Decolonizing Art and Empire

Abstract

Tis special feature brings into conversation two specialists, one in the art of the early modern Spanish Empire, the other in that of the British Empire of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. At a moment when art history seeks to identify and disavow colonial legacies, we propose a renewed, theoretically informed, and critical engagement with the historical imbrication of art and empire. Empire has been a presence in virtually all historical periods and all regions. We recognize that a broader discussion is needed, involving scholars representing the full chronological and geographical range of art historical study. But empire also remains with us now, in every aspect of social life, and imperial thinking, in plain sight, still conditions the practice of art history. Te institutions of our discipline are the products of empire and allow its ideologies extended life, ordering our museum collections, library shelves, and course catalogs. We write during a global pandemic, at a time punctuated by the toppling of racist monuments and urgent calls for justice. We bear witness to the disastrous legacies of empire, from political instability and demographic catastrophe to devastating climate change. We propose that at this febrile juncture, as art history moves beyond the European canon to tell a richer, more vibrant, transregional, decolonized, and intercultural history of the visual arts and material culture, there are timely new possibilities for the analysis of art and empire. How, though, can we write about art and empire without replicating imperial ideologies and hierarchies, naturalizing the historical subjugation of colonized peoples, or reinscribing empire’s own organizing principle of center and periphery? Allow us to open with a land acknowledgment, naming the direct and salient links between histories of empire and our present locations—a necessary act of self-refexivity. One of us writes from the University of California, Los Angeles, which stands on unceded Gabrielino/Tongva land, in a city named in 1781 by the soldier-governor Felipe de Neve (1724–1784) as part of the Spanish Empire, el Pueblo de los Ángeles. To echo the UCLA Chancellor’s Ofce’s acknowledgment of August 22, 2019: “UCLA acknowledges the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples as the traditional land caretakers of Tovaangar (the Los Angeles basin and Southern Channel Islands). As a land grant institution, we pay our respects to the Honuukvetam (ancestors), ‘Ahiihirom (elders) and ‘Eyoohiinkem (our relatives/relations) past, present, and emerging.”1 Te recent toppling of statues of Father Junípero Serra (1713–1784), founder of nine of California’s twenty-one Spanish-Indian missions, drew public attention to the state’s history as a crossroads of empire (Fig. 1). Sited on Tongva lands that were seized to become the Rancho de San José de Buenos Aires, UCLA was founded with fnancial support from UC Berkeley, one of the universities created after the seizure of Indigenous land through the 1862 Merrill Act. Te other writes from Yale University, which recognizes the stewardship across generations of the lands and waterways of what is now the state of Connecticut by Indigenous peoples and nations, including the Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic, Quinnipiac, and other Algonquian-speaking peoples.2 In the university’s history, colonialism, capitalism, and slavery are braided together. Founded in 1701 at New Haven in the English (from 1707 British) colony of Connecticut,