Counter-epistemologies of the global South: Indian floor drawings re-envisaged

ABSTRACT

The essay proposes that the female, pan-Indian tradition of drawing threshold designs offers the potential of articulating a counter-epistemology of the South that differences prevalent approaches to the post-colonial and the global in the visual field. Based on its Tamil variant, the multiple marginalization of this vernacular practice is argued as indicative of larger issues and the fact that none of the prevalent methodological frameworks for discussing the visual cater for its aesthetic registers. On the basis of this acknowledgment, the practice’s very ‘strangeness’ is re-framed as a gift for radical aesthetic enquiry. The discussion draws on the Boaventura de Sousa Santos, notion of the post-abyssal, Parul Dave Mukherji’s critique of existing approaches to global art history and her call for a differenced meta-theory, Ashis Nandy’s reframing of notions of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ as well as Deleuze and Guattari connective notions of subjectivity and post-human aesthetics.

KEYWORDS:

• Deleuze-Guattarean aesthetics
• the post-abyssal
• global art history
• global design studies
• globalization
• Ashis Nandy
• nonhuman aesthetics
• de-colonial
• women’s street art in Tamil Nadu

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Renate Dohmen

Renate Dohmen is lecturer in art history at the Open University. She is editor and co-author of Art and Empire: British India (MUP & The Open University, 2018) and is editor of the section on British India in Art and its Global Histories: A Reader (MUP & The Open University, 2017). Her book Encounters beyond the Gallery: Relational Aesthetics and Cultural Difference (I.B. Tauris, 2016) draws on Deleuze-Guattarean aesthetics to examine issues of contemporary art, aesthetics, anthropology and the global. She has published essays on cosmopolitanism, nineteenth-century women’s memory cultures and contemporary women’s street art in India, and explores transcultural perspectives in contemporary and colonial visual cultures with a focus on post-human epistemologies, the cosmopolitical and ecologies of knowledge.