Multiple and One examines queer and trans* global art practices through the intertwined lenses of creolisation, opacity and archipelagic thinking. Centring artworks by LGBT*Q creatives alongside pieces less explicitly concerned with gender or sexuality, the study offers an approach to decolonising art history grounded in materiality, autotheory and curatorial knowledge-making. Moving between South Florida, eastern Europe, the Americas and east Asia, it maps how transcultural exchange informs artistic production and critical method. Short interludes focused on exhibitions or individual artworks provide reflective transitions, highlighting how storytelling and errantry shape interpretive practice. The book foregrounds the planetary and the cosmic as ethical and conceptual frameworks, articulating alternatives to nationalist and cisheteropatriarchal narratives. Through its interdisciplinary approach, it proposes new models for writing global queer art histories attentive to place, relation and material form.
Price: $140.00
Pages: 368
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Series: Rethinking Art's Histories
Publication Date:
05 January 2027
ISBN: 9781526168542
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
ART / Criticism & Theory, Educational: Art and design, ART / History / Contemporary (1945-), SOCIAL SCIENCE / LGBTQ+ Studies / Gay Studies, Theory of art, LGBTQ+ Studies / topics
Alpesh Kantilal Patel is Associate Professor of Art History at Temple University
Introduction: Multiple and One: writing queer global art histories
1 Aesthetics of queer opacity: present, past and future south Florida
BREAK 1 From south Florida to eastern Europe
2 Queer, tidalectic roots/routes: eastern Europe
BREAK 2 From eastern Europe to trans-Asia
3 Art historical/queer errantry: passage through trans-Asia
BREAK 3 From trans-Asia to mainland middle and southern America
4 Tout-monde, relation and trans-ecology: mainland middle and southern America & beyond
BREAK 4 Back toward south Florida
5 (Part I) From archipelagic feeling to constellations of knowledge
5 (Part II) From archipelagic feeling to constellations of knowledge
Coda or stories you can’t make up