{"id":6280,"date":"2015-06-30T14:41:43","date_gmt":"2015-06-30T14:41:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=6280"},"modified":"2019-11-22T15:23:18","modified_gmt":"2019-11-22T15:23:18","slug":"bookshelf-rebecca-m-brown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=6280","title":{"rendered":"Bookshelf: Rebecca M. Brown"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor’s Note: Bookshelf is a new series on Art Journal Open that takes a peek at the personal reading lists of art historians, artists, curators, and other arts professionals. First up:<\/em> Art Journal’s incoming Editor-in-Chief, Rebecca M. Brown.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Rebecca<\/a>
Rebecca M. Brown’s bookshelf (photograph \u00a9 Rebecca M. Brown)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I\u2019m presenting my bookshelf at the end of the semester, a time when I\u2019m fully immersed in the questions and discussions of my classroom and seminar table, so my shelf is a reflection of that ongoing and still percolating conversation. I\u2019ve been teaching courses on the global modern this spring, and that has meant I\u2019ve had a wonderful time reading across the globe in new ways, introducing myself and my students to texts in African, Latin American, and Asian modernisms outside of my own area of South Asian art. It\u2019s been incredibly rich\u2014we read some \u201cclassics\u201d side-by-side in one seminar\u2014early publications of Ulli Beier and Geeta Kapur served as an interesting conversation starter in relation to some of the more recent engagements with modernism, including Alicia Volk\u2019s book on Yorozu Tetsugoro\u0304, Karin Zitzewitz\u2019s exploration of questions of the secular in India, Joan Kee\u2019s examination of a particular abstract movement within Korea, and Chika Okeke-Agulu\u2019s close reading of the 1950s and 1960s in Nigeria. The two books in the Making Art Global series on Magiciens de la Terre and the Third Havana Biennial were wonderful sources for discussion, and will be crucial reference works for teaching and thinking about these important exhibitions.<\/p>\n

I work in both analog and digital, so my academic pursuits extend to the Kindle\u2014we discussed questions of hybridity in several seminars this term, and both N\u00e9stor Garc\u00eda-Canclini and Tace Hedrick\u2019s interventions were crucial for guiding our conversation in relation to the discussion of Latin American modernism. I\u2019m incredibly excited and energized by these books\u2014I feel that we are finally creating a foundation for a larger conversation about the modern that might truly be grounded in particular examples and histories. I can\u2019t wait to keep reading and see what\u2019s next.<\/p>\n

\"Rebecca<\/a>
Rebecca M. Brown’s Kindle “shelf” (image \u00a9 Rebecca M. Brown)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In my spare time, I enjoy reading writing about writing\u2014I\u2019m a huge David Foster Wallace fan. I\u2019m halfway through Eric Hayot\u2019s book on writing in the humanities. I started reading it because I thought I might recommend it to my graduate students, and I\u2019m finding some interesting ways of thinking about writing for my own practice as well, which is a wonderful gift. I managed to finish Alan Hollinghurst\u2019s The Stranger\u2019s Child<\/em> and David Mitchell\u2019s The Bone Clocks<\/em> over the past six months\u2014I truly enjoyed Hollinghurst\u2019s exploration of memory, archive, and history, and Mitchell\u2019s folding over of time and weaving together of narratives has long captivated me. After those two lengthy books I decided to turn to an old friend: Virginia Woolf. It\u2019s been ages since I read To the Lighthouse<\/em> (I think I was in high school?), and it\u2019s such a treat to re-read. Memory, return, and folding of time indeed.<\/p>\n

My Reading List:<\/p>\n

Ulli Beier, Contemporary Art in Africa<\/em> (New York: F. A. Praeger, 1968)<\/p>\n

N\u00e9stor Garc\u00eda Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity<\/em> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989)<\/p>\n

Eric Hayot, The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities<\/em> (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014)<\/p>\n

Tace Hedrick, Mestizo Modernism: Race, Nation, and Identity in Latin American Culture, 1900\u20131940<\/em> (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003)<\/p>\n

Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger’s Child<\/em> (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011)<\/p>\n

Geeta Kapur, Contemporary Indian Artists<\/em> (New Delhi: Vikas, 1978)<\/p>\n

Joan Kee, Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method<\/em> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013)<\/p>\n

David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks<\/em> (New York: Random House Inc., 2015)<\/p>\n

Chika Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria<\/em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014)<\/p>\n

Lucy Steeds, et al., Making Art Global: Part 2, Magiciens de la terre, 1989<\/em> (London: Afterall Books, 2013)<\/p>\n

Alicia Volk, In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugoro\u0304 and Japanese Modern Art<\/em> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010)<\/p>\n

Rachel Weiss, Luis Camnitzer, Alex \u00c1ngeles, Lucy Steeds, and Charles Esche, Making Art Global: Part 1, The Third Havana Biennial, 1989<\/em> (London: Afterall Books, 2011)<\/p>\n

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse<\/em> (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1927)<\/p>\n

Karin Zitzewitz, The Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India<\/em> (London: Hurst & Co., 2014)<\/p>\n

\n

Rebecca M. Brown<\/strong> (Johns Hopkins University) is a scholar of colonial and post-1947 South Asian art, visual culture, museum studies, and politics. She has curated several modern and contemporary Indian art exhibitions. Brown has published widely on architecture in colonial India, modernity and visual culture in twentieth-century India, and the imagery of the spinning wheel from the colonial era to Gandhi\u2019s deployment of it for the nationalist movement. Her next book examines the role of temporality in the art exhibitions of the 1985\u201386 Festival of India in the US, and she is researching a book on the global modern. She is the editor-in-chief of Art Journal<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the first in Art Journal Open’s new Bookshelf series, Rebecca M. Brown shares what’s on her reading list.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":6301,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"kia_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[164],"class_list":["post-6280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-notes","tag-bookshelf",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6280\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}