New Worlds: Frontiers, Inclusion, Utopias

This book gathers the contributions made to the colloquium , held in Rio de Janeiro, in 2015. A joint initiative of the International Committee of Art Historians (CIHA) and the Brazilian Committee of Art History (CBHA), the colloquium aimed to contribute to the theoretical and methodological discussions of art history by focusing on the geopolitical displacements involved in the process of “expanding” the field.  Developing on the spatial metaphors subsumed in such a discourse, its organizers proposed to understand the New Worlds of art history in terms of positions and relations within the various political maps in the field. At the time of the conference, questions such as who has power and voice in art history today, who does the mapping, and how do images, ideas, people and things circulate across borders were to be foregrounded. Since then, the recent history of mass immigration and shutting of borders has turned many of the questions posed by the colloquium into pressing political issues, making the discussion held in this book even more urgent.