In recent years, there has been an increased access and
interest in the archives produced by the European colonizing countries and
those provided from the archives of the countries that have become independent.
This interest is partly due to the end of the legal barriers that prevented
access to or dissemination to these archives. Moreover, after several decades
of decolonization processes, which caused traumas and misunderstandings between
the actors of both factions, a new generation of academics and non-academics
aims to better understand these stories. On the other hand, the work of
digitizing some of these assets has made it possible to reveal the very
existence of the archives, facilitating their visibility and contributing to
their reception outside the restricted group of political and social
historians. Thus, in literature, journalism, cinema, anthropology, the history
of science, photography and the arts, between theorists, as well as between
artists and other protagonists of the world of culture, a critical work is
being produced concerning these objects of the contemporary history of the
twentieth century, whose effects are still felt.
The number 5 of the journal VISTA uses the notion of
"sight", in its diversity of meanings, to propose a debate on the
colonial and postcolonial regimes of visuality and their contemporary
relevance.
The idea of "Imperial Views" is based on the
famous article by W. J. T. Mitchell entitled “Imperial Landscapes”, published
originally in the Landscape and Power (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
2002). In this article, the American researcher disputed the interpretation
that the landscape genre was specifically a genre of painting, as well as a
modern and Western genre (Clark, 1979). To dethrone the two arguments, the
author pointed out to the Chinese painting and to the earlier Greco-Roman mural
paintings, to come up with another interpretation: landscape genre flourishes
in imperial regimes and uses all available media. In these contexts, images of
the whole, which characterize the idea of landscape - a wide, distant view of a
large part of a terrain or geography (the general shot in cinema) - become a
means to affirm identity, a policy of identity between self and others, both
located in space and time. Mitchell contested, therefore, that landscape genre
was a mere affirmation of the aesthetics (Gombrich, 1950) to defend the
alternative version that landscape (both the representation and the object
represented, site and sight) is a (more or less) powerful form of political
struggle, which always conceals a "dark side" (Barrell,1983), which
is always a "social formation" (Cosgrove, 1984 ) and which has its
field forces, its distributions of subjects and powers: "landscape
circulates as a medium of exchange, a site of visual appropriation, a focus for
the formation of identity “(Mitchell, 1994: 2).
In this edition of VISTA, we use the motto of
"landscape" to interrogate the production of images that can directly
reflect on these imperial regimes, but we are not limited exclusively to
landscapes, in their strictest sense, or exclusively to images. Although, it is
a requirement for the acceptance of paper proposals, their relation to the
themes and approaches of Visual Culture.
In the field of Visual Culture, we are interested in turning
the images deposited in colonial archives into the central objects of
reflection and interpretation, as performative media that were constructed and
construct the stories they also testify. In this edition, we intend to
highlight the visual production, hidden in the archives (photographs, films,
engravings and drawings, maps, paintings, videos, objects, etc) and their
various modes of use related to the colonial topic - whether the archives are
institutional or personal, public or private, national or international. We are
also interested in bringing to this issue of VISTA, reflections about the
invisible, what was left out of the field, the interdicts, the codes of
visuality that transcend the practice of images but organize it, the ethics of
the visible and of the invisible. We also call for propositions on the role
played by Digital Humanities within the contemporary framework of network
communication, not only concerning online archives and museums, but also on the
dissemination of these " imperial sights” in the internet, and of their
eventual images of resistance.
In short, we welcome contributions to debate the politics of
images and views in colonial and post colonial contexts and their contemporary
implications.
References:
Barrell, J. (1983). The Dark Side of the Landscape: The
Rural Poor in English Painting 1730-1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Clark, K. (1979). Landscape into Art. New York, Hagerstown,
San Francisco and London: Harper&Row Publishers.
Cosgrove, D. (1984). Social Formation and Symbolic
Landscape. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Gombrich, E. (1950). "The Renaissance Theory of Art and The
Rise of Landscape". In Norm and Form. Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (pp.
107–122). London: Phaidon Press.
Mitchell, W. J. T. (1994/2002). "Imperial landscape". In W. J.
T. Mitchell (Ed.), Landscape and power (2nd ed., pp. 5–34). Chicago and London:
The University of Chicago Press.
VISTA - visual culture journal is a peer-reviewed journal
and operates under a double blind review process. Each submitted work
will be send to two reviewers previously invited to evaluate it, in
accordance with the academic quality, originality and relevance for the
objectives and scope of the issue of this edition of the journal. Articles can be
submitted in English, Portuguese, Spanish and French to the e-mails of
the invited editors: teresaflores@fcsh.unl.pt; Cecilia.Jardemar@konstfack.se.
Guidelines
for authors can be found here.
Deadlines
Submission: 2 September 2019
Notification: 2 October 2019
Date of publication: 20 December 2019
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario