Transmodern

Can histories of modern art be rethought after postcolonial criticism without simply placing regional schools alongside a canon that remains centred on Europe? This book approaches modernism as a network rather than a single European story, following exchanges among artists in Asia, Europe and the Americas, where modernist movements met, borrowed from and pushed back against one another.

Its case studies include Indian modernism, the Harlem Renaissance and post-war abstraction. Kravagna shows how artists on opposite sides of colonial rule came into contact, and why those encounters matter for understanding the period. He argues that non-Western avant-gardes, along with Black avant-gardes working within Western countries, should be studied as transmodern currents that run against the mainstream of modernism.

The book places transcultural art practices from the 1920s to the 1960s within anti-colonial movements. It also engages recent transcultural thought that questioned colonial ideas of race and culture, using the concepts of syncretism and hybridity to do so.