Enfilade

From the Call for Essays for a project with Brepols:

Material Metamorphosis: Natural Resources, Artmaking, and Sustainability in the Early Modern World
Volume edited by Louise Arizzoli and Susanna Caviglia

Proposals due by 15 July 2023, with final papers due 15 May 2024

Between the sixteenth and the early nineteenth century, raw materials circulated globally to be traded, studied, and transformed into luxury goods for the consumption of Europeans, whose mishandling of the colonies’ natural resources turned some of the potentially wealthiest countries into the poorest ones. This volume proposes to investigate craftsmanship and artmaking against the backdrop of colonial trade and in relation to current issues such as environmental, social, cultural, and economic sustainability. The focus will be on natural resources, in particular their materiality, extraction, migration, and transformation through labor and manufacturing processes as well as on the effects of their cultivation and the exploitation of territories.

Global trade routes interconnecting distant parts of the world existed since Antiquity. The famous Silk Road allowed to bring silk and spices from China to Rome in exchange of wool, gold, or silver; the Incense Route facilitated the transport of frankincense and myrrh from Southern Arabia to the Mediterranean; and the Amber Road permitted to carry the precious homonymous stone from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean. These well-established complex networks of commercial trade boosted economies but were also vital means of intercultural exchanges. Global trade soared in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with the lead of the Portuguese and the Spanish who opened new maritime routes, followed in the seventeenth century by the Dutch, the English, and the French. Renewed commercial relationships with India, China, Japan, and the Americas were the occasion for the Europeans to establish a stronghold on local economies and make profit on the trade of local products; the infamous triangular trade between Europe, Africa, and the Americas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century represents one of the apexes of these exploitative systems.

These systems and their long-lasting impact on people, labor, production, and the landscape have gathered renewed scholarly interest. Here, we aim to investigate the effects of global trade routes on the exploitation of natural resources as related to artistic production, since raw materials were imported to Europe from abroad to produce goods of all kinds. The aim is to approach these objects not as finished products but as the final results of a long production process anchored in the exploitation of natural resources that contributed to the increasing environment’s degradation and led to question the relationship between the human being and nature.

We seek papers dealing with materials that travelled from Asia, the Americas, and Africa to Europe (such as sugar, coffee, tobacco, wood, cotton, indigo as well as gold, iron, and ivory). Papers could interrogate the fate of such natural resources and ask, in particular, how they were received, transformed, represented, collected, displayed, or consumed. In general, we welcome research that deconstructs the artwork and looks at the material itself, its origin, exploitation, metamorphosis, reuse, preservation, and consumption through the lenses of global exchange and development related to the modern concept of sustainability, the prodromes of which appear in the seventeenth century. This period coincides indeed with the occurrence of the first ecological damages (deforestation, soil erosion, silted rivers, drought, etc.) which can be directly related to the new commercial strategies.

The volume will be articulated around three areas of the world where Europe founded colonies and exploited natural resources. For example:
• Asia: silk, cotton, spices, precious stones, tea, cotton
• Africa: ivory, wood, iron, horn, gold, cloth
• The Americas: silver, gold, pigments, sugar, tobacco, coffee, cotton

This inquiry welcomes a variety of media, including but not limited to: the decorative arts, ephemeral arts (theatre, exhibitions, masquerades), visual arts, textiles, cabinets of curiosities, and jewelry. Please send proposals to Louise Arizzoli (larizzol@olemiss.edu) and Susanna Caviglia (susanna.caviglia@duke.edu). Include in your proposal: name and affiliation, paper title (maximum of 15 words), abstract (maximum of 200 words), and a brief CV (maximum of 300 words, in ordinary CV format) by 15 July 2023.

Submission Timeline
• 15 July 2023 — submit your abstract
• 1 September 2013 — notification of acceptance
• 15 May 2024 — submission of your contribution (information on publication format and guidelines available upon acceptance)