The Density of Unexpected Encounters (original) (raw)

Imagined Encounters: Historiographies for a New World (Session Organizer)

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 socioarchaeological 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 "a form of social and political action in the present with emancipatory potential" (Christopher Tilley, 1989).

“History and Its Shadow: thinking about the contours of absence” Screen 55:1(2014):119-127

The recently increased deployment of the term apophany in the humanities probably says something about the current state of things. One might credit this interest in finding meaningful patterns in random data -or something like pattern recognition -to ever more frequent shifts in theoretical framing and reference, to the dramatic increase in access to ideas both scholarly and not, and to the non--stop process of reorientation required in a 24/7 networked culture where ideas and responses trade at unprecedented speed. Try plugging the term (or your theorist or jargon of choice) into Google's n--gram, and a set of patterns will appear in graphic form, tracked along a time--line.

Suitcases and the Poetics of Oddities: Writing History from Disorderly Archives

History in Africa, 2015

I argue here against two things: fetishizing the power and wholesomeness of colonial archives, and equating the scarcity of post-1960 repositories with new difficulties to write the past of Africa. Instead, I suggest the productive power of odd findings, and the necessity for historians to trust the energy of heterodox pieces to create original and meaningful historical narratives.

Introduction: Strange Meetings

Classical Receptions Journal, 2018

The introduction to this Special Issue explains how it contributes to the Centenary commemorations by re-evaluating the place of Classics and classicists in World War One. It argues that in the cultures of the War classical receptions functioned as an important filter for experience and means of expression. The lives of WWI classicists illustrate how an international community of scholars was affected and how the War shaped the discipline itself. This first extended study of WWI receptions of the ancient world considers the multiple interfaces between literary, visual, and experiential insights. To allow a sustained focus, its parameters are responses to the War mainly from Britain and Germany, either during the conflict or referring directly back to it. Wilfred Owen's metaphor of a 'strange meeting' between living and dead is presented as emblematic of wartime encounters with ancient texts and forms. In this turbulent and estranging period, the recourse to Classics arose from its deep embeddedness in European cultures. While many continued to be inspired by traditional values of heroism and empire, new dissenting movements rejected them as obsolete. Yet the multivalence of Classics stimulated creative innovation regardless of allegiance. Classical receptions in WWI are shown to be as diverse as the personal reactions, motives, or official agendas that prompted them. The introduction provides a survey of influential works in Cultural History that have informed new classical research projects and conferences on WWI during the Centenary, tracing developments through the decades since the fiftieth anniversary. It closes with a brief overview of the collected articles.

Contact Tracing: The Materiality of Encounters by Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard

History and Anthropology, 2021

This article introduces the special issue on 'Material Encounters' by addressing the praxis of materiality across time, disciplines, areas of study, and technologies. We use the metonyms of track and trace and the distinction of objects and things to disentangle ways in which materials and understandings of the material mediate dynamic encounters with specific people or places, particularly in Oceania. These material encounters generate diverse, unstable forms of knowing on all sides, through the uneven flux of human embodiment (in encounters) and embodied materialization (in object, inscription, representation, memorialization). We juxtapose the assumed, if increasingly challenged priority of materials in object-oriented fields such as archaeology and museology; the reflective revival of material culture studies and the 'material turn' in anthropology from around 1990; and the belated recognition of the salience of materials and materialities by historians, whose craft depends on present material traces of the pasts they seek to elucidate. With reference to the agency of persons, places, time, or things, we stress the plurality of materialities and their related ontologies, and the qualities of movement, instability, and incompletion inherent in all encounters.

Theory of history and history of historiography: Openings for "unconventional histories"

História da Historiografia: International Journal of Theory and History of Historiography, 2019

This article aims to discuss the relationship between what we will call “unconventional histories”, the Theory of History and the History of Historiography. We will discuss the possible openings of these disciplines to the spheres that strain with their more settled protocols. Moreover, we seek to reflect on the relationship of these openings with the emergence of a temporality that has transformed the Humanities and their epistemological priorities. We will argue that the practical past, the Critical Quantitative Inquiry, the paradigm of presence, Public History and popular historiographies would be some examples of openings for “unconventional histories” since these perspectives can critically intervene in speeches and academic and historiographical paradigms.