The Pleasure of Challenging Representation – Writing Global (Art) History
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Research Symposium The Pleasure of Challenging Representation – Writing Global (Art) History ABSTRACTS AND CVS TALK AND RESPONSE I Climate Change, Catastrophe, and the Historical Imagination in the Anthropocene In the light of geologic catastrophism, the idea of the Anthropocene era and the diagnosis of global environmental change that underlies it can be seen as a return of catastrophism in our time. However, most historians disapprove of explanations using climate as an argument for past civilizational decline (or catastrophic collapse) and are sceptical about “doomsday scenarios” of the expected future effects of global warming. It seems that most scholars in the discipline of history are unwilling to question their “uniformitarian” views of history, while other disciplines in the wider spectrum of the historical sciences (anthropology and archaeology) and beyond (geology) have at least begun to modify their once dominating uniformitarian concepts of change, thus adapting them to evidence of abrupt or catastrophic change. Franz Mauelshagen is a Senior Fellow at the IASS, Potsdam working on the Anthropocene and the interferences it has created between earth history and human history. He is an environmental historian with a strong background in the histories of climate and (natural) disasters. He earned an M.A. in philosophy, history and law from the Rheinische Friedrich- Wilhelms University in Bonn (Germany) and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Zurich (Switzerland). Since 2000 he has held research positions at the Universities of Bielefeld (2000-2003) and Zurich (2003-2008) and at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in Essen (2008-2014). He has lectured at the Universities of Bielefeld, Zurich, Berne and St. Gallen. Together with Monica Juneja he edited Coping with natural disasters in pre-modern societies (Sage 2007). He also published Wunderkammer auf Papier (Bibliotheca Academica 2011) and Klimageschichte der Neuzeit (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 2010). Respondent Michael Falser is research fellow and project leader affiliated to the Chair of Global Art History of the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” at Heidelberg University (since 2009). He studied architecture and art history in Vienna, Paris and Berlin. His habilitation (2009-2013) focuses on the discussion of heritage as a transcultural concept taking Angkor Wat in Cambodia as a case study. His current project “Picturesque Modernities” (2014-2017) centers on late-colonial architectural styles in Asia in a comparative study on the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina, and British India. His 1 publications include Kulturerbe und Denkmalpflege transkulturell. Grenzgänge zwischen Theorie und Praxis (Transcript); “Archaeologizing” Heritage? Transcultural Entanglements between Local Social Practices and Global Virtual Realities (Springer 2013, both together with Monica Juneja); Cultural Heritage as Civilizing Mission. From Decay to Recovery (Springer 2015). His monograph Angkor Wat. From jungle find to global icon. A transcultural history of heritage will be published this year (De Gruyter). Chair Joachim Kurtz joined the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” at Heidelberg University as Professor of Intellectual History in the summer of 2009. Before his assignment in Heidelberg, he was an Associate Professor of Chinese at Emory University and a Research Group Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He has studied in Hamburg, Beijing, Berlin, Shanghai, Göttingen and Erlangen and held visiting positions at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His research focuses on cultural and intellectual exchanges between China, Japan and Europe, with special emphasis on practices of argumentation, logic, political theory, rhetoric, translation studies, historical semantics, and the history of the book. His recent publications include The Discovery of Chinese Logic (Brill 2011) and “Disciplining the National Essence: Liu Shipei and the Reinvention of Ancient China’s Intellectual History,” in Benjamin A. Elman and Jing Tsu (eds.), Science and Technology in Modern China, 1880s–1940s (Brill 2014). Together with Monica Juneja and Rudolf Wagner he co-edits the journal Transcultural Studies (www.transculturalstudies.org) and co-directs the research group “Towards a Global History of Concepts”. TALK AND RESPONSE II Pleasures, Burdens and Bereavement: Representations in Globalized African Biographies The people of Zimbabwe have long lived with experiences of oppression, war and migration. In writing their history there has also been a long tradition of telling stories and