The Geometries of Afro Asia - by Joan Kee

About the Book

"How do we embark on a history of art that proceeds from the assumption of a global majority? Taking as a rhetorical departure the construct of Afro Asia which doubles as both an ontological reference and an epistemological intervention, this book centers the worlds Black and Asian artists initiate through their work. Afro Asia breaks down delineated time into points, trajectories, angles, magnitudes and relative positions so that temporality and chronology figure primarily as questions of geometry: it asks if and how we can we be something other than what biology, politics, culture, and economics tells us we are or must become. Spanning North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, this book challenges the institutionalization of contemporary art as a global enterprise increasingly governed by the judgments of a self-selecting minority"--

Book Synopsis

A groundbreaking method for writing art history, using the language of geometry.

How do we embark on a history of art from the assumption of a global majority, outside of essentializing categories like race or hollow proclamations of solidarity? With this book, Joan Kee presents a framework for understanding the rich and surprisingly understudied relationship between Black and Asian artists and the worlds they initiate through their work.

The Geometries of Afro Asia breaks down this relationship and chronology into points, angles, and trajectories. Spanning North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, Kee looks at the relationships that formed between Black and Asian artists at critical historical junctures--from civil rights struggles in the United States and the development of South Korea amid US military occupation in the 1960s and 1970s to debates over multiculturalism and critiques of globalization in the 1990s and 2010s. Through geometry, a language of magnitudes and alignments, Kee opens up new ways of seeing how artworks shape our lives and politics by getting us to commit some of our most valuable resources--time and attention--to one another.

From the Back Cover

"Pathbreaking! The Geometries of Afro Asia cuts across boundaries, in all senses of the word, emphasizing how Afro Asian artistic relationships lead the world. A pioneering work that splendidly articulates how deimperializing works across the globe. Simply a must-read."--Kuan-Hsing Chen, author of Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization

"'Together, ' 'relation, ' 'common, ' 'friendship.' Such are but a few of the liberating keywords in the passionately humanistic, genuinely groundbreaking art history Joan Kee invents and enacts in these pages. This book's many brilliant analyses of discrete artistic and social formations answer the need to track representations that no single concept of difference can capture."--Darby English, Carl Darling Buck Professor of Art History, University of Chicago

"With a deep understanding of art's capaciousness, Kee beautifully brings to the surface the suppressed connections, affiliations, and histories of work by artists of African and Asian descent. The Geometries of Afro Asia also pressures us to consider that art production does not always pivot around whiteness and the West."--Steven Nelson, Dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art

​"The most exciting art history book in years. Kee not only writes important first drafts of history, she creates ambitious new ways to write history itself. The Geometries of Afro Asia will undoubtedly reshape scholarship across many fields."--Katy Siegel, Distinguished Professor and Thaw Chair, Stony Brook University

Review Quotes

"Commenting on the disciplinary narrowness of the field, Kee's book takes the reader through different historical and political contexts ranging from the 1960s until the 2010s, in order to question and redefine the fundamental framework of 'global' in art history as it is understood and taught in Eurocentric institutions of art."-- "Visual Studies"

"For Kee to be able to summon so many precise examples from a vast catalogue of cultural production is a feat in itself and testifies to the seemingly infinite potentials of Afro Asia."-- "Art History"

"Wide-ranging and meticulously compiled, the volume examines artworks from the past century that push our conceptions of Afro Asia beyond the confines of identity and regionalism currently in institutional vogue."-- "ArtForum"

"A reformulation in which 'Afro' and 'Asia' are loosed to orbit and collide with one another in new ways, presenting nuanced and timely approaches to exchange. . . . Kee's rich interpretive geometry is a fractal that arcs towards the future."-- "ArtReview"

About the Author

Joan Kee is Professor in the History of Art at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method and Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post-Sixties America.