Ibero-American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

IASECS-RELATED-PANELS-ASECS-Denver-2019

Please see the ASECS webpage for full submission details https://asecs.press.jhu.edu/

IASECS RELATED PANELS ASECS 2018

Call for Papers
49th ASECS Annual Meeting
Orlando, FL
March 22-25, 2018

Session Descriptions
Proposals for papers should be sent directly to the session chairs no later than 15 September 2017. Please include your telephone number and e-mail address. The session chair should be informed of any audio-visual needs and special scheduling requests. Presentations by younger and untenured scholars are warmly encouraged. Session chairs are reminded that all papers received up to the deadline MUST be considered. Please do not announce that the panel is closed prior to the 15 September deadline.

Chairs have until 30 September to send the names of participants, their e-mail addresses and the titles of their papers to the ASECS Business Office: asecsoffice@gmail.com (Fax: 716-878-5700).

The Society’s rules permit members to present only one paper at the meeting. Members may, in addition to presenting a paper, serve as a session chair, or a respondent, or a panel discussant, but they may not present a paper in those sessions they also chair. No member may appear more than twice in the program. Please be reminded that if you submit a paper proposal to more than one session, you must notify all the chairs to whom you have made a submission. If you fail to notify the session chairs, they will have the right to decide between themselves in which session the paper will be presented or whether the paper will be excluded entirely. All participants must be members in good standing of ASECS or a constituent society of ISECS. Membership must be current by September 30, 2017, for a participant to be included in the printed program and to receive pre-registration materials. Members of constituent societies of ISECS must furnish a snail mail address (to asecsoffice@gmail.com) to receive pre-registration materials.

1. “Contesting the Caribbean: Caught between Empires” (Roundtable). Renee Gutiérrez, Longwood University; gutierrezar@longwood.edu
A confusion of influences from many empires roiled the Caribbean early on, even among competing indigenous tribes prior to the arrival of the Europeans, and those influences left their mark on the area throughout the 18th century. What happens when imperial powers collide on land and at sea? How can our disciplinary narratives be challenged by tracking different imperial agents and examining different protonational voices? This roundtable will be constructed so as to foster an interdisciplinary dialog across multiple
academic fields, discussing the impact of imperial projects in the Caribbean. All disciplines are welcome: literature, history, art history, linguistics, etc. To start (but by no means limit) your thinking, consider these questions: Who were the winners and losers in the Caribbean? Who controlled Caribbean economies and how? How did power shift, and how were those shifts explained? Who ruled Caribbean ports and their cities? Who resisted the imperial reach of Spain, France, and England? How were contesting narratives constructed and how did they circulate?

7. “Bull! Tauromachy in the Enlightenment” Ana Rueda, University of Kentucky; rueda@uky.edu
Bullfighting has generated abundant commentary and controversy. Rousseau credited bullfighting with keeping alive a certain “vigour” in the Spanish people, while other writers linked bullfights to Spain’s backwardness and refusal to embrace the Enlightenment. The Bourbons disapproved of them for their barbaric nature, but corridas were held in commemorative festivities and served to vindicate national identity against the foreign gaze. The spectacle waned among the aristocracy, yet grew in popularity among the masses in the Iberian Peninsula and parts of France. In Spanish America bullfighting prevailed as an uninterrupted local tradition since the conquistadores introduced it in the early 1500s. How does bullfighting in its different forms enlighten us about national identity in the Enlightenments of Spain, Portugal, France, Mexico
or Venezuela? How do we reconcile the ferocity of bullfights with the demarcations between rationality and irrationality as epistemic and moral phenomena? Goya sketched colorful bullfighting scenes in his Tauromaquia series, but The Death of the Picador (1793), depicting gruesome agony in a moment of pure terror, suggests an aberration of the national pastime. This panel seeks to explore the ritual of tauromachy and the taurine subject in order to determine the place of this tradition in enlightened societies and nations.

