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From The Lewis Walpole Library:

Viewing Topography Across the Globe Series, Workshop II: Indigeneity
Online, The Lewis Walpole Library, 13–14 May 2021

Organized by Cynthia Roman and Holly Schaffer

Topography, from topos, is the practice of describing place through language, the features of the land, the inhabitants, and the accumulation of history. Specific to locality and the perspective of the person delineating, describing, or collecting materials, topography counters the worldliness of geography while also offering a potential tool to multiply singular approaches.

In this second workshop in the series Viewing Topography Across the Globe, we will consider approaches to place from Indigenous and European perspectives and interrogate the frame of ‘topography’ in global contexts (the first workshop was held at Brown on 11 December 2019). In two half-day virtual sessions, we will focus on topographical practices in the Americas as well as South and Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean as well as how the materials of art-making both locate and disrupt notions of place. We will hear from artists and academics, work with colonial-era paintings, Indigenous objects, mapping, and literature, and consider Indigenous pedagogy.

The workshop, which will take place via Zoom, has been organized by Cynthia Roman (The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University) and Holly Schaffer (Brown University). Details, including abstracts for each talk, are available as a PDF file here. Please note that registration is required for each day’s sessions (links are available below).

Keynote Speakers
• Cannupa Hanska Luger
• Douglas Fordham

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T H U R S D A Y ,  1 3  M A Y  2 0 2 1

Register here»

10.00  Panel 1: The Americas
• Barbara E. Mundy (Fordham University), Indigenous Bodies and Topographical Imagination
• Emmanuel Ortega (University of Illinois at Chicago), Local vs. Universal Knowledge: Locating Place in von Humboldt’s Picturesque
• Robbie Richardson (Princeton University), Sucker-fish Writings: Indigenous Inscription and the History of Written Language in the 18th Century
• Heather V. Vermeulen (Wesleyan University), Sybil / Spider / Sibyl: On Anancy*ness, Archives, and Spider Space

12.00  Lunchtime Keynote Talk
Moderated by Marina Tyquiengco (Boston Museum of Fine Arts)
• Cannupa Hanska Luger (Artist), Artist as Social Engineer

F R I D A Y ,  1 4  M A Y  2 0 2 1

Register here»

10.00  Panel 2: South, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Ocean
• Jinah Kim (Harvard University), Beyond Human Vision: Knowing Angkor Wat through Topography, from a Watercolor Map to LIDAR Capture
• Dipti Khera (New York University) and Debra Diamond (Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution), Unexplored Terrains: Topography, Temporality, and Emotion in 18th-Century Udaipur
• Kailani Polzak (University of California, Santa Cruz), Rising from the Ocean: Perspectives of Land and Watercraft during Cook’s Third Voyage
• Ayesha Ramachandran (Yale University), Topographies of Battle: The National War Memorial, New Delhi
• Garima Gupta (Artist and Researcher) and Chitra Ramalingam (Yale Center for British Art), Anxieties of a Bazaar: Making of Commodities in Colonial South and Southeast Asia

12.00  Lunchtime Keynote Talk
Moderated by Tim Barringer (Yale University)
• Douglas Fordham (University of Virginia), Techniques of the Imperial Observer: How Aquatint Travel Books Taught Britons to See