to assert the values
of traditional disciplinary boundaries, but to develop innovatory method-
ologies and participatory structures for an expanded field – a “national art
history” grounded in global history’s complementary models of “connection”
and “comparison,” while duly cautioned against the perils of universality and
translation without comment. The first pitfall, we knew, would be terminology,
as terms were already being trademarked, and everything we had learned to
that point militated against ideational slogans and enclosure. Our processes
seemed as yet delicate; our redefinition of national history as a multifocal lens
rather than a monument was just beginning to take shape.
It is a commonplace that nationalism as a suitable companion or container
for art has been under review since the relationship first developed, neither
“nation” nor “art” being particularly precise, transparent, or stable, concepts
and both, as rallying points, being highly susceptible to, and productive of,
propaganda and economic opportunity. Any drift in global politics, econom-
ics, or technology causes ripples in cultural activity; the seismic shifts since
1989 have had their effects as artists and art historians – citizens after all –
have been struggling to redefine their fields of operation. But if national art
history is headed for the junkyard, its replacement has not yet arrived. A pro-
ductive uncertainty prevails. The global project is periodically announced and
ac k nowledgment s

maintained by interim solutions of reorientation and classification that never

quite pan out. Certain definitions are predicated on twenty-first-century con-
ditions that can seem very precarious – even for the rich, when the electric
power fails. Others seem to perpetuate prejudicial divisions between Western
and non-Western societies, even as they open rich cultural veins to national
art-historical investigation. Art history’s historiographical literature is shot

xvii
 through with speculation and paradox, which keeps the discussion lively, if
sometimes disconnected. The big thinking that should be compatible with
world-making sometimes falters before the scariness of the endgame – the
prospect that real change, affecting more than curriculum and administrative
units, is taking place. Establishing the differences between global art history
and world history sometimes seems less about concepts than about academic
and museological turf. What is fascinating and sometimes repulsive about
such all-too-human behaviour is the retrenching of art history as a discipline
by the elimination of extraneous ideas and objects – interdisciplinarity and all
that visual culture – and not the quashing of national art history as a project,
which interdisciplinary approaches to visual culture have already cleared from
the field as retardataire.
So the “unfinished world” figured in the title of this book is a plural concept:
it captures the microscopic unit that is the field of art history today, as well as
the macrocosm, a set of supranational conditions that are not only reflected in
specific events of cultural practice, but are arrogated by thought-leaders and
abstracted over space and time to demarcate the new virtual commons. The
humanities are “unfinished” economically and ideologically: that the digital
commons is not universally accessible is merely a fact of life – the unwired
will always be with us. “Unfinished” also describes art-historical research and
its performative narrativization – “ways of describing whatever is described,”4
as Nelson Goodman puts it – descriptions here pegged to the criss-crossing
lines between local and global, between the centre (as sensed) and all points
imaginable.
ac k nowledgment s

xviii
narratives unfolding
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 Introduction
M a rtha L an g f o r d
1
T he word “global” appears nowhere in the title of this book, yet it strides
like an éminence grise through its chapters. Globalization of all human
endeavours has overtaken technological societies; as we shop, so shall we
experience visual culture. Access and acceleration rule. The selfie before the
masterpiece is the new aura. The virtual museum without walls offers new or
as yet inexperienced forms of aesthetic and sensual pleasure. Into this radi-
ant surface, consumers of culture drill down for self-affirming and/or difficult
knowledge. All art experience is by definition “local,” as affect theory might
help us to understand, but in tune with the “leitmotif of our times,” we sense
and make sense of events as occurring on a much larger stage.1
Ten of the fifteen participants in this project met in 2014 at the “Networked
Nationalisms” session of the Association of Art Historians (aah) conference
in London. Five other art historians subsequently came on board, scholars fo-
cused on nationally bounded research and operating within the boundaries of
the discipline as a modern institution worth saving, though in need of renova-
tion from within.
At the aah conference we were acutely conscious of five conditioning fac-
tors. The first was that affirming interest in national art history might appear
to be swimming against the tide of globalization. Second, that any announce-
ment of the death of national art history was premature; it was in fact being
expanded by theory and methodology that are deployed by global and world
history but are directly applicable to the construction of national narratives.
A third factor was that the resultant histories were revisionist and in many
ways disturbing to national accounts that dominated both global and national
imaginations; as in any family quarrel, the reasons for domestic discomfiture
needed to be rehearsed and put in perspective. Fourth, that transnational
encounters loomed large among national secrets, tucked into art-historical
accounts under the heading of influence or multiculturalism but to that point
improperly measured, whether exaggerated by claims to cosmopolitan mod-
ernism or staunched as belonging to a developmental phase no longer worth
 mentioning. Issues of identity – nations within states – we all found very
much alive and still closely entwined with other unifiers such as ethnicity, race,
class, and gender. And finally, we all spoke English, the idiomatic English of art
history; our burgeoning network was representative not of world history, but
of its efforts and limitations as a set of methodologies developed and trans-
mitted in the language of colonization, past and present. Our meeting point
was London; the currency of our exchange was a body of literature sustained
by global economic engines – the language of empire and business. Trans-
lation, broadly defined, was the explicit framework of some presentations and
an overarching reality for our affiliative project as a whole.2
In this introduction I attempt to sketch this vast panorama as it relates to
the ambitions of this volume and its individual chapters. Drawing on an ever-
expanding body of literature, I begin by outlining a global historiographical
template, and then move to its manifestations in the art world which both infill
and expand global history’s spaces of inquiry. I stress this point as an article
of faith: that cultural production is more than the reflection or illustration of
socio-political formations; it is a highly performative agent with both privil-
eges and responsibilities. Here subjectivity comes into play. A close colleague
recently wondered aloud whether we don’t sometimes ask too much of art and
artists in terms of social and political engagement. My feeling is that we don’t
ask enough, and therefore don’t ask enough of ourselves as spectators and in-
terpreters. My recourse to the literature is no doubt guided by this attitude,
whose development I will also briefly trace.
National art histories, however internationalist their thrust, come from
somewhere and are harboured somewhere. This point is repeatedly affirmed
by Michela Passini in La fabrique de l’art national, a study that illuminates the
formation of the discipline as it occurred in France and Germany between 1870
and 1933 – the creation of a set of ideas about the history of art, many of which
survived the catastrophic nationalisms to follow, flourishing in the academ-
ies, museums, and archives of Britain and the United States.3 It is sometimes
useful to consider the intellectual biographies of national historians, as the
motives behind their vocation are not always clear. Passini surveys ferocious
arguments over authenticity of style and sources of motifs, both of which she
sees as expressed from racial and/or religious roots, as European art historians
battled over the origins of the Renaissance. These quests are far from irrel-
M artha L angford

evant to contemporary theory. As this introduction shows, global art history

is currently devoted to exposing and loosening the stranglehold of Western
thought and its institutions, moving toward an understanding and, it must be
said, a validation of practices that Western art-historical training has encour-
aged us to overlook. What today’s actors might learn from Passini’s research is
to scrutinize their motives and the aspirational language they deploy. At the
inception of the field, when the Italian Renaissance reigned as the ne plus ultra
4
of cultural expression, a career in art history might be built on the righting of a
historical injustice by bringing one’s own national school out of the shadows.4
Invidious comparison was the weapon of choice, contrasting the vitality and
humbleness of native, sometimes called “indigenous” arts with the stagnating
imitations foisted off on gullible Western European patrons by Italy’s second
string. Suspicion of the émigré artist began then and there, along with difficul-
ties over national designation – what was Vincent van Gogh really? – which
persist to this day, inconvenient truths sometimes handled by institutional
obfuscation.5 In other, more open discussions, the émigré artist may be es-
teemed for recognizing and refreshing the distinctiveness of the host culture.6
Opposing calcifying dualities and expanding the well of knowledge, we find
other historiographical models, most notably in Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne
Atlas (1924–29), which continues to inspire scholarly consideration, despite
its Eurocentric failings, and possibly because of its unfinished state. No longer
extant, the Atlas is an ideational ruin, a study of motion as yet unstilled, and
not despite, but because of its photomechanical apparatus.7 Its staging of in-
finite possibility is not based simply on the gestural content within a picture;
it results from “the picture as a whole [being] treated as an element in a wider
chain of works,” including other paintings and text. Michael Podro calls War-
burg’s system “a network,” which is precisely its enduring performative appeal
and the reason I mention it here.8
This book comes from Canada, and many of my reference points are
Canadian; for that I make no stereotypically polite apology. As part of this
introduction, it seems important to discuss the shapes of national projects
of consolidation, celebration, and contestation – the Canadian repertoire is
the one I know best, and can therefore convincingly perform in all its com-
bative and sometimes claustrophobic character. I mention Canada here as an
example of how transnational approaches transform national programs of
art-historical research. Attention to cultural transfers is not limited to “cross-
ing nation-state borders,” as conceptual historian Jani Marjanen explains. It
may be sparked by “transfers between cultures, linguistic communities, pol-
itical cultures, nation-states, different political languages, scholarly disci-
plines, associations, and so on.” Marjanen proposes that we think in terms of
“different communicative spaces,” an approach that Canadian cultural theory
has recognized since the 1960s, if sometimes imperfectly applied.9 One new
direction I have in mind is settler-colonial art history, which has launched an
international network of inquiry and encounters pockets of resistance across
the spectrum of political opinion wherever the ship lands.10 Despite such con-
Introduction

troversies, or perhaps because of them, the questions raised by settler-colonial

art history have begun to stick, in part thanks to its international momentum.
Each of the settler nations is singular, but not alone, in developing the tools to
conduct its inquiry.11 This statement applies to each of the nations addressed
5
 by this volume – or perhaps I should say that making that statement true is the
project’s fundamental goal.

The View from … Where?

For contemporary historians, theorists, educators, and public intellectuals, a

global perspective is both pleasure and prescription, though the concept re-
mains notional and somewhat exaggerated, as historiographers of global hist-
ory, the global history of art, and global art history tend to agree. This is where
agreement ends, however, because global history, the global history of art, and
global art history are not precisely in tune.
Global history is a disciplinary concentration on patterns and forces that
transcend and transform national boundaries. As historiographer Patrick
O’Brien effuses, “historians who have committed (albeit as conscripts or col-
laborators) to this cosmopolitan enterprise in teaching and writing, as well as
professional volunteers, find themselves at an intellectual frontier unbounded
by geographies, hemispheres and continents, let alone national borders and
parish boundaries.”12 O’Brien insists that what we now call “global history” is
not a new approach, but the restoration of a historiographical tradition that
dates back to Herodotus (495–425 bce ). “Connection” and “comparison” are
O’Brien’s key words.13 Cosmopolitanism, imperialism, migration, technology,
trade, and visual culture are topics of interest, but so is nationalism, under-
stood as a set of ideas that have bubbled up under comparable conditions in
different societies at different times.14 Jürgen Kocka deftly explains how com-
parative history, as practised by French social historian Marc Bloch among
others, and sometimes marginalized within the field for its recourse to sec-
ondary sources, fragmentation, selectivity, and decontextualization, can now
be discerned in research that is “less interested in similarities and differences
between, let us say, Europe and the Arab World, [than] in the processes of
mutual influencing, in reciprocal or asymmetric perceptions, in entangled pro-
cesses of constituting one another … the history of both sides is taken as one
instead of being considered as two units for comparison.”15 Internal compari-
sons are nevertheless inevitable. Nations exist – indeed they reassert them-
selves daily. Global history is literally “transnational” – it attends to “sustained
cross-border relationships, patterns of exchange, affiliations, and social forma-
M artha L angford

