The Dunhuang Star Chart was discovered in a Buddhist grotto cut into the rock of a cliff located in Dunhuang, an oasis town where two main branches of the western network of the Silk Road converge and continue eastward to China’s capital city of Xi’an.^[1] Dated to the Tang dynasty, somewhere around 705–710AD or possibly 940AD, this is the oldest complete atlas of the heavens that has been preserved from any civilisation.^[2] Beautiful to look at, it is a remarkably precise astronomical document. While the purpose of the Dunhuang atlas was astrological divination (celestial events were believed to mirror those on Earth), it was based on accurate scientific observation.^[3] Over two metres long, its multiple panels are a graphic depiction of the entire sky, unambiguously displaying the position of over 1,300 stars within the traditional Chinese constellations.^[4] The panels are a sequence of circumpolar regions in azimuthal projection, a measurement method still in use today.^[5]

Due to the inferior quality of its calligraphy, the Dunhuang atlas is believed to be one of multiple copies of an imperial original. Scrolls were portable, hence useful for caravan navigation.^[6] Although visibility changed with the seasons, and positionality changed with location: ‘Silk Road travelers and residents saw the same stars whether they were on the shores of the Mediterranean or the borders of China, and knowledge of the stars was disseminated along its length.’^[7] Star charts measured distance in time, the movement of the heavens, in order to traverse space. With an eye on the stars, one did business on Earth.

Centuries later, a European map of the world, or Mappa Mundi, was produced in an Iberian monastery at a time when most of the peninsula was under Muslim (Umayyad) rule. This type of map is known as a T-O Map because of its shape: a circular ‘O’ depiction of the inhabited world surrounded by ocean. Jerusalem, the navel (umbilicus) of the earth, is pictured at the centre above a ‘T’ formed by the Mediterranean Sea, the Nile River to the south, and the Don (Greek: Tanaïs) River to the north. The three major waterways forming the T separate the world into the known continents. Asia is above, Europe on the left, Africa on the right, and a fourth continent, ‘not known to us because of the heat of the sun’, below Africa.^[8]

Versions of the T-O map appear in a series of illustrated commentaries on the book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible that describes in calamitous detail the apocalyptic end of a fully Christianised world. The copiously illustrated manuscript series—of which there are twenty-six extant copies—is known as the Liébana Beatus after the monk who produced the (lost) original prototype in 785AD, Commentary on the Apocalypse of St John. It is a Christian perception of the whole of Earth’s space imagined in terms of time, from Adam and Eve to the End of Days that would come after the world was fully exposed to Christianity through apostolic missions. In the Silos Beatus, a variant of the Liébana Beautus series, China, the Orient, is depicted as the Garden of Eden and beginning of the world.

The Christian symbolic meaning of space as time and the eschatological depiction of the history of the world placed little value on scientific accuracy. Indeed, ‘Christianity began with the announcement that time and history were about to end’.^[9] Within these temporal limits, the geographical measurement of space was not a theological concern.^[10] Compare the T-O map with the Mappa Mundi in the Tabula Rogeriana by the Muslim geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi, a book created only half a century later in 1154. Al-Idrisi, from a Moroccan family of Princes and Sufi leaders, had studied at Cordoba in Muslim Spain at the same time that Christian monks to the north were diligently copying the prototypes of the Liébana Beatus. He had access to the extensive work of Arabic geographers, having travelled widely in Africa, Anatolia, and parts of Europe, before settling in Sicily at the court of the Norman King Roger II, who commissioned him to create this map and others as part of an encyclopaedic text incorporating knowledge of Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the Far East, gathered by merchants, explorers, and cartographers from various civilisations. The king’s Christian father, Roger I, had overthrown the previous Arab rulers of Sicily, but welcomed certain Muslim families for the scientific knowledge they could bring, maintaining Sicily’s multi-confessional culture.

Also known as Nuzhat al-mushtāq fi'khtirāq al-āfāq, or ‘The book of pleasant journeys into faraway lands’, the Tabula Rogeriana is considered ‘one of the most exhaustive medieval works in the field of physical, descriptive, cultural, and political geography’.^[11] The map that Al-Idrisi produced for the Tabula Rogeriana remained the European standard for accuracy for the next three centuries.

Accuracy, however, while necessary for trade or conquest, did not displace maps with more lofty theological values. The Hereford Mappa Mundi, for example, the largest known medieval map in existence, is a Euro-Christian map produced more than a century later in circa 1300. Now on display in the Hereford Cathedral in England, the map was drawn in black ink on a single sheet of calfskin, with details rendered in red, gold, blue, and green. While geographical detail makes this map more topologically convincing, it is still a classic T-O map with Jerusalem at the centre, the Orient on top, Europe at the bottom left, Africa bottom right, and spatial significance marked according to theological understanding. In other words, even when geographic space was known scientifically, Christians persisted in depicting the world in the eschatological terms of space as time.

Compared to the Da Ming Hun Yi Tu, or Great Ming Dynasty Amalgamated Map, Western Europe seems backwards in its history of mapping. The Da Ming Hun Yi Tu, created in 1389 AD, is the oldest surviving Chinese world map, and has been cited as one of the earliest world maps to depict Africa.^[12] Benefiting from Islamic science and geographic knowledge, it is a detailed and sophisticated rendering that nonetheless depicts a worldview from China’s vantage point. The map measures 386 by 456 centimetres and is painted on silk; Manchu language captions on paper slips were superimposed on the Chinese several centuries later.

But it would be wrong to limit our own historical understanding of the history of cartography in terms of a telos of scientific progress. Experts warn against the distortions caused by ‘scientific chauvinism’, which judges past maps anachronistically according to the modern value of accuracy of measurements; erasing art and replacing it with the secular goals of science, whereby the history of cartography charts the rate of progress among competing civilisations written as ‘the saga of how the unmappable was finally mapped’.^[13] If we consider later copies of al-Idrisi’s Rogeriana map, the distortions of scientific chauvinism become evident. Variants were produced two centuries after the original, this time by a different tradition of Muslim map-makers known as the Balkhi school, named after the tenth-century geographer Ahmed Ibn Sahl al-Balkhi. In these maps, decorative aspects appear to overpower scientific description.

Islamic world maps with stylised spatial features similar to the T-O maps were produced by the Balkhi school, though there were advancements in the practice. Ibn al Hawqal’s 977AD map known as The Face of the Earth, or Ṣūrat al-'Arḍ, of which a copy from 1445 is housed at Topkapi Museum in Istanbul, presents a revision and extension of the Masalik ul-Mamalik map of Istakhri from 951AD, which was a revised edition of the Suwar al-aqalim map by Ahmed Ibn Sahl al-Balkhi from 921AD. Al Hawqal travelled widely, including twenty degrees south of the equator along the eastern African coast, and corrected the Greeks by showing that this land was not uninhabitable.

More to the point: what we call scientifically ‘advanced’ in al-Idrisi’s Tabula Rogeriana was actually tied to the past: the 1,000-year-old tradition of mapping founded by the second-century Greek geographer Ptolemy, which had been lost in Europe, remained alive and made more accurate by Muslim cartographers from as early as the ninth century under the patronage of Al-Ma’mun, the great Abbasid patron of philosophy and science. These advances would continue unabated within the Muslim world, despite multiple changes in that world’s theological and political orientations.^[14]

In short, the history of map-making does not fit the narrow conception of history as progress. In fact, none of the ordering binaries of modernity (science v. art^[15], religious v. secular,^[16] Occident v. Orient^[17]) enable us to grasp the empirical history of maps that had multiple traditions, and that were used simultaneously by theologians, court astrologists, imperial conquerors, travelling scholars, religious pilgrims, and merchants of trade. The contrast being made here is a limited point of comparison. Star maps and land maps charted space in a way that allowed one to traverse space in time, as opposed to the theological approach whereby divine history—time—was mapped as the space of the world. In terms of the philosophy of history, the Christian depiction of space as time can be seen as proto-Hegelian: the beginning of time is in the East, the ‘Orient’, and the end, the highest stage, is in the West.