11. “Currents of Empire: Toward a Global Material Culture” Douglas Fordham, University of Virginia; Monica Anke Hahn, Temple University; Emily Casey, University of Delaware; currentsofempire@gmail.com
This panel calls for papers that consider how the material turn can or should inflect the global turn in early modern cultural history. In art history, scholars have increasingly embraced the importance of things and their materiality to questions of cultural construction and exchange. Together, paintings, prints, and sculpture, alongside other types of visual and material culture, can be used as evidence to reconstruct complex networks of power, exchange, and identity performance that freshly illuminate the geographies and time periods of art historical study. “Currents of Empire” asks contributors to consider how the transoceanic movement of objects enlarges our understanding of the entangled histories of the empires of Britain, Spain, and France, and first nation communities in the Americas, Oceania, and the Pacific Rim. How do things support and trouble the performance of imperial and native colonial identities in a global world? Especially encouraged are proposals that expand traditional boundaries—geopolitical, cultural, art historical—in order to reexamine and enrich the growing interdisciplinary conversation around material culture and global exchange in the Age of Empires.

28. “Here, There, or Anywhere: Eighteenth-Century Senses of Place” Pamela Phillips, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras; phillips.pamela@gmail.com
This panel considers the multiplicity of ways “sense of place” works itself out in the eighteenth century. Topics addressed may include but are not limited to: place attachment, abandonment, and dependence; the relation between individual or community identity and physical environment; the desire to stay vs. the start of a more
mobile modern society; the process of assigning meaning to a physical space; the emergence of new communities alongside established places; eighteenth-century sense of responsibility to place; memory and place. Proposals from an array of disciplines are especially encouraged.

29. “1808: The Peninsular War, aka The Spanish War of Independence” (Roundtable) Yvonne Fuentes; yfuentes@westga.edu
The abdication of Charles IV of Spain in favor of his son Fernando VII took place in March of 1808. On May 2nd, the people of Madrid rose against the French troops, and the retaliation of the following day would be immortalized in Goya’s painting, El tres de mayo. Consequently, by the end of that same month Joseph Bonaparte sat on the Spanish throne. The crisis in sovereignty caused by the collapse of the Spanish monarchy led the allied powers of Spain, Britain and Portugal to mount offensive attacks, counterattacks, and eventually defeat the great imperial forces in a war that lasted six long years; a war known as both the Peninsular War and the Spanish War of Independence. We invite participants from different disciplines to explore the many facets and actors in these theatres of war. Additionally, we would like to address the following questions: What does each space highlight? To whom would one or the other nomenclature appeal?
Can they be physical and/or imaginary spaces? We are particularly interested in textual and visual representations of events that resulted in or from those circumstances, and especially those based on or containing conflicting interpretations.

39. “They were Warned and Yet They Persisted” Yvonne Fuentes; yfuentes@westga.edu
Like today, opposition, resistance, and protest was everywhere in the eighteenth century and took many forms: caricatures, anonymous libels and lampoons, protest songs, and even street riots; and the real or imagined grievances were also multiple. For example, rising prices of bread and other food staples in England, France, and Spain were behind the many riots throughout the century. While the “new” policies on hats and coats resulted in the Esquilache Riots in Madrid, the displeasure with foreign competition and attacks on silk weavers’ looms in London brought about the Spitalfields riots and executions. Similarly, we must not forget that the taxes on lead, glass, paint, paper and tea would be one of the causes of our own Boston Tea Party. Eighteenth century public opinion was strong, and the will of the people was expressed in both indirect and direct ways. We invite papers that explore popular protest, opposition, and resistance in any medium. We are particularly interested in connections between real and/or fake news as part of the rise of the press and the attempt to shape public opinion, as well as scandals, and other causes of protests.

43. “Art, Alchemy, and Royal Rivalry: The Eighteenth-Century Manufactory” Tara Zanardi, Hunter College, City University of New York; tzanardi@hunter.cuny.edu
The long eighteenth century witnessed the foundation of countless royally-sponsored manufactories, including porcelain, tapestry, and glass. The majority of the objects produced were destined for royal consumption to decorate palatial residences in the crafting of fashionable interiors or to stage grand performances of royal prowess and taste. Many of these goods were used as diplomatic gifts, from individual works to large sets. The dissemination of these objects contributed to the intense rivalry that was inherent in the factories as one monarch attempted to outdo another. Thus, scientific experimentation, secrecy, artistic collaboration, and emulation were key components of these institutions as kings and queens fostered technical ingenuity. What were the different modes of production employed by royals to generate innovation? How did such manufacture suggest a monarch’s command over natural or man-made materials and help to forge a particular royal identity? What problems existed within the factories, such as the lack of commercial viability, the shortage of appropriate materials, and power struggles with guilds and non-royally sponsored manufactories? How did the production of these objects participate in economic debates or in broader geopolitical conflicts? Papers should engage with these or related issues surrounding the eighteenth-century manufactory.