tions”16 – but other means of connection are also possible, as reference to Mar-
janen has already suggested, and as Merry E. Weisner-Hanks explains in her
survey of transnational gender history. From Michael Werner and Bénédicte
Zimmerman, she takes the concept of “histoire croisée” and then introduces
a family of ideas, such as “connected histories” (Sanjay Subrahmanyam and
Victor Lieberman), “shared histories” (Frederic Cooper), “comparative connec-
tions” (Ann Stoler), and “entangled histories” (Shalini Randeria). The logical
6
next step, Weisner-Hanks explains, is “history that emphasizes mixture and
hybridity,” and she credits historiographer Peter Burke’s insight that the ter-
minology has been borrowed from “botany, physics, and metallurgy, as well as
… anthropology and linguistics,” capping his observation with her own: “Thus
in thinking about borrowing, hybridity, or whatever one chooses to call this
process, historians have engaged in it as well, crossing disciplinary borders.”17
This statement echoes Werner and Zimmerman’s emphasis on reflexivity – a
system of undisguised interest in points of interaction.18 Their approach is “re-
lational”; the recuperation of “buried reality” is but the first step to reinserting
it in “a multiplicity of possible viewpoints and divergences” that generate a
different set of questions. All this coming from “a particular angle”19 – and
here I am reminded of Karen Stanworth’s recourse to Donna Haraway’s con-
cept of “situated knowledge,” exposed in her introduction to Visibly Canadian:
“the idea that knowledge is not composed of a singular truth but that various
ways of knowing can be simultaneously present, yet not equally authoritative.”
Why? Because, as Stanworth explains, not all factors are weighted equally. She
frankly admits that the desire to bring under-considered visual expressions
of Canadian identity to light is what drives her project. Any student of visual
culture, she writes, situates meaning “in the local, the discursive, and in subject
positions,” her own ethics figuring importantly: “methodology as a negotiated
process … research process as a negotiated space.”20
One of these spaces is a Portrait of Three Friends, painted around 1773 by
British artist William Pars, a “conversation piece” that Stanworth first encoun-
tered in 1996, hanging in the meeting room of the president of the University
of Toronto. The painting includes a portrait of John Graves Simcoe, the first
lieutenant governor of Ontario, as a young man. As Stanford discovered, the
choice of this painting for this space hinged on the president’s understanding
that Simcoe “started the university system in Ontario.”21 Claiming this Brit-
ish painting for Canadian art history involves a recalculation of its meaning
or, more precisely, meanings accrued over transfers of ownership and evolv-
ing attitudes about colonization, masculinities, and patronage.22 The work is
claimed for the history of Canada through the application of the methodolo-
gies of global history; the same investigation writes new chapters in the un-
finished history of British prestige in Canada. Nationhood is a recurrent theme
of global history, both as a cartographic fact and as a generator of spatial meta-
phors that bind its narratives, though with a stress on interstitial spaces, within
and without the state. The old maps, sharply outlined and colour-coded, no
longer meet our needs, for they fail to account for the aggregation and im-
Introduction

brication of “nations” within sovereign states: nations within nations whose

histories are not, technically speaking, transnational but entangled – an inter-
nal approach incorporating “elements of histoire croisée,” as Magda Fahrni ob-
serves about the curious case of Quebec in Canadian historical writing.23 For,
7
 as Fahrni points out, Quebec offers new imperial historians a rare opportun-
ity: “a double European colonisation and succeeding European metropoles.”24
Complicating the Quebec/Canada story, and differentiating it from other col-
onial histories, is the question of language – “the politics of knowledge ar-
ticulated around language, and the main colonial languages of the modern
world system,” English, French, and German, which the geopolitics of the early
twentieth century put “on a par in terms of prestige and influence.”25 Hence the
pull between metropoles and their epistemologies, which sometimes isolates
Quebec from the rest of Canada, sometimes increases the distinctiveness and
status of its ambidextrous scholarship. “Bilanguaging,” which Latin American
specialist Walter Mignolo applies to his “border thinking,” is duality in another
key, speaking back to the power of language as a colonizing instrument that
combines epistemology with ideology and crushes the vernacular. “Thinking
beyond language,” he focuses on “signs and memories inscribed in the body
rather than signs inscribed on paper.”26 As he writes, “language is not an object,
something that human beings have, but an ongoing process that exists only
in languaging.”27 Here, supported by most of the contributors to this volume,
I would have to insist on broadening the definition of this “ongoing process”
to include the language, or languaging, of form, whether it be pattern, gesture,
unrepeatable mark, or cloned waterfront development.28
The carving out of those liminal spaces – the creation of a laboratory for
thinking through the various constructions of global history – is deeply in-
debted to cultural theorist Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of a Third Space, a space
of “translation and negotiation” – and sometimes of productive misunder-
standing, given his appetite for multiplicity and dissonance.29 A return to Bha-
bha’s “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation”
underscores the need to atomize the various contributions to the theorization
of global history, compiling them in a way that respects their rough edges (a
fragmentary solidarity), as opposed to smoothing them out or melting them
into a system. Bhabha’s rejection of binarism is incomprehensible without a
knowledge of colonialism’s sharp distinctions between “victims … and victim-
izers.”30 Entering his commodious Third Space means running the gauntlet of
his precursors, a portal carved in struggle and irresolution. Background read-
ing plunges us into Mexican political philosopher José Vasconcelos’s futuristic
Cosmic Race, empowered by racial blending;31 we must find a way to digest
M artha L angford

the transculturalist triumphalism of Brazilian modernist poet Oswald de An­

drade’s “Cannibalist Manifesto” of 1921;32 and we must also consider Mikhail
Bakhtin’s linguistics, which forms not a mixture but a dialogical structure of
encounter – “only one language is actually present in the utterance, but it is
rendered in the light of another language.”33 These concepts were never bounded
but were volleyed back and forth between activists and intellectuals, often in
translation. The refraction of postcolonial nationhood through the medium
8
of culture is described by Frantz Fanon: “The forms of thought and what it
feeds on, together with modern techniques of information, language and dress
have dialectically reorganised the people’s intelligences … the constant prin-
ciples which acted as safeguards during the colonial period are now under-
going extremely radical changes.”34 Abjuring racial universalisms (we might
say “globalisms”) and their nurturing of a “timeless black cultural imaginary,”35
Fanon is prescriptive: “the native intellectual who wishes to create an authen-
tic work of art must realise that the truths of a nation are in the first place its
realities.”36 The would-be nation must be present-based and forward-looking,
in a stance that does not imply amnesia, but is purposeful in searching and
deploying the collective memory.
Bhabha likewise raises the conceptual bar, proposing that we think “space”
in terms of “time.” He reminds us that the occurrence of nationhood has al-
ready been explained as synchronized mental effort. This effort is continu-
ous, as French theorist Ernst Renan insisted: “a daily plebiscite.”37 Selective
remembering sloughs off the difficult passages that impede cohesiveness.
Modern nationhood is imagined through a variety of channels – technologies
of connectedness – whose succeeding technologies continue to operate in the
present, though with different sets of tensions.38 But as Bhabha, Edward Said,
and others have argued, this plotting of national history ignores the fact that
history is written as it is felt to unfold, in medias res – it is not just a matter
of looking backward for the events that lead to this moment and forward for
what is needed to shape an enduring account, but of attending to those sup-
plementary questions that made the past somewhat less than monolithic and
make the present tense of writing so unruly, so uncontrollable in its effects.39
As Bhabha writes: “We then have a contested conceptual territory where the
nation’s people must be thought in double-time; the people are the historical
‘objects’ of a nationalist pedagogy, giving the discourse an authority that is
based on the pre-given or constituted origin in the past; the people are also the
‘subjects’ of a process of signification that must erase any prior or originary
presence of the nation-people to demonstrate the prodigious, living principles
of the people as contemporaneity: as that sign of the present through which
national life is redeemed and iterated as a reproductive process.”40 That re-
peated word – “process,” a set of actions toward an objective – prompts its
own set of methodological questions that are never completely answered by
postcolonial and post-structural theory. How to interlace these times, which
are multiple in individual consciousness, and continue to multiply in the mind
of a researcher who looks at individual experience?41
Introduction

The supplementary question is proffered as a tool that one can learn to use.
Here we encounter Bhabha’s rich sense of irony, itself a thickening of meaning.
To illustrate what he means by “supplementary” he goes to the British Parlia-
ment, where a supplementary question is defined (and allowed) as additional
9
 to the original question because already contained within it. He cites phil-
osopher Rodolphe Gasché’s elegant definition of supplements as “pluses
that compensate for a minus in the origin.”42 They are immanent or embed-
ded factors. In 1985 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s supplementary question
about Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre brought forth Bertha Mason: the woman
in the attic, co-present with her unwitting successor and beneficiary, a figure
of repression and presence, of economic gain and affective debt, of madness
within the logic of empire.43 Through Spivak’s attention to the “operation of the
‘worlding’ of what is today ‘the Third World,’” second-wave feminist criticism
was called out for its reproduction of “the axioms of imperialism.”44 As Bhabha
writes: “The supplementary strategy interrupts the successive seriality of the
narrative of plurals and pluralism by radically changing their mode of articula-
tion.”45 A theorist will pose these questions; a historian will listen for them in
the historical record; a cultural theorist and historiographer will read for them
in “presences” and “processes” – Raymond Williams’s “structures of feeling.”46
Just as a performative utterance recasts a promise as an actuality, the recov-
ery of past circumstances in their full potentiality alters our understanding
of agency, revising our judgments of actors and events, past and present. This
has been the task of cultural studies, with its attention to colonial and postcol-
onial histories, to the effects of nation-building through various and mutually
supportive forms of invasion: military, economic, ideological, religious, and
educational. Postcolonial and decolonization theory subtends these histories:
the elimination or subjugation of the peoples discovered; the repopulation of
conquered territories through migration, slavery, and indenture; administra-
tive and cultural impositions of assimilation that drive cultural performance
from the public to the private sphere; the preservation, and sometimes calci-
fication, of cultural formations within exilic and diasporic communities; and
the rebound of these formations in unexpected places and hybridized forms.
These patterns of human behaviour, which political philosophers, economists,
psychologists, and ethicists have been at pains to explain, are manifest in ob-
jects, events, and institutions that anthropology, ethnography, geography, his­
tory, and sociology have helped art history to interpret.
Celina Jeffery and Gregory Minissale’s Global and Local Art Histories ap-
plies postcolonial theory to the analysis of “visuality, art, and art history out-
side of hegemonic Euro-American themes and concerns.” This collection had
its genesis at an earlier aah conference; its theoretical framework and scope
M artha L angford

are somewhat similar to those of this collection. It is strikingly different, how-

