The archive has neither status nor power without an architectural dimension, which encompasses the physical space of the site of the building, its motifs and columns, the arrangement of the rooms, the organisation of the “files,” the labyrinth of corridors, and that degree of discipline, half-light and austerity that gives the place something of the nature of a temple and a cemetery: a religious space because a set of rituals is constantly taking place there … and a cemetery in the sense that fragments of lives and pieces of time are interred there, their shadows and footprints inscribed on paper and preserved like so many relics.

—Achille Mbembe, 2002¹

Studying the art and architectural movements that thrived in mid-twentieth-century Baghdad has been a nerve-wracking endeavor. It is an ostensibly impossible project: modern repositories in Iraq were heavily compromised following the 2003 American-led invasion, and conducting research within the country became immensely dangerous in the turmoil that ensued. But my anxiety has primarily stemmed from a formal training as a scholar in the West, with stringent protocols dictating that there is simply no history without official archives or extensive fieldwork. As a historian of art and architecture, I had learned a specific definition of archives: collections of well-preserved primary materials, including original and unpublished documents, held for their cultural or research value at national collections, historical societies, and various other public or academic institutions. My options were to either abandon the project or to challenge accepted dogmas.²

Indeed, there is a tacit assumption that the veracity of a historian's narrative depends not only on a rigorous practice of citing and interpreting credible sources, but also on the kind and authenticity of these sources, not to mention the institutional archives out of which the evidence is drawn. Archives seem to be unconsciously equated with truthfulness—their contents are meant to inspire certainty, as the most credible, and perhaps only, body of evidence for the exacting historian. Archival research is therefore seen as a rite of passage. The primacy of the archives as the sanctioned foundation of historical scholarship has been reified by political systems invested in bolstering narratives that reflect the ideological frameworks that precipitated their national archives in the first place.² This valorization of archives, as the hallowed arbiters of what can be said about the past, has equally been perpetuated by independent historians, who have defined their role in direct connection to archives.³ Fortunately, early on in my research journey, I suspended the tenets that overtly or implicitly govern historical scholarship.⁴

While I am still working on this research, I came to realize that parting ways with conventional archival definitions could enable me to share some of my findings about the unique art-architectural culture of modern Baghdad.⁵ This research would not have been possible otherwise—had I expected to find records at proper, western-sanctioned archives. Even though this history has not been adequately documented to date, and no substantial evidence has been deposited at official archives, it became possible for me to outline key aspects of this culture thanks to direct conversations with surviving pioneers of that movement, as well as access to their private archives. For example, I have argued how this shared art-architectural culture emerged in domestic spaces and not in institutional settings, as in other contexts—and that it would only be possible to account for this culture from within domestic spaces too. Indeed, traveling around the world, and speaking with exiles at their homes, while consulting what they had kept from their time in modern Iraq, gave rise to an alternative history, which I could not have possibly anticipated, thus radically transforming my scholarship. But to appreciate how I got there, I must retrace my steps.

Institutional archives in Southwest Asia (the region conventionally known as the “Middle East”) reflect the crises that have plagued this part of the world, and postcolonial geographies more broadly, since the advent of modernity. Official documentation practices have been scarce to begin with, especially in formerly colonized contexts. Local histories were hardly the priority of modern colonial institutions. State-sponsored archives, when they were established before or after independence (or under some form of mandate that guaranteed the colonizers’ continued influence, as happened in Iraq under the British), either remained inaccessible or did not necessarily privilege the recording of intellectual output at odds with oppressive nationalist politics.⁶ Therefore, historians working on postcolonial subjects often face a dire reality: patchy archives, poorly maintained facilities, erratic documentation procedures, circuitous and murky access parameters, politicized excisions, and highly charged approaches toward collecting evidence that mostly serves to legitimize national or ruling party histories.⁷ But what is the fate of scholarship when the historical record is subjected to another degree of erasure, specifically the systematic destruction wrought by conflict, as has been the case in Iraq over the past few decades? And, considering Achille Mbembe's proposition in the epigraph, what happens when both the evidence and the architecture that contains it are targeted and wrecked?

