Enfilade

From H-Material-Culture:

Special issue of the Journal of Festive Studies on “The Materiality of Festivity”
Articles due by 31 December 2019

In previous issues, the Journal of Festive Studies explored the emerging academic sub-field of festive studies (broadly defined) and the politics of carnival. For this issue, we follow Peter-Paul Verbeek’s advice and look at “the things themselves,” i.e. at the material culture in which carnivals and other festivities are rooted (Verbeek, 2005).

The 1996 inaugural editorial for the Journal of Material Culture defined Material Culture Studies as “interdisciplinary research in ways in which artifacts are implicated in the construction, maintenance and transformation of social identities” and as the “investigation of the relationship between people and things irrespective of time and place” (Editorial,1996). More recent studies have expanded the scope of the discipline to look at the agency of things (Latour, 2005), thus rejecting “any absolute ontological distinction between humans and things” (Roberts, 2017). The field has also seen a shift from the exclusive focus on consumption to an investigation of the production of objects and materials (Adamson, 2013 and 2018 and Smith, 2012). Other approaches include investigations of ways in which the exchange of objects shapes social life and experiences; how that process is negotiated intra-cultures (Appadurai, 1986); and the environmental impact of those objects and materials (Clarke-Hazlett, 1997, Ingold, 2012, and Morton, 2013). Furthermore, there has been a move to understand the materiality of things beyond finished manufactured products, or the raw matter of which these objects consist of, in all of its socio-historical and political implications (Lange-Berndt, 2015, Ingold, 2012, and Rosler et al., 2013). Scholars of festivities have also paid attention to the “things” that constitute the phenomena they investigate, whether by poetically capturing in photos and in text the embodiment of Caribbean history and identity in Trinidadian mas (Adonis Browne, 2018); by analyzing how banners and flags display identity through color in Belfast’s Orange Parade (Jarman, 2003); or by questioning why we consume (or abstain from consuming) certain foods during festivities (Avieli, 2009).

Building on such scholarship, and taking the material record of celebrations from all time periods and geographical areas as a starting point, this special issue of Journal of Festive Studies seeks to explore the following themes/questions:

• The things themselves: costumes, jewelry, makeup, musical instruments, the body itself, posters, flags and banners, float designs, paintings, sheet music, photographs, food, etc. What does the material record of festivities include?
• The preservation of that material culture: What are the politics of curating and what are the material constraints bearing on archival sites?
• Objects as part of a mise-en-scène of identity: How is identity created-recreated-negotiated through masking, costumes, makeup, etc.? How is gender and sexual normativity created/expressed/challenged through interactions with objects in celebrations?
• Imagining communities: What is the role of these objects/materials/artifacts in the creation of imagined communities during these celebrations? How do individuals and communities relive and reinvent traumatic pasts through rituals and the artifacts used to physically manifest them?
• The evolution and circulation of things: How does the material record of celebrations change over time, reflecting different socio-historical moments? How do geopolitical realities, global capitalism, and the flow of ideas and things affect the material record of celebrations?
• What role do these objects play in current debates on decoloniality and cultural appropriation?
• The environmental problems caused by the objects/materials used in festivities (such as the plastic pollution of Mardi Gras beads in the U.S. Gulf Coast) and the environmental solutions encountered by festival organizers and revelers (such as the ban on glitter in Sydney’s LGBTQ Mardi Gras.)

Contributors may also choose to focus on some of the methodological issues faced by scholars researching festivities across the globe and how does material culture feature in these processes. For instance, how does equipment affect the way the researcher interacts with their subject? What sorts of objects, outfits, and accouterments are used in the researcher’s “performance of self” during fieldwork and how might that affect their relation to the people and environment they are observing?

In line with the interdisciplinary nature of the Journal of Festive Studies, we welcome submissions of original research and analysis rooted in a variety of fields including (but not limited to): social and cultural history, anthropology, archeology, cultural geography, art history, architecture, decorative arts, technology, folklore, musicology, consumption studies, labor studies, museum studies, and design studies. In addition to traditional academic essays, we invite contributions that incorporate digital media such as visualizations, interactive timelines and maps, video and imagery.

Documents should be between 6,000 and 12,000 words and should be uploaded by December 31, 2019 to the journal’s website, along with the author’s bio and an abstract of c. 250 words. Please consult the author’s guidelines under “Submissions” on the website for further submission specifications, such as citation methods. Contact Isabel Machado (isabelmchd@gmail.com or machadoisabel) with any questions.

