My research focuses in particular on the entanglements between (left-wing) aesthetics and 20th-century decolonization in South Asia and across transnational formations in the Global South.
I studied History in my BA (Presidency College, Kolkata, India), MA and MPhil (both at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India), before doing my PhD in Art History (Department of History of Art, University College University London, United Kingdom). My primary specialization is in South Asia (India and East Pakistan/Bangladesh after 1971), and I work with transregional scales of Afro-Asian decolonization and Third World liberation movements in the 20th century.
In my first monograph, Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and India’s Long Decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2020) (https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=29337) I argued for a conceptual apparatus that can accommodate the contradictions that shape entanglements of modern art and (anti-colonial) left-wing political movements. Using a catastrophic famine in the frontiers of British colonial empire in Bengal in 1943, I foregrounded the dialectical relationships between modernism and realism that marked the aesthetics of late-colonial and early postcolonial transition in India. Partisan Aesthetics won the Best Art Publication Accolade at the 2021 ICAS Book Prize, sponsored by the International Convention of Asia Scholars. Read excerpts here: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=29337
Source and read more:
https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/s/u/s.sunderason/s.sunderason.html