Over the past few decades, Iraq has tragically become synonymous with chronic unrest, warfare, displacement, and the general collapse of state sovereignty, with ineffectual governments that have been unable to restore even the highly compromised infrastructure and services that existed prior to the 2003 invasion.⁸ Looking further back, the fledgling modern nation created by the British colonial administration in 1921 was rocked by political instability, culminating in the over-throw of the Hashemite monarchy in the 1958 coup d’état, known as the July 14 Revolution. More coups followed in the 1960s, eventually giving rise to the Ba'ath Party and Saddam Hussein's brutal regime. The protracted Iraq-Iran war (1980–1988) depleted the country, and then the regime invaded neighboring Kuwait in 1990, leading to the Gulf War and repeated American-led strikes throughout the 1990s, along with the sadistic UN-endorsed economic sanctions that starved Iraqis for thirteen years.

But it was the carnage and chaos unleashed by the American-led invasion that dealt the most devastating blow to the country's cultural and academic institutions. In pre-2003 Iraq, recordkeeping and access to information may have been colored by the political priorities of successive local governments (not unlike other contexts that experienced such drastic and rapid changes). But the modern nation of Iraq did manage to build some impressive repositories, concentrated primarily in the capital Baghdad. Soon after the invasion, however, museums, libraries, and archives were burned, looted, and vandalized—an enormous cultural catastrophe the full extent of which is still unknown.⁹ The assault on Iraq was also enacted through the annihilation of its national memory, whether deliberate or simply the result of gross negligence.¹⁰ Like Iraq's former regimes, the United States signaled its priorities when it came to recordkeeping: the occupying troops protected the Ministry of Oil and also transported millions of Ba'ath Party documents now housed in Stanford University's Hoover Institution.¹¹ Also gone missing in Iraq were some of the inventories that account for the holdings of local repositories—particularly the modern art collections, crucial for my research.¹² Today, several of the surviving archives remain closed or neglected, and barely any reliable information exists about their current status and whether they can be accessed by independent scholars.

In recent years, and as a sort of remedy, I have attempted to uncover whatever remnants of relevant sources might still exist around the world. With the right local connections, I also managed to access several institutions in Baghdad. I discovered that priceless materials have been irrevocably lost. Everything at the Iraqi Artists Society was destroyed in 2003, and the current “archive” consists of poor-quality images printed from anonymous sources found on the Internet. But some repositories have been rehabilitated, at least partially. This includes the Iraqi National Library and Archives, which reopened for researchers after being pillaged and set ablaze in the days following the invasion. Much of the material I consulted, with a focus on the history of art, archaeology, and heritage more broadly, was extracted from the Iraq Museum library (which miraculously survived the infamous ransacking of that institution). The Ministry of Culture, on the other hand, has suffered immense losses in the turmoil. All that remains is a small library at the Directorate of Plastic Arts, containing some Iraqi publications, which pales in comparison to the Iraqi holdings of some American libraries. The ministry attempted to rebuild its archives by purchasing the private collections of a few prominent local figures, but after one costly acquisition that remained largely uncataloged and abandoned in a dusty storage space, these efforts have been aborted (it is a lot more lucrative for the contents of surviving archives to be sold locally to collectors and dealers or smuggled abroad).

This is not to give the impression that private archives in Iraq have remained intact. At the center of my research is the home-grown modernism led by a group of local artists and architects who produced powerful work during the mid-twentieth century, despite the immense difficulties they encountered. But compounding the dearth of scholarship on the subject and the destruction of official archives is the fact that many of these Baghdadi figures have already passed away, while others were forced abroad, usually leaving behind the bulk of their belongings—a few personal libraries have been entirely discarded. The best of their work, preserved for decades at museums and academic institutions in Iraq, was plundered following the invasion. Some of the buildings realized by the architects of this period, which constitute important evidence for my project, were destroyed in conflict or razed to the ground due to wild real estate speculation and the lack of governmental regulation that could have protected these structures as examples of modern heritage; other buildings were decimated by American missiles or in battles with the terrorist organization ISIS. The situation in Iraq has made my quest to narrate the history of the country's modern art and architectural movements a formidable challenge.

