Appel à communication : « Artistic Practices in the Long-Eighteenth Century »

CAA Annual Conference, Chicago, February 12 – 15, 2014
Deadline: Jul 15, 2013

Call for Papers:
Artistic Practices in the Long-Eighteenth Century

Session at the College Art Association Conference, Chicago
Session sponsored by the American Council of Southern Asian Art (ACSAA)

Panel Chair: Dr. Yuthika Sharma, Postdoctoral Fellow, Max Planck
Institute of Human Development, Berlin, Germany.

The eighteenth century in South Asia was an era of transition that saw the gradual decentralization of the Mughal State, the rise of autonomous regional polities as economic hubs and consolidation of the English East India Company as an administrative power. The artistic culture of this period underwent a fundamental change with increasing diversification of the patronage base, the rise of the domestic art market and the consolidation of regional identities. With the Mughal court no longer a dominant venue of artistic production, artists cut across of divides of genres and styles and acquired greater mobility. The rise of collecting, in turn, also indexed a demand for historical paintings and manuscripts contributing to a burgeoning market for copies. Taking a longue durée span between the closing years of the 17th century to the opening decades of the 19th century, we invite papers to consider a range of complexities that signal important shifts within artistic practice in this period. How can we think about in this period differently, reaching beyond conventional art historical categories or regional paradigms of analysis? How did the mobility of artists, ideas, and the rise of new media and print culture create new modes of visual expression? How did artists invent new visual vocabularies to address their cross-cultural contexts? What were the private and public channels through which artworks circulated? What was the role of copies in this period? This panel asks how the art of this transition era can bear upon the present methodologies of art historical analysis and how they can further inform questions about the nature of modernity in this period. While the term modern is taken here as a research problematic, this panel is concerned with explicit and implicit expressions of newness in artistic practices that can enrich new perspectives within South Asian art history.

Please send an abstract (300 words) and a brief one page CV by July 15, 2013 with the subject heading CAA-ACSAA Long 18th Century to: yuthika.sharma@gmail.com