The Contradictions of the (Para)National

This paper was delivered at the Association of Art Historians Annual Conference, Norwich 2015, in the session 'National Histories of Art Beyond the National Borders'. It interrogates current thinking on national identity in relation to the contemporary art world and globalised exhibitions circuits. The paper proposed new ways of thinking about and deconstructing national identity based on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's conceptualization of the planetary and the para-national.