Material Culture Caucus: Heritage, Empire, and Design: Material Stories of the Caribbean and Central America

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

As noted in the call for papers, the 2025 Annual Meeting site in Puerto Rico, “forces us to confront the intimacies of empire and settler colonialism.” This panel invites us to do this work materially through the analysis of experiences, objects, and spaces created to tell stories about Mexico, St, Croix and Puerto Rico. Intimate and direct experiences with material things often unfolded in national and international contexts. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, geographic and culturally-defined places began to be understood as saleable and to be commodified in new ways. Through the interrelated phenomena of World’s Fairs, tourism, and international business travel, there emerged a market for knowledge about and material items from particular places in the world. Recognition of a place as interesting to outsiders could bring money along with reductive objectification, complicating responses. Issues of cultural authority and drifting ideas about identity were complicated by political and financial interests.


The three papers on this panel explore the objects and messages entangled in the material definition and commodification of place in the Caribbean and Central America. How have particular nations and societies navigated the opportunities and challenges of tourism in the context of political and cultural imperialism? What objects and experiences are designed to attract visitors and how do they help to establish the power dynamics between native and foreigner? With three case studies, the presenters explore different locations and negotiations to understand how people exert cultural autonomy in relation to tourism and empire. Dr. Heidi Nickisher examines items selected to represent Mexico at Worlds’ Fairs, analyzing how they embodied both artistry and commercial ambition, but also notions of empire and links to an international economy. Dr. Megan Elias considers how Hilton Hotels used the design of the Caribe Hilton in San Juan as template for its international design without acknowledging the influence of Puerto Rican architects and culture. Dr. Ayana Flewellen argues that in St. Croix, public heritage sites stewarded by federal institutions tend to marginalize the resilient histories of Afro-Caribbean communities. Dr. Sarah Anne Carter will comment on these panels through the lens of her work on material culture and critical museum studies. We look forward to questions and a lively discussion with the audience following our presentations.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• The Politics of Heritage in the USVI: Reclaiming Afro-Caribbean Histories on Landscapes of Contestation in St. Croix. - Ayana Flewellen, Stanford University

• Tamales, Temples, and Trays: Material Traces of American Empire and Industry - Heidi C Nickisher, Rochester Institute of Technology

• “Native, not Quaint”: The HiltonCaribe Hotel, Puerto Rico and an International Design Empire - Megan J. Elias, Boston University

Chair

• Sarah Anne Carter, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Comment

• Sarah Anne Carter, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Biographical Information

Heidi Nickisher is an American art historian with a B.A. from the University of California Santa Barbara and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is a Principal Lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where she teaches courses on 18/19 th Century Art, Women/Gender Studies in Art, Pre-Columbian Art, and Latin American Art. She also is a frequent presenter at the annual Popular Culture Conference, having recently given talks on the influence of Mayan architecture on Frank Lloyd Wright, the Aztec-inspired sterling silver serving tray Tiffany & Co. exhibited at the 1893 World’s Fair, a spun glass dress made by the Libbey Glass Co., and the crazy cats of Louis Wain.

Ayana Flewellen TK

Megan Elias TK


Sarah Anne Carter, Ph.D. is the Executive Director of the Center for Design and Material Culture and an Associate Professor of Design Studies in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At UW she teaches courses on historic interiors, the material culture of childhood, and material culture theory and methods. She previously served as Curator and Director of Research at the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she collaboratively curated many museum exhibitions and led Chipstone’s Think Tank Program in support of progressive curatorial practice. She is author of Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World (Oxford, 2018), co-author of Tangible Things: Making History Through Objects (Oxford, 2015), co-editor (with Ivan Gaskell) of the 32-essay collection, The Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture (2020). She is co-editing the book “Material Histories of Home Economics: Bodies, Homes Networks” with her UW colleague Prof. Marina Moskowitz and she is currently at work on a new book project entitled, “Museum Feelings: An Emotional History of the American Museum.”