Migrating Histories of Art

Book excerpt: Art historians have been facing the challenge – even from before the advent of globalization – of writing for an international audience and translating their own work into a foreign language – whether forced by exile, voluntary migration, or simply in order to reach wider audiences. Migrating Histories of Art aims to study the biographical and academic impact of these self-translations, and how the adoption and processing of foreign-language texts and their corresponding methodologies have been fundamental to the disciplinary discourse of art history. While often creating distinctly "multifaceted" personal biographies and establishing an international disciplinary discourse, self-translation also fosters the creation of instances of linguistic and methodological hegemony.