An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Professor Peggy Levitt (Visiting Research Fellow 2023; Wellesley College and the Global (De)Centre)
Move Over, Mona Lisa. Move Over, Jane Eyre: DeCentering the World’s Universities, Museums and Libraries
In 2021, the Tanzanian writer, Abdulrazak Gurnah, won the Nobel Prize for Literature—the first Black writer to win since Toni Morrison in 1993. Yet as New York Times Reporter Alexander Alter asked, “He won the Nobel Prize. Why are his books so hard to find? Afterlives, which explores the brutality of Germany’s colonial rule in East Africa, came out in Britain in September 2020 and was hailed as a masterpiece but it failed to reach a large audience and wasn’t even published in the United States” (Alter 2021).
What’s wrong with this picture? If everyone agrees that the world’s universities, museums, and libraries must become more diverse, why is progress so slow?
The answer is the inequality pipeline—a set of gates that aspiring arts and writers must pass through for their work to circulate globally. The pipeline begins when a toddler in the US or Europe is surrounded by art supplies while a toddler living outside these regions is left empty-handed. It continues when a work by an author writing in a European language gets translated and circulates widely while her peer writing in Arabic or Hindi is read only by people back home. And it extends through structures of the cultural and academic worlds to what gets taught in the university classroom or textbook.
My talk, based on the book I am working on while at IASH, tells how artists and writers from Argentina, Lebanon, and South Korea negotiate their way through the nodes of the pipeline and what enables some to travel easily while blocking others at every step along the way. While unequal relations of economic and political power explain a lot, we need a much more granular view to begin to change things—to understand all the ways, big and small, the inequality pipeline works in order to disrupt it. I tell the story of people who are changing the art and literary worlds from within and of people who are decentering them from the margins. Taken together, these efforts bring us closer to moving over the Mona Lisa and Jane Eyre.
Click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/86535202023
Passcode: Vr8f3ew2