Now, to make this small point, why have I submitted you to all this cartographical data? It is to show you that the deeper one delves into empirical history (and this is generally true of historical research), the more the material evidence overthrows unilinear narratives of cultural developments belonging to particular civilisations. When empirical facts are not presumed from the start to belong to the histories of different political territories or religious spaces, the findings go against the conventions of history as a discipline. What I would like to propose is a different construction of history altogether—to cite the past, as one might sight the stars, bringing elements of it together within constellations of meaning that relate to our own time as the vanishing point.

In August 1966, the US moon satellite Lunar Orbiter II transmitted the first picture of Earth shining over a lunar landscape. Two years later, the first manned spacecraft, Apollo 8, orbited the moon, from which the first image of the whole earth by a human was taken on 24 December 1968. Of course, the timing, Christmas Eve, was not accidental. US President John Kennedy pressured the scientists to meet that deadline so that the crew of Apollo 8, orbiting the moon ten times, could make a Christmas Eve television broadcast in which they read the first ten verses of the book of Genesis from the King James version of the Bible. So much for the so-called secular West!^[18]

The moon landing happened one year later. This was a triumph of modernity as the technological dream of human progress.^[19] It was the apogee of American power. But in a real sense, this culmination was also an ending. The German historical philosopher Hans Blumenberg writes that the American moon landing initiated a transformation in human consciousness that ‘took place rapidly and almost silently’.^[20] It was the stream of transmitted pictures of the Earth that marked the world significance of this event. Not the political staging, not the words, ‘That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind’, and not even the images of the first moonwalk (a visually pitiful, even dubious event)—but rather, the images sent back to us of earth.

Blumenberg writes: ‘Perhaps it would not have been necessary to send people to the moon at all if what was to be brought back was, above all, pictures.’^[21] He called this event the end of the Copernican Age. Rather than looking out into space, human beings look back from it, and see themselves. Images of the Earth are returned to us in the cosmic mirror and, for the first time, humanity sees its whole body reflected. It is a body in pieces.

If, in Blumenberg’s sense, the event of seeing the planet Earth, a ‘cosmic exception’,^[22] marks an end to Copernican modernity, let us claim the right to authorise this lunar vision of Earth as the origin of a new era, one entered into in common by Earth-dwellers, and name it the Era of Globalisation.^[23]

Others were paying attention to this event of the birth of globalisation. One was the Taiwanese artist Liu Kuo-Sung, co-founder of Taiwan’s Fifth Moon Group, or Wuyue Huahui (五月畫會). Liu was inspired by the Apollo 8 space mission to paint a series of images depicting the newly visible realities it revealed, by fusing the techniques of Chinese landscape painting with those of contemporary hard-edged abstraction. The Fifth Moon Group was a painting society of Taiwanese artists mainly active in the 1960s. Liu taught in Hong Kong in the 1970s and 1980s, and was a visiting artist and professor in the United States on several occasions. Invited to Beijing in the 1980s, he has since become well known on the mainland. A major retrospective exhibition of his work was held at Beijing’s National Palace Museum in 2007.

A second artist, the filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik, was a child at the time of the moon landing, living in a small village in the Philippines. As a young man, he produced a film about that experience, described as an ‘awakening’ from his ‘cocoon of American Dreams’.^[24] Entitled Perfumed Nightmare (1978), the film received numerous international awards. In the film, Kidlat tells of his childhood enthusiasm when hearing reports from the Voice of America of Apollo 8 on his portable radio. It was the time of the US military occupation (and the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos), and the young Kidlat became founder and head of the village fan club for Wernher von Braun, the rocket scientist whose brilliance made the space voyages possible. But that is not the whole story of von Braun. Before being recruited to the American space effort as director, he worked as a scientist in his native Germany. He joined the Nazi party in 1937 and served as a German SS officer during the war.

If we bring these three human beings into the same constellation under the sign of the 1969 moon landing, we get an idea of just how fragmented the now globally visible humanity was (and, of course, still is). Hans Blumenberg, whose description of the moon landing is the climax of his lengthy 1975 philosophical history, The Genesis of the Copernican World, was a student in Germany during the Hitler years. A Catholic, he was labelled a half-Jew by the Nazis, spent some time in concentration camps, and was hidden by his future wife’s family toward the end of the war. He neither credits nor even mentions Wernher von Braun in his book.