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Outside Iraq, there are other impediments. When it comes to periodicals, original publications, or archival materials focusing on the modern artistic and cultural developments in Iraq, I came to discover how little western libraries have collected—perhaps due to the lack of interest in nonwestern modernisms, at least until fairly recently (but the holdings of some libraries, such as those at Harvard University, still possess more sources than the majority of extant libraries in Iraq). Most institutions tend to focus on ancient history, to bolster the absurd but long-held belief that Mesopotamian heritage constitutes the cradle of western civilization (a conviction that canonical surveys of western art and architecture continue to propagate, and one that was repeated in some media coverage of the looting of the Iraq Museum).¹³ Furthermore, while hardly any of these institutions have collected primary materials on Iraqi artists and architects, let alone the secondary literature about the subject produced and published in Iraq, they might have collected periodicals about the modern literary or poetry movements and mostly those about economic and political developments. The clearer the picture, the more daunting the prospects: writing a historical account without official archives or primary sources seemed like an impossible task.

It became imperative to come up with an alternative approach, one that entailed simply keeping track of everyone and everything I could find—whatever may shed light on the subject. I reached out to those who lived through the period in question and gradually established an extensive network of contacts. This translated into interviews by phone or in person, as well as traveling to meet living protagonists, their families, or associates. The majority of those I connected with were generous with their time, memories, personal collections, and contacts. My research in Baghdad and the region also proved fruitful in terms of Arabic language sources, some of which I had to purchase from various vendors, and others I digitized wherever I found them. Combined with materials I spotted at libraries and public archives in different parts of the world, which I systematically scanned or photographed for my research, I ended up compiling my own specialized, mobile, and primarily digital archives.* In other words, instead of relying on the kinds of thorough, already established, and regularly maintained public collections available to someone studying western subject matter, I found myself obliged to create my private archives. This was the most viable methodology I could devise: to build an alternative evidentiary body, the provenance of which I was confident. My archives encompasses photographs, drawings, maps, handwritten documents (such as memoirs, notes, and letters), publications, postcards, and artworks, among other materials.

Therefore, and while I did consult some traditional primary sources at official archives, such as indexed or cataloged documents accessed through carefully prepared guides and finding aids and deposited at governmental or academic institutions around the world, I also ended up encountering a wide range of informal evidence: personal papers and family collections that have barely been examined, sometimes for decades, even by their owners; diaries, correspondence, and neglected ephemera in private possession; and photographs, film clips, and scraps of publications. Through my work, I contributed to organizing collections, annotating thousands of documents, helping consolidate and preserve information with the original owners, and at times providing support with moving materials to publicly accessible archives.¹⁴ In some cases, I relied on crowdsourced materials when I needed, for example, to locate a specific site or document, or to identify a person in a photograph, and was often pleasantly surprised by what new things complete strangers could teach me online.

Furthermore, I was able to access numerous Iraqi and Arab publications from the period on which I focus—some in completely unexpected places, tucked inside folios, or sitting on shelves and in boxes untouched for many years—and I produced extensive translations of these materials, as well as previously unpublished documents. By digitizing whatever I could find, whenever I was given permission, for my own reference, the bits and pieces collected by individuals began to complement those held by others, and I soon ended up with what became one of the most comprehensive archives on the art and architecture of modern Iraq, larger than any publicly or privately held archives of which I am aware.¹⁵ This makeshift archives is far from complete, however. The vagaries of time and the tumultuous events that Baghdad has experienced have taken their toll. But what I have gathered—which continues to grow as more evidence becomes available—has sharpened the outlines of an emerging narrative, supplying the cornerstones for the arguments this provisional archives enabled me to make.

Summarizing my research process in a few lines does not mean this was an easy journey. It took me several years of total immersion in this effort. It made me seek out countless individuals and visit numerous homes and organizations. It cost enormous resources, at times directly from my own savings. And, in retrospect, some of my research trips were potentially dangerous, not only because of haphazard attacks, such as suicide bombings or kidnappings that often targeted congregations and institutions, but also because of official and public suspicion of anyone conducting research, documenting objects and buildings in a volatile context. Additionally, I am not addressing here how much of the material I encountered, whether in private or public possession, was a source of ideological contestation, colored by current and past political allegiances, class and social circles, or religious and sectarian belonging, even for those who are not necessarily practicing; the power dynamics and instability within modern and contemporary Iraq, not to mention its diasporic communities, can affect access to crucial materials.¹⁶ Moreover, I do not wish to pause here at the occasional chilling realization that some historical episodes—which may be detected based on elementary information such as the biography of an important protagonist or an influential article published in a local periodical, neither of which can be pieced together or found—are irretrievably lost.¹⁷

