“Art History as Créolité/Creolising Art History”
Deadline: November 7, 2016
Association of Art Historians (AAH) annual conference
6th – 8th April 2017
Loughborough University, England
As part of the three-day workshop titled ‘Créolité and Creolisation’, which took place on St Lucia as one of the platforms of Documenta 11 (2002), participants explored the genealogy of terms such as ‘creolization’ and ‘Créolité’, and their potential to describe phenomena beyond their historically and geographically specific origins (however slippery they are). Surprisingly, there has been little engagement with the potential of creolisation as a way of doing or writing art histories differently since that time. This session aims to redress this lacuna.
Stuart Hall, one of the workshop participants, writes that what distinguishes creolisation from hybridity or diaspora is that it refers to a process of cultural mixings that are a result of slavery, plantation culture, and colonialism. Yet, Martinican-born poet and theoretician Édouard Glissant notes that creolisation can refer to a broader set of sociocultural processes not only in the Caribbean but also ‘all the world’ (Tout-monde). Drawing on Hall and Glissant, Irit Rogoff suggests that créolité can more broadly reference the construction of a literary or artistic project out of creolising processes.
What would it mean to re-imagine art history as Créolité? That is, hegemonic Western art history has created in its wake an array of ‘other’ art histories connected to regions such as Latin America, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and South Asia to name a few. Of special interest in this session is not only considering such regional art histories as relational to each other, but also exploring how other constructions of identity – such as gender, sexuality, race, and class – are intertwined with them. Papers exploring contemporary and historical periods are both welcome; and those critically examining Glissant’s terms – such as ‘opacity’ and ‘globality’ – to bear on the session theme are especially encouraged.
Please email your proposals (max 250 words) for a 25-minute paper to session convenor Alpesh Kantilal Patel (Florida International University, Miami) at alpesh.patel@fiu.edu by November 7.
Also, include a short title, your name, affiliation and email.
