ABSTRACT

Since the mid-2000s, scholars have written a plethora of transnational, global, and world art histories that have systematically begun to reimagine art history beyond Euro-America. Since roughly the same period, art historians have addressed the heteronormativity of art histories by incorporating lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) subjectivities. However, there has not been any appreciable overlap between these two important developments in the discipline. Indeed, my own first book, Productive Failure: Writing Transnational South Asian Art Histories (Manchester University Press, 2018), incorporated LGBTQ perspectives into transnational South Asian art histories, but still focused primarily on the US and the UK. An LGBTQ transnational art history not focused exclusively on Western European and American contexts has yet to materialize. This monograph addresses the gap in the extant literature. I will draw on Martinican-born poet and theoretician Édouard Glissant’s (1997) compelling writings on creolization to theorize my approach to this book project. “Writing Global Queer Art Histories” aims to offer an alternative to the way in which global art histories and LGBTQI art histories are being conceptualized. This book also acts as an antidote to the resurgence of toxic (and often white, male, and heteronormative) nationalism around the world.