“Imagined Encounters: Historiographies for a New World”
Session at the 2011 Theoretical Archaeology Group Meeting, Archaeology of and in the Contemporary World, University of California, Berkeley, 6-8 May 2011
In José Saramago’s História do Cerco de Lisboa (1989), a transgressive proofreader alters the course of history with the insertion into a text of a single word, not. Negating a crucial statement in a text on the siege of Lisbon, the proofreader sets out to rewrite history. Archaeologists and art historians by reconstructing objects and audiences produce narratives on visual encounters. Through excavations, primary texts, and artifacts, cultures of reception are articulated and experiences with objects are extrapolated.
Similar to the proofreader’s transgressed ethical code, archaeologists and art historians operate with an infinite list of assertions and negations that define the possibility of certain inquiries and narratives. The scholar knows, for example, that a twelfth-century Byzantine viewer did not use an iPad for worship. Despite understanding the visualities of a Byzantine beholder and the workings of the iPad, the extrapolation of this encounter is verboten as a scholarly narrative. Nevertheless, the scholar engages in the same process of imaginative and discursive reconstruction when they produce any historical narrative.
This panel encourages the suspension of disbelief, the negation of historical givens in order to construct imaginary historiographies that displace and perform the processes of socio-archaeological research. Papers should study impossible encounters between past audiences and contemporary visual culture. The panel’s aim is to articulate how this new historiography could be used to further current methodologies, such as archaeological ethnography and phenomenology, that embrace scholarship, as Christopher Tilley stated in 1989, as “a form of social and political action in the present with emancipatory potential.”
DEADLINE: 31 December 2010
Abstracts can be no longer than 100 words and are to be submitted online: http://arf.berkeley.edu/TAG2011/call-for-papers/
Please address all inquiries to Roland Betancourt (roland.betancourt@yale.edu)
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