Cooptations: History’s Lesson in Sampling Visual Narratives

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Throughout the centuries hegemonic powers have proposed readings of history that assert their vision of an incorporated past. In that process individuality has been erased, visual culture has been reframed, values misrepresented. In an effort to correct these omissions or appropriations, revisionist approaches have countered highlighting the important efforts made to uncover/reveal the layers of compressed cultural interpretations. Readings analyzing an imperial gaze, for example, have demonstrated the ways in which the hegemonic view coopted important cultural elements resignifiying them to their advantage. The result of this dialectic analysis however, has implicitly polarized our views of cultural exchanges, always viewing them in uneven terms like the “contact zone”. Rather than focus on correct or incorrect readings of the past, this panel examines the rich ways visual imagery accommodates multiple narratives where no one reading necessarily precludes another. This panel is an attempt to introduce the discussion of a paradigm that analyzes how might historical transformations be read among the many cultural encounters in a more dialectic manner.

Sub Track

• Art, Architecture and Visual Culture

Chair

• Nina Gerassi-Navarro, Tufts University

Individual Presentations

• Building on Whose Capital? Mexico’s Memorial a las victimas de violencia and its Regime’s Recollection of the Past - Eulogio Guzman, School of the Museum of Fine Arts

• "Some Appropiations of Olmec Art" - Rebecca B Gonzalez Lauck, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia

• Decoding Humboldt's Frontispiece - Nina Gerassi-Navarro, Tufts University

• Towards The Creation of a Cinematic Pre-Colombian Codex - Cynthia L Stone, College of the Holy Cross