DEFENSE: “The Art of Nation Building: Cultural Politics and Artistic Practices in Nepal, 1950-2025”
Anthropology Dissertation Defense
May 11, 2026
10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
BSB 3160 and on Zoom
Calendar
Download iCal FileDissertation Defense by UIC Anthropology PhD Student Dipti Sherchan
Abstract
This dissertation examines the cultural politics of nation-building in Nepal during the mid-twentieth and twenty-first century through the emergent formations of artistic subjectivities in this period. Amid the global emergence of newly decolonized nation-states in "the long 1950s", a dynastic and authoritarian Hindu Shah monarchy took helm of building and governing a nascent ‘modern’ Nepali nation-state under a form of direct rule called the Panchayat regime (1961-1990). These three decades continue to cast long shadows onto the cultural production of what constitutes modern and contemporary Nepali art, artist, and art history. The central question that drives this dissertation is: how do contemporary artists, situated within the contested field of the global art world, navigate and negotiate these historically contingent intersections between art and politics? First, by tracing monarchic state patronage of the arts, I argue that distinct domains of ‘art’ and ‘politics’ were historically produced and reified through the institutionalization of ‘modern Nepali fine arts and artists.’ At the same time, I show how artist-subjects—diasporic, gendered, and Indigenous—trouble the distinctions drawn between art and politics in governance. To examine these works of troubling, I develop the analytics of (1) ambivalence and abstraction, (2) body becoming performance, and (3) unsettling visual politics in respective chapters. These analytics stage interdisciplinary conversations across anthropological and art-historical scholarship on state ideology and nationalism, postcolonial modernities and global modernisms, body politics and performance, and indigeneity and decoloniality. The project is also methodologically placed at the intersections of anthropology, history, and art history, drawing on ethnographic and archival fieldwork conducted between 2018-2024 in Kathmandu, Nepal.
Date posted
May 6, 2026
Date updated
May 6, 2026