It was only by perceiving the challenges as opportunities and revisiting the definition and role that the archives is meant to play that I was able to bypass the ostensibly insurmountable obstacles that stood in the way of my research. This is important not just in the context of contemporary Iraq, but, as some scholars have argued, in the postcolonial Arab world and the non-West more broadly.¹⁸ Rather than dwelling on the incompleteness or loss of official archives, I realized that reconciling myself to the likelihood that there are gaps we simply cannot fill and embracing alternative sources such as those I started relying on—oral accounts, private collections, and so on—could shift the course of my research and yield equally alternative histories. This raised the question of where such alternative sources and methodologies might lead my research. I became cognizant of the fact that a careful interpretation of these nonconventional and typically discredited sources, aided by new digital representation methods that might render intelligible information entering circulation for the first time, could play a decisive role in my scholarship. This produces not only more truthful and situated chronicles grounded in the specific reality of the context as well as in the agency of local protagonists, it also crosses disciplinary boundaries and creates unexpected, layered, and dense narratives.

This has led me to the concept of the “counter-archive,” which designates the alternative evidentiary body—admittedly fragmented, fluid, and ever-evolving—that might be assembled from materials that defy conventional definitions of archives, and which would in turn produce alternative histories.¹⁹ While I stumbled on this concept organically, through the methodology I pursued in response to the challenges I was facing, I came to find out that there is an existing body of literature about community and counter-archives (mostly in the field of archival studies, that is, beyond art and architectural history, and usually outside existing scholarship on modern Iraq). For instance, Jeannette Allis Bastian proposes that in postcolonial contexts, traditional archives do not capture subaltern voices, so more egalitarian, community-based recordkeeping practices become crucial for writing more inclusive and representative histories.²⁰ Andrew Flinn has described anti-hegemonic archival practices, as well as nonprofessional public history creation, as a form of activism, part of a progressive and democratic social movement.²¹ Michelle Caswell, Marika Cifor, and Mario H. Ramirez have studied the impact of community archives and concluded that counter-archival practices not only fill a glaring gap in historical scholarship but also create a sense of belonging for communities previously overlooked or excluded from national and global narratives.²² Numerous other scholars have explored similar ideas in different contexts, contributing to a growing body of knowledge that is ameliorating colonial archival conventions and questioning research norms, as well as challenging state-sponsored and institutional documenting powers.

But, in the specific context of contemporary Iraq, where successive wars have taken their toll, nontraditional archives assume an even more vital role. Indeed, as Mbembe suggests, the destruction of archives, not necessarily only as a result of warfare, allows them to acquire new meanings, which could very well generate new imaginaries, thus new histories.²³ For me, the transgressions of the counter-archive serve to combat deliberate erasures, slow down the corrosive effects of time, and assert the possibility of writing histories in places where documentation may appear unlikely, or impossible. The counter-archive acknowledges, rather than evades or suppresses, the geopolitics that produced hegemonic archival definitions and practices to begin with—mired as they are in colonial entanglements—and that also led to the destruction of repositories in war-torn geographies. The concept does not compromise on rigor, and it still holds the historian accountable. Equally, the counter-archive does not obviate the need for a diligent search for materials, verification and evaluation of sources, or careful interpretation of evidence.

By bringing the haunting legacies of colonialism into sharp focus and liberating the nonwestern historian from oppressive doctrines, the counter-archive can begin to change research optics and methodologies. The resources identified and the narratives woven by the historian can be prioritized, rather than venerating the traditional archives in and of itself. This enables the counter-archive to empower the historian to tell alternative stories.²⁴ It also helps eschew the false pretenses of objectivity and neutrality not only in relation to the evidence found in archives, but also as that pertains to the historian's craft, emphasizing instead the agency and underlining the deeply personal motives, and biases, of the historian (in my case, the desire to retell misconstrued narratives about figures whom I knew made salient contributions and to counter the insidious erasures threatening the modern culture of my ancestral homeland).²⁵ Additionally, the new narratives are rooted not only in the complex reality of this part of the world, but also in the fraught nature of the counter-archive itself.²⁶ However, the counter-archive is not simply necessitated by the circumstances of a beleaguered context such as that of modern Iraq as the only, and impoverished, option of approaching the challenges at hand. Instead, the counter-archive must be viewed affirmatively as a place of recollection, an archives uniquely capable of capturing the memories, including the adversities, of the extraordinary time and place being studied.²⁷ In retrospect, and by adopting the concept of the counter-archive, I can recognize three distinct areas in which my research has changed significantly.