90. “Enlightenment Censorship” Theodore E. D. Braun, University of Delaware; braun@udel.edu
Censorship was an international phenomenon during the long eighteenth century (identified here as 1650- 1850), not only in Catholic countries or by the Inquisition, but in all nations worldwide. Its targets varied but usually included interpretations of the dominant religion, attacks against the reigning monarch or the political establishment, pornography, varying moral judgments, and the like. This panel seeks three papers on
censorship within this period and from more than just one nation or language group. Besides major authors censored it will be of interest to see less-known figures who were likewise censored, and what the results of the censorship were (suppression in part or in entirety of a work? imprisonment or even torture and/or death of the author involved? or other consequences, such as loss of patronage or of an office?).

117. “Objects of Pleasure or The Pleasure of Objects” Enid Valle, Kalamazoo College; valle@kzoo.edu
Notions of decoration, order, taste, imagination, meaning, commerce, and cultural exchanges, may be gleaned from objects that provide pleasure to all of society whether they be from the aristocracy or from the merchant classes. Material objects that can be found in royalty’s quarters, commercial outfits, and private residences, may reveal cultural appropriations, and creative designs such as the chinoiserie. Objects of pleasure can also be found in textual and visual representations, such as those that appear in newspapers, commercial documents, traveler logs, testaments and wills, letters, biographies, diaries, narratives and paintings. In both the public and private spheres, objects of pleasure are displayed, collected, hidden, bought, sold, exchanged, but most importantly are acquired and consumed. This session welcomes interdisciplinary proposals that weave together notions of aesthetics, business, consumerism, history, narratives and politics in order to explore the impact of these objects of pleasure.

118. “Creeds, Confessions, and Conversions: Enlightenment Contact Zones Revisited” Hazel Gold, Emory University; hgold@emory.edu
While the Enlightenment has commonly been associated with the drive toward religious liberalism and secularism, conflicts among religious belief systems continued to exert significant influence over individuals and their societies: either through the existence of multiple religious communities within the nation state or as the result of religious encounters that occurred through travel in an increasingly global eighteenth century. This
panel invites papers that consider anew how individuals, churches, and governments negotiated engagements that arose in Enlightenment contact zones where differing structures of religious belief (or non-belief) interacted in contexts of largely asymmetrical power relations. Based on specific instantiations – Catholic- Protestant rivalries; debates between followers of Deism and traditional Christianity; Christian interactions with
Jews or Muslims; Western exchanges with indigenous religions, among other possible examples – what were favored strategies for expressing or repressing dissent by religious minorities? Did these encounters ever conclude in rapprochement or only in unresolved polemic or outright, sometimes violent containment? In an environment of multiconfessional rivalry, what role did conversion play? More generally, how might scholars rethink the place of religious enthusiasms in the political, cultural, or moral life of Enlightenment societies?

123. “Letting the Cat out of the Bag: The Cultural Work of Eighteenth-Century Pets” Joanna M. Gohmann, The Walters Art Museum, AND Karissa Bushman, University of Alabama Huntsville; jgohmann@thewalters.org and keb0025@uah.edu
Despite scientific, philosophic, and social efforts to define and preserve a clear boundary between humans and animals, eighteenth-century pets, like our modern-day companions, defied this categorization. Madame du Deffand’s cats, William Hogarth’s pug, and the Duchess of Alba’s bichon frise were integral to expressions of their owner’s identity. Owners indulged their creatures in human luxuries like miniaturized human furnitures,
porcelain dishware, fancy outfits, and pricy jewelry, which firmly embedded the creature within the owner world. In Histoire Naturelle, Buffon explains that animals embody their masters’ traits, stating: “the dog is … haughty with the great and rustic with the peasant.” But, what do animals do for the owner? Do masters adopt traits of the pet? What cultural work do pets perform? Responding to such works as Martin Kemp’s The Human Animal in Western Art and Science (2007), Jacques Berchtold and Jean-Luc Guichet’s edited volume L’animal des Lumières (2010), and Louise Robbins’s Elephant Slaves and Pampered Pets (2002), this panel seeks to deepen the dialogue of Animal Studies by considering pets’ agency and impact on the material and historical world. This panel seeks to address a diverse array of domesticated, companion animals from many cultures and invites participants from all disciplines.