ever, on a most important score: the concept of “the nation” seems almost to
have been expunged.47 There are euphemisms, of course – references to soci-
eties and communities are unavoidable – and some nations and nationalities
must be named as Minissale introduces the various chapters, some of which
deal explicitly with national questions. But he avoids the “n”-word, nimbly
10
leaping between global and local perspectives. In some ways, Minissale ap-
pears to be revisiting the phenomenon that Eric Hobsbawm not so long ago
identified as the “making of nations”: ideational constructions “from above …
which cannot be understood unless also analysed from below, that is in terms
of the assumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interests of ordinary people,
which are not necessarily national and still less nationalistic.”48 These forces
have been intersecting and colliding since 1780 (Hobsbawm’s start-date) and,
while Hobsbawm himself suggested (in 1990) that the “new supranational re-
structuring of the globe” was changing this dynamic, his basic argument that
we need to understand “nation” and “nationhood” to understand modernity
seems irrefutable.49
Minissale’s decision – it must have been one – complicates his task when,
for instance, he comes to Jonathan Blackwood’s chapter on Estonian modern-
ism, which develops tensions between the young Republic of Estonia’s strug-
gle for independence and modernism’s “borderless, globally comprehensible
visual idiom.”50 Blackwood describes this “creative milieu” as “culturally sub-
nationalist,” borrowing this framework from Scottish political theorist Tom
Nairn.51 The volume co-editor phrases things differently: if modernism was
“out of step” with the young Republic’s political ambitions, Estonia’s “artistic
identity” was destined to be snuffed out by Soviet invasion during the Cold
War – a “globalising force.”52 This history is presented by Minissale as “the ob-
literation of local difference.”53 To repeat: Estonia, once a nation and a nation
once again, is captured by this introduction under the heading of “local” – this
is paradoxical, to say the least, and perfectly exemplifies the rush to termino-
logical rebranding that propagates both categorical confusion and misunder-
standing of historical conditions.
More nuanced translations of postcolonial theory’s “spaces of encounter” to
the writing of art history can be found in studies of transculturation. Julie F.
Codell introduces the term in relation to British art, 1770–1930, but with con-
siderable application to a number of studies in this collection – transcultura-
tion at work. Codell herself considers transculturation a “travelling concept,”
an interdisciplinary approach attributed to Mieke Bal, who distinguishes it
from a “method,” preferring the term “practice” as a more dynamic mode of
encounter through close, sometimes collective readings.54 Transculturation
might be understood as the trading of cultural models between nations, but
this interpretation supposes a monolithic or essentialist definition of nation
that generally applies only by force of law. The condition that interests Codell
and her contributors exists both between and within pluralistic societies,
Introduction

activated by cultural contact – the human factor – and, one might add, by
an acknowledgement of the flow of wealth toward the centre and the flow of
power toward the source of wealth in the so-called periphery.55 These flows
are both international and local, as between the metropolis and its suburbs,
11
 and are driven by unpredictably changing tides. When this introduction was
being drafted, a prominent example of local transculturation was the coming
together of Paris (henceforth to be known and administered as the Métropole
du Grand Paris), in an effort to redistribute resources and decrease the sense of
outsider-ness in largely migrant communities.56 It remains to be seen whether
recent acts of terrorism in Paris and elsewhere will derail this program, change
daily life in the French capital, or affect France’s position within the Euro-
pean Union.57
Transculturalism should not, however, be schematized simply as currents
of exchange alternating between cultures. Artistic currents are intertwined, as
are the actual objects and performances of cultural production.58 As Codell
introduces her project: “Close transcultural readings of works of art offer a
virtual space that ‘reopens and dissimilates the givens,’ that is, the cultural as-
sumptions that Europeans brought to places and cultures and those they took
away from those places, they themselves being transformed and reshaped by
their colonial encounters.”59 Reciprocity and growth might strike the reader
as warm and fuzzy concepts, but Codell traces transculturation to its roots
in Latin American anthropological studies, specifically to the work of Cuban
anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, who coined the term in 1940, correcting the
notion of “acculturation,” as understood by his American colleagues. For Ortiz,
transculturation sprang from an awareness of “loss and recovery in new forms
of cultural expression.”60 There are phases in the process: “partial discultura-
tion … neoculturation.”61 In other words, in contrast to the positivist notion of
“acculturation,” all is not smooth sailing in this creative space. Related terms in
more recent usage are “fluidity,” “hybridity,” and “spatiality”; transculturation
likewise acknowledges the complexity and dynamism of a border-crossing
cultural event, but emplaces it. As Codell insists, the dialectical process of
transculturation occurs “somewhere and at a historical time. Transcultural art
takes a snapshot of an encounter in which time and place remain fundamental
elements of cultural production, reproduction and reception.”62
The global history of art and global art history are also interested in processes
that operate in-between: both focus on the production and circulation of art in
a global context. Arguing for a “balanced materialist treatment of artifacts and
unified approach that emphasizes questions of transcultural encounters and
exchanges as circulations,” Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin,
M artha L angford

and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel are bent on verifiable facts – objective data about
the object, one might say. At the same time, they insist that a historiographical
system attuned to the object in all its modes and means of reception is also open
to the ways that “cultures” are formed, which, they say, is by “ceaseless trans-
formation and adaptation of ideas, including the reception of objects or images
originating elsewhere.”63 Their approach breaks down the binary of Western
and non-Western, as well as the hierarchical structure of centre-periphery
12
relations. Other approaches promise the same, but key differences, or em-
phases, are breadth and duration: antecedents to the global history of art are
“total history,” which flourished in the post–First World War years of anti-
nationalism and European reconciliation, and a World History movement
that arose as an antidote to Cold War containment.64 For Kaufmann, and this
is crucial, scholarly attention to “circulations” is part of a long historical trad-
ition – Universalgeschicht (universal or cosmopolitan history), or the history of
oikumene, the inhabited world, which could be mapped and inventoried. As
he explains, a truly global history of art begins with commerce, with trade in
raw materials and finished goods, which becomes truly global around 1500.65
Globalization descends and inherits from systems of economic exploitation
and cultural exchange that transformed the earth and redefined the very na-
ture of knowledge – its composition and location – in terms of values and the
power to impose them.
Benedict Anderson’s influential concept of nationhood as “imagined com-
munity” – contiguity in both its physical and psychological states – has been
expanded into a global consciousness that has been theorized by Arjun Ap-
padurai in terms of ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, mediascapes, and
ideoscapes.66 Such neologisms are at home in the global art history system,
which, at this writing, is less than thirty years old. Born in Paris with the
launch of the 1989 exhibition Les Magiciens de la terre, global art history is the
conceptualization of contemporary art as constituting separate and distinct
“art worlds.” The first chapters of a global art history coincided with the end
of the Cold War; it is therefore closely associated with the political and eco-
nomic transformations symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the world-
reshaping events of 2001.67
At a pace and tone sometimes indistinguishable from those of criticism,
global art history has taken charge of the documentation and interpretation
of globally disseminated contemporary art. The study of global art history
can be taxed for its lack of historical distance. The same complaint could be
launched against contemporary art history as a whole, a relatively recent addi-
tion to the field whose historiography and methodology are explicated by
Terry Smith in both its Western wellspring and global manifestations.68 But
before handing over to Smith, it seems important in this context, to say some-
thing about historical distance as a guiding principle that has much evolved.
Endearingly to this reader, historiographer Mark Salber Phillips draws a pic-
ture to establish his starting point: “Much like the discipline of art history, his-
torical scholarship has made mastery of perspective an index of progress and
Introduction

sophistication.”69 His analysis explodes this schematic. Defining historiciza-

tion as mediation, Phillips introduces “four fundamental dimensions of dis-
tance that shape our experience of historical time … form, affect, summoning,
and understanding.”70 A familiar art-historical example, cited by Phillips, is
13
 Edgar Wind’s classic essay on Benjamin West’s Death of General Wolfe (1770),
in which the painter’s breaching of decorum by presenting an event from the
recent past in contemporary rather than classical dress, is shown to mark a
milestone in history painting: “in the depiction of a modern hero, remoteness
in space could stand in for distance in time.” Phillips’s rehearsal of Wind’s argu-
ment introduces corollary changes to the function of history painting, which
henceforth would be “carried along by a current of national feeling that altered
both its affective and ideological coloration … in an increasingly close engage-
ment with the national histories of Europe” and its representation in secular
narratives.71 Foreshortening Phillips’s discussion – spoiling the plot – I want
to underscore and build on his point that history is already taking form as “the
texture of experience … history as it is experienced in common life,”72 in realist
formulations of private life that are closer to snapshot memories, those vivid
memories of the circumstances in which one learns of momentous events. In
novels and paintings, the grand narratives of nation-building are staged in par-
lours and villages. To restate in historiographical terms, microhistory horns
in on macrohistory. The training of Western audiences to participate imagin-
atively in world events was greatly advanced with this shift in attention, and
its curriculum of performative engagement is only writ larger in this new field
of contemporary art history. For, as Keith Moxey explains, contemporary art
historians must come to terms with different notions of time – he speaks of
“heterochronicity, the notion that there are multiple forms of time” and re-
jects concepts that subtend theories of provincialism or explain influence in
terms of “belatedness.”73 He focuses on the “anachronic power” of the work
of art whose “presence” is truly present.74 Whereas contextual art histories
achieved plenitude by assembling the factors of a work’s creation in the past,
Moxey wants us to consider the conditions of interaction with the work in the
moment. He develops “the concept of anachronism as a means of describing
the process of mediation that goes on between artifacts that both solicit an af-
fective response and invite the desire of the contemporary historian or critic to
make meaning.”75 Spaces of translation, the mental alcoves to which we retire
to think and write about art, are also being transformed by more acute senses
of alternative temporalities – or perhaps ought to be.
Seizing the past as though vividly present can be risky, however, as reality
sometimes exceeds imagination’s grasp. South Asian art specialist Sonal Khul-
M artha L angford

lar offers a dual model. Time-travelling on the wings of contemporary Indian

art exhibited at the Venice Biennale of 2011, she describes her fascination with
postmodern art’s critical engagement with modernism and colonialism – a
phenomenon that Kenyan literary theorist Simon Gikandi has characterized
as “perhaps the most intense and unprecedented site of encounter between
the institutions of European cultural production and the cultural practices
of colonized people.”76 Transnational and interdisciplinary affiliations in the
14
present strengthen Khullar’s desire to uncover the tangled roots of Indian mod-
ernism, to pose and answer certain supplementary questions. Periodization is
one: her study of Indian modernism from the 1930s to the 1980s puts right
the erroneous assumption that everything cultural shifted in 1947, but also
dismantles the argument that the mechanical advantage of the global north –
Terry Smith calls it “iconogeographic twisting”77 – remained all-powerful until
the 1970s. Khullar effects this double correction not just by force of argument
but by showing her readers where she learned to look for the evidence, leading
them to “the file room of modernism in India”: information about the art of
the 1930s still circulating “through social networks and oral tradition.”78 There
is every reason to believe that much of this “iconogeographic twisting” was
tightening the screws on other non-Western modernisms as well, although the
particulars are “where” and “when.” And the particulars are just that: as If­tik­har
Dadi shows about modernism and Muslim South Asia; as Elaine O’Brien and
five co-editors canvas the multiple locations of modernism in Africa, Asia, and
Latin America; as Esther Gabara elucidates the ethos of modernism in Mexico
and Brazil, and so forth.79 Different sites, different file rooms, and different
forms proliferate under the sign of modernism.
On to Smith, then, who traces the emergence of contemporary art history to
its first conscious manifestation in the conceptual artists’ collective Art & Lan-
guage, founded in 1968 and active internationally in the manner that interests
Smith by the early 1970s.80 Under the heading of “Contemporary Artists Do
Art History as Art,” Smith explores artists’ engagement with debates surround-
ing the origins of modernism – his illustrations are works explicitly referential
to this discourse by Jeff Wall (b. 1946), Josephine Meckseper (b. 1964), Tacita
Dean (b. 1965), and Josiah McElheny (b. 1966). Obliquely citing some of the
criticism aroused by these works, Smith dismisses postmodernism’s labels of
“appropriation,” or less positively, “pastiche,” to argue for the importance of art-
istic practices that are taking the “art historical definition of what is, and has
been, at stake in modernist art to be an important component within what is
most at stake in making art now.”81 A prehistory of contemporary art history
provides the backstory of these intellectual struggles. Smith moves through the
art capitals of Europe, then shifts to New York, paying particular attention to
major institutions that first collected contemporary art. Institutions’ writing of
contemporary art history through acquisition is not a speculative history, but
a history of speculation. As he traces the variant definitions of “contemporan-
eity,” Smith is led away from the centre – the metropolises of modernism – to
the periphery, where he encounters wide-ranging sets of values and aspira-
Introduction

