Call for Papers until Sept. 3, 2019 - Considerations for the Research of Local Knowledge Circulation: The Interaction between Europe and the Americas in the Early Modern Era (original) (raw)
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The early modern global empires were built upon the extensive movement of people, goods, and ideas across the world. Thousands of people migrated and crossed the oceans seeking for a better future, but many other men and women moved against their will. Moreover, this era saw the development of complex global networks of trade through which American silver poured into European and Asian markets. Visual images and works of art also moved with extreme ease throughout the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Last, but not least, prejudices, stereotypes, expertise, and knowledge circulated profusely, shaping people's understanding of their own regions and the wider world. This symposium aims to study the latter kind of movement in order to explore the ways in which knowledge that was operative in one context was adapted, manipulated, reframed, or dismissed, as spurious or heretical in another framework. Particularly, it seeks to analyse the role of indigenous knowledge, from the Americas, but also from other areas such as the Canaries or the Philippine Islands. We seek to explore how indigenous knowledge was preserved, disputed, challenged, incorporated, refuted, reframed, and subsumed by European knowledge. Moreover, we expect to discuss how historians can unveil and recover such knowledge.
Call for Papers – SYNCRONIZING HISTORY. The Transplantation of European Ideas in the Americas – International Conference: Palermo, 18-21 September 2024, 2023
In recent years, historians and translation scholars have progressively refined and intertwined their respective methods and approaches. The linguistic relationships that Europeans established with indigenous people in America cannot be compared with the translations between European languages; in the former case there were asymmetrical relations with people who did not possess a common conceptual framework such as that which had formed in Europe. As a consequence, European people believed that their duty was to explain rather than translate their ideas to local populations, and in some cases the transfer of ideas became an instrument for the colonization of indigenous people. But this is only one aspect of the transfer of European ideas in America. In general, Europeans had to adapt their ideas in the new context in which they lived, independently of their relationships with local populations. Just as the plants that the Europeans brought in America had to adapt to the new climates found there, so too were their ideas transplanted into the new American cultural climate, transforming themselves and taking new shapes. Though translations are our central concern, we also call attention to the importance of the transplantation of ideas and institutions between Old and New World via the same language. For example, an economic instrument such as the censo consignativo, which was widely used in Renaissance Europe, was transplanted in the Mexican economic environment and conditioned its development. Concepts and abstract ideas were transplanted from the Old to the New World in French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, and other languages, tracing cultural paths which deserve to be examined in their specificity. As the heterogeneous populations that had moved to America acquired new identities, the displacement of concepts, as it has been described, became ever more articulated. From the Eighteenth century onwards, the stabilization of European languages in the Americas opened up a new phase, thanks also to the work done by European exiles and scholars who moved to the New World. One need only think of the role German scholars played in the university culture of the United States between Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries. The general process of transplantation of European Ideas in the Americas has led to a synchronization of the history of the Old and New Continents and to the creation of what we call Western history. We invite proposals for papers which can help to shed light on the vast transplantation of European ideas in the Americas, paying particular attention to the methodological and theoretical aspects inherent in any analysis of this complex cultural movement. The members of the Scientific Committee and the organizers of the Conference to be held in Palermo in September 2024 aspire to create a space in which historians and translation scholars can meet themselves in fruitful ways; the conference will be the place for the creation of new approaches to history and translation or even, as recently argued, to history as translation. Indeed, historians and translators are invited to refine their methods and to intertwine their respective approaches, with the aim of reaching a new and more comprehensive knowledge of the process which led to the formation of Western history. Please, send all proposals to: Europe.Americas2024@gmail.com For further information: Europe.Americasinfo2024@gmail.com
The talk I will give will use this draft, "A peculiar review of a few concepts and words useful to understand material knowing and doing in the watery realms of early modern colonization," as its basis. In oral remarks I will integrate literature on landscape analysis, etymologies and critiques of the written word (especially drawing from John Stilgoe). This is all an early articulation of preoccupations that were incipient in my first book but which have since then come to the fore for me about key concepts and understandings in the history of early modernity which apply as well to the issues this workshop will contend with on the transmission of knowledges about environments between Europe and the Americas. As a result, this piece is a bit of a hybrid, and not quite yet what I would regard as " work in progress ". It is, rather, an enunciation of the core ideas and concepts both of an essay and of a proposal for a revised book project that looks at the Hispanic Atlantic's early history in dialogue with its French and English counterparts with the aim of clarifying what colonization is. For the moment, the text exemplifies this only with a comparison of the treatment of " wastes " – specifically, marshlands. I have used this counterpoint before, and so some of you might be familiar with it-New Spain's basin of Mexico and the English fenlands. At this time, these specific marshlands are simply stand-ins for commons as a whole and a vehicle to clarify concepts that I would like to deploy later onto a more diverse terrain in the larger comparative project. I would be grateful for your thoughts regarding either or both projects and how to move forward. Most of all, however, I am interested in a conversation about the issues I pose here, whichever shape it takes.