ANN 08.11.2020

Society of Contemporary Art Historians: Foreign Language Index

Jacob Stewart-Halevy, Tufts University

The inaugural issue of the Foreign Language Index (FLI) stems from discussions with art historians, curators, critics, artists, and students about the state of contemporary art history. Many lamented the increasing hegemony of anglophone scholarship, which can be traced to the rise of online content and the concentrated attention economy, along with the demise of both regional print publishing and foreign language acquisition. The dominance of English pervades the entirety of art history, but it is particularly pronounced in the contemporary field insofar as contemporary art is often meant to address a global audience, using English as a means of doing so. These circumstances threaten to limit the modalities of art writing and, in turn, homogenize the histories and perspectives that may be disclosed through them.

The project builds on a number of ongoing translation initiatives. These include the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories; MoMA’s Primary Documents series; Documents of Latin American and Latino Art at the International Center for the Arts of the Americas at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Asia Art Archive; Qalqalah; the journals Art in Translationand ArtMargins, alongside numerous others. Members of these institutionally robust endeavors have generously devoted their energies to contributing and consulting on the FLI at SCAH, whose infrastructure remains comparatively minimal. The major distinction between these established translation projects and the one at SCAH is that they are mainly geared toward the preservation of documents in an archival form, where the FLI, whose articles have been published within the last year or so, seeks to provide a snapshot of the field at the current moment.

The FLI will be published on an annual basis. It includes abstracts, citation information, commentary, and links to recent non-anglophone scholarship in contemporary art history in sixteen languages.

The document may be accessed and downloaded for free at:
https://scahweb.org/Foreign-Language-Index

Editors:
Jacob Stewart-Halevy
John Tyson

Indexers:
Albanian–Raino Isto
Arabic–Mostafa Heddaya
Chinese–Kathy Mak, Lu Pan
Danish–Eli Ståhl
French–Umut Ungan
German–Daniel Spaulding
Italian–Martina Tanga
Japanese–Daria Melnikova
Korean–Boyoung Chang
Latvian–Ieva Astahovska
Polish–Magdalena Moskalewicz
Russian–Yelena Kalinsky
Spanish–Noemi de Haro García
Turkish–Eran Sabaner Kalaora
Ukrainian–Olena Martynuk
Vietnamese–NGO Ngoc Phuong Anh

For comments, questions, suggestions, or if you would like to index a given language in future issues of the FLI please contact: Jacob.Stewart_Halevytufts.edu

Quellennachweis:
ANN: Society of Contemporary Art Historians: Foreign Language Index. In: ArtHist.net, 08.11.2020. Letzter Zugriff 29.03.2024. <https://arthist.net/archive/23885>.

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