DAAAS Fall Faculty Research Seminar(s)

About

Please join DAAAS for the Fall Quarter Faculty Research Seminars on first thursdays from 12-1.30pm.

The speaker line-up:

October 8: Power, Historiography, Photography--Professor Joshua Cohen, Associate Professor of Art and Art History and, by courtesy, of African and African American Studies.

Description: The place of photography in the historiography of African modernism raises significant questions for the discipline of art history and for African and postcolonial studies more broadly. Independence-era portraits and nightlife scenes by the Malian photographers Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibé in Bamako, and by the Angolan-born photographer Jean Depara in Léopoldville/Kinshasa, among others, are commonly accorded a documentary authority that anchors relationships between aesthetics and politics, modern self-fashioning and decolonization. Yet to recall anthropologist Simon Ottenberg’s 1993 observation that African art studies aimed mostly “to show the positive and cohesive view of African life in the face of so many negative stereotypes in the West” is to ask how much the field’s aesthetic and political parameters have really changed since that time. Even when independence-era photos are read in political terms, they tend to imply a somewhat selective vision of the political gleaned through the confidence and style of individual portrait subjects and image-makers. How do such readings mesh with the much more complicated histories of African decolonization and the Cold War that are by now well documented? And what do such readings suggest about the current role of art history, the art museum, and the humanities within global power structures and information ecosystems?

Joshua I. Cohen is a historian of modern art specializing in postcolonial, African/diaspora, and global Cold War studies. His research and teaching explore modernist practices and discourses spanning francophone West Africa, southern Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States

November 12 : Empathy in Black Studies--Dr.Timothy Pantoja, Mellon Fellow of the Humanities at Stanford University and a Lecturer in the Department of African and African American Studies.

Description: This talk traces the productive tensions between empathy as a moral idea and empathy as an aesthetic practice in Black Studies. In particular, I analyze how Zora Neale Hurston’s ideas on embodied spectatorship forecasts both the critique of empathy as a moral shortcut and the current turns towards the haptic in black aesthetics. While Hurston is celebrated as an anthropologist, novelist, and choreographer her aesthetic insights on participatory perception, what she calls “watching”, remain under-appreciated. Therefore, this talk examines the ways Hurston improvised upon aesthetic ideas across the Enlightenment to contemporary ideas on kinesthesia to theorize the reflective dimensions of everyday practices of black expressivity.