Works Cited

“Editorial.” Journal of Material Culture 1, no. 1 (March 1996): 5–14.
Adamson, Glenn. The Craft Reader. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2010.
Adamson, Glenn. The Invention of Craft. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2013.
Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Theory, Culture & Society 7, no. 2–3 (June 1990): 295–310.
Avieli, Nir. “‘At Christmas We Don’t Like Pork, Just Like the MacCabees’: Festive Food and Religious Identity at the Protestant Christmas Picnic in Hoi An.” Journal of Material Culture 14, no. 2 (June 2009): 219–41
Bauer, Arnold J. Somos lo que compramos: historia de la cultura material en América Latina. México: Taurus, 2002.
Browne, Kevin Adonis. High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Photography. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
Clarke-Hazlett, Christopher. “Interpreting Environmental History through Material Culture.” Material Culture Review / Revue de la culture matérielle, [S.l.], June 1997.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, and Eugene Rochberg-Halton. The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Ingold, Tim. “Toward an Ecology of Materials.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012): 427–42.
Jarman, Neil. “Material of Culture, Fabric of identity.” In Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter, edited by Daniel Miller, 121–45. London: Routledge, 2003.
Lange-Berndt, Petra. Materiality. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2015.
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Madison, D. Soyini. Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance. Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2012.
Roberts, Jennifer L. “Things: Material Turn, Transnational Turn.” American Art 31, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 64–69.
Rosler, Martha, Caroline Walker Bynum, Natasha Eaton, Michael Ann Holly, Amelia Jones, Michael Kelly, Robin Kelsey, Alisa LaGamma, Monika Wagner, Oliver Watson, and Tristan Weddigen. “Notes from the Field: Materiality.” The Art Bulletin 95, no. 1 (2013): 10–37.
Smith, Pamela H. “In the Workshop of History: Making, Writing, and Meaning.” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 19, no. 1 (2012): 4–31.
Verbeek, Peter-Paul. What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design. Penn State: Penn State University Press, 2005.

Next year’s RSA meeting takes place in Philadelphia, with a handful of panels welcoming late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century topics. I’ve noted a few of these below, and the larger list of sessions is available at the RSA blog. –CH

Renaissance Society of America
Philadelphia, 2–4 April 2020

Proposals due by July 2019 (specific dates vary)

Accommodations and meeting rooms have been booked at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown and the nearby Courtyard Philadelphia Downtown, both of them a short walk from the famed Reading Terminal Market and City Hall. The Philadelphia Historic District, which was the first World Heritage city in the US, is also within walking distance or accessible by a short cab, bus, or subway ride. The Library Company of Philadelphia houses collections on American society and culture dating from the seventeenth century. The majestic Philadelphia Museum of Art, originally chartered for the Centennial Exposition in 1876, with its main building on Fairmont Hill completed in 1928, has pay-as-you-wish evening hours on Wednesdays and evening hours on Fridays as well.

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Exhausted with Antiquity: A Symptom of Early Modern Invention
Organizers: Marisa Bass (Yale University) and Carolyn Yerkes (Princeton University)

Where and when did early modern artists, architects, and writers begin to show signs of fatigue with the models of the classical past, and what kinds of creative experiments developed in response? Renaissance scholarship has long since moved beyond an understanding of its period as one defined first and foremost by a revival of antiquity. Although the significance of antiquarianism and classicism to manifold developments in early modern art and culture remains incontrovertible, both of those projects also met with productive resistance.

We invite papers addressing works of art or literature that reveal an exhaustion with antiquity and a conscious attempt to develop alternative modes, forms, and principles of invention. Especially welcome are proposals for papers that consider competing notions of the past, the distinction between ‘antique’ and ‘modern’, the political and cultural implications of the choice to forgo classical models, and the reasons why antiquity may have come to be perceived as an exhausted source in the context of certain moments and localities.

To submit a paper proposal please provide the following by email to Marisa Bass (marisa.bass@yale.edu) and Carolyn Yerkes (yerkes@princeton.edu) by 22 July 2019:
• your name and institutional affiliation
• paper title (15-word maximum)
• abstract (150-word maximum)
• keywords
• curriculum vitae (up to 5 pages)
• PhD completion date (past or future)

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The Miniature and the Monumental in Early Modern Art, 1500–1700
Organizers: Isabelle Lecocq (Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, Brussels) and Elizabeth Rice Mattison (University of Toronto)

This panel aims to examine the role of scale and size in early modern art (ca. 1500–1700). This period witnessed increasingly ambitious projects: massive tomb complexes, immense palaces, and large programs of stained glass. Meanwhile, diminutive arts became increasingly popular: collectible statuettes, tiny prints, portrait miniatures, and small painted glass (commonly known as ’roundels’). Scale and size affected the production and reception of the arts across media in the face of shifts in patronage, organization of artists’ workshops, and dissemination of objects.

