Over here: international perspectives on art and culture

This anthology drew on Fisher's research on art, multiculturalism and globalisation, associated with eight years experience as Editor of the journal Third Text (1991-1999). Fisher co-edited the volume with the Cuban international curator and critic Gerardo Mosquera with a jointly authored Introduction. The project was begun in 1999 and over three years were spent researching, translating and selecting the final list of 22 contributors. Although the contributions were drawn from countries as divergent as China, India, Indonesia, Martinique and Lebanon, special attention was given to critical debates from the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking ex-colonial world, little of which had been translated into English.
The book's significance must be assessed against a background of commentaries on cultural politics and postcolonial theory dominated by diasporic intellectuals in Euro-American metropolitan centres, anthologised in MIT's Out There, 1990. Whilst Out There addressed marginality ‘internal' to the West, by contrast, Over Here presented art critics, historians and cultural theorists speaking from different global contexts who offered alternative critical positions towards modernity and globalisation to those of Western metropolitanism. The originality of the book rested in its challenge to the notion of the homogenisation of art under globalization through its investigation of the way internationalized aesthetic codes are re-articulated through local experience and symbolic systems.
The volume represented the first published attempt to re-draw the critical art field from a global perspective, and many of the issues it advanced have since been further debated, for example, in the Venice Biennale international conference of 2005, ‘Where Art Worlds Meet', in which some Over Here contributors were invited to participate (Fisher, Mosquera and Geeta Kapur). MIT Press has recently reprinted the book.
Reviews appeared in The Art Book, 2005; ‘Must Reads', ARCO Contemporary Art, Madrid, 2005; Publ.H-Gender-Mideast, Fordham University USA, 2006; Parachute, Canada, 2006.
Portfolio available.