Critical Theory

— Pepe Karmel As an art historian and sometime curator, my version of this question is to ask: how should we teach and exhibit “global” art? For art prior to around 1870, the answer is relatively unproblematic.  Encyclopedic museums in…

— Luis Ramos What if we were to view the Enlightenment less as an intrinsically Western idea and more as a new approach to knowledge prompted by a prolonged period of European exploration and colonial expansion? Drawing from the recent…

— Mahnaz Yousefzadeh In an exemplary articulation of cultural incommensurability, Borges’s “Averroes’ Search” imagines the difficulty of the Medieval Islamic philosopher Averroes in translating Aristotle’s Poetics. He then reflects on the absurdity of the task he himself had undertaken, to understand…

— Emily Bauman In the second edition of Shawn C. Smallman and Kimberley Brown’s Introduction to International and Global Studies the authors pose a telling question to their student readers: “Why do you think the fine arts are sometimes forgotten…

— Jan Nederveen Pieterse Global Studies has tended to focus on how institutions manage and individuals experience the flow of goods, ideas, and artifacts across boundaries of various kinds, while Critical Theory tends to focus on the artifact and its…

— Robert Squillace From sociologists like Appadurai, Giddens, and Pieterse to human geographers like Massey, theorists of globalization have challenged the old notion of culture as a web of meanings that are imposed or recognized by a local community.  Globalization,…