The International Committee of the History of Art (CIHA) has recently been addressing concerns about the unequal distribution of resources around the globe and challenges from post-colonial societies to the older methods and concepts of Western art history. At the CIHA congress in Melbourne in January 2008, one of the key issues for discussion was the extent to which we need to re-think the discipline of the history of art “in order to establish cross-cultural dimensions as fundamental to its scope, method and vision”. The national association of South African Visual Arts Historians (SAVAH) proposed continuing these discussions in the colloquium ‘Other Views: Art History in (South) Africa and the Global South’, held at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in January, 2011.

A principal focus of the discussions took the ‘other view’, that is the view from the Global South. What if the centres of intellectual and financial power are reversed? What if the ‘developing world’ becomes the ‘first world’? If South becomes North? In short, we tried to imagine a public intellectual space where such polar reversals can happen, and where new histories of art can emerge which are not necessarily centred on Western-based systems, nor dependent on the West for validation.

This paper explores some of questions central to this debate, and provides a tentative framework for its central aim, viz. to complicate the history of art and the relationship between histories in the Global South and the ‘North’ or ‘West’.