tions: from artists’ desires to be recognized as engaged in and equal to inter-

nationally recognized movements and the utter rejection of such aspirations
as slavish and colonial; to the desire to be or not to be international, national,
regional, or local; and above all, to the desire not to be seen as provincial, a
15
 condition that Smith himself had diagnosed in excruciating detail in his inter-
national debut article of 1974.82
As an older and wiser Smith catalogues the diversity of contemporary art
movements around the globe, he is convinced that “there will be no single story
(and thus no style change in art as such) but rather many parallel, contingent
but identifiably specific histories.”83 But this level of pluralism is difficult for
historians to consolidate, and as Smith continues his historiographical survey,
he fleetingly adopts the perspective of cultural theorist Peter Osborne, who
advances the cause of “the deeply reflexive work of Art & Language during the
1980s and 1990s,” making it the reference point for contemporary practice: a
“post-conceptual art” establishes “the historical-ontological condition for the
production of contemporary art in general,” writes Osborne.84 This centre will
not hold, however, as Smith fully recognizes. A reinvigorated attack on mod-
ernism “does not, I believe, fully meet what contemporaneity now requires of
art and its articulators: demands that are broader in geopolitical scope, more
lateral in their experiential character, and deeper in their theoretical challenge
than modernism of whatever stamp can allow.”85 And so say all of us, the con-
tributors to this volume. Smith, however, was saying it in Art Bulletin, where
only a small percentage of the readership would consider modernism an ex-
hausted topic; or, to put it more gently, one that has been well served by late
twentieth-century scholarship and art practice; or less gently, a subject that
seems increasingly irrelevant outside elite cultural circles; or in more practical
terms, one whose limited stock offers diminishing returns in a bullish global
art world. In 2008 Okwui Enwezor was already advising those who would seek
to understand contemporary art “to provincialize modernism,” casting Pop as
just one among many other progressive art movements, one that is utterly
senseless outside its “consumer society” and “capitalist structure” – in China,
for instance.86 Enwezor’s division of modernity into four concurrent temporal
thought-categories follows Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s attack on
unitary historical time as it shores up European hegemony; his exhortation
echoes Chakrabarty’s title, Provincializing Europe, thereby participating in its
program to decentre both perspectives and power.87
Perhaps sensing the magnitude of this historiographical sea-change, Smith,
in a later essay, makes the somewhat counter-intuitive argument that globaliz-
ation is just one set of forces in the contemporary art world and furthermore
M artha L angford

that undue attention to “top-down globalisation,” as he calls it, misses a great

deal about what is coming from the other direction.88 Understanding the art
world as circumscribed – and many of its inmates do – one might begin to see
the global as a complex construction of the local, a single-point perspective re-
lationally composed from multiple points of view; that is the paradox that rises
like a mist from his work. As Smith puts it, “From the multiscalar perspective

16
of worlds-within-the world, we can see that each is, at the same time but in dis-
tinctive ways and to specific degrees, local, regional and international – that is
to say, worldly, in character.”89 And intentionally so, as its cosmopolitan artists
and curators assert. Australian-born, American-based Smith draws on Indian
cultural theorist and curator Nancy Adajania’s citation of Nigerian-born, New
York- and Munich-based curator Enwezor’s “identification of a widespread
‘will to globality’” that conditions her practice and has also informed the na-
tional art histories in this book.90
German art historian Hans Belting has been a driving force in establishing
the global art history movement, maintaining his focus on the kind of art that
is produced in a global context, especially as it escapes Western “guidance” and
“institutions.”91 His mise au point for The Global Art World captures the flailing
of Western institutions as they attempt to adapt a framework “for studying art
via a history of form,” which only functioned properly in relation to Western
art since the Renaissance to non-Western practices.92 Contemporary art mu-
seums appear to be the most disoriented, having been displaced by the bi-
ennales as purveyors of the avant-garde, and in some non-Western capitals,
enervation equals inflation. In Shanghai, as Oscar Ho Hing-kay reports in the
same 2009 volume, a hundred new museums were slated to open by 2010 –
the comparison is to Starbucks.93 If such decentralization seems very remote
from Western museum development, it is worth noting that in Canada, plans
to create a new building for the Vancouver Art Gallery have been hassled by
local developers’ counter-proposals to handle the vag ’s need for expansion by
creating a network of “themed satellite galleries” around the downtown.94
While the Western modern art museum “was context or provided a con-
text” for contemporary art – a model much imitated by modernizing coun-
tries – “museums have lost their former authority as a given context, and the
art market does not offer an alternative context,” says Belting.95 The major
art institutions, it might be observed, are undergoing a dual repositioning:
mission-wise, from validating authority to tourist destination; location-wise,
from the old metropolises to the new art cities. Whether they can maintain their
leadership roles in the narration of art history remains to be seen. Belting re-
views the modern museum’s record of “double exclusion”: ignoring practition-
ers of modernism outside the metropolitan centres; relegating non-Western
practices to ethnographic museums, though, as he allows, the latter division is
beginning to break down as contemporary art enters ethnographic museums
and art museums begin to embrace global art.96 The division is not erased,
however, by special exhibitions and rehangs of a museum’s collection; it is, in a
Introduction

sense, perpetuated in the academy and its production of scholarly studies. Dis-
tinctions continue to be made between global art history and world art history,
which deals with the visual culture of societies that, as Belting puts it, “had no

17
 previous share in modernism”97 but is now being displayed and interpreted in
institutional settings – the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris is the now classic
example – whose creation and operations have been atomized by Sally Price.98
While the stink of imperialism, Orientalism, and primitivism is impossible
to eradicate from these rooms, there are arguments for keeping them dusted
and open to reinterpretation, as long as modernism continues to be studied.
“Universal museums, as an idea, are a legacy from modernity’s claim to offer
universal models.”99
Globalization in general and global art history in particular reawaken other
ideational legacies, notably avant-gardism, metropolitanism, and cosmopol-
itanism, forces dynamically at play in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century
constructions of nationhood and, like historical distance, reconfigured for the
twenty-first in national and transnational studies.100 There is more afoot than
intellectual restlessness, though the human factor, both individual and collect-
ive, is obviously at root. People leave of their own volition; some breathe easier
elsewhere; an expatriate may be a creature of two-way curiosity, a “stranger”
in Georg Simmel’s proto-relational theory, and immutably so, according to
Jean-Luc Nancy.101 Persons who live out of their suitcases form communities
of non-belonging – here we might think, perhaps romantically, of interwar
Paris.102 Both émigrés and migrants are also pushed out by a range of factors,
from ostracization to catastrophe – here the images represent non-conformity,
religious persecution, racial prejudice, and territorial seizure. From the de-
parture (pun intended), scholars find many modes of transnational identity,
which they link back to the reasons for leaving home and the sense of com-
munity formed elsewhere. Still they grapple with the conceptual differences
between transnational and diasporic identities, which, as Caroline B. Brettell
explains, are far from settled, though they might yearn to be.103 She cites Peggy
Levitt, who suggests that the first are sometimes succeeded by the second:
“Diasporas form out of the transnational communities spanning sending and
receiving countries and out of the real and imagined connections between mi-
grants from a particular homeland who are scattered throughout the world. If
a fiction of congregation takes hold, then a diaspora emerges.”104 A diaspora is
a function of collective self-recognition. A diasporic consciousness, one might
observe, also forms transcultural alliances between persons and peoples who
have experienced displacement; they live together in places of transition, and
M artha L angford

the verbal and visual images about their conditions are often quite similar.
As Donald E. Pease puts it, “When used as a noun, the transnational refers to
a condition of in-betweenness (the ‘trans’), and to a behavioral category that
imputes the traits of flexibility, non-identification, hybridity, and mobility to
agents of conduct.”105 These transnational behaviours are imagined within a
vast array of possibilities and reconstructed from the particularities of place

18
and moments in time. As Pease continues, “The transnational is not a discourse
so much as it is itself a volatile transfer point that inhabits things, people, and
places with surplus connectivities that dismantle their sense of a coherent,
bounded identity.”106 The dismantling can be traumatic or liberating, and
every shade in-between, for those who directly experience displacement and
for the next generation as it forms a diaspora. Theories of collective memory,
cultural memory, and postmemory are useful in such instances.107
In terms of methodology, something akin to dismantling is enacted in the
softening of disciplinary boundaries, whether in academic or museological
research. For example, tracing the movement of art objects from the colony
or the field to the metropolis and the museum – the in-depth study of proven-
ance – currently may involve transnational, transcultural, and transdisciplin-
ary networks of art historians, curators, archivists, scientists, and ethicists in
discourse analysis, forensic studies, and production of oral histories. Deeply
affected by postcolonial theory, art history has absorbed concepts of hybridity
and interstitiality that redefine the idea of nation. In studies of circulation, the
interpretational outcomes are important, as are the direct impacts on the lives
of objects that may benefit from new protocols of preservation and display, or
may be repatriated to their original nations. But Renan’s frequently cited ques-
tion, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” keeps oiling the engine of national redefinition.
A sampling of current transnational studies draws out a general impatience
with traditional research models that ignore “the heterogeneity and heteron-
omy”108 of subject practices and populations. Within the history of European
modernism, David Cottingham argues that perspectives on the avant-garde
in England have been clouded by essentialism and isolationism, making his
case for the closer comparison of London and Paris.109 Mark Cheetham, for his
part, “draws out the Englishness of English art theory” in relation to Empire
and a cosmopolitan framework that “structured both the importation of theory
from the Continent – especially for [William] Hogarth, [Wyndham] Lewis, and
[Herbert] Read – and in turn shaped the exportation of English art theory.”110
Examining the resurgence of cosmopolitan conceits in the current “post-
national” moment, Cheetham begins to wonder whether the redeployment of
these exhausted arguments might not be a persistent strain of nationalism and
regionalism, unconscious perhaps, but no less effective.
Such subtle re-reasoning of modernism and modernity belongs to the cur-
rent moment, in which we are trying to make sense of cultural transactions
and their imbalances. But it is also of a moment just past: the crisis of modern-
ism as performed by postmodernism’s polyvalent skepticism, which attacked
Introduction

political philosophies, systems of knowledge, and cultural practices, with par-

ticular scorn for the false idol of universality. This is not the place to rehearse
those arguments, but possibly to remember Hal Foster’s more forward-looking

19
 notion of a “postmodernism of resistance” as one lens through which we read
the politics of national and transnational culture today.111 Foster’s still-useful
edited collection, The Anti-Aesthetic (1983), includes a chapter by Edward Said,
who taxes the Left for its “shrill withdrawal” from the project of universal lit-
eracy, which he still values as a tool for “healthy oppositional participation in
modern industrial society.”112 Said urges renewed political engagement through
media, considering “alternative uses of photography” that attempt to represent
the histories and intimate experiences of others in ways that ultimately can
be connected to “ongoing political and social praxis.”113 His program is exem-
plified by Le Harem colonial (1981), an archival project of photographic recu-
peration and textual re-enactment by Algerian poet and critic Marek Alloula,
which Said recognizes as an important bridge between Algerian experience
and Western readership. Also in Foster’s collection, architectural theorist Ken-
neth Frampton develops his six-part theory of “critical regionalism” – he “ap-
propriates” the term from Alex Tzonis and Liliane Lefaivre – shaping it into an
“arrière-garde position” that “distances itself equally from the Enlightenment
myth of progress and from a reactionary, unrealistic impulse to return to the
architectonic forms of the preindustrial past.”114 In conceptualizing an “archi-
tecture of resistance,” Frampton pays particular attention to urban gathering
places – to the importance of the polis – which he relates to Martin Heidegger’s
“bounded place-form” and Hannah Arendt’s “space of human appearance.”115
This “place-form,” argues Frampton, is the people’s stronghold against an urban
design of placelessness – the proliferation of the megalopolis that is imposed
on a site with little regard for nature or culture – the “topography, context,
climate, and light” – and with utter disregard for the experience of architec-
ture, which should be tactile as much as visual. The sensorial poverty of West-
ern design – a focus on visual experience – is being exported through “the
relentless onslaught of global modernization.”116 In Frampton’s architecture
of regional resistance, “the tactile opposes itself to the scenographic and the
drawing of veils over the surface of reality”; he too offers counter-examples,
notably the Säynatsalo Town Hall (1951), designed by Finnish modernist archi-
tect Alvar Aalto (1898–1976).117 As will be evident in this book, postcolonial-
ism and postmodernism continue to support both theory and methodology,
though with increasing reflexivity and more attention to positive models, as
Said and Frampton, among others, were already advocating in the early 1980s.
M artha L angford

