ERC Consolidator Grant 2023–2028 | How have artists and thinkers in the decolonising 20th-century worlds of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East imagined freedom, especially in relation to its contesting meanings during the Cold War? In her research, Sunderason removes the concept of freedom from the hegemonic contradictions of 'First World' versus 'Second World' values, and instead examines freedom through (artistic) interventions and representations of independence, liberation, and emancipation in the 'Third World'. Sunderason proposes turning 'decolonial modernisms' – modernist art that emerged uniquely within 20th-century decolonisation – into critical historical archives. With her project team, Sunderason will connect diverse histories and multilingual archives to develop new methodologies for theorising decolonisation through dialogue and solidarity as well as through the differences and contradictions that shape the Global South.

Project Team

ERC Consolidator Dr Sanjukta Sunderason                                                             

Sanjukta Sunderason is a historian of 20th-century aesthetics, working on the interfaces of visual art, (left-wing/socialist) political thought, and historical transition during 20th-century decolonization in South Asia and across transnational formations in the Global South.

She studied History in my BA (Presidency College, Kolkata, India), MA and MPhil (both at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India), before doing her PhD in Art History (Department of History of Art, University College University London, United Kingdom). 

Doctoral Researcher Sabahat Zehra  

Sabahat Zehra is a Researcher and Educator with a demonstrated history of working in the higher education industry. She holds an MA in History of Art from the University of Toronto, and a BSc in Social Sciences and Liberal Arts from the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi. Her interdisciplinary research interests include Urban Studies, Gender, Sexuality, & Queer theory, Art History, Visual Culture, Postcolonial Studies, Psychoanalytical Theory, and Communal Pedagogies.

She contributes to Entangled Freedoms with a focus on de-centering the Archive in history writing and discursive analysis.

Doctoral Researcher Mir Rifat us Saleheen

Mir Rifat us Saleheen holds a Bachelor’s degree in Media Studies and Journalism from the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh and a Master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies (specializing in political history) from the University of British Columbia, Canada under the theme 'Power, Conflict and Ideas'. His research focuses on the role of radical media, political mobilization, and transnational solidarity movements. He contributes to Entangled Freedoms alongside his doctoral research on decolonial networks in South Asia.

Student Assistant Lilli Thöne

Lilli Thöne is a Media and Culture student at the University of Amsterdam and supports the Entangled Freedoms ERC project as a student assistant. Her academic interests lie in film culture, decolonial thought and transnational art and activism. She contibues to various aspects of the project’s development, combining research support with creative and organisational tasks.

Decolonial Meridians: Art-Histories-Theories

Sanjukta Sunderason, Eszter Szakács

(*check bottom of the page for upcoming sessions)

Decolonial Meridians: Art-Histories-Theories was formed in Spring 2023 to develop a forum for reading – in collective and relational ways – intersections of art (artistic form/iconography/genre), historiography (histories/narratives/schools), and epistemology (knowledge/thought/theory).

While the concept of meridian combines time, space, and transit, its construction historically is tied to colonial reordering of geographies. By using “decolonial” meridians we are rejecting this rationality and also forging potential “relational” (Glissant) lines – of dialogues, intersections, and even conflict – between 20^th and 21^st century artistic thought from widely disparate geographies. This includes the decolonizing worlds of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin Africa, as well as counter/hegemonic art and visual practices in European, East European, and North American contexts.

We feel that while there is a growing thirst among students/scholars to read non-Eurocentric texts/histories/forms, there is also a potential danger that arises from reading the “non-Eurocentric” in dissociation with Euro-American (mostly hegemonic, or even the marginal therein) spaces. Such dissociation (suggested in current decolonial thought, for instance, via the concept of “de-linking”) – while theoretically and politically critical – is historically unsustainable given the entangled nature of such geographies. Decolonial Meridians thus aims to develop a social-intellectual space and conceptual vocabularies for connecting geographies/artistic epistemes historically and critically – via contradictions and difficulties as much as via affinities and potentials.

In our meetings, we are reading across texts, images, histories, and methods – from disconnected or resonant geographies – addressing among others, the following themes:

1. Decolonial thought – via historical temporality, aesthetic interventions, and theoretical structures
2. Artistic modernisms and radical aesthetics from counter/hegemonic contexts, spanning 20^th+21^st century practices
3. Plural and contesting notions of freedom, liberation, independence that have connected disparate geographies via geopolitics of Cold War and decolonization
4. Solidarity and its limits (political or geographical) that sought to imagine a decolonizing world otherwise 
5. Indigeneity and vernacularity, in bringing back to the questions of “tradition”, the “other”, and “subaltern struggles”– the politics radical alterity and theories from below
6. Methods – of connected, comparative, relational aesthetics, thinking beyond the bounds of geographies – particularly from non-Euro-centric vantage points and scholarship
7. The question of the archive – in alternative, non-institutional, embodied, or spectral forms

We are particularly aware of the different difficulties that we will confront in such a project, for instance,

1. How do we put in dialogue resonant or dissonant geographies as well as opposite geopolitical paradigms – in other words, what makes connection and comparison possible?
2. How can we draw theories from the difference of plural histories – rather than i.e., go to histories with theory from above?

Our goals therefore are to:

1. read shared aesthetic themes or artistic/literary forms from heterogenous geographies and histories 
2. develop a pool of conceptual vocabularies from such heterogeneity – relate them to each other to draw connected questions
3. generate tools for writing (the “contemporary”) in historically and theoretically co-informed ways

…

We are colleagues across Art History and Cultural Analysis (and beyond!) – and open to researchers and early-career scholars – across the humanities – who are interested in thinking theoretically via rooted, particular histories beyondhierarchical geographies sustained by imperialism (for instance, “empire/metropole”), Cold War (for instance, “First, Second, Third Worlds”), or globalization (for instance, “Global North/South”). Instead we want to think via the concept Meridians. We are particularly open to new/PhD/Postdoc research scholars joining us.

We have begun with a reading group first and hope to develop the space into future writing workshops (reading each other’s texts), and with possibility of future public/international workshops.

If you are interested in joining Decolonial Meridians, please email Dr. Sanjukta Sunderason (s.sunderason@uva.nl)