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.