The notion that cosmopolitanism “requires and involves the very roots it
claims to transcend” has been part of the discourse since the late 1990s, a set
of ideas under the heading of “rooted cosmopolitanism.”118 Its chief explicator
has been political philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, who argues that “you
can be cosmopolitan – celebrating the variety of human cultures; rooted –
loyal to one local society (or a few) that you count as home; liberal – convinced

20
of the value of the individual; and patriotic – celebrating the institutions of
the state (or states) within which you live.”119 In somewhat less celebratory
language, Will Kymlicka and Kathryn Walker rehearse the history of cosmopol-
itanism, tracing its utopic construction in moral, political, and cultural terms,
arriving at the source of its current dystopic form: “The core idea of cosmopol-
itanism may be to recognize the moral worth of people beyond our borders,
particularly the poor and the needy, but its historical practice has often been
to extend the power and influence of the privileged elites in the West while
doing little if anything to benefit the truly disadvantaged.” They cite Craig
Calhoun’s wry definition of cosmopolitanism as the “class consciousness of
the frequent flyer.”120 As a political philosophy, rooted cosmopolitanism main-
tains the moral altitude of responsibility to others, while “revising earlier com-
mitments to a world state or a common global culture, and affirming instead
the enduring reality and value of cultural diversity and local or national self-
government.”121 In short, cosmopolitanism begins at home – in this case, Can-
ada – as a term that can be applied to the languishing populations of nations
within nation-states, lonely alien workers hidden in the barns of agro-business
and family farms, families hidden in plain sight in the suburbs of the new city-
states, where political and economic refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants
gain precarious footholds. The four co-editors of Cosmopolitanism, Sheldon I.
Pollock, Bhabha, Carol Appadurai Breckenridge, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, also
cited by Kymlicka and Walker, take the concept of “world citizen” into these
new realities by recasting the cosmopolitan as a figure of displacement and
dispossession: “The cosmopolitanism of our times does not spring from the
capitalized ‘virtues’ of Rationality, Universality, and Progress; nor is it embod-
ied in the myth of the nation writ large in the figure of citizen of the world.
Cosmopolitans today are often the victims of modernity, failed by capitalism’s
upward mobility, and bereft of those comforts and customs of national be-
longing.”122 This cosmopolitanism – a “minoritarian modernity” – draws on
transdisciplinary knowledge to form different alliances that denaturalize sys-
tems of power: “a vernacularization of a great tradition and the amplification
of a petit récit.”123
Thierry de Duve brings yet another meaning to cosmopolitanism in his con-
sideration of the global proliferation of biennales, which his use of language
aligns with a business world that practices “glocalization,” the development
of local markets through slight but meaningful customization of products.124
Participation in this cultural economy earns “glocal citizenship [which] can
be construed as the present-day version of cosmopolitanism.”125 The new art
Introduction

cities of the world are products of a reinvigorated capitalism, which continues

to excite different opinions, as de Duve observes: “Interpretation of the phe-
nomenon also oscillates between the optimistic embracing of a democratic

21
 redistribution of cultural power among established and ‘emergent’ regions of
the world, and the pessimistic recognition of a new form of cultural hegemony
and re-colonisation on the part of the West.”126 De Duve cuts a fresh path by
coining his own neologism, “singuniversal,” the combination of “singular” and
“universal,” which brands his desire for the reawakening of Kant’s sensus com-
munis: “A communality or communicability of sentiment, implying a defin-
ition of humankind as a community united by a universally shared ability for
sharing feelings.”127 As De Duve imagines it, sentiments that might under the
right circumstances be shared cross-culturally would be aesthetic judgments
about art. Political philosopher Thomas Nail also summons Kant, but draw-
ing different conclusions about his cosmopolitan legacy: “For Kant, migrants,
nomads, and other non-citizens are only allowed temporary access to the terri-
tory of a state: visitation (Besuchrecht), not residence (Gastrecht) … History and
the culture it has built is off-limits to the migrant.”128 The state of statelessness
that Nail calls “migrant cosmopolitanism” forms its own organizations with
traditions of openness and movement: “The created universalist and often
egalitarian underground societies that dug up enclosure fences in the night;
lived in the forests, wastelands, and commons; and preached the cosmopol-
itan right of the poor to the land.”129 One might be tempted to say that De
Duve’s cosmopolitanism belongs to an earlier age, but Nail’s historical survey
suggests that this was a Neverland. In the twenty-first century – “the century
of the migrant”130 – De Duve’s quixotic search for meeting points between
cultures puts him into an elite “papered” cosmopolitan community whose art
experience is writing global art history, but whose connection to the migrant
cosmopolitan is, for the most part, remote.131
The category of World Art made its first appearance as a colonial construct.
Belting traces it to the Viennese school of art history, the term being Welt-
kunst.132 It re-emerged in the late 1990s, developed by British art historian
John Onians in an article, “World Art Studies and the Need for a New Natural
History of Art,” which appeared in Art Bulletin in 1996.133 Onians was address-
ing a field that had been engaged in reform for over a decade. The “New Art
History” was shaking off modernism’s obsession with form, originality, and
almost exclusively male genius, inviting contamination from other disciplines,
both the sciences and the humanities, in a concerted effort to broaden think-
ing. Onians’s exposition belongs to a special section of the journal, “A Range
M artha L angford

of Critical Perspectives: Rethinking the Canon,” which begins with medievalist

Michael Camille’s confession of embarrassment over his involvement with a
museum collection predicated on “triumphant nationalism, a purely stylistic
taxonomy of objects, and a rigidly chronological system of classification,” and
ends with Africanist Christopher B. Steiner’s modest proposal that art hist-
ory’s efforts to dismantle the canon might better be put to understanding the

22
structures that have established hierarchies that remain relevant within other
societies.134 In between, architectural historian of the Ottoman period Zeynep
Çelik pushes beyond the Western consciousness-raising of Edward Said’s Ori-
entalism to explore the devastating “modernization” of Algiers from Algerian
perspectives and to examine the work of painter Osman Hamdi (1842–1910)
as a critical response to Orientalist thinking. I cite this provocative set of essays
to broaden the context of Onians’s intervention, which was made in a field
undergoing significant renovation into which he introduced a new take on an
old paradigm that he had developed from working with a collection donated to
the University of East Anglia in 1975 by Sir Robert and Lady Sainsbury (now
known as the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection, Sainsbury Centre for
Visual Arts). The collection as currently described includes works from Oce-
ania, Africa, the Americas, Asia, the ancient Mediterranean cultures of Egypt,
Greece and Rome, and Medieval Europe, as well as examples of European
modern art.135 In 1996 Onians’s approach followed the original intentions
behind the gift, which were not to explode the category of art history but to
“stimulate sensual awareness.” The donors’ aim is honoured in an approach
that stresses the human relation to material through sight and touch, Onians’s
call for a “natural history of art” based in human physiology, psychology, and
“the human relationship to the natural environment,” rather than focusing on
“the cultural context of art making, the way that it is influenced by educational,
social, political economic, religious, philosophical, technical, and other factors,
[which] is comparatively well understood.”136 The imbalance within the system
he was describing is undeniable, and since that time, study of the senses led by
anthropologists and research-creators has increasingly informed art-historical
research, though with decreasing confidence in essential qualities and univer-
sal structures, and increasing reliance on continental philosophy, notably the
work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.137
The category of world art and its institutions can be critiqued as the pre-
serve of otherness, “respecting” the fact that art, as “we” define it, is a Euro-
centric concept and that the material culture of other societies needs to be
thought about differently. This disciplinary distinction can be hard to grasp
for several reasons, one being its dependence on knowing and rehearsing a
structure of prejudicial understanding – modernism’s link between primitiv-
ism and pastness, for example, which has been weakened by anthropology,
ethnography, and world history’s own investigations, and further complicated
by the redefinition of historical distance that, as Phillips notes, results in “a
pattern of affective engagement that we recognize as characteristic of these
Introduction

times,” by which he means the present.138

Under the rubric of global art, contemporary artists concerned with the leg-
acies of transnational processes such as slavery or colonization appropriate,

23
 or in some cases reappropriate, the processes and objects preserved by world
art history, as a way of speaking back to power within the constructs of nation
that still have a negative impact on their communities. The same motive force
brings out representations of traumatic histories whose “singuniversalization”
threatens to strip them of meaningful context. A further complication is intro-
duced by the exploded definition of visual art, whose edgiest forms are no
longer provided by the emulative behaviours of the avant-garde, but by pro-
ductive transcultural exchange that has trickled down through documentaries,
biopics, and the online presence of world art museums and global art fairs into
Western art education. To put this rather crudely, if the West once missionized
the East, that learning process (a euphemism) has been reversed, at least in the
academy, making certain kinds of distinctions – object versus event, for ex-
ample – incomprehensible to students of art history and visitors to museums.
This is not a loss of reference points but a gain through broader exposure. In
her introduction to Global Theories of the Arts and Aesthetics, Susan L. Feagin
underscores her collection’s attention to the arts as “constituent of everyday
life, including important events, transitions, and religious attitudes and ob-
servances”; she further notes the “integration” of practices and forms that the
West has tended to distinguish.139 Emerging researchers of national art histor-
ies are interested in the material culture and archives of art actions, however
obscure or ephemeral, which have tested the equilibrium of the nation-state,
whenever and wherever they have occurred, and they commonly anchor that
interest in relational art-historical practices that form fluid socio-political for-
mations. Further informed by global history, they bring these insights to bear
on their histories of global art, passions frequently ignited by contemporary
artists’ and curators’ archival interventions – “anachronistic inspiration” is an
oxymoron. Students of art history are tutored by trans-practices of all kinds,
which makes connection and comparison part of their basic toolkit. As to
sensitizing these same students to social justice and the wider ramifications
of local actions, there is very little we can teach them. Many want to do and/
or bring justice to the cultural production of the place they know – their an-
cestors’ constructions of nationalism, however these might be judged. Caught
in the flood of world history and global art history, they see certain nuances
of their own subject-formations, positive and negative, being lost. And so they
ask: Who will write these stories if I do not?140
M artha L angford

This fundamental question concludes the backstory of this project, a col-

lection of national histories gathered from different places on the globe, each
carrying a singular set of challenges. To locate other theoretical turns and
themes of global history – their unfinished business – within an emplaced his-
tory; to think comparatively without falling prey to “metaphor,” stereotyping,
or essentializing; to narrate episodes of cultural exchange without blindness

24
to other agendas and the rarity of a two-way street: these are only the first hur-
dles.141 An interest in transition – its first iterations and promissory notes – is
the mortar of this collection. It is no accident, I think, that topics have arisen
from Mandatory Palestine (1920–48), the Irish Free State (1922–37), and cur-
rent events in Egypt – chapters of mobilizing national self-consciousness – or
that are shaped in terms of diaspora, decolonization, and decommunization.
Nations and nationalisms are writ large at these moments; they help us to map
current conditions, and vice versa. In the cultural sphere, as recourse to other
scholars has shown, many questions are left in globalization’s wake. It is not
the ambition of this book to raise and answer all of them, but rather to focus
on issues arising from attempts to write histories of the visual arts in relation
to nationhood and its foils. Produced by natives of somewhere or by alien
researchers with a stake in the subject-culture, these are reflexive projects, or
they are nothing, and so it behooves me, I think, to say something about my
own history in the field, before introducing the chapters.

