CFP: “Colour Me Queer” Session @ AAH Conference, London

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: Colour Me Queer

Association of Art Historians (AAH) 40th Annual Conference
Royal College of Art, London
​April 10-​12, 2014

While art history as a discipline has adopted a queer postcolonial gaze to trouble the canon, most ground-breaking scholarship on art and visual culture from queer racialized perspectives has been accomplished outside its borders—albeit with some notable exceptions, such as work by Kobena Mercer and Amelia Jones.

This session specifically aims to explore how art history might develop a vocabulary and methodology that speaks to better understand transnational, diasporic, indigenous and decolonial bodies alongside their gendered and sexualized lived experiences. Colo u​r Me Queer does not signify fixed/specific otherness, but rather functions as a politics that interrogates epistemological limits of race, gender and sexuality.

If art history has been largely resistant to exploring queer racialized visualities, what are the tools necessary to dismantle the conventions of knowledge production around art? How can a queer racialized gaze affect the relationship between visual analysis and knowledge production? Do newer forms of art such as performance, film, video, and installation (rather than older forms more burdened by western art history like painting and sculpture) lend themselves more easily to queer racialized visualities?

Overall, this session considers the stakes involved in queer racialized methodologies in visual analysis as well as the opportunity to interrogate canonical formation. Papers will not only assess what a queer racialized lens affords art history but correspondingly, what visual analysis provides queer racialized lived experiences.  What tropes and themes are incited when queer racialized visualities come to the fore? And finally, what might a queer racialized lens still occlude from critical analysis?

By November 11, please email a 250 word abstract of a proposed paper of 30 minutes, including your name and affiliation, to co-chairs:

• Natasha Bissonauth, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, nb337@cornell.edu

• Alpesh Kantilal Patel, Florida International University, Miami, alpesh.patel@fiu.edu.

Author: Camara Dia Holloway

I am an art historian specializing in early twentieth century American art with particular focus on the history of photography, race and representation, and transatlantic modernist networks. I earned my PhD at Yale University in the History of Art Department. Besides my leadership role as the Founding Co-Director of the Association for Critical Race Art History (ACRAH), I am recognized for my expertise on African American Art, particularly African American Photography, and as a seasoned consultant for exhibitions, museum collections, and symposia/lectures planning. View all posts by Camara Dia Holloway