Blumenberg was born in 1920, Liu in 1932, Tahimik in 1942. If we were categorising them according to nationality, or generation, or the genre of their work, they would never come into contact with each other. Blumenberg was a Western modernist, Liu merged modernism with Chinese tradition, and Tahimik’s Perfumed Nightmare was singled out by Fredric Jameson as a Third-World example of postmodern cinema coming out of a neo-colonised formation.^[25] But rather than keeping them in place within existing mappings of the intellectual landscape, within a global constellation, these three figures are allowed to converge.

I will take you to another location.^[26] The place is the Middle East.

In April that year, Malcolm X made the Hajj to Mecca, an event that signalled his transformed understanding of politics, no longer a strategy of Black Nationalism and separatism, but one of transcending race through the universality of Islam.

That same year, Milestones (Ma’alim fi al-Tariq) a book by Sayyid Qutb—a former functionary in the Egyptian ministry of education, who became the intellectual inspiration for the Muslim Brotherhood (founded by Hassan al-Banna in 1928)—appeared: a call to action by a lay writer, in opposition to both the religious and the government establishment in Egypt, to recreate the Muslim world on strictly Qur’anic grounds. The book rescued for Islam the substance of Marx’s critique of socio-economic injustice, and argued, in terms that echoed the contemporaneous politics of liberation theology among Catholics, that obedience to God superseded the sovereign claim of any earthly power. (The book ultimately caused Qutb to be re-arrested by Nasser’s government and sent back to prison, accused of plotting to overthrow the state.)

It was the year, too, that the Leftist intellectual Ali Shari’ati returned to Iran after exile in France, where he had corresponded with—and published in Iranian translation—the Martinique-born Marxist psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon, whose philosophy of liberation was foundational for postcolonial theory.^[27]

After his brief arrest by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shari’ati began his famous university lectures in Iran (including ‘Fatima is Fatima’), articulating a truly leftist Islamic political position, drawing eclectically and syncretically (as opposed to Hegelian synthetics) on Marxist, Islamist, feminist, anti-imperialist, and existentialist theoretical insights.^[28]

Two years later, the Sudanese Muslim Mahmoud Taha published The Second Message of Islam, a reading of the Qur’an that interpreted the Meccan revelations to the Prophet—which express radical racial and sexual equality—as universal in their truth, in contrast to the socio-historical specificity of the Medina revelations that, he argued, reflected the particular needs of practical governance, given the customs and consciousness of the times.

Malcolm X was assassinated in the United States in 1965. The plot involved the Nation of Islam or the FBI, or both. In 1966, Sayyid Qutb was executed for alleged conspiracy against the government. Ali Shari’ati died suddenly in Southampton, England, in 1977, before the outbreak of the Iranian Revolution (SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, remains suspect); in 1985 Mahmoud Taha was executed for his views by the Sudanese Islamist dictator Jafaar al-Nimeiri, who was backed at the time by the local chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood.

All of these historical actors were part of the 1960s generation—a global generation, and this is the point. Seen from a global perspective, they can be brought together in the same constellation despite their differences. Rather than inserting each of them individually into a separate national story or religious tradition, history is imagined in terms of simultaneities in space, instead of sequential developments in time. Such constellations mark the uncharted sky of universal humanity as a body in pieces. What might the implications be for a global history of art?

‘Art teaches us to see things. It is training in observation.’—a Walter Benjamin insight, paraphrased.^[29]

The 2006 book Is Art History Global? considered the implications for a global art history in terms of the history of art as an academic discipline, and debated whether the study and teaching of art could or should be global in terms of its methods, contents, and canon. James Elkins, the book’s editor, questioned the extreme position of Mieke Bal, a founding figure in the new field of visual studies, who was seemingly content to dissolve the disciplinary boundaries of art history completely. Elkins proposed using (Western) theory as the foundation of a global discipline of art as traditionally understood. He found exemplary the work of specific (Western) art historians: T.J. Clark, who grapples with Hegel; Michael Fried, who does the same with Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein; Michael Camille with Derrida; and Didi-Huberman with Lacan. We might add the omnipresent Foucault, the man for all seasons, whose ‘governmentality’ provides a critical concept for all disciplines in the humanities.