Uh-oh, Canada

At this point in my career, and with regular time off for good behaviour, I iden-
tify myself as a “Canadianist,” a word that my Canadian English spell checker
has accepted with reluctance. Writing the histories of Canadian photography
(1839–present) and contemporary art (1960–present) has necessitated know-
ledge of international movements, both parallels and intersections, as Canada
has grown, often kicking and screaming, from a “young” nation, the offspring
of two founding nations, British and French, into a nation-state more truth-
fully described as a multicultural settler-colonial nation occupying lands taken
from its Indigenous populations, Canada’s First Nations, Inuit, and Métis. Offi-
cial bilingualism and multiculturalism have been pillars of Canadian national
identity since the late 1960s. Neither has been even partially achieved without
a struggle. In 1990 Canada was singled out in Hobsbawm’s influential study
for the ardour of Quebec nationalism – an example of late-twentieth-century
divisiveness in nationalist movements.142 The adoption of multiculturalism as
a political philosophy has often been cited as an antidote to Quebec’s desire
to be recognized as a distinct society, within and beyond Canadian borders.
It was a multi-purpose panacea and very much a product of the Cold War.143
My chapter in this collection looks at one immigrant community and its con-
struction of photographic infrastructure in the late 1960s and 1970s – that
this population came from the United States, importing both its values and
Introduction

confidence, to define Canadian photography is shot through with irony, but is

unlikely to surprise cultural historians who have attended to the conditions of
co-existence in the Americas.

25
 My turn to the Canadian situation is intended less as a history of Canadian
art-historical writing – for the twentieth century, this attempt has already been
made144 – than as an exercise that illustrates some of the ways in which one
national art history has been set against a global backdrop in the past. The
Canadian case is particular, but it may be exemplary – which is a typical Can-
adian conceit. What Canada wants is to be seen and understood – a very tall
order, and one that is hardly unique. Every contributor to this book has strug-
gled with the question of its readership and how much common knowledge
could be assumed. We shared the dread of commonplaces that would bore our
compatriots to tears, as well as the fear of unfounded assumptions that would
leave most readers detached. The challenge of integrating the global with the
local has sometimes been met creatively – Lucy Lippard solved it by writing
The Lure of the Local in three parallel registers: art theory, case history, and
personal experience of place.145 That graphic presentation is not in use in this
book, but its polyphonic structure, including the reflexivity of the author, pre-
sents in every chapter.
Four episodes of Canadian art-historical writing played on my mind in the
course of this project. I want to hover over them briefly. The first was a thematic
issue of artscanada published in December 1979: “Art and Nationalism,” edited
by Anne Trueblood Brodsky. artscanada (1968–83) was the continuation of
Canadian Art (1943–68; 1984–present), which was itself the continuation and
expansion of Maritime Art (1940–43). Throughout its existence, and despite
(or, given the times, is it because of?) its upstart, e e cummings–style orthog-
raphy, artscanada was for English readers the journal of record for the visual
arts in Canada. The Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales d’histoire de l’art
canadien was founded in 1974, and was only just finding its feet. The rebrand-
ing and reorientation of 1968 effectively interrupted Canadian Art at the very
moment when Canadian nationalism was hydroplaning on the official celebra-
tions of the nation’s centennial (1967). But the coast-to-coast cohesion sought
by federal optimists since the nineteenth-century building of the railroad was
not to be obtained. French president Charles de Gaulle caused an international
incident when he capped a speech delivered during his official visit to Expo
67 in Montreal with a popular appeal to Quebec nationalism: “Vive le Québec
libre!” For both federalists and cosmopolitans, this was all the more galling as
the world’s fair had been conceptualized and trumpeted as the actualization
M artha L angford

of Canadian communications guru Marshall McLuhan’s “global village.”146

Changes to Canadian immigration policy that took place at that time were also
significant, reversing the pattern of immigration from Europe to Asia, empow-
ering existing communities, and infusing Canadian culture with a diversity
of practices. Also being revamped, though less successfully, was Canadian
federal policy on the Indigenous peoples, leading to the misbegotten White

