Short description:

Writing Borderless Histories of Art is an aspirational, historical, and critical project that offers a fundamental rethinking of the relationship of humans to the rest of nature. Its multilayered approach will appeal to art historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, musicologists, scientists, and philosophers.

Long description:

Writing Borderless Histories of Art is an aspirational, historical, and critical project that offers a fundamental rethinking of the relationship of humans to the rest of nature.

Social justice, Indigeneity, abuses of power, and the environmental crisis are the burning issues of today. A transcultural approach calls for abandoning structures of domination that are built into the academic disciplines, regardless of the scale or extent of interpretation. Drawing upon writings from a wide range of fields, Claire Farago argues that Art History can play a role in advancing the public's interconnectedness with the planetary life-support system that so urgently needs to be restored. Studying the discourse on art at the intersection of global capitalism, environmental degradation, and human subjection over four centuries, Writing Borderless Histories of Art advocates ontologies that do not distinguish between the sentience of humans and other animals and go beyond the dualistic metaphysics of the nature/culture divide.

While this book is addressed to a wide audience, its multilayered approach also reaches out to art historians for whom chronology, canons, and style are structures fundamental to the organization and operation of the discipline. The book is neither a history of ideas nor a search for the origins of art history, but a recognition of the structures that drive its narratives. 

?Writing Borderless Histories of Art is an extraordinary book, as bold as it is erudite. Claire Farago brings to light formative connections that have always existed between art making, climate theory, and transcultural relationships, but which have been overlooked by scholarship in art history. Eloquently written and incisively argued, this is a book of vital contemporary relevance that will transform the field. It deserves to be read by every art historian.? 

- Monica Juneja, Senior Professor at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, University of Heidelberg, Germany

"Eurocentrism has a cost far beyond the obvious power asymmetries we see damaging the world today. Claire Farago?s erudite and readable book makes that point forcefully in relation to climate transformation and art discourse. She powerfully combines her deep knowledge of European ancient to early modern thought with an expansive view of contemporary global society and its brutal extractive methods, tracing the origins of the human exceptionalism in European thought to the present. Demonstrating the interrelations among globalization, colonization, disciplinary formations, and the traffic in art objects, she offers refreshing counter arguments that are collective, relational and ?borderless.? A tour-de-force!"

- Amelia Jones, Robert A. Day Professor of Art and Design and Professor of Art and Design, Art History and American Studies & Ethnicity, University of Southern California

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Taking Responsibility in the Age of Capital  Intermezzo I: Time as a Healer  1. Defining an Ecological Approach: On the History of Human Exceptionalism  2. How the European Discourse on Art Shaped Accounts of Human Exceptionalism  Intermezzo II: What Is ?National Style"?  3. Hauntologies of Art: "Race," Climate, and Genius  4. A Transcultural Approach to Histories of Vision  Intermezzo III: Deep History: Disentangling ?Race? and Genetic Science  5. Borderless Thinking on our Animal Planet: On the Future of the Past