The Geometries of Afro Asia: Art Beyond Solidarity

A groundbreaking method for writing art history, using the language of geometry.

How do we embark on a history of art from the assumption of a global majority, outside of essentializing categories like race or hollow proclamations of solidarity? With this book, Joan Kee presents a framework for understanding the rich and surprisingly understudied relationship between Black and Asian artists and the worlds they initiate through their work.

The Geometries of Afro Asia breaks down this relationship and chronology into points, angles, and trajectories. Spanning North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, Kee looks at the relationships that formed between Black and Asian artists at critical historical junctures--from civil rights struggles in the United States and the development of South Korea amid US military occupation in the 1960s and 1970s to debates over multiculturalism and critiques of globalization in the 1990s and 2010s. Through geometry, a language of magnitudes and alignments, Kee opens up new ways of seeing how artworks shape our lives and politics by getting us to commit some of our most valuable resources--time and attention--to one another.

ISBN-13: 9780520392458

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: University of California Press

Publication Date: 04-18-2023

Pages: 320

Product Dimensions: 10.00h x 7.00w x 0.60d

Joan Kee is Professor in the History of Art at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method and Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post-Sixties America.