26
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
drinking the tempting fluid on the sly, too, for his bristling mustache
was suspiciously creamy.
“What’s the matter with you?” he reiterated.
“Father, Katie has suddenly disappeared, very strangely and Mr.
Jeffries is much alarmed.”
“Disappeared?”
“Yes; nothing has been seen of her since last night. She is not at
home.”
“Hoh! she’s at some of the neighbors’.”
“No, she is not. I have been here ever since daybreak, and no one
has left the house.”
“Ha!” and Dunbar started.
“What’s the matter?” asked Jeffries. The other came forward with a
grave, solemn face, and laid his hand on his shoulder, quietly.
“See here, Rob, I’ll not beat about the bush, but will out with it. Last
night, about midnight, I was awake, and as I lay quiet, I heard what I
thought was an Indian yell, away down the creek. I got up and
looked out the window. The moon was shining very bright, and all
was still as the grave. As I stood looking, I saw something small and
white glance for an instant close to your house, then a bright red light
shine down by Hans’ cabin. Thinks I, something’s brewing, and I
watched, but I saw nothing more. But I heard somebody away down,
it seemed like, in Dead-Man’s Forest, say these words in a far-away
voice:
“‘Take care! beware!’”
Jeffries started. “That voice!” he exclaimed, uneasily.
“What, did you hear it, too?”
“Go on!” and Jeffries gestured impatiently.
Dunbar stared, but went on. “It was the strangest voice I ever heard,
and I can’t give any reason for it, but a cold chill ran over me, and I
felt for my gun. It was a voice from the grave.”
He stopped short, and Hettie turned pale. Jeffries gave a gesture of
irritation.
“Go on!” he said.
“In a few moments, say ten minutes, I saw, or imagined I saw, a dark
object moving rapidly down the hill. Part of it was black, part white. I
only saw it for about five seconds, when it vanished, and all was
quiet again.
“I waited for some time, then, seeing no more, went back to bed,
wondering. Just as I was falling asleep, I felt a draft of air pass over
me, and looked up. Though seeing nothing, I was sure that a
presence was near me—a thing felt, but not seen.”
He stopped, and drew Hettie protectingly to him, and grasped
Jeffries’ hand.
“Now, my daughter, I don’t want to alarm you, but though I could not
hear it, something seemed, ay, said:
“Trouble in Shadow Swamp—take care!”
Jeffries looked uneasy and seriously alarmed, while Hettie grew very
white. Dunbar watched them both steadily, then said:
“Now, what I think is this.”
Jeffries stopped him.
“Hold! I’ve suthin’ ter say, too. It’s all about thet rascal, Danforth—
thet galish feller.”
Then he related the events of the evening before; the meeting of the
lovers; the quarrel between Danforth and Walter; the latter’s defeat,
and the former’s disappearance; and concluded in a low, earnest
tone:
“I was a-huntin’ for the villain, and was down by Hans’ cabin, whar
he stops, when suthin’ said, ’pears like away off in the night:
“‘Yer air a-treadin’ on dangerous ground! tek keer, tek keer!’
“Wal, thet voice seemed so far away like, I kedn’t tell whar it was; but
as I war thinkin’, it kim ag’in, clost ter my ears, loud an’ peart, right
from the bunch of willows jist above the cabin. Thinkin’ it must be
Danforth hisself, I beat ’em all through, spendin’ an hour at it; but it
was no go. Then, hafe scared, I kim home. Dunbar, thar’s suthin’
wrong.”
“I am afraid there is, my friend, very apprehensive. I have always
given Dead-Man’s Forest a wide berth since the red-skins have been
about, but I think the best thing we can do is to search in it at once
for Katie—for it’s my opinion you’ll find her there.”
“That’s so, sartain. She ain’t ter hum, an’ whar she is no one knows.
Great God, whar’s my pooty little gal, my little pet?” And Jeffries
buried his face in his hands.
“Courage, my friend!” said his friend, kindly. “Courage, perhaps we
are mistaken—perhaps something strange though not of evil might
have turned up. Hettie, run to Sol Jacobs and give the alarm. Tell
them to spread the men around while I go down to Hans Winkler’s
cabin to see him. Gather the whole settlement and send a swift lad
for Cato the Creeper—we’ll find her soon.”
Hettie sped away toward the distant cabins, making her white,
bewitching ankles fly over the ground; she loved Katie dearly, and,
with a woman’s lightning wit, suspected the true state of the case.
Once she had been strolling about on the border of the wood, and
had overseen Danforth in close confab with a trio of villainous,
desperate-looking men, all armed to the teeth. Then, again, she had
seen him exchange significant glances with Cato, whom she
cordially suspected of evil.
To use an uncouth but forcible phrase, Hettie was “nobody’s fool.”
She linked several suspicious events, and by a little shrewd
guessing picked Danforth to pieces.
Though naturally penetrating and keen, she was under the influence
of the great sense-sharpener—Cupid, and was thoroughly in love
with gay, handsome Captain Downing. She loved him with an ardent,
whole-souled love, and could have gainsayed him in nothing.
Fortunate for her it was that the unscrupulous robber did not know of
her passion for him—very fortunate; for he would have caused her
bitter misery. She well knew his impulsive temperament, and avoided
him, knowing that to see him were only to give her love another
impetus.
Stop and consider what this backwoods girl was doing, and see what
a heroine she was. Cognizant of Downing’s ardent love for Katie,
conscious he did not love her, knowing Katie was her successful
rival, she was deliberately doing all she could to protect and save her
—she who had unwillingly outstripped her in the love of the beautiful
bandit—to organize a party for the apprehension and punishment of
her idolized hero, though it would almost be her death-blow to see
him disgraced and punished.
You see she was a very extraordinary girl—this young backwoods
maid.
She soon arrived at the cabin of Sol Jacobs, and hurriedly entering
told them of the story. Old Sol heard her through, heard her
suspicions, conjectures and fears, then turned sharply to his son, a
stalwart young fellow of twenty who would have died for Hettie, being
devotedly attached to her.
“Arouse the settlement, Eben!” he said, “and make your pins fly too.
Tell every man that little Katie has disappeared suddenly! that’ll bring
’em together short meter.”
Eben sprung away while Hettie lingered with the women, who,
cackling all at once, plied her with questions. Old Sol took down his
gun and rubbed the dust off the barrel.
The news flew like wildfire about the little settlement. Men frowned
and quietly took their rifles from their pegs. Young men swore an
oath or so, then clenched their teeth, and baring their arms, watched
their brawny muscles as they swelled with the arm’s rise and fall.
Then they clutched their guns, and uniting together, clamored to start
in pursuit.
The elders, though quite as resolved and more worthy and reliable
than their juniors, were men of experience, and never moved rashly,
always looking before leaping. They assembled the youngers, and
all uniting started for Jeffries’ cabin.
They had gone but a short distance when they discovered three
forms approaching by Winkler’s cabin. They halted and waited for
them on receiving a signal to that effect.
They were Cato, Eben Jacobs, and Walter Ridgely, the latter walking
unsteadily. His head was bound up in Eben’s scarlet handkerchief
and his face was livid and white. His eyes were bruised and purple
and his nose was defaced. He was too angry and chagrined to
control his anger, but allowed it free scope. The result was that he
was in a dangerous state of mind.
They gathered round him, plying him with questions, which he
answered moodily.
He had been walking, he said, through the spur of forest when he felt
a rustle behind him, and turning had seen a man with uplifted
bludgeon directly behind him. He tried to avoid the impending blow
but too late; the cudgel descended squarely upon his head, and he
knew no more until morning, an hour or so since, when he was
stumbled upon by Eben, on his way to Cato’s cabin.
When asked if he recognized his would-be assassin he replied in the
negative. But he was sure that it was not Danforth. He was a much
larger man, being almost a giant.
Murmurs of indignation and menaces rose from the settlers, old and
young. They had long suspected the depths of the grim forest were
the haunts of evil men, and they were now sure of the fact. They
were rapidly believing that quiet Danforth too was not what he should
be, but was connected in some way with Katie’s disappearance, all
being aware of last night’s events.
Walter was frantic when told of her sudden and strange absence,
and sick with fear and doubt, raved to be gone in hot search. In this
he was seconded by Jeffries, who was scarcely less alarmed and
distracted. Accordingly, hasty arrangements were made; officers and
scouts were chosen; Cato, the Creeper, stood ready to fix upon any
trail, trace or mark; and the hearts of the whole band beat as one.
Every man was armed to the teeth, and what was better, was
buoyed by the sense of being in the right—a weapon far more potent
than the steadiest rifle, the deadliest pistol, or keenest knife ever
made.
Place two men of equal strength and agility upon an open field to
combat, one being in the right and the other in the wrong. It will
surprise you to see how soon the former will defeat his antagonist.
This is solid truth.
Sol Jacobs was chosen chief, as being an old Kentucky Indian-
fighter. The next in command was Jeffries. The scouts and flankers
were the keenest, sharpest young men in the settlement, under the
supervision of Cato, the Creeper.
Before long they were wending their way down the hill toward the
forest, Cato grinning with delight, the only agreeable person in the
party. The women stood by the little block-house watching them
depart; and though many feminine hearts were sad, none were so
heavy and torn as the virgin one of sweet Hettie Dunbar, watching
with red, swollen eyes, the departure of cunning, earnest men, to
bring to harm her lover.
In a few moments they were out of sight, and the women went back
to their cabins sorrowfully. But Hettie mounted the narrow ladder in
the block-house and sat drearily alone, sadly waiting, trembling lest
at any moment she should see her heart’s idol brought back
wounded or dying, and in disgrace and shame.
 CHAPTER V.
A FIENDISH DEED.
Downing and Cato hurried away through the forest, toward Shadow
Swamp, Katie meanwhile lying unconscious in her abductor’s arms.
But, when they arrived at the pool, and stopped and signaled for the
canoe, the cessation of the jolting motion aroused her and she
opened her eyes.
At first her senses were scattered, and she did not remember the
startling occurrence which had just taken place. But by degrees her
wandering thoughts collected, and looking at the dark, grim trees,
the still, pale light of the moon, the sable form beside her, and at her
own villainous captor, she realized all and her heart sunk. The
incidents, one by one, with startling distinctness rushed over her; the
sudden awakening and fright; the villain’s rude and immodest grasp
of her; the gradual fading away into oblivion; all, with the terrible,
sickening dread of her fate to come was too much for her, and she
swooned again.
When she again opened her eyes she looked upon four log walls
and a roof of “brush.” She was in a cabin.
The walls were hung with skins, weapons, utensils and clothing, and
last, in one corner, was a looking-glass—the pet of the dandy
captain. The cabin was small, very small; but it was clean. Raising
herself on her elbow, she looked around. In two corners were two
piles of buffalo-skins undressed, and blankets—evidently used as
beds. A round, short piece of a log stood on end in the center of the
room, evidently a stool. This, with her own couch, completed the
scanty furniture of the cabin.
She was lying on a bed which had been prepared for her, and she
was delicately covered by skins. Her own clothing lay near.
In a few moments the door opened, and Captain Downing entered.
He found her dressed and sitting vacantly on the stool without power
to fly and escape. He had evidently taken some pains with his toilet,
as his green coat was carefully brushed, his hair was arranged, and
his boots were cleansed of all soil which generally adhered to them.
He bowed gracefully, in a manner which would have reflected credit
upon many a “carpet knight.”
“Ah!” he said, softly, “I am very glad to see you are able to be up and
about. Please accept my sincerest wishes for your health.”
She did not raise her head, but sat as if in a trance. He went on:
“May I call you Miss Katie? Please do not be offended if I do. It
seems so much more pleasant than cold, formal Miss Jeffries.
Besides, my ardent regard for you causes me to use a more familiar
title.”
But she did not notice him. After watching for any effect his remarks
might produce, he lounged gracefully upon his pile of robes, and
took a meerschaum from his pocket.
“A relic of former days,” he said, in a musing tone. “May I so far
trespass upon your good-humor as to smoke? A vice to which
gentlemen are much addicted. The dear ladies, however, in their
sweet graciousness, not only grant their permission generally, but
protest they ‘like the perfume of a good cigar.’ Here’s to the ladies—
one in particular, the bonniest of them all. Having no claret to quaff
their health in, I am forced to be satisfied with a meerschaum and
very villainous tobacco. Miss Katie, your own health.”
He puffed out a wreath of smoke with exquisite effrontery, and smiled
as a low moan escaped her lips.
“You are looking lovely to-day, Miss Katie—very enchanting. If you
only knew how my heart bleeds for you in your present embarrassing
situation, you would at least reward me with one of your sweet
smiles. Let us hope, however, that the present place may soon
become pleasant, even dear to you. I will do all in my power to make
it so, I assure you.”
His last remark had the effect of partially arousing her from her
apathy. She looked at him mournfully, with a glance in which were
mingled grief, outraged modesty, terror and contempt. He laughed.
“You are very beautiful—very lovely. When you gazed at me so
earnestly just now, my heart beat faster than its usual wont, and I
imagined I could detect a sly twinkle of love, too. Was my surmise
correct, Katie?”
She rocked to and fro, groaning in sheer despair and terror. His eyes
snapped.
“I’m like the boy who drew the nightingale in the lottery,” he muttered.
“I’ve got her, and now she won’t sing. Well, we will try the efficacy of
force.”
He arose deliberately and stood before her, and their eyes met. Hers
were terror-stricken, like a wounded fawn’s; his glittered like a
snake’s. Nevertheless, he spoke musically and low.
“If the fair Katie is aware of the value of obedience, she will temper
her stubbornness slightly.”
Her eyes wandering vacantly about, fell upon a polished pistol
hanging to a peg close by; she noted it. He waited a moment, then
laid his hand quietly on her shoulder.
With a wild, piercing cry she shook it off, and darting away, clutched
the pistol.
Never opening her lips, but piercing him with her eye, she stood
drawn to her full hight, her cheeks pale, her hands quivering, and her
whole being aroused.
“Stand back, you monster!” she commenced, in a ringing, grating
voice. “Don’t dare to lay your vile hands on me! Keep off, I say!”
She was thoroughly aroused, and her eyes darted angry fire.
Irresistibly lovely she looked, and Downing, in spite of his chagrin at
her opposition, loved her ten times more than ever. He gazed at her
with his heart beating violently, he was so affected by her resolute
bearing. Then his lip curled and he advanced on her.
She quickly cocked the pistol and presented it. He halted, but moved
slowly around her, trying to find an opportunity for rushing in and
disarming her. But, impelled by her terrified modesty, she was wary
and kept him at bay. After some time spent in gliding about, he saw it
was no use and changed his manner.
Dropping his arms and extending his hands, he put on, with splendid
cunning, a mask of virtue. Throwing a wistful, pleading look into his
comely brown eyes, he murmured, in a low voice:
“Lady, do your will and take my life! See, I am unarmed and
unguarded; shoot! Oh, dear lady, to die by your hands were far
sweeter than to live and see you scorn me so, my love!”
His sudden change surprised her, but she was too affrighted to lose
her advantage. He saw she was in earnest, and he went on:
“I do not, I could not wish to bring myself to such a degraded level as
to wish to do you harm. If you knew how passionately I love you, with
what high regard I esteem your purity and courage, you would at
least refuse to threaten me so. Your harsh manner cuts me to the
heart. Believe me, dear lady, I do not mean you ill—if you think so,
you have only to shoot and rid yourself of such a detested object as I
am to you.”
He groaned as he said this, and sinking on his couch, buried his face
in his hands. She watched him warily, though half melted by his
protestations.
“I brought you here,” he said, with his face muffled, “to love and
cherish you—to tenderly care for you. If, after a time you did not like
it here, I was going to take you back. But oh! it wounds me to have
you scorn me so.”
“I know too well your foul hypocrisy to be deluded by it. You have
brought me here for evil, and you can not deny it. But this I tell you—
that if you lay your hand on me but once, it will be your last moment
upon earth. Take it in earnest, you demon, for I am terribly so.”
He groaned, then spoke, pleadingly:
“Oh, my love! please—”
“Keep your distance in language as well as in manner, for I will brook
no rude familiarity from you!”
“Miss Jeffries, won’t you try and care for me? Even if you can not
regard me as I would choose, you can at least endeavor to respect
me.”
This last was a false move. With this last effrontery her ire and grief
found a full vent.
“Dare you sit there and ask me to respect you?” she rung out, in
noble wrath. “Dare you, in the name of all that is pure and holy, to
ask me to look even pityingly upon you? Oh, sir, if in your mother
was a spark of womanly virtue, if your father was a man of worth and
honesty, if you ever had a pure sister, think of them and then of
yourself at this moment!—think of them and release me from this
wicked place. Take me back to my dear home; do not, oh, sir, do not
bring down the wrath of Heaven upon you! Think of my poor father—
of his anguish at my absence; think of the one who is to be my
husband; please, sir, please pity and commiserate me. Oh, if you
could imagine my grief and horror at being here, away from my
friends, if you could respect or pity my sorrow, you would at once
release me. Oh, sir, for the love and in the memory of your mother
and sister, please do so, and let me go, and I will never tell of what I
have been through here.”
He looked up in his natural expression and said, quietly:
“I will at once release you and take you safely home if you will grant
me a single favor. It will not incommode you.”
“Name it!” she said, hastily, with her face lighted by a ray of hope.
“I will. It is to marry me.”
“Marry you!”
She looked at him steadily for a moment, then sunk on the stool with
a shudder, wildly weeping.
“What is your answer?” he asked, with a quiet smile.
She did not answer, but sobbed and wept as if her heart was
breaking.
“What is your answer?” and he smiled.
“Never!” she sobbed; “never!”
“Very well—very well.”
He arose and walked toward the door and looked out.
“By the sun I should judge the time to be ten o’clock. Now, Miss
Jeffries, you will stay here twelve times twelve hours without food or
water unless you accede to my desire. I do not wish to humiliate you
in any manner, and will say there is a preacher about forty miles
east. If you desire to unite your fortunes with mine, say the word and
before night we will be at his house. Otherwise think of the terrors
and anguish of slow starvation. I will give you an hour to decide.
Reflect carefully, Miss Jeffries!”
He walked quietly out, leaving her a prey to the most harrowing
thoughts. She had been tenderly reared and had never known the
slightest grief, and this blow, dire as it was, humbled her and caused
great anguish. She well knew his quiet ferocity and unrelenting
disposition; she had just now seen his character in different phases;
and knowing he would accomplish his purpose if it was possible, she
trembled at the thought of the future.
In addition to these keen pangs was one nearly as piercing—she
had no idea in what place she was. In the settlement the robber had
lived in Hans Winkler’s cabin; she had often been there and knew
this was not it. She was probably in some remote and obscure place,
far from any path, alone with this dangerous and passionate man.
She did not dream that a dozen yards from the cabin, seven or eight
men, abandoned and profligate, ready to sanction and further any
act of Downing’s, isolated from any thing pure or honest, were
laughing and coarsely joking—even about her.
It was fortunate she did not, else she might have been unable to
bear the thought, and would have swooned with fear.
She was in a critical and harrowing position, without means of
escape, as she had heard him place a heavy log against the door as
he went out. The door opened outward purposely in order to confine
any prisoner within. Escape by the door was impossible.
As she thought upon her situation, fear lent her strength, and she
began to examine the walls of the cabin. For a half-hour she beat
them and pushed at the heavy logs feebly; she ran about sobbing,
beating them with her delicate hands until they bled; she mounted
the stool and searched the strong roof; she vainly endeavored to
force the door; she called on her father and lover frantically; then,
when escape was only too vain, she began to pray, half-crazed.
At the expiration of the hour Downing entered and closed the door
behind him.
Then he folded his arms and quietly gazed at her as she sat on the
low, rude stool, in a semi-stupor.
“Well?” he said.
She made no reply, neither did she raise her eyes; but sat
motionless.
“Well,” he continued, smiling slightly, “have you made up your mind?”
He expected here that she would show some spirit, at least a little
resistance; but she neither did one nor the other.
“Have you resolved which alternative you will take?”
She answered in a faint voice, “I have.”
“Well, will you be my wife and gain a protecting husband?”
“No!”
“Are you in earnest, Miss Jeffries? Think well before you speak. You
know the alternative; do you choose it?”
“I do; any thing were better than being the wife of a man I loathe and
detest.”
“You will find yourself mistaken before many days, mark well what I
say. I am not to be deterred from my resolve.”
“I am resolved.”
“Once again I enjoin, nay entreat you to reflect. You are,
metaphorically speaking, at the forks of a road. One leads, if not to
perfect happiness, to at least, an easy, indolent life, well garnished
with luxuries; the other to—a horrible, unknown death.”
“Fiend!”
“I am, Miss Jeffries, I acknowledge it. Yet I can be most tender and
agreeable when I choose. Fiend! that is a harsh word, yet I take a
strange sort of pride in it. You do not know my early life. Well, I will
relate it. Meanwhile you can, in listening, form some opinion of death
by starvation. I love you fondly, tenderly, Miss Kate, as only one of
my disposition can; and it is for this reason that I treat you so cruelly.
It is one of the contradictions of my nature. But I will go on with my
history.”
He lighted his quaint, costly pipe, and begging her pardon as politely
as any native of France, began in his rich, round voice, occasionally
making a gesture with the ease of an experienced orator.
“I am a native, of nowhere, and my parents were nobody. That is, my
parents either died or deserted me when very young, as I was found,
a frail infant in the middle of one of New York’s busiest
thoroughfares, in early morning, by a young roystering blade, rolling
home in the morning. He took me to a foundling asylum, and left me
to live or die—as my nurses by their care or neglect, might will.
“I lived—after suffering all the ills and evils of babydom, and grew
strong and healthy. When I arrived at the unripe and vicious age of
ten, an old gentleman, a retired merchant, attracted by the
comeliness of my face and form, adopted me, giving me his own
name—Robert Davis.
“I was a quick-witted, jovial little chap, and if I do say it myself, was
very fair and handsome. Being petted and caressed by all the
women both old and young, of the neighborhood, I easily grew into
the belief that I was something superhuman—in fact a genius, one
day to be the President of the country. It is true, that notwithstanding
my good-nature and affability, I was at times seized with fits of quiet,
inordinate cruelty, which made me a demon, and at these moments
everybody avoided me.
“As years went on these attacks became more frequent and violent.
Before, when under the influence of them, I restrained myself, and
was content with murdering all the small animals within my reach.
But now, I became more bloodthirsty and ferocious—attempting,
though vainly, the lives of all my companions.
“Then they avoided me, and feared the very ground I trod. This
incensed me and I grew more violent. At last, on my twentieth
birthday, a fit, stronger and more uncontrollable than any before,
seized me. Without provocation of any kind I fell upon a comrade
and attempted his life. I failed, though he was made a cripple for life,
and I was buried in an insane asylum, a monomaniac. I was not
insane but only a monomaniac, yet that was sufficient to cause my
incarceration.
“In five years I was pronounced cured, and was freed. I went back to
my old haunts, penitent and resolving to do all in my power to
alleviate any suffering I had caused. But I was too late; the friends I
sought were gone. My adopted father was dead, the one whom I had
made useless for life had gone, no one knew whither; and weary of
lingering near the scene of so much unhappiness I went South.
“If you recollect, or if you ever knew, a most horrible robbery and
murder occurred in Charleston, a few years since. The perpetrator
was never discovered, though long and vigilant search was made for
him, and large rewards were offered for his apprehension. I see by
your face you recollect the event—it was the talk and alarm of the
whole country. I will not tell you what reason the murderer had for his
outrage; I need not dwell upon the subject, but will only say that he
escaped scot-free, plunged into the western wilds and organized a
band of robbers. Miss Jeffries, the man who stole into a banker’s
house for purposes of robbery (and to gratify a grudge) and who,
being discovered, took the lives of him and his servant, then made
off with a rich plunder, stands before you.”
She started up wildly, then after gazing at him in terror, clasped her
hands and sunk to the ground, unnerved. He smiled.
“I did not relate the narrative for effect—if I had I would have told it
minutely and in much greater length; but I told it briefly to make you
aware with whom you are dealing. And, to conclude, I will tell you my
name is not Danforth, but Captain Downing, chief of a bandit band,
and that I was never yet thwarted. Have you your answer ready?”
She slowly arose, pale, but firm and calm. Smiting him with her eyes
she regarded him steadily until his own quailed. Then she spoke in a
strange, grating voice:
“Were I in the power of one ten times the villain that you are; were I
looking forward to a fate worse than death; were I doomed to eternal
future pain and misery, instead of knowing that you can but take my
life; I would still have the same answer—I shall never wed but one
man, and he is your opposite.”
“This is your final resolve?”
“It is my final resolve!”
“Very well. May you enjoy yourself then, in the short life you have
marked out for yourself.”
He went softly around the cabin, and took every weapon from its
walls, even the pistol at her feet. Then, he opened the door, and
looked at her fixedly.
“It is well!” he said, with a quiet smile. “Through this open door take
your last glimpse of nature. You will never see human being or
outside world again. Farewell forever Miss Jeffries.”
“Ay!” she said, “we will never meet in the future world. I have but one
single prayer, and that is, may you forever be haunted by the ones
whom you have so fiendishly injured on earth. God forgive me for
uttering such a wish; but, mark my words, if ever there was justice
above or below you will be punished.”
He smiled on her, then turned and went out. The door closed and
was barred; she sunk down, overwhelmed; but a voice rung out
through the forest, unheard at the island in Shadow Swamp, but
speaking still, and the words were ominous:
“You are treading on dangerous ground; take care!”
She was left, without hope, to her fate.
 CHAPTER VI.
A DOUBLE BRIBE.
The pursuing and searching party wound swiftly into Dead-Man’s
Forest, with Cato the Creeper in advance. He strode boldly along,
whistling and singing jovially, though keeping a sharp eye upon
every thicket and matted copse. In addition to his razor, he carried a
huge knotted bludgeon which he trailed along the ground. When
fairly in the shades of the forest, he commenced a favorite melody,
with great gusto:

