With the publication of “The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History” (edited by Tatiana Torres, Florencia San Martin & Charlene Villasenor Black) in November of 2023 recent self-critical (and self-reflective) efforts in the fields of art history and visual culture studies have become solidified as central to the disciplines at hand. Catherine Grant’s and Dorothee Price’s questionnaire on “Decolonizing Art History” (published in Art History in 2020) already showed the critical importance of looking at art history as part of a colonial tradition and it called for practices that exceed “diversifying canons, curricula, and practitioners” (21; James D’Emelio cited in response to the questionnaire). Still, diversification, self-reflection, and inclusion (of formerly marginalized artists, critics, and practitioners in general) might indeed serve as necessary points of departure for art history’s decolonial trajectory. As part of the efforts we summarize as “decolonial,” the status of disciplinary thought (or, the discipline) has itself come under scrutiny: on the one hand, we find aspirational calls for a decolonial movement (or at least effort) from within the discipline(s), on the other hand the historic processes inherent in the institutionalization of, for example, art history have themselves been identified as part of a colonial matrix of making the world legible in a specific way. 

It is at this juncture and within this tension that the symposium seeks to take up the task to discuss the potentialities of decolonizing art history from within, but also beyond itself. The symposium brings together speakers from art history, digital game studies, cultural studies, and North American Studies and asks contributors to consider the confluence of digital image-making and our contemporary modes of critical trans-disciplinary self-reflection. Here, another productive tension emerges; unlike art history, digital game studies has always been dependent on digitality and digital image-making, i.e. the field would hardly be imaginable were it not for the kind of digital image-production we refer to as graphics. Put differently: it lacks the historical depth (and at times the outlook) of art history. Still, much like art history, digital game studies have only recently begun to critically reflect its thorough colonial embeddedness, which arguably starts but does not end with the colonial logics of production of the devices that enable digital gaming in the first place. While game studies scholars (rightfully) emphasize “play” and “playability” as crucial to understanding games, digital visuality and practices of image production more generally are crucial to making sense of games today as well. Visual culture studies might provide a preliminary bridge between the fields of art history and digital game studies, but it still demands a robust aspiration to take practices of “decolonializing” seriously. It is in the context of these questions and complexities that the symposium convenes scholars from the aforementioned fields and asks them to reflect on the decolonial aspirations in and between them.