141. “Theorizing Eighteenth-Century Disability” (Roundtable) (Disability Studies Caucus) Travis Chi Wing Lau, University of Pennsylvania AND Madeline Sutherland-Meier, University of Texas at Austin; laut@sas.upenn.edu and madelinesm@austin.utexas.edu
This panel continues a conversation that began at the 2017 ASECS Disability Caucus panel, “Crip Futurities.” As Chris Mounsey has suggested, disability studies has long depended on the nineteenth-century concept of the norm. Yet how do we theorize disability before it has become, to put it in Vin Nardizzi’s words, “the master trope of human disqualification”? We invite papers to theorize disability from the eighteenth
century. Papers may consider representations of disability and disability writing in the eighteenth century and/or conceptualize a disability studies method from an eighteenth-century standpoint. How might the eighteenth century offer antecedents to the concepts of the normative or compulsory able-bodiedness? How do disabled writers like William Hay provide models of disability thinking and identity that might challenge more presentist understandings of disability that currently dominate disability studies methodologies? How do eighteenth-century representations of bodily variability help to better nuance histories of disability?

151. “The Eighteenth Century and the Present Crisis” (Roundtable) (Race and Empire Studies Caucus)
Sal Nicolazzo, University of California, San Diego; snicolazzo@ucsd.edu
Scholars of race and empire will recognize in today’s political moment an intensifying of ongoing structures ofviolence and expropriation long subject to critical analysis. How can scholars of race and empire bring theircritical capacities to bear on the present political moment, at the most local level of our work as teachers and scholars? We may understand the narratives of “Western civilization” employed by fascists, white supremacists and nationalists, but what can we do about it? We may recognize the interplays of race, empire and capitalism underpinning the modern nation-state system, but what do we do when we, our students and our colleagues are targeted by anti-immigrant violence, state-sanctioned or otherwise? How might the texts, objects or histories we teach become sources of hope, resilience and even of a capacity to imagine a radically different future? This panel asks how we put our collective insight to work in our classrooms, campuses, and public spheres. We welcome practical roadmaps for action, lessons learned in organizing or teaching, critical/theoretical interventions in pedagogy, analytical insights that can mobilize, inspire, or caution us in our political work, and more. The format will be 7-8 minute flash talks that aim to stimulate discussion.

152. “Life and Death, in and across Race and Empire” (Roundtable) (Race and Empire Studies Caucus) Tony Brown, University of Minnesota; tcbrown@umn.edu
Building on recent work concerned with biopolitics (Agamben, Esposito, Butler) and social death, afropessimism and necropolitics (Hartman, Sexton, Mbembe), this roundtable asks: What purchase does the bio or necro-political have in approaching questions of race and empire? We especially welcome proposals attending to empire beyond the Anglophone world (such as the Spanish, Portuguese, French, German or
Dutch) or beyond the Western (such as the Algonquin, Mexica, Kalinago or Khoikhoi).

173. “Back to Black: Goya and Color” (Ibero-American Society on Eighteenth-Century Studies (IASECS)
Elena Deanda, Washington College; edeanda2@washcoll.edu
Taking the Black Paintings by Francisco de Goya as a point of departure, this panel will investigate the role played by color (or its lack thereof) in his work and/or the works of other eighteenth century painters and artists. From darkness to lightness passing through the whole gamut of colors, we welcome papers that explore the intersections of philosophy and color; morals, ethics, and color; psychology and color; and color and other disciplines, as they were expressed primarily in eighteenth century painting but also in other artistic expressions. As light became the central trope that defined a whole century, emanating from the seminal work by Sir Isaac Newton called Opticks, written in 1704, to the Theory of Color by Goethe in 1810, we will ponder the value and performance of light and darkness, chromaticism and perception, with the goal to better
understand a unique dimension of el Siglo de las Luces.