“Jawbone walkin’, Jawbone talkin’,

Jawbone eat with a knife an’ fork:
Jawbone broke an’ de marrow—”

“Dry up!” sternly ordered Sol, the leader. “Don’t yer know thar’s
Injuns skulkin’ round? let alone the gang of rascals I know hide in
these yer thickets. Ef yer don’t yer’d oughter.”
“Golly, Mars’r Jacobs, I’ve done prowled ’round these yer woods fur
dis long time an’ I done never see’d any gang. Ef thar was one, ole
Cato’d know it, shore.”
“Curse me ef I don’t believe you do,” mentally declared Jacobs. “I
guess I’ll keep an eye on the nigger.”
They were in a small glade. Stopping short, Jacobs turned and faced
the men, who halted and gathered about him. After thinking a
moment, he said:
“Now, boys, yer’ve pretty much made up yer minds how little Katie
got lost, ain’t yer?”
An expressive grunt was his answer.
“Wal, ’cordin’ ter Dutch Joe, this yer Danforth ain’t what he should
be, an’ it’s my opinion he’s in some way or t’other, got suthin’ ter do
with it. Them yer sentiments, boys?”
“Ay, ay!” and “you bet!” were his emphatic answers.
“Now, Dutch Joe is rayther cracked, but he’s right smart on common
things. He’s told me, time an’ ag’in, that he seen Danforth paddlin’ on
Shadow Swamp pond, with a lot of hang-dog men, armed ter the
teeth. Now, yer know thar’s been sev’ral chaps gone in this timber
that’ve never b’en seen ter come out. Blood, too, has been
diskivered. Most every one has heerd yells come from this yer timber
when these yer chaps war in it—yells of terror. Boys, yer know old
Sol Jacobs has fou’t Injuns and knows a thing or two; and yer know
he’s no person’s fool eyther. Wal, puttin’ this, that, and t’other
together, it’s my opinion this yer Danforth is in cohoots with a gang of
robbers, and that whar he is at, the pretty little Katie is.”
Several exclamations came from the men—groans from Walter and
Jeffries, threats from the young men, and murmurs of assent from
the elders.
“Wal, now, ter get little Katie back ag’in, we must find Danforth. Ter
do that we must hev a trailer who knows the woods and who kin
foller a blind trail. The best fellur fur that biz in the outfit is Cato, here;
and though I know he’ll work fur nuthin’, still he’ll work a durned sight
faster and surer with suthin’ in view—pay, p’r’aps.”
“Golly, Mars’r Jacobs, yer done speak de truf dat time, shore,” and
the negro grinned in anticipation.
“Now, boys, what’ll yer give ef he does his duty, whether we find her
or not? Fur one, I’ll throw in a dozen beaver-skins. Come, boys, shell
out!”
They did so, giving liberally of their scanty store of backwoods
paraphernalia. One gave a gun, another a foundered pony, a vicious
Bronco; another promised a small keg of liquor; another gave a set
of beaver-traps; while Walter and her father, in their grief and anxiety,
promised all their earthly possessions if she were returned to them
unharmed.
After this no time was lost. Eager for the search to begin in earnest,
anxious to recover the pet of the settlement, burning to meet and
vanquish the supposed gang of robbers, the men, one and all,
clamored to be led on.
Cato, who had been grinning from ear to ear during the discussion,
now desired to be left to himself, assuring them he would soon find a
trail on which to fasten. Then all would be easy.
“Wal, go on!” said Sol, impatiently. “No one’s hindering yer.”
Cato answered by gliding off into the “bush” at a rapid, sneaking
shamble. Eben followed him closely. The negro turned, half angrily:
“Mars’r Eben, ef dis yer niggah’s gwine ter pick out de trail, he must
be left ter hisself, shore. Kain’t work when any pusson’s ’round.”
“I’ve got orders ter foller yer,” answered the young man.
Cato dropped his hands to his sides.
“Wal, den, dis yer niggah’s done give up de job, fo’ shore. Kain’t do
nuthin’ while pusson’s round tramping up de ground. It must be cl’ar.”
The young man laid his hand significantly on his gun.
“Go on!” he sternly commanded.
“Golly, Mars’r Eben! yer don’t shoot dis yer niggah?”
“You bet I will ef yer don’t dust around lively. Time’s scarce; move
on!”
“Dat I will; dat I will!” surlily answered Cato. “Mars’r Eben, dis niggah
done go on. Call ’em all ’long! brung de hull pack! skreech an’ yell all
yer want! it don’t make no difference ter Cato!”
“You threaten, do yer, yer black rascal? Well, this I’ll say: ef yer play
us false, watch out fur a bullet.”
“Golly, Mars’r Eben! dis chile nebber cheats. Fo’ shore I find um trail
berry soon.”
“Well, what d’ye stand there for? Curse yer, why don’t yer go on?”
“Move on! Move on!” came in a high, warning voice close by, in the
opposite direction from where the party were grouped, watching their
movements. It proceeded from a dense thicket near at hand.