College Art Association Annual Conference
Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture

Session:
After the Secular: Art and Religion in the 18th century

Chaired by Dr Kevin Chua, Texas Tech University

Religious art of the 18th century has long been framed within a
narrative of secularization. It was thought that, with modernization,
societies would move away from religious values to embrace secular
ones. Yet scholars such as Charles Taylor, Talal Asad, and Hent de
Vries have questioned this dominant narrative. Not only has
secularization been shown to be not the end point of modernization, it
has proven to be, perhaps, the last progress narrative that we need to
unbind. This panel seeks papers on religious art, visual culture, and
architecture that trouble the old secularization narrative, and come
to grips with the paradoxical efflorescence of religion in the 18th
century. Approaches that move beyond a simple inversion of the
secular/religious binary are encouraged. Papers might address the
contradictory place of art between the flourishing of marginal
religions and the public sphere, engage the various “returns” of
religion in and for art, and rethink the supposedly unidirectional
shift from “religious” to “secular” worlds in aesthetic media. Did
secularism paradoxically occasion particular kinds of objects (eg.
relics)? How did religious affect, and the religious beholder, change
in the 18th century? Other possible topics include the geographical
and cultural diversity of the secular (eg. non-Western religions);
iconoclasm and/as secularism; and secularism in and through
non-religious art.

Please send a proposal of not more than 2 pages, double-spaced, to
kevin.chuattu.edu by May 6, 2013.