'Imperial tensions: visual cultures of coercion, silence and display'

Session at the annual conference of the Association of Art Historians,
Glasgow, 2010:

Barringer and Flynn's 'Colonialism and the object' (1998) applied
developments in new museology and post-colonial theory to analyze the impact
of ideology on the collection and display of colonial objects. At the heart
of this and other related cultural studies has been a critique of projects
that sought to construct funds of knowledge via educational and scientific
pedagogies whilst simultaneously enacting imperial control. Keeping in view
more recent shifts in museum ethnography and indigenous studies, which
enable institutional silences to be apprehended productively, a key question
emerges: how representative of the violence of imperialism and colonialism
were these displays? In broaching this topic art historians may actively
engender new multi-disciplinary formations, to invoke research in visuality,
materiality, spatiality and temporality that contest existing
epistemologies.

Which objects are most representative of colonial coercion? Do national and
universal museums generate cultures of silence around such objects? Were
objects of imperial violence admissible for public display during the
imperial heyday, or was there an obligation to sanitise history and obscure
evidence of conflict? How did the metropolitan visualisation of coercion
function within popular cultures of imperialism? In raising these
questions, the panel seeks not only to identify the way objects were created
and/or collected in colonial contexts and the visual history of empire
between c.1750 and c.1950, but also to assess how such cultures of display
were received amongst imperial interest groups, journalists, artistic
communities and the wider public of empire.

Proposals for papers for this session are now invited and would be
gratefully received by November 9th 2009. Please submit your proposals by
email to Dr Matthew Potter, Department of History of Art and Film,
University of Leicester, mcp20le.ac.uk or Dr Daniel Rycroft, School of
World Art Studies, UEA, Norwich, D.Rycroftuea.ac.uk.