narrating lives. This contribution will focus on the question of how and under which circumstances biographical voice, derived from local settings, may become effective on a global scale. Why and how do voices from Zimbabwe actually matter elsewhere, be it in the academic or local sphere? To answer these questions I will take a closer look at three collections in which biographical voices represent crucial Zimbabwean experiences which are perhaps a bit more than merely Zimbabwean, and merely local. Kirsten Rüther is Professor of History and Societies in Africa at the University of Vienna. She has a long standing interest in the history of Christianization in the context of colonialism as well as in the genre of life stories. More recently, she has embarked on a study of the history of smaller African cities through issues of housing. She has always conceived of African 2 history as part of wider histories of entanglement and interaction. Among her recent publications is Gender and Conversion Narratives in the Nineteenth Century: German Mission at Home and Abroad (Routledge 2015, with Angelika Schaser and Jacqueline Van Gent). Her collaboration with Monica Juneja dates back to 2005 when they both worked at the Leibniz University Hannover. Respondent Kim Siebenhüner holds a professorship founded by the Swiss Research Council at the University of Bern. She is interested in the social and cultural history of early modern Europe and South Asia as well as in transcultural and global perspectives. She has worked on the history of material culture and consumption, autobiographical writing and the history of religion. She is the author of Die Spur der Diamanten. Eine Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte der Juwelen in der Frühen Neuzeit (forthcoming at Böhlau). Currently, she works on a research project focusing on cotton textiles in early modern Switzerland and Germany. Together with Monica Juneja she edited “Religious Conversion in medieval and pre-modern societies,” Theme Issue The Medieval History Journal (2010). Chair Antje Flüchter is Professor of Early Modern History in Bielefeld. She earned her doctoral degree in 2002 in Münster with a thesis about celibacy and concubinage in the 16th and 17th centuries. From 2008 to 2013 she was Junior Research Group Leader at the Cluster “Asia and Europe in a Global Context”. In 2012 she earned her habilitation with a book about the European perception of early modern statehood in India. At Heidelberg University, she co-edited the journal Transcultural Studies (www.transculturalstudies.org) together with Monica Juneja et al. TALK AND RESPONSE III Migrating Images: From Istanbul to India My paper returns to Aby Warburg’s project of “Bildwanderungen und Nachleben der Antike” but not with the intention to explain the topic once again but with the attempt to expand it beyond the frontiers of Europe and outside the closed circle of antiquity and Renaissance. In fact, Warburg invites us to embark on what he calls a “comparative approach to cultures” in areas which in his own days he had not yet in mind. Such an attempt needs the effort to extend “the methodological borders in both material and spatial terms” of which he spoke in a famous lecture from 1912. I therefore will introduce two situations which make us understand that the migration of images implies a profound transformation from what they have been to what they have become when collected and copied in a different culture. In a brief introduction, I will discuss the migration of images from China in Persian book painting, as attested by the Persian “album” in the 15th century where such models have been 3 reinterpreted and adapted to a new culture. In the second part I will briefly present the migration of images of the western Renaissance, especially from Venice, in Ottoman art from 1480 on. In fact, the visit of Gentile Bellini leads to a re-orientation of his own art to a new cultural climate. In addition, his images are copied and transformed in the next two centuries and finally reached Mughal India. This process has been a multi-faceted and polyvalent procedure which Monica Juneja explains as a kind of negotiation for which the notion of “braided histories” offers a reference model. Hans Belting is co-founder of the School for New Media (Hochschule für Gestaltung) at Karlsruhe, Germany (1992) where he served as Full Professor of Art History and Media Theory for a decade. He has held previous positions in the art history departments of Heidelberg University as well as LMU Munich, and taught at Harvard University (1984), Columbia University (1989), and North Western (2004) as well as at the Collège de France in Paris (2003). From 2004 to 2007, he acted as Director of the “International Center for Cultural Science” (IFK) at Vienna. At present, he is advisor