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A three-year research and pedagogical initiative based at the South Asia Art Initiative, UC Berkeley.

In response to contemporary conditions of environmental precarity, resurgent nationalisms, and intensified global interdependence, Language of Nature, Language of Culture: Towards a Decolonial Art History critically examines the relationship between nature and culture as one of the central problematics confronting the humanities today. India serves as the project’s primary site of inquiry. Rather than treating the nation-state as a self-evident unit of analysis, however, the project foregrounds longue durée histories of circulation, ecological entanglement, and multi-sited exchange through which the subcontinent has remained connected to wider worlds spanning the Indian Ocean, Eurasia, Africa, and the Transpacific. In doing so, the project advances a connected history that challenges claims of civilizational enclosure by showing how artistic, intellectual, and ecological formations have long been co-produced through circulation, encounter, and material exchange beyond the territorial limits of the nation-state. Supported by the Getty’s Connecting Art Histories Initiative, the project’s animating hypothesis is that such an orientation can yield conceptual and methodological tools for thinking environmental precarity and ethnonationalist politics not as discrete crises, but as historically entangled formations whose contemporary force demands new histories of relation, movement, and planetary interdependence.

Nature and culture are not opposed domains, but co-produced histories of matter, mobility, imagination, and power.

Led by Professors Sugata Ray and Atreyee Gupta, this three-year project is based at the South Asia Art Initiative (SAAI), housed within the Institute for South Asia Studies (ISAS) at the University of California, Berkeley. During its first two years, the project convenes a global cohort of early-career scholars and practitioners for intensive seminars in Delhi and Kolkata, two historically layered megacities where ecological processes, material histories, and cultural production remain deeply entangled. Through experiential learning, field-based workshops with leading scholars and artists, archival encounters, and collaborative research, participants will develop a rigorous, portable lexicon for artistic and visual history that brings material, environmental, and cultural analysis into conversation with the intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical demands of the present. In its third year, the project culminates in a convening at Berkeley. This final gathering will synthesize the cohort’s inquiries through a series of public engagements and will launch the project’s lexicon as an illustrated deck of conceptual cards designed to serve as a critical pedagogical tool for collective inquiry.
Across all three years, SAAI will host a roster of distinguished art historians, critical and cultural theorists, and scholars of visual culture for public talks in Berkeley, Delhi, and Kolkata. These talks will anchor the program’s interdisciplinary engagement with climate, decolonization, and planetary thought while contributing to a publicly accessible, evolving archive of lectures and conversations hosted on the project website.

Across all three years, SAAI will host a roster of distinguished art historians, critical and cultural theorists, and scholars of visual culture for public talks in Berkeley, Delhi, and Kolkata. These talks will anchor the program’s interdisciplinary engagement with climate, decolonization, and planetary thought while forming a publicly accessible, evolving archive on the project website.

BAM1IMG_9099: Artist(s) once known, Shah Jahan striking a lion, 1680. Ink and color wash on paper, 9 × 8 in. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Gift of Jean and Francis Marshall

Language of Nature, Language of Culture: Towards a Decolonial Art History

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