Different Brushstrokes: Amending Colonial Cultural Legacies in Arts & Cultures Curriculum

In his famous TED talk video, African American artist Ted Kaphar asks and enacts the question: "Can art amend history?"On a large reproduction of a 17 th century painting by Frans Hals, Kaphar applies sweeping strokes, obscuring the row of imposing Dutch figures so that a small dark-skinned boy -tucked to one side -commands the space.Art historians, Kaphar claims, had only engaged with the Dutch figures and ignored the black boy.Rendering the boy singularly visible, Kaphar explains, "shifts the lens" to "amend" and not necessarily "erase" the racial structures and biases of the colonial past.In my article I explore specific ways to decolonize arts and literature curriculum by amending and altering the focus, and also retrieving past erasures.Two specific modalities will be discussed.One, to highlight and study cultural networks that displace Eurocentric models: for example, the Indo-Persianate early-modern connections that generated extraordinary artistic and literary innovations in India, such as Amir Khusrau's Khamsa stories.Secondly, anti-colonial and postcolonial interventions by artists who incorporate western forms and techniques and reinvent them for divergent purposes.Included in an arts curriculum, these works and approaches vibrantly "amend" colonial pasts, preconceptions and priorities.