Most people agree that the world benefits when a broad range of ideas are represented in our classrooms, libraries and museums.
Why then are our schools and museums still focused on the same thinkers—the same ideas that they’ve been focused on for hundreds of years? Why is change so slow? How can artists, writers, thinkers, and the professionals who promote their work make the world’s institutions more diverse?
Peggy Levitt, Mildred Lane Kemper Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College, says we’ve spent too long focusing on the wrong problem. Instead of making the current cultural and intellectual pipeline more inclusive, Levitt says, we need to create new pathways and networks that not only bring new voices into existing conversations, but also disrupt hierarchies and convene new conversations with people who’ve previously been excluded.
Levitt presents this argument in her new book, Move Over, Mona Lisa, due out July 14 from Stanford University Press. Bypassing complex theory in order to reach a mainstream audience, the book features conversations with artists, thinkers, and professionals from the academic and art communities in Argentina, Lebanon, and South Korea.
While some of these individuals still have their sights set on making it in London, New York, and Paris, many others are already forging cultural and intellectual landscapes with multiple centers in which participants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa are treated as equals. They’re willing to accept less acclaim and less money to be able to rewrite the rules of the game on their own terms.
A co-founder of the Global (De)Centre—a paradigm-shifting platform that brings together scholars from all over the world to create and share new knowledge more equitably—Levitt received an incubator grant from the Wagner Centers for Wellesley in the World to support a spring 2025 gathering of researchers and scholars engaged in radical collaborations. “Global cultural decentering,” Levitt says, “is well underway. It’s just that most of the world has not been looking.”
Here’s what else Levitt had to say about art, ideas, and new ways of shaping the world.
What inspired you to write this book?
Much of my previous work has been about transnational migration. But about 15 years ago, I started researching and publishing about museums and globalization. In 2015, I wrote a book called Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display. In my new book, I wanted to go even further: I wanted to reach a mainstream audience with the actual voices of people who are hard at work disrupting the inequality pipeline. And I wanted to include a strong message of hope.
What’s the most important message you want people to take from this book?
Americans are far too parochial in the art we look at, the books we read, and the thinkers we turn to make sense of these works. My agenda is to ensure that culture and ideas produced in previously marginalized parts of the world circulate more equally, and that what is produced outside the West is valued as much as what gets produced inside it.
I don’t want to decenter the pipeline to recenter it with a more diverse set of actors and artworks. I want to help create more open, less hierarchical worlds of ideas and culture that allow more people from more parts of the world to create, consume, and collaborate with one another.
How do we in the West reimagine and support this new vision?
We need to go beyond what I call “soft reform,” or simply diversifying the pipeline.
There are many people out there who seek deeper, more fundamental changes, although ones that ultimately leave the existing power hierarchies intact. Let’s call that “hard reform.” (Imagine, for example, universities organized around social problems and their solutions, rather than departments and majors, or libraries organized by geographic regions or historical periods rather than the U.S. Library of Congress subject headings.)
But others believe there are institutions that cannot be repaired because they were born with racism and colonialism in their DNA. These people—and I am one of them—call for a “beyond reform” approach: a total starting from scratch, or what the Gesturing Toward a Decolonial Future Collective calls hospicing. That means helping institutions die a slow death because they cannot be saved, and replacing them with newly created spaces based on different values that do not repeat the same mistakes.
What are the odds that this will actually happen?
In this book, I try to walk the line between being pragmatic and being a dreamer. The power in the global art and literary worlds still remains in North America and Europe. But new institutions, new networks, and new cultural hubs are emerging throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The Art Basel and Frankfurt Book fairs of the world are alive and well, but the Guadalajara International Book Fair is now the most important annual literary event in the Spanish-speaking world.
Where do you find the hope in this?
In the amazing people and projects I encountered while doing my research. In fact, each chapter in my book ends with examples of decentering efforts. One is the Arts Collaboratory, a South-South network of arts organizations that work collectively to nurture young artists to build local, sustainable art scenes. Another is an effort to undermine the power of art fairs like Art Basel or Frieze by creating mini, pop-up fairs that are smaller, less expensive, and invite in more than the ultra rich.
The inequality pipeline is alive and well, but so are activists around the world who are working to disrupt it.