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This chapter discusses the aim and objectives of the volume by way of addressing the recent debates in the discipline of art history. The two main themes that comes through from this discussion are the current efforts of decolonising the curriculum of art history and the discipline itself, and the ongoing challenges to art history and its canon particularly coming from the perspectives of transnational feminism and postcolonialism. This introductory chapters draws upon scholars whose studies have been key to these discussions, including Okwui Enwezor, Nada Shabout, James Elkins and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, providing a comprehensive overview of the current state and relevance of them to the volume. This chapter ends with an explanation of how each section and chapters contribute to these debates and what novelties they bring into art historical scholarship.

This chapter argues that poetry is vibrantly dialogic, a quality usually reserved for the novel. It proposes a “dialogic poetics” that would combine analysis of poetry’s interplay with other genres, in Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense of “dialogic,” and genre-specific analysis of poetry as poetry, in Roman Jakobson’s sense of “poetics.” In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, poetry metabolizes a variety of discursive forms, and this chapter focuses on three: the novel, theory, and the law. Ever since poetry lost its literary preeminence to the novel, it has sought ways both to assimilate, and to differentiate itself from, novelistic realism, plot, and character. Similarly, it has borrowed aspects of theory and philosophy, while showing poetry’s forms, figurations, and visual materiality to diverge from these abstract discourses. It has also recognized itself in the precision and narrative structures of the law, even as it has separated its polyphony and multifariousness from what it sometimes represents as the law’s narrow rationalism, its binary logic. In readings of poets from W. B. Yeats to Christopher Okigbo, NourbeSe Philip, and Lorna Goodison, the chapter traces poetry in the act of defining itself situationally and relationally, as it incorporates, and contends with, other discourses.

The Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France (ASMCF) seeks to promote knowledge of France mainly, but not exclusively, through the area studies approach, which is broadly the study of the country including its political system, history, geography, and general culture integrated with its language. The ASMCF has three main areas of activity: the annual conference, publication of the journal, and support for local and regional research groups. This chapter explains the growth of the association during the expansion of French teaching in higher education.

This chapter emphasizes the tight connections between contemporary modern frameworks and processes that date back over two hundred years, and the similar links between injunctions toward cheerfulness and their recent past. Modernity and expectations of happiness were both huge departures from the traditional past. They launched at the same time and place—the eighteenth-century West. They reinforced each other in many ways, and their impact, though evolving, has in each case continued to the present day. But the two developments were distinct. Modernity involved problems as well as opportunities—hardly a formula for consistent cheer. Efforts to blend modernity and happiness, through formal ideas of progress, glossed over distinctions for many articulate optimists into the early twentieth century. Ultimately, however, the combination could not survive the onslaughts of the twentieth century or the persistent complexities of modernity itself.

This chapter presents a detailed description of Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1975 art work Conical Intersect, its interpretation in art history, and the position that it occupies in Matta-Clark’s oeuvre and in late twentieth-century Paris (esp. the destruction of Les Halles and the building of the Centre Pompidou). Discussion examines Matta-Clark’s architectural cutting art in terms of action and performance, and the spectation of the cut. The chapter concludes with an extended discussion of the relevance that Conical Intersect has for the reader’s understanding of the pit-houses at Măgura and other sites like it in terms of cutting as destroying, as participation, as knowing (and opening), as part of the visual field, and as an object within a political context.