Academic Sessions: Glasgow 2010
AAH Annual Conference 2010
15 - 17 April, University of Glasgow
Imperial Tensions: Visual Cultures of Coercion, Silence and Display
Session Convenors:
Matthew Potter, University of Leicester, mcp20@le.ac.uk
Daniel Rycroft, UEA, Norwich, D.Rycroft@uea.ac.uk
Barringer and Flynn's 'Colonialism and the object' (1998) applied new developments in museology and post-colonial theory to analyze the impact of ideology on the collection and display of colonial objects. At the heart of such cultural studies has been a critique of projects that sought to construct funds of knowledge whilst simultaneously enacting imperial control. In line with recent investigations in museum ethnography and indigenous studies into ‘institutional silences’, a key question emerges: how representative of the violence of imperialism and colonialism were past displays?
Addressing this question encourages new multi-disciplinary formations and engagements with visuality, materiality, spatiality and temporality that contest existing epistemologies. Which objects are most representative of colonial coercion? How do national and universal museums generate cultures of silence around such objects? How were objects of imperial violence displayed to the public during the imperial heyday, and 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? This panel seeks not only to identify how objects were created and collected in colonial contexts between c.1800 and c.1920 but also to explore issues of reception amongst imperial interest groups and the wider public.
Speakers:
Sarah Thomas (University of Sydney)
Slaves and the spectacle of torture: British artists in the ‘New World’, 1800-1834
Fintan Cullen (University of Nottingham)
Imperial tensions in Dublin c. 1900
Stephanie Pratt (University of Plymouth)
George Catlin and the 'collecting' of Native American peoples
Mark Elliot (Fitzwilliam Museum)
From artwork to pariah, and back again? Marguerite Milward’s Ancient Tribes of India
Philippa Kaina (Courtauld Institute of Art)
Invisible Cities: Colonial appropriations and re-presentations of Near Eastern Antiquities in nineteenth-century France
Heike Neumeister (Birmingham City University, Birmingham Institute of Art & Design)
'Negro sculpture', monuments and fetishes: notes on the display and reception of African ethnographic objects and the rise of the German imperial 'Kolonialwissenschaften' c. 1908-1918
Dominic Hardy (Université du Québec à Montréal)
Caricature and the collection of ruins in colonial and post-colonial Montreal (1849 and 1905)
Matthew Potter (University of Leicester)
‘In Memoriam’ or ‘damnatio memoriae’: Sir Joseph Noel Paton and the Indian Mutiny