Seminário Internacional Avançado em Relações Étnicas e Raciais Centro de Estudos Afro-Orientais Universidade Federal da Bahia

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1 EMENTA 3 PROFESSOR: DMITRI VAN DEN BERSSELAAR Reading list for Fabrica 2013 Dmitri van den Bersselaar Atiz Rezistans (Mario Benjamin, project leader): Freedom! Sculpture (2007), International Slavery Museum, Liverpool, UK commissioned by international development charity Christian Aid. I was very happy to do it, but ideally I would prefer to work with a gallery than with a charity. (Jean Herard Celeur) Theme: globalisation

2 Session 1: Art, objects and globalisation Session 2: Travelling, collecting and history Session 3: Categories, styles and (hyper)visibility Session 4: Photography and video as art, history or illustration Session 5: Haiti as a site and as a global brand

3 Session 1: Art, objects and globalisation In this session we will look at how objects travel, and how people give them meanings that make sense within the world view and circumstances within which the objects are used, rather than reflecting the intentions of the makers of the objects. We will explore what the journeys taken by objects tell us, and also consider that the placing of objects, in space, on paintings, or in displays, is never accidental and always indicative of wider local or global connections. The time periods covered in the core readings ranges from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, to indicate that globalising processes are not limited to the period since the end of the Cold War. Igor Kopytoff, The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process in: Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1986), pp Timothy Brook, Vermeer s Hat. The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (London, 2008) Nancy Rose Hunt, Bicycles, birth certificates and clysters: colonial objects as reproductive debris in Mobutu s Zaire in: Wim van Binsbergen and Peter L. Geschiere, eds, Commodification. Things, Agency and Identities (Muenster, 2005), pp Session 2: Travelling, collecting and history In this section, rather than looking at the objects, we will be looking at the actions and motivations of the people that bring objects, impressions, and knowledge back from their travels. What are the limitations to what an observer can see, or what a collector can bring back? What are the influences of the politics or expectations of 'home', and where does the agency come in of people in the places that are visited? To what extend are contacts in the context of trade, mission, or imperialism unequal? Michael O. Hanlon, 'Introduction', in M. O. Hanlon and R. L Welsch, eds, Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic Collectors, Agents and Agency in Melanesia, 1870s-1930s (Oxford: Berghahn 2000), pp Louise Tythacott, 'From the fetish to the specimen: the Ridyard African Collection at the Liverpool

4 Museum, ', in: A. Shelton, ed., Collectors: Expressions of Self and Other (London: Horniman Museum, 2001), pp Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa: Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (London: Macmillan 1897 or later edition), pp Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938 or later edition)

5 Session 3: Categories, styles and (hyper)visibility In this session we consider what is the impact of expectations and of the interpretations that are shaped by institutional and national policies. Does globalisation result in a more open and more accurate understanding, or is all knowledge produced in fixed, pre-conceived categories? What impact does this have on how material culture and immaterial culture are displayed and discussed? Henrietta Lidchi, 'The poetics and the politics of exhibiting other cultures', in: Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage 1997), pp Sidney Kasfir, 'One tribe, one style? Paradigms in the historiography of African Art', History in Africa 11 (1984), pp Kobena Mercer, 'Ethnicity and internationality', Third Text 13:49 (1999), pp Session 4: Photography and video as art, history, or illustration Photography and film are very powerful media, whether they function on their own, or are used to contextualise objects or immaterial culture in a display. Documentary film and photography in particular, exist in an uneasy space between 'fact' and 'art'. We will explore strategies of representation, methodology and impact. We will also discuss how to display photography and film. Maya Deren, The Divine Horsemen: the Living Gods of Haiti (video, filmed ) watch on: Dorothea Fischer-Hornung, 'Transbodied/transcultured. Moving spirits in Katherine Dunham's and Maya Deren's Caribbean' in: Annalisa Oboe and Anna Scacchi, eds, Recharting the Black Atlantic: Modern Cultures, Local Communities, Global Connections (London: Routledge, 2008), pp Anna Seiderer, 'The legacy of Pierre Fatumbi Verger in the Ouidah Museum of History (Benin): the development of an ambivalent concept of Hybridity', History in Africa 40 ( forthcoming) Making History exhibition in Tate Liverpool (2006): Visit the website and exhibition guide at:

6 See also: David Campany, Lynda Morris Mark Nash and Tanya Barson, Making History: Art and Docmentary in Britain from 1929 to Now (Liverpool: Tate Publishing 2006)

7 Session 5: Haiti as a site and as a global brand In this session we will focus on the global display of art produced in or about Haiti. Ever since the late eighteenth-century, and the subsequent founding of Haiti as the first black independent nation in the New World, Haiti has held a particular fascination for artists, activists and travellers worldwide. We will look at the 'hypervisibility' of Haiti and Haitian art as a global brand, but also a particular place. We will consider the question of who defines what it means for art to be 'Haitian' and how art defined as such is sold on a global art market and displayed in galleries and museums. Leah Gordon, Atiz Rezistans, the sculptors of grand rue (video 2008) watch on: vimeo.com/ see also: The Ghetto Biennale, Port-au-Prince, Haiti: Polly Savage, 'The Germ of the Future? Ghetto Biennale: Port-au-Prince', Third Text, 24:4 (2010), pp Jerry Philogene, 'Visual narratives of cultural memory and diasporic identities: two contemporary Haitian American artists', Small Axe, 16 (8.2), (2004), pp Patricia Mohammed, 'The sign of the Loa', Small Axe, 18 (9.2), (2005), pp