A book review of Alpesh Kantilal Patel’s

Productive Failure: Writing Queer Transnational South Asian Art Histories.

Alpesh Kantilal Patel’s Productive Failure: Writing Queer Transnational South Asian Art Histories is more than an art historical intervention intended to correct the field’s neglect of South Asian art and artists. It may be true, as the author suggests (7), that apart from Women, the Arts and Globalization: Eccentric Experience, the multiau- thor volume edited by Marsha Meskimmon and Dorothy Rowe for the same series of books, Western art history has primarily ignored South Asian visual culture, par- ticularly work engaging queer and feminist ideas.1 The chief aims of Patel’s book, how- ever, are to prompt art historians to consider how these exclusions were made to begin with, and to attend to the ways in which art histories are “always a product of the people who write them”(4).