Elkins concluded: ‘I think it can be argued that there is no non-Western tradition of art history, if by that is meant a tradition with its own interpretive strategies and forms of argument.’^[30] His evidence: Chinese specialists are not hired to teach in Western universities on the basis of their ability to deploy indigenous (that is, Chinese) historiographic methods. The Bal-Elkins debate will not concern us here.^[31] We take a detour around art history as a discipline with its established, undeniably Western-centric traditions and, side-stepping the interdisciplinary/non-disciplinary concerns and internecine struggles of the academy, push ahead by changing the question.

Rather than considering the relevance of theory for art historians, we will look at how looking at art, studying art, making visual connections and cross-references among artworks and artists, can help us in conceptualising the global in a different way. Cultural production conceived as ‘global’ is not world culture, wherein universality is understood as inclusion, expanding the existing art canons around abstract terms that imply universality, or giving equal time to civilisational or cultural differences, or arranging the art of civilisations in a chronology that culminates in a universalised, globalised modernity. Rather, global aesthetic imagination and the capacity to apprehend artistic production in a new way emerges at a particular time, marked by certain common historical experiences.

These experiences have their origins not in the West, but in the postcolonial world, necessitating a conceptual break between the modern and the global. ‘The modern’ is locked into a Western concept of time—one that itself is not at all modern, but dates back to the medieval T-O maps that I showed you, and conceives of itself as a teleological progression, so that some parts of the globe are judged to be in advance, and others are backward, trailing behind. The teleological imprint on aesthetic and political modernity is encapsulated in the concept of the ‘avant-garde’. To be modern is to be avant-garde, at the cutting edge of historical time, economic development, and political progress—all three. The sequel to Western modernity has been named postmodernity, a feeble term if ever there was one. Postmodernity as a stage in a teleological sequence can lead nowhere. But globalisation allowed the emergence of a new, planetary imaginary and the discovery of a new temporality: one that belongs, potentially, to all of humanity—a humanity that, coeval and diffuse, appears to us now as a body in pieces.

In the postcolonial world, as Elizabeth Giorgis has recently argued, aesthetic modernity was intrinsically bound up with national projects of modernisation. Even countries not colonised accepted the conceptual equation of modernity and the West—which meant, of course, the conscious attempt to mimic the Western historical patterns of industrial development and nation-state formation.^[32] In this context, there was no way to be modern as an artist except by Western standards that, while claiming universality, were historically quite specific. Moreover, by those standards, non-Western artists would always be found lacking; their modernity always belated, derivative, mimetic. At best, artists were able to catch up with an avant-garde that had already arrived at a future to which the whole world was heading. Postcolonial artists were caught in a dilemma as a consequence. On the one hand, they were part of the national political project. They were relied upon to produce a separate, national identity as part of what it meant to arrive as a modernised, nation-state. On the other hand, that national identity would need to be based on indigenous aesthetic traditions that were, by definition, not modern.

In the struggle to be both new and national, artists developed transnational strategies that rescued past traditions by subjecting them to a radical transformation. In the process, they opened up a common ground that now can be seen as the origins of a globalised aesthetic. A key figure in this development is the African-Chinese-Cuban artist Wifredo Lam. Only as an international figure—who spent years in Spain and France, and was befriended and promoted by Picasso, Andre Breton, and others—did Lam come back to Cuba with a thoroughly modernist sensitivity to the African heritage that he sought to rescue from two fates. One was its dehistoricised appropriation by European modernists; the other was its erasure from Cuban national identity.^[33]

The painting The Jungle, which Lam produced after his return to Cuba, was both figural and abstract, both nationally specific to Cuba and anticipatory of a new, transnational consciousness of Négritude.^[34] There are striking parallels between this strategy and that taken by the Ethiopian artist Alexander ‘Skunder’ Boghossian. Within Western histories of art, if he is considered at all (which is rarely), it is within the Surrealist tradition: as dreamlike, primitive, and in sum, ahistorical. But that was not Boghossian’s intent. ‘I am aware that I am a witness to my time, other times, time itself’, he said; the time of the modern for him meant developing imagery that, as Giorgis writes, ‘presents an absorbing and critical account of the political culture of the colonial and postcolonial eras, challenging the discourse of European modernist expressions to define modern Ethiopian art against canonical interpretations’.^[35] This involved ‘hybridisation’ and a ‘conceptually complex’ dialogue between nationalism and transnationalism—a kind of postmodernism avant-la lettre, exhibiting these anti-essentialist qualities before the metropolitan West.^[36]

Like Lam, Boghossian spent time in Paris, an experience that was less a pilgrimage to the European centre for colonial artists than a meeting place with others in their situation.^[37] (Compare this with the exportation of New York modernism to the rest of the world as a conscious cultural policy of the US Department of State.) Boghossian recalled seeing drawings by Wifredo Lam in a Paris gallery window as he was passing by ‘that actually gave [him] a bodily shock’.^[38] It was, again, the all-important decade of the 1960s, when Frantz Fanon was also in Paris, and Boghossian’s circle included Aimé Césaire and Cheikh Anta Diop (and only later Andre Breton, who, like Sartre, was an appreciator of these figures after the fact), whose transnational political position condemned French colonialism and existing African regimes, both at once.^[39]

This was the collective dream out of which Africa needed to experience a historical awakening, in Benjaminian fashion, as Giorgis observes. Boghossian’s 1969 painting Juju’s Wedding is a fusion of African animism and Christian divinity, idols, and icons, showing the influence of traditional Ethiopian magic scrolls that Giorgis compares with the influence of the Afro-Cuban cult of Santería on Lam.^[40]

Giorgis describes this simultaneity of history and modernity as a Benjaminian sense of time, in which ‘the meaning of the past is realised in the present’.^[41] This particular use of the past in order to be modern, whereby the aesthetic power of historical objects is released within a contemporary force-field that is crisscrossed by multiple currents of politics and culture, produces a non-sequential temporality and is exemplary of the new, global imagination.

Within this same historical constellation is Sadequain, who became the founding figure of Pakistani national art.^[42] Like Lam and Boghossian, Sadequain became nationally famous only after a sojourn in Paris (1961–1967), with some degree of international success. Like Lam and Boghossian, he appropriated elements of modernity for very different purposes than artists of the West. The Parisian exhibitions of modernist painters were his musée de l’homme, a toolbox of raw materials; with this toolbox he returned home to become the leading artist of the newly created Muslim nation of Pakistan. Called upon by the Pakistani government in the 1960s to construct murals in public buildings, Sadequain painted historical panoramas that matched in their monumental sweep the Mexican murals of David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera.^[43]

Sadequain’s relation to the nation-building project was complicated by the intertwining of modernity with the national hegemony of Islam as the form of cultural identity.^[44] Surprisingly, it was not in his murals but in his most personal, most Parisian paintings that references to Islam were decisive. In the 1960s, Sadequain produced a series of self-portraits of the artist in his studio that clearly echo the work of Picasso, but with the not-so-minor difference that the artist is depicted with his head in his hand. This is an intentional reference to the decapitations of martyrs such as seventeenth-century Sufi mystic Sarmad Shaheed, who wandered about naked and wrote transgressive verses that got him beheaded in 1661 under the charge of heresy.

In a self-portrait from 1966, Sadequain makes use of simple black lines on a white background to show himself naked, with sheltering hands that, in their branch-like expanse, spell out the name Allah—a gesture that Sadequain also performed in his photographic portraits. Arabic calligraphy, which may appear to be non-representational abstraction to Western eyes, is filled with historical, cultural, and political content to those who can read it.^[45] The artist accomplished a revival of the art of Arabic calligraphy with a distinctly modernist sensibility in his paintings, many of them distinctly script-based. The appearance of calligraphy in his Self-Portrait is vegetative rather than textual, setting up a circuit of meaning that moves between nature and history mediated by the artist’s own subjectivity.^[46]

Iftikhar Dadi has called such uses of handwriting in art ‘calligraphic modernism’, characterised by the affective, gestural communication of the brushstroke itself, the emotive quality of which can be appreciated despite linguistic obscurity.^[47] At the same time, in other parts of the Islamic world, artists were using the traditions of calligraphy to negotiate the postcolonial tensions between national belonging and a new consciousness that was, in Dadi’s words, ‘larger than the iconography of any single nation state’.^[48]

A decade before Sadequain, the Syrian-born artist Madiha Umar explored the formal elements of Arabic calligraphy. ‘Modern’ in Umar’s work is the way she breaks apart the letters into their visual components, a destruction of literate-ness that has been described as working to ‘free the Arabic letter from its bondage’.^[49] By the sixties, calligraphic modernism as a practice that de-emphasised literal meaning became widespread, allowing artists to communicate to each other across national and linguistic divides.

The Sudanese artist Ibrahim El-Salahi created an interplay between calligraphy and figuration, combining African motifs with calligraphic elements and celestial bodies with animate forms in the 1964 painting The Last Sound. While the work’s title refers to a specific Islamic practice of reciting prayers for the dead and dying to accompany the soul’s passing from the corporeal to the celestial, it is ‘manifestly modern’ in its dynamic integration of forms.^[50] El-Salahi’s experimental practices, which were rejected in the salon culture of postcolonial Sudan, engaged with ‘a more democratic and vernacular visual culture’.^[51] El-Salahi’s use of Arabic calligraphy inspired the Ethiopian artist Boghossian (when the two were in Paris) to create his 'Feedel' series, which incorporated the forms of Amharic letters (the script of the Ethiopian Christian church), intentionally merging the oppositional moments of abstraction and realism, the sacred and the profane.^[52]

In Iraq, and Iran as well, the Arab cosmopolitanism of ‘calligraphic modernism’ was, writes Dadi, a progressive aspect of the return of artists to tradition: ‘the abstract/calligraphic mode pries open the boundaries of the nationalist frame’, cutting ‘across temporality and geography, thereby propelling this body of work into the present’.^[53] The paintings of Iraqi painter, sculptor, and writer Shakir Hassan Al Said are exemplary of this approach, with abstract expressionist canvases that bristle with signs and scripts articulated across various mediums and planes. In The Victorious (1983), a mixed-media surface built up on a wooden panel invokes the texture of a wall, with the isolated Arabic letter ‘waw’ scrawled over it like graffiti.

The sense of being in a porous, border space between the national-specific and the international-modern was common to many non-Western artists who shared an interest in calligraphic traditions. Taiwanese-born Liu Kuo-Sung, whose work I showed you earlier, claims to have discovered abstraction precisely within the brushstroke of traditional Chinese landscape painting.^[54] China, it should be noted, was a politically fractured landscape, including the Maoist People’s Republic of China, the British colony of Hong Kong, and the nationalist Chinese government in Taiwan—areas whose residents speak such different dialects that only through writing is communication possible. Yet for Liu as well, the familiar calligraphic shapes, released from literal meaning, became visual forms that have affinities with the natural world. His description of the process echoes the motivations of Boghossian, Sadequain, and El-Salahi, treating the past as a modern painter in order to break away from it.

As previously noted, Liu’s planetary series began by merging the gesture of the ink brush with the hard edge of modernism. In 1965, Liu wrote, ‘We are neither ancient Chinese nor modern Westerners. If copying ancient Chinese paintings is forgery, so is producing modern Western paintings’.^[55] His goal was to achieve a new kind of painting altogether: ‘“Chinese” and “modern” are the two blades of the sword which will slash the Westernised and traditionalist schools alike.’^[56] In all of these examples of calligraphic modernism, language—that element in social life which is experienced as most exclusionary—leaves textual rootedness and even semantic legibility, and allows artists to participate globally in the creation of something new. Like Sadequain, Liu rescued the tradition of calligraphy by modern means. And whereas Arabic calligraphy linked multiple nations from Pakistan to North Africa, Chinese calligraphy linked multiple spaces that were at the time politically divided: Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the People’s Republic of China.

There is another, shared aspect of the new globalisation that deserves comment: the fact that in every instance we have been considering, from the Apollo moon missions to the transnational aesthetics of postcolonial modernity, we have been concerned with images. Temporal simultaneity and spatial coexistence on a global scale is ‘experienced’ only virtually, as a mediated experience. The reproduced image has been fundamental in the emergence of a global sensibility. The first pictures of the earth were transmitted from space via televised broadcast. Blumenberg found the space images of the earth a more significant event than the actual moon landing. Liu Kuo-Song recalls being inspired by space photography. Kidlat Tahimik, listening on his radio, was deprived of moon images when the voices of the astronauts reached him on earth, but precisely this lack is the visible content of his prize-winning film Perfumed Nightmare.

The frequently attested importance of the reproduced image for postcolonial artists is striking. Wifredo Lam first became familiar with the work of Picasso and Matisse through magazines brought back from Paris by friends.^[57] Dadi writes that ‘Sadequain had formed his initial impressions of European modern art from magazine reproductions’, a de-contextualisation that allowed for a ‘mistranslation’ of European modernist works, freeing them ‘to be perceived in the Pakistani context without their ideological baggage’.^[58]

Again and again we have documentation of this fact.^[59] The technologies of reproduction—camera and film, illustrated magazine, and televised broadcast—allow the image to meet the viewer halfway (to paraphrase Walter Benjamin).^[60] And far from being a problem for artists, far from degrading artistic production through a loss of aura, these widely dispersed images decreased the authority of the metropole over the postcolonial artist, for whom modernist techniques, ripped out of their original contexts, became useful tools within transnational networks producing intercultural solidarities. The anti-auratic appropriation of the image via technological reproductions is foundational for a global aesthetics.

This may indeed be the lasting effect of the 1960s.

Not only images circulated. The political climate of the 1960s brought issues of social justice to world visibility in a global public sphere. No political issue was merely national. The US civil rights movement resonated with African Négritude; postcolonial movements were united in their need to negotiate between the two superpowers, attracted to Marxism yet burned by the brutality of Soviet-backed takeovers (as in Ethiopia under the Derg), choosing freedom yet facing a US foreign policy that all too often sacrificed democratic ideals for narrow self-interest. All of the artists we have been considering were well aware of these political realities. None of them compromised their creative independence to back a particular political regime; none of them followed the whims of the art market. All of them forfeited existential security and a simple national or cultural ‘identity’ as a consequence.

Let’s return to the question, is art history global? The answer calls for remapping time as well as space, and questioning the most basic categories of our historical narratives—ones that privilege the sorting out of aesthetic production by national, civilisational, or cultural identities. It demands that we question models of explanation based on causal influence and that define creativity in terms of an authentic original, disseminated mimetically in the form of degraded copies. From a global perspective, what is primitive about the modern is precisely the opposite of the mythic or the archaic. ‘Primitive’ here is fully historical: it means originary, the first stage, describing Urforms of the global present and possibilities of a time to come.^[61] What is called for is nothing short of a transformation of scholarship; its empirics, its theories, but also, and perhaps most significantly, the social relations of art as property (of the artist-creator, or the culture/nation/ethnicity to which s/he ‘belongs’) that underlie both theoretical conceptualisations and the empirical research that sustains them.

Elkins’ comment regarding Western universities not hiring Chinese-trained historians of art is valid within the given frameworks of knowledge. But if the established disciplines cling to their foundational narratives that lead into the cul-de-sac of postmodernism, then Western universities will find themselves irrelevant and no self-respecting intellectual will want to teach at them. But the alternative is not to get on the bandwagon of art’s present globalisation—commercial markets, museums, and biennials as currently arranged. No rupture with the past would justify totally jettisoning the history of art as just too much excess baggage, in favour of a continuous contemporaneity that flatters the already amnesia-prone profession, and lulls artists, critics, and art promoters into believing that their blissful ignorance is liberation. We need history, now more than ever, but it will involve a transnational expropriation of cultural heritage, a rescue of history in the communist mode.

Today we hold the world in our hands, but only virtually. Modernity’s hoped-for ‘family of man’ remains a body in pieces. The creative forces of the present explode the structures of history, scattering fragments of the past forward into unanticipated locations. These fragments have multiple affinities that cannot be known beforehand, which is a good thing. Their juxtaposition in the present produces unforeseen constellations, providing new readings of the past as a way of charting a different future. Entering multiple constellations, they shine the brighter for it.^[62]

In the early 1920s, with the rise of European modernity, Georg Lukács lamented the fact that modern society had lost every image of the whole. Influenced by Hegel, he believed that the totality of the past could only be grasped as a sequence of stages that led all of humanity from feudalism to capitalism and beyond. This trajectory of history has indeed come to an end. But the history of humanity, far from over, may be just at the beginning.