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. Although hailed as a masterpiece, it wasn’t even published in the US. What’s wrong with this picture? If everyone agrees that the world’s universities, museums, and libraries should be 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 emptyhanded. It continues when a work by an author writing in a European language gets translated and circulates widely while her peers writing in Arabic or Hindi is read only by people back home. And it extends through the structures of the cultural and academic worlds to what gets taught in the university classroom or textbook. My talk 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 of the way. While unequal relations of economic and political power explain a lot, we need a much closer view to begin to change things. I tell the stories 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.

Speaker

ISA Visiting Fellow - Peggy Levitt

Wellesley College, MA, United States

Visit Prof. Levitt's web page

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