“ARCHIVE WARS: THE POLITICS OF HISTORY IN SAUDI ARABIA”
Rosie Bsheer, Harvard University
Wednesday, April 6th, 12:30pm ET
[Online] Silsila Spring 2022 Series
Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi ArabiaThe production of history is premised on the selective erasure of certain pasts and the artifacts that stand witness to them. From the elision of archival documents to the demolition of sacred and secular spaces, each act of destruction is also an act of state building. Following the 1991 Gulf War, political elites in Saudi Arabia pursued these dual projects of historical commemoration and state formation with greater fervor to enforce their postwar vision for state, nation, and economy. Seeing Islamist movements as the leading threat to state power, they sought to de-center religion from educational, cultural, and spatial policies. Archive Wars explores the increasing secularization of the postwar Saudi state and how it manifested in assembling a national archive and reordering urban space in Riyadh and Mecca.Rosie Bsheer is Assistant Professor of History at Harvard University, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on oil and empire, social and intellectual movements, urban history, historiography, and the making of the modern Middle East. Rosie’s publications include Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia (Stanford University Press, 2020) and “A Counterrevolutionary State: Popular Movements and the Making of Saudi Arabia,” Past and Present (2018). She is a contributing editor of the journal Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAME), Associate Producer of the 2007 Oscar-nominated film My Country, My Country, and a co-editor of Jadaliyya E-zine. Rosie received her Ph.D. in History from Columbia University (2014) and came to Harvard from Yale University, where she taught for four years.Date: Wednesday, April 6th Time: 12:30-2:30pm Location: Online This event will take place as a live Webinar at 12:30pm ET (New York time). To register as an attendee, please use the following link: https://nyu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_adE-dQXxRoC9gSQXzvoZMA Only registered attendees will be able to access this event.Silsila: Center for Material Histories is an NYU center dedicated to material histories of the Islamicate world. Each semester we hold a thematic series of lectures and workshops, which are open to the public. Details of the Center can be found at: http://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/research-centers/silsila.html
Please mark your calendars for our annual Rosenblum Lecture, given this year by Emily Braun, Distinguished Professor of Art History at Hunter College, The Graduate Center, CUNY. Professor Braun’s lecture is titled Harlequin, the Immigrant : A New Reading of Pablo Picasso’s Family of Saltimbanques. The lecture will be on Thursday, April 7th at 6:30pm via Zoom (link forthcoming). We hope to see you there.
NYU Africa House, La Maison Française, and Deutsches Haus at NYU presents a conversation between Bénédicte Savoy, one of the world’s foremost experts on restitution and cultural heritage, and visual culture theorist and activist, Nicholas Mirzoeff, on Savoy’s new book “Africa’s Struggle for Its Art: History of a Postcolonial Defeat” (Princeton, April 2022, translated by Susanne Meyer-Abich). Opening remarks will be delivered by Yaw Nyarko, Director of NYU Africa House.
In her book, Savoy reconstructs the initial restitution debate in Europe, which started in the 1960s when African intellectuals, politicians, and museum professionals called for the return of royal and sacred artworks stolen by European colonial forces, and the fierce resistance these calls were met with in Europe. The conversation will focus on how many of the arguments and talking points that have dominated public discourse around restitutions in recent years were developed and honed by European collecting institutions since the 1960s, what roles “historical mechanisms of forgetting, renunciation, and silence” have played in the process, and why restitution is fundamental to any future relationship between African countries and the West.
About “Africa’s Struggle for Its Art: History of a Postcolonial Defeat”:
For decades, African nations have fought for the return of countless works of art stolen during the colonial era and placed in Western museums. In Africa’s Struggle for Its Art, Bénédicte Savoy brings to light this largely unknown but deeply important history. One of the world’s foremost experts on restitution and cultural heritage, Savoy investigates extensive, previously unpublished sources to reveal that the roots of the struggle extend much further back than prominent recent debates indicate, and that these efforts were covered up by myriad opponents.
Shortly after 1960, when eighteen former colonies in Africa gained independence, a movement to pursue repatriation was spearheaded by African intellectual and political classes. Savoy looks at pivotal events, including the watershed speech delivered at the UN General Assembly by Zaire’s president, Mobutu Sese Seko, which started the debate regarding restitution of colonial-era assets and resulted in the first UN resolution on the subject. She examines how German museums tried to withhold information about their inventory and how the British Parliament failed to pass a proposed amendment to the British Museum Act, which protected the country’s collections. Savoy concludes in the mid-1980s, when African nations enacted the first laws focusing on the protection of their cultural heritage.
