Yale University, April 06, 2019
Deadline: Feb 1, 2019
The Fifteenth Annual Yale University American Art Graduate Symposium
Encounters, Entanglements, and Exchanges
Points
of encounter can occur across time and space. In the seventeenth
century, Puebla blue-and-white pottery responded to East Asian porcelain
while ceramic manufacturers in China adapted designs that catered to
pan-American tastes. More recently, Carrie Mae Weems’s “The Hampton
Project” reexamined a nineteenth-century vocational school that served
as a cultural crossroads for formerly enslaved African Americans,
American Indians, and white Americans to raise pressing questions of
race, imperialism, and nationalism. These points of convergence between
individuals, groups, places, and objects often instigate shifts in
creative production with lasting and global resonances. The interaction
of disparate cultures offers a rich nexus for artistic creation. Yet
such encounters are also inseparable from the shifting dynamics of power
that operate along gendered, racial, economic, and political lines.
What can exchanges and entanglements reveal about the nature of
encounter? How do encounters shape exchanges? In what ways do exchanges
propagate new encounters?
The Fifteenth Annual Yale University
American Art Graduate Symposium invites papers that interrogate the
dialectical relationship between encounter and exchange and explore the
legacies of cultural intersection. We invite submissions that address
art across North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean, that
engage a range of critical perspectives, and that speak to a variety of
time periods and artistic practices.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
– Activism, coalition building, and the arts
– Micro-histories that address a specific instance of encounter
– Collaborations that problematize narratives of “influence” across social, cultural, or political hierarchies
– Impact of religious proselytization and conversion in the arts
– Gift exchange, diplomacy, and trade
– Appropriation, fetishism, and mimicry
– Contact zones, intersectionality, and peripheries
– Imbalanced power dynamics within systems of colonialism, racism, homophobia, or sexism
– Immigration, migrants, and refugees
– Authorship and ownership
– Tourism and travel narratives
– Global encounters with the notion of “Americanness”
– Networks created via technology, globalization, and media
Interested participants are invited to submit an abstract of no more than 350 words along with a CV to americanist.symposium@gmail.com
by February 1, 2019. Accepted participants will be notified in
mid-February. Accommodations will be provided for all participants in
New Haven, Connecticut.
