From: Sylvia Houghteling <shoughtelibrynmawr.edu>
Date: Feb 24, 2017
Subject: CFP: Not All at Sea: Material Histories on Oceanic Thresholds

We seek individual paper submissions for an open call panel, "Not All at Sea: Material Histories on Oceanic Thresholds,” for the American Council of Southern Asian Art Symposium to be held October 12-15, 2017 in Cambridge, MA.
http://southasiainstitute.harvard.edu/acsaa2017/

"Not All at Sea: Material Histories on Oceanic Thresholds"
Chairs: Dipti Khera (New York University, dipti.kheranyu.edu) and
Sylvia Houghteling (Bryn Mawr College, shoughtelibrynmawr.edu)

Dazzling textiles, pungent spices and precious maps. Merchant houses, factories and forts. Travel itineraries, lists and letters. Objects, architecture and texts traversing the waters and the frontiers of the Indian Ocean defy multiple boundaries—spatial, ontological, and technological. This panel invites participants to consider material histories occurring on oceanic thresholds that present a local, liminal or interregional perspective.

The merchants, pilgrims, scholars and messengers who traversed the ports of South Asia formed connections throughout Indian Ocean regions, becoming central to the global economy of goods, art and ideas. Yet historical entanglements occurred across differing scales and multiple modes of mobility, not just along global itineraries. For this panel, we seek papers that focus not only on large-scale trade patterns but also on the way trade and circulation transformed local, often littoral, spaces from the Bay of Bengal to the Persian Gulf. We welcome papers on art and aesthetic practices across time periods that unite discussions of local, regional, trans-regional and global travels that are usually confined to discrete conceptual spheres. We hope to discuss how the lives of people and things encompassed both maritime and inland cultures. Studies of eclectic, hybrid and multilayered forms and practices will help rethink the established temporal and regional boundaries that exist in art histories of South Asia and beyond.

Please send your paper abstract and a short C.V. by March 15, 2017 to Sylvia Houghteling (Bryn Mawr College, shoughtelibrynmawr.edu) and Dipti Khera (New York University, dipti.kheranyu.edu). Papers not selected for this open call panel will be considered for individual paper panels by the ACSAA symposium selection committee.