Colloquium March 2007

Solitudes and Globalization:Art and Culture Across the Americas from Post-World War II to the Present

Professors Serge Guilbaut and William Wood

Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory

University of British Columbia

While the accelerating pace of globalization over the last several decades has enabled an unprecedented movement of people and cultural practice across Canada, the United States, and the countries of Latin America, there has been little intellectual exchange about the visual and cultural realms across this same geography. A constellation of both well-established and emerging scholars is scattered throughout regions such as Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Guatemala, Mexico, Canada, Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean whose work interrogates the complexities of modern cultural production in the Americas.  The points that make up this constellation, however, remain largely isolated from one another. This situation calls for a more powerful form of exchange: a sustained discussion of ideas to question assumptions and produce knowledge across the Americas.

It is crucial, in our view, to reassert the cultural outline of the Americas as a subject of inquiry and a space of intellectual dialogue and debate.  As such, we wish to propose a two-day colloquium, international and interdisciplinary in scope, under the title of Solitudes and Globalization.  The purpose of this meeting will be to interrogate and historicize interactions and to examine gaps across the cultural terrain of the Americas from the period that stretches from post-Second World War “reconstruction” to the present, and to explore how globalization has impacted (and in turn is impacted by) the visual arts.  Along with three speakers from different departments within the UBC academic community, we will ask five invited scholars from diverse geographies and disciplines to address specific issues and themes from their localized and specialized viewpoints.  Running concurrently with the Solitudes and Globalization colloquia, we envision an exhibition on contemporary Latin American conceptual art at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery.  Separate funding will be sought for this exhibition.  Already we have a great pool of scholars and graduate students (within the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory and beyond) interested in this proposed meeting who will be actively involved in all facets of the colloquia preparation and debate. 

Conference participants will be asked to address one of the two following major frames of inquiry:

I. Reframing the Continents: Hegemony and Resistance

Looking toward aspects of hegemony, identity, and power, we will aim to interrogate historically the tensions between concepts of nation and nationalism in light of post-World War II internationalism. Whether through cultural, economic, military or political policies and organizations, both the porosity of borders and the autonomy of nations have been tested.  This has pointedly opened states to new pressures and inter-relations that promise forms of internationalist identification at the same time as expose internally felt needs to recognize and safeguard particular traditions and ways of life. We will examine how cultural policies and institutions at regional, national, and international levels have articulated and attempted to account for and perhaps ameliorate and erase cultural struggles over identity, especially through the politics of the built environment, gallery and museum representation, and cultural funding.  Inquiry will also focus on how specific communities (such as First Nations, Québécois, Chicano, African-Canadian, African-American, and Caribbean groups) have utilized material culture to survive, resist, and accumulate cultural capital, how traditional forms are transformed into commodities and how this process might supplant established patterns of historical memory, gender roles, and local identities.

II. Re-construction and Re-volution (all over again)

Our purpose here will be to reflect upon our current political and cultural moment in the wake of globalization, particularly in light of accelerated migrations of populations, the crisis of the nation-state, and the new phenomenon of the megalopolis.  Can the notion of persisting “solitudes,” which has a particularly Canadian resonance, still be applied to the cultures of the American continents?  In mapping the contemporary terrain of artistic and cultural production and diffusion across the Americas, particularly in light of recent surge in museum expansion, periodical publication, biennales, as well as film and television production, our interests will focus not only on the diverse voices producing such discourses, but also the powers affecting their regulation and dissemination.  We will question how cultural producers and intellectuals are currently reacting to these increased flows of people, labour, and capital, and how they represent and address these issues through their visual and cultural practices.

The purpose of this project is manifold.  The themes taken up in this colloquium will help scholars historicize the challenges of past inter-relations within the Americas in order to better understand our histories and to move forward, developing better strategies with which to address the current process of globalization.  The results of the colloquium discussions will then be gathered together and published in book form, to reach as wide an audience as possible.  Most importantly, this effort will create a pan-continental and pan-disciplinary network of intellectual inquiry and interaction, and through the inclusion of graduate students, will invest in the continuance of that interaction and debate in a future generation.  Particularly as we are now witnessing a burgeoning interest in the post-war period as a subject of historical inquiry, we are confident that a greater connectivity between scholars will produce an unprecedented exchange of ideas – ideas with great impact and international reach. All that is needed is a powerful conduit to facilitate this process and break the current isolation that permeates the scholarly community.