After the Global
Constructions of historiography in visual and material spaces
Symposium

organized by Sria Chatterjee and Eva-Maria Troelenberg
Max-Planck-Research Group "Objects in the Contact Zone – The cross-cultural Lives of Things"

The academy is in a crisis, of sorts. Globalization, with its cultural implications and awareness warrants a global history. But can there be a global history that steers completely clear of universalizing tendencies? The common concern that brings academics and writers together in this symposium is a very basic one - what histories? Starting on the premise that the past is no longer seen or read as one single story, this symposium seeks to explore the ramifications and possibilities of a horizontal historical landscape of multiple histories.

Viewing historiography as more than the study of the writing of history and of written histories, the symposium addresses alternative histories of representation, display, objects, encounters, and remains that do not necessarily occur only in text and fall within, without and in between the established canons of the humanities. Acknowledging that historiographies are by nature constructed, Slicing through rather than charting the canon of Western historiography and art historiography, the symposium seeks an approach in which historiography does not register as method but a means of relooking at stories that grow out of objects, institutions, individuals, groups, presentations and re-presentations of cultural identity.

The aim of the symposium, through a series of talks and discussions across disciplines, is to allow the participants to think about contingencies - space, time, people and things in visual and material terms, reviewing historical narratives to question established ontological and epistemological categories, and to explore contemporary methods of rethinking the past.


PROGRAM

Thursday, June 5th 2014

11:00
Sria Chatterjee - Introduction to the symposium
Postglobal Bodies: Some Questions on the Making of Art History in the Anthropocene

Finbarr Barry Flood
The Global Before Globalization? History through a Door
(Finbarr Barry Flood is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of the Humanities, IFA & Dept. of Art History, NYU)

coffee break

12:30
William Beinart
Joy and George Adamson's Lion Photographs: Visual Media and Environmental Consciousness
(William Beinart is Rhodes Professor of Race Relations at Oxford University)

13:15 lunch break

15:00
Zahid R. Chaudhary
Mediating History: The Past as Play in Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing
(Zahid R. Chaudhary is Associate Professor, Department of English at Princeton University)

Arindam Dutta
Counter-Genesis: Agrarian Capital and Political Theology in the Bengal Frontier
(Arindam Dutta is Associate Professor of Architectural History at Massachusetts Institute of Technology)


Friday, June 6th 2014

10:00
Eva-Maria Troelenberg – Introduction
Nei Sassi di Matera, or: In Search of Topoanalysis after the Global

Iain Chambers
Migrations, Modernities, Musics and a Minor Mediterranean
(Iain Chambers is Professor of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies at Università degli Studi di Napoli 'L'Orientale')

coffee break

11:30
Esther da Costa Meyer
Architecture, Neoliberalism, and Anthropogenic Change
(Esther da Costa Meyer is Professor of Modern Architecture at Princeton University)

Yannis Hamilakis
Sensoriality, Materiality, Time: Subaltern Ontologies of Life
(Yannis Hamilakis is Professor of Archaeology at University of Southampton)

13:00 lunch break

14:30
final discussion


CONTACT
Sria Chatterjee
sria.chatterjeekhi.fi.it

LOCATION
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut
Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai
Via dei Servi 51
I - 50122 Firenze