How does the present global health crisis impact the historical meaning of ‘globalisation’ as a keyword that remains defining of the contemporary in art and society since 1989 and the end of the Cold War? This lecture considers a possible periodisation of capitalist globalisation in which its first two phases (the long 1990s and the juncture of the global financial crisis) were associated mostly with changes and problems in capitalist production, while the Covid-19 crisis initiated in 2020 points to a global crisis of social reproduction. Argued from a Marxist feminist perspective, the analysis will point to the political dilemmas generated by the pandemic in a global context where the struggle against neo-fascism and capitalist totalitarianism was already a political need in many parts of the world. 

Angela Dimitrakaki is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Edinburgh, where she also directs the MSc Modern and Contemporary Art. She has authored articles, essays and books on subjects such as globalisation, labour, gender, social reproduction, democracy, anti-fascism, and the art institution. She co-edited the special issue on ‘Anti-fascism/Art/Theory’ for Third Text in 2019 and ‘Social Reproduction and Art’ for the same journal in 2017. She is Corresponding Editor of Historical Materialism and a co-organiser of the Marxist feminist stream for the journal's annual London conference. She is currently working on a book titled Feminism, Art, Capitalism.