The Atlantic Ocean provides Africanist art historians a rich model of investigation and analysis. Connecting Africa to Europe and the Americas, the Atlantic maps the flows, circularities, and dislocations of African arts in and out of diaspora. But it also separates. In the hulls of slave ships, new worlds were both forged and lost, underscoring a separation that lives on as today even distinctly black Atlantic scholarship often includes little space for African ideas and worldviews. Responding to the inclusion of open panels dedicated separately to both African and African-American art, this thematic panel seeks contributions that take up African arts’ indeterminate space in the Atlantic world as both possibility and pitfall. Such case studies may include, but are not limited to, the role of African artworks in negotiating new identities and profound social changes wrought by the Atlantic world; the impact of diasporic arts on the African continent; African artistic responses to slavery and the slave trade; and efforts to re-center African epistemologies in diasporic contexts.
The 2017 Conference of the Midwest Art History Society will be held April 6-8 at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Please submit a 250-word proposal and a 2-page CV to Matthew Rarey (mrarey@oberlin.edu) by Saturday, December 31, 2016.
You can access the full conference info and CFP at https://www.mahsonline.org/conference/
ACRAH 