Belatedness as possibility

A marvellous exhibition of ‘contemporary art from India’ was held at the Chicago Cultural Center that year. The art works of Gulammohammed Sheikh, Nalini Malani, Subodh Gupta, Vivan Sundaram and others were impressive and brilliant in their own right. American museums had avoided purchasing or exhibiting contemporary Indian art until it became truly contemporary, something that had moved from being ‘stuck in an ethnographic mode of self-comparison’ to a state where ‘contemporary artists from India of the world happen to be living and working in India’. The theme of belatedness and a certain spirit of rebellion against it were written all over Subaltern Studies. The problem of belatedness speaks to a problem of repetition and recognition in history. ‘The theatre of repetition is opposed to the theatre of representation, just as movement is opposed to the concept and to representation which refers it back to the concept’

Anthropological Studies and Insights · Computer Science · South Asian Cinema and Culture · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies