Heritage and Debt

"Heritage and Debt is a comparative study of global contemporary art that addresses artworks from around the world without falling into a survey of successive regions as most art-historical accounts of globalization do. It demonstrates that art's globalization has the capacity to redress Western modernism's historical responsibility for the cultural dispossession of the Global South. Both imperialism and slavery--two primary means of capital accumulation in the 19th century-asserted the cultural inferiority of non-Western cultures as justification for appropriating their land, labor, and the personal freedom of their peoples. While non-Western art was denigrated and suppressed in its places of origin, it was nevertheless appropriated by European modernism in the subordinate position of "primitivism" or "exoticism," or collected as defunct anthropological relics in encyclopedic or natural history museums in the European or American metropolis. Global contemporary art confronts this history of dispossession in its reanimation of cultural heritage as a contemporary resource. Since the 1980s artists from around the world have reclaimed local traditions to challenge the predominance of