First, oral history has helped open my eyes to narratives that are largely absent from existing published or archival materials. I was initially skeptical about conducting interviews with surviving protagonists, mostly because my western training subscribed to the paradigm that the historian's craft lies in writing accounts based on a critical interpretation of primary materials found in official archives—that testimonies should be discredited as unreliable hearsay, even when the interviewee happens to be at the very core of the narrative. Fortunately, however, I drifted into the realm of casual conversations, unfettered by what I had learned. Not that the interviews became my main source. I hardly ever quoted any of my interviewees or relied solely on their statements; instead, I would reference them, usually in footnotes, when I thought that acknowledging an individual's viewpoint was important for illuminating specific aspects of the narrative. Listening to artists and architects describe in their own words the ambitions of their projects, their gatherings and collaborations, and the hurdles they faced, as well as provide an evaluation of their work and that of others—sometimes hearing these memories, on the verge of disappearance, in Baghdad itself—provided me with a lucid image of that place and time, which in turn informed some of the claims I make in my scholarship.²⁸ Above all, these interactions humanized these figures for me, which was essential in forming a better appreciation of their circumstances, challenges, and accomplishments.

Critically, oral histories helped me refute preconceived ideas about the intentions and practices of these figures. Again, this is one of the ways in which the counter-archive operates: it elucidates absences or uncovers implausible arguments, generating alternative narratives that are more faithful to the protagonists’ project and more situated in the realities of the context. The work of these artists and architects was characterized by a polemical integration of local elements, motifs, and materials into an otherwise modern framework. This has invariably been interpreted as a nationalist aesthetic, a postcolonial identity struggle, or even a nascent form of postmodernism. By listening to the protagonists, however, I came to understand that the apparently self-provincializing approach they deployed was an attempt to assert a definition of “globalism” (or Al-’Alamiyah in Arabic), the idea that each modern culture participates in making a pluralistic world that flourishes only by amplifying diversity. In other words, their artworks and buildings advocated a progressive and radical intellectual position wherein only by asserting local specificity could these artists and architects produce quintessentially global works. Listening to them, and collecting the evidence to which they guided me, transformed my approach to the subject, ultimately helping me do justice to their work. My narrative now challenges stereotypical assumptions about this and other nonwestern contexts, underlining the protagonists’ agency and desire to engage with the world.

Second, I discovered through these conversations, and the evidence I collected from various private archives, that the work of the architects could not possibly be discussed without addressing fellow artists active in mid-twentieth-century Baghdad. Again, embracing the counter-archive alerted me to the fact that certain historical episodes—such as the development of artistic practices in modern Iraq—are taken for granted, as though not much remains to be contributed. To correct those mis-conceptions, my project evolved to become fundamentally interdisciplinary, exploring the shared artistic-architectural movement, in the singular, that emerged in this context, crossing the boundaries of art and architecture. I have been working on the first study to consider the fundamental roles of both art and architecture in shaping the distinct local intellectual agenda and aesthetic forms that emerged in modern Baghdad. I am interested in unpacking the affinities, overlaps, and common projects of disciplines that are historically intertwined and yet have become increasingly autonomous in the modern era.²⁹ My project goes beyond the customary focus on the Iraqi government's oil-funded development campaign, or how Baghdad brought together a stellar group of international architects, such as Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Walter Gropius. Instead, my emphasis is on local protagonists, from artists such as Jewad Selim, Mediha Umar, and Shakir Hasan Al Said, to architects like Ellen Jawdat, Rifat Chadirji, and Mohamed Makiya. By tracing the lineaments of this movement, and how it was founded and flourished, the project questions the hyperspecialization of art and architecture, emphasizing instead multiplicities, intersections, and syntheses across disciplines.