Questions this panel considers include: What is the difference between scale and size in early modern art? What is the relationship between scale and size and the circulation of objects, ideas, and materials? How does choice of medium affect the scale of a work? What happens to scale in translations of an iconography across media, and how does scale transform that iconography? How are the miniature and monumental connected, as in instances of microarchitectural projects such as sacrament houses, altarpiece cases, or reliquaries? How did artists working on simultaneously small and large scales adapt their style accordingly? What is the role of scale in new cultures of collecting and display?

This panel invites papers of any geographic focus that explore aspects of scale between 1500 and about 1700. Please send proposals including a paper title (15 words), abstract (150 words), keywords, PhD completion date (past or expected), and CV (max. 5 pages) to the organizers: Isabelle Lecocq (isabelle.lecocq@kikirpa.be) and Elizabeth Rice Mattison (elizabeth.mattison@mail.utoronto.ca) by 15 July 2019.

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Art Theory and Global Dissemination of Early Modern Spain and Colonial Spanish America
Organizers: Livia Stoenescu (Texas A&M University) and Luis Javier Cuesta Hernández (Universidad Iberoamericana)

Papers are sought for panel presentations on the impact of art theory and the global dissemination of works of art from Early Modern Spain and the Hispanic territories of the New World. Spain’s visual culture and literary arts thrived amid a time of political turmoil, instability, and economic crisis. The theoretical discourses generated by Spain, the Hispanic Kingdoms, and Viceroyalties prompted new conceptions of art and unprecedented claims to artistic originality while producing an intense circulation of artistic works around the world.

We invite papers that examine sacred allegories, historical painting, philosophical and literary texts from Golden Age Spain, as well as architectural settings, public processions, miraculous relics and the venerated saints that were held up as symbols of the city and/or the kingdom. The presentations comprising this panel will provide an in-depth perspective on the interrelated issues of Early Modern Spain and the Hispanic territories, and on understudied aspects of the interaction with the arts of Colonial Spanish America in a global context.

500–1,000-word abstracts are invited for consideration on topics including but not limited to the following:
• Spanish paintings distributed in Peru, New Spain, and the rest of the Americas and the impact of the imported art on the art of the colony from the late sixteenth century to mid-eighteenth century.
• the majolicas of Spanish America and global distribution
• early global trade and lavish consumption in the Spanish America
• art theory and the circulation of works of art at the Court, and in the cities of Valencia and Naples as independent art centers, as well as in other major regional centers such as Toledo, Seville, Madrid
• art theory and art dissemination in the main centers of Colonial Spanish America such as Mexico and Lima, and their interrelation with Early Modern Spain
• the status of painting as a liberal art and the painter as its noble practitioner on both the Spanish national art scene and in the Hispanic territories
• the large body of art theory in Early Modern and Baroque Spain: Carducho, Pacheco, Jusepe Martínez, Lázaro Díaz del Valle, and Antonio Palomino (1724).
• Italian Renaissance ideas and Palomino’s theory of 1715 that Spanish artists should attend the schools of Spain, rather than the osterie of Rome where they experience only bewilderment and disorientation
• art theoretical positions by major artists such as Diego de Velázquez, Alonso Cano, Francisco Ribalta, Jusepe de Ribera, Felipe Gómez de Valenica, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, and others that mark the historical and political events of the Siglo de Oro
• Spanish Baroque artists engaging the Italian Renaissance art, culture, architecture, and art theoretical discourse
• materials and techniques of polychrome sculpture as well as the important centers, clientele, and art theorists associated with its production
• innovative art theoretical approaches to the integration of painting and carving that characterize the complex medium of polychrome sculpture as a devotional art form
• old practices of processional statues, altarpieces, stalls, and their reassessment by art theorists
• the true portrait, or the Veras Imagos, sculpted likeness that stood on the church altar
• the dissemination and circulation of drawings in Colonial Spanish America

Abstracts, one-page CV (not in prose!), and keywords should be sent by 1 July 2019 to Dr. Livia Stoenescu livias@tamu.edu and to Dr. Luis Javier Cuesta Hernández luis.cuesta@ibero.mx.