Los Angeles Artists and Revisionist Historiography: A Diasporic Intervention

<p>This dissertation examines contemporary Los Angeles-based artists whose identity and work engages with issues of diaspora. I combine visual analysis of the artwork with interviews with the artists to look at the ways in which they utilize several visual and theoretical concepts of diaspora, arguing, that as diasporans they adopt a dialogic gaze that disallows monologic readings of their work, while denying easy binaryisms, to transgress multiple borders – temporal, cultural, stylistic, and geographic – simultaneously. In doing so, I argue that their work performs a revisionist historiography – they contribute to a project that decenters dominant discourses, by shifting absent or marginal narratives to the center, modeling a process of writing history that goes beyond merely inserting peoples of diverse backgrounds into the history of art, but revisions history from a more equitable perspective. Furthermore, drawing on a broad field of diaspora studies, I utilize a theory of diaspora that moves beyond a single ethnic or national identity to a global intersectional framework, which allows me to compare work that might not be otherwise read together. Therefore, I argue that applying a diaspora analysis to this diverse work contributes to a revisionist historiography by producing new narratives and analytical frameworks to an art historical discourse, one that centers questions of gender, culture, migration, sexuality, transnationalism, and global power structures.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Cultural Studies, PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Restricted to Claremont Colleges Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

School of Arts and Humanities

Year dc:date.available

2020

Author dc:creator

• Singh, Surana Kaur

Contributors dc:contributor

• Joshua Goode
• David Pagel

• Art
• Contemporary
• Dialogic
• Diaspora
• Historiography
• Los Angeles
• American Studies
• Art Practice

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/624

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarship.claremont.edu:cgu_etd-1646