Ca. 1945, when nothing seemed more certain than that “the towers of London, Vienna, and Paris were about to fall”

This talk brings into dialogue two recent book projects, Postwar Revisited–A Global Art History (coedited with Okwui Enwezor, Duke University Press, 2025) and Non-Aligned: Art, Decolonization, and the Third World Project in India (Yale University Press, 2025).

Situating modernism within the broader processes of decolonization and geopolitical realignment Postwar assembles a global constellation of scholarly perspectives to examine the entanglements of art and politics in the aftermath of the Second World War. Non-Aligned, in turn, returns to India to reconcile these globally expansive postwar histories with the specific trajectories of South Asian modernism, within the decolonizing Afro-Asian milieu of the Non-Aligned Movement.

Together, Postwar Revisited and Non-Aligned then suggest that the cultural politics of decolonization must compel a rethinking of twentieth-century modernism and its afterlives. They propose a methodology for global art history that is attentive to the entangled genealogies of aesthetics and politics, and fundamentally reconsiders the terms through which modernism and world-making have been understood.

Atreyee Gupta is Associate Professor of Art History at UC Berkeley. She is currently at work on a second book, tentatively titled 1968: Art, Revolution, and Radical Imagination in India. In addition to her scholarship, Gupta maintains an active collaborative curatorial practice. At the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, she co-curated When All That Is Solid Melts into Air (2020) with Lawrence Rinder and a team of undergraduate and graduate students.