CFP for a session at the upcoming ASECS Annual Meeting.

Session Title: American Empires: Art, Vision, Race, and Power in the Long 18th Century.

Chairs: Kristi Peterson (Skidmore College, kpeters4skidmore.edu), Emily Thames (Independent Scholar, ekthamesgmail.com).

Session Abstract:
When discussing the Western hemisphere and its imperial relationships, a handful of national identities typically dominate the conversation and thereby reduce the continents’ complexities. In truth, the imposition of empires and their legacies is a complex tapestry of hybridity, synthesis, and negotiations that rarely remain stable in their semiotics. European colonizations of the hemisphere also do not represent the earliest American empires, and the conversation often ignores Indigenous responses and negotiations of changing power structures informed by their own histories and placemaking narratives. As both markers and makers of emic social systems, visual and material culture both reflect and sustain, fulfill and negotiate, imperial impositions and systems. This session is specifically interested in exploring and complicating this concept via the artistic production of the American hemisphere and its relationship to, and intersection with, the construction, maintenance, and transformations of vision and imperial structures in the eighteenth century. This session seeks papers that examine the questions of the intersection of art making and empires in the Americas across time and national boundaries that impact our understanding of the eighteenth century in the hemisphere and its legacies. We welcome submissions that examine issues related to vision, race, and power structures broadly defined. This includes but is not limited to: indigenous responses and negotiations of empires, the mechanisms by which empires are built and maintained, how both local and imperial identities are negotiated through artmaking, and how visual culture is used to aid, negotiate, and even undermine/subvert imperial imposition.

Proposed papers may be submitted at the associated web address (the deadline for submission is September 15th). Please feel free to share this CFP with your networks, and of course do not hesitate to reach out with any questions.