And third, my alternative sources made me acutely aware of how existing historical narratives have often overlooked the fundamental role played by women as creative and intellectual interlocutors, and as true partners in the formation of the modern art-architectural movement that emerged in this context. This is especially pronounced in a conservative society such as that of early and mid-twentieth-century Iraq, where women could not enjoy the same opportunities as their male counter-parts, forgotten in chronicles that focused primarily on men. An integral dimension of my ongoing project became the documentation of the role played by women in this narrative: for example, highlighting the work of pioneer architects like Ellen Jawdat, who championed the introduction of modern architecture in Baghdad and the articulation of localized intellectual agendas and formal expression. I also study artists like Mediha Umar, known as one of the first to experiment with hybridizing Arabic calligraphy with abstract painting (in fact, a trailblazer in the regional movement that came to be known as “Hurufiyyah,” or letter-based modern and contemporary art).³⁰ My preliminary research has already shown that the shared artistic-architectural movement that emerged in this context was progressive in the interaction of the genders, something that previous scholars had disregarded, focusing instead on key figures, often men, who dominate existing narratives.

Shunning conventional archival definitions allowed me to appreciate how the modernism of these Baghdadi artists and architects was exemplary, both intellectually and aesthetically—not just considering the challenging state of affairs in Iraq, but globally too, in the context of the post–World War II period.³¹ Misrepresentations of this culture, usually examined from a sterile distance, abound: judgments stem from viewing this and similar places through the instantly dismissive lens of being different, belonging to the Arab-Muslim “Orient,” with all its putatively unmodern associations. But, if these reductive and pernicious judgments are suspended, then a more accurate understanding of Baghdad's post–WWII art-architectural movement can be articulated. Indeed, by looking at the written, visual, and built evidence—not only lost in translation, but largely untranslated and undocumented to date—and the sort of lives the protagonists of this story led, rather than casting the narrative in the usual myopic mold, the unique accomplishments of these protagonists can be recognized. The evidence I collected, as well as my familiarity with the culture, my fluency in the local dialect of Arabic, and the intimacy I developed with surviving protagonists, aid me in avoiding the essentialisms and myriad preconceived notions about these people, or about Baghdad, the city where they lived and worked.

Adopting the counter-archive made me realize that the most fundamental contribution my project can make lies in simply rendering the narrative as faithfully as possible and amplifying through my scholarship the collective voices of the protagonists, all while capturing the nuances of local culture. Even though my research has been concerned with the emergence of a shared artistic-architectural movement in Baghdad and the type of aesthetics to which it gave rise, the narrative is equally about the agency of Baghdadi artists and architects. This relatively small group, aided by certain circumstances and impeded by others, envisioned their place in the world, laid the foundations for their disciplines locally, institutionalized the practice and education of art and architecture, and shaped the built environment of their city, eventually exporting their work to the rest of the region. Indeed, my work became about simply accounting for this movement. At times, I was more like an ethnographer embedded within his own community, attempting a “thick description” that produces a richer representation of a subject—and less like a historian working in a place that has been ravaged, and where little documentation exists.³²

The counter-archive for me is now a metaphor, a methodology, and an ethos. It affirms a stance of resistance, defying the cult of the archives, which by default invalidates scholarship about places that lack the kinds of repositories housed in the protected, templelike establishments to which Mbembe alludes. The counter-archive questions the western epistemological monopoly and the various barriers erected to keep “other” histories from being written. Like maps, archives are often produced by those who possess the power to create them, and to acquire, control, and spread knowledge. The counter-archive asks how divergent, bottom-up, and nonhierarchical archives can be created, and what kind of narratives can be told through a closer alignment with the protagonists and their grassroots culture. The counter-archive points to the alternative materials I could manage to collect—and that I continue to consolidate today—as well as novel methods of presenting and sharing the findings to write cohesive narratives about this context. Similarly, the counter-archive impresses on me the fact that historians’ perseverance, resourcefulness, and identification of other ways of approaching historical scholarship are an integral part of their labor, allowing them to address, if not overcome, debilitating circumstances.³³

But this redefinition should not obscure the fact that there are serious gaps in the historical record of formerly colonized, or currently occupied, geographies.³⁴ Scant or nonexistent sources result in historical lacunae, translating into lopsided global narratives and perpetuating the violence endured by places that have been prevented from contending with their complex past or celebrating remarkable accomplishments that may inform their present or future. But a counter-archive can begin to redress the harm and bypass some of the war traumas. Only by unearthing and disseminating stories like those from modern Baghdad, and other places in the non-West, with archives that are severely compromised or extremely difficult to access and that require a specific set of cultural knowledge, language skills, and stubborn persistence can we begin to approach what might be truly equitable global histories of modern art and architecture.