Making the case for why restitution is essential to any future relationship between African countries and the West, Africa’s Struggle for Its Art will shape conversations around these crucial issues for years to come.
About the panelists:
Nicholas Mirzoeff is a professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt, a visual activist, working at the intersection of politics, race and global/visual culture. In 2020-21 he is ACLS/Mellon Scholar and Society fellow in residence at the Magnum Foundation, New York. Among his many publications, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (2011) won the Anne Friedberg Award for Innovative Scholarship from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies in 2013. How To See The World was published by Pelican in the UK (2015) and by Basic Books in the US (2016). It has been translated into ten languages and was a New Scientist Top Ten Book of the Year for 2015. The Appearance of Black Lives Matter was published in 2017 as a free e-book, and in 2018 as a limited edition print book with a graphic essay by Carl Pope and a poem by Karen Pope, both by NAME Publications, Miami. Since the 2017 events Charlottesville, he has been active in the movement to take down statues commemorating settler colonialism and/or white supremacy and convened the 2017 collaborative syllabus All The Monuments Must Fall, fully revised after the 2020 events. He curated “Decolonizing Appearance,” an exhibit at the Center for Art Migration Politics (September 2018-March 2019) and is currently collaborating on a global public art project with artist Carl Pope, poet Karen Pope and gallerist Lisa Martin, entitled “The Bad Air Smelled of Roses.”
Bénédicte Savoy has held a full professorship in the Department of Art History at Technische Universität Berlin since 2009, where she currently has the Chair for Modern Art History/Art History as Cultural History. From 2016 to 2021 she also held the “chaire internationale” at the Collège de France in Paris (Histoire culturelle des patrimoines artistiques en Europe, XVIIIe-XXe siècle). Together with the Senegalese author and academic Felwine Sarr, she prepared the groundbreaking report on repatriation from French museums commissioned by French president Emmanuel Macron. She curated a major exhibition on Napoleon entitled “Napoleon und Europa. Traum und Trauma” at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn (2010/11) which travelled to the Musée de l’Armée in Paris; and co-curated the extensive exhibition on the brothers Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt at the Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin (2020).
“Africa’s Struggle for Its Art: History of a Postcolonial Defeat” is funded by the DAAD from funds of the German Federal Foreign Office (AA).
John Hopkins will deliver the Del Chiaro Lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, hosted by the History of Art Department and the Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology on April 21 at 5 PM Pacific Time. His lecture, titled “Sacro-creative Action Within and Beyond Rome in the 5th c. BCE,” will consider the purported downturn in Roman artistic production in that century and what it means to look beyond sociopolitical structures and the terminology of “Roman Art” in considering sacred and creative activities and the subalternated communities behind them.
Here’s hoping you are all well and enjoying the longer days. We in the DAH are looking forward to summer as we imagine many of you are.
The department was fortunate, last year, due to the generosity and vision of one alumni, to award a BIPOC student our first Summer in the City grant. We are hoping to award it again this year but we need your help. Will you please consider donating any amount to the campaign? You can do so through NYU’s Rising Violets page.
Simply click on the Give Now button to make your tax deductible donation. No amount is too small. Thank you for your consideration.
Image Alt Text: Inaugural Fund recipient, Serena Ponciano, speaking to visitors at the Affordable Art Fair as part of her internship with Fremin Gallery
“Last summer, I was the inaugural recipient of the Summer in the City Student Fund for my internship with Fremin Gallery, a contemporary art gallery located in Chelsea. The fund allowed me to pursue diverse experiences and build a wide array of marketable skills which have opened the door for my continued success in the art world. During my time at Fremin, I was mentored by the Director of the gallery and actively participated in the art market by connecting with artists and clients. I was able to build a professional community and network early on which has resulted in several career building opportunities. The following semester, I became a Museum Associate at Fotografiska, a contemporary photography museum, and an intern for the Heller Group, an art advisory organization that operates across three continents. Through these two opportunities, I was able to experience the modern art market from multiple perspectives which provided me with a competitive advantage when pursuing a full-time job. I am now a full-time Gallery Associate at JDJ Gallery and will continue to develop my career there after I graduate.” – Serena Ponciano
Sculpture of Dionysos-Bacchus found in Carthage, second century ce. Kunst historisches Museum, Vienna
In the 19th century, ancient Carthage served as a major point of competition between European archaeologists, which led to both French and British governments pursuing a newly revived rivalry fifty years after the Campaign of Egypt. This practice awakened a new taste for antiquities amongst the local ruling class, who became increasingly aware of the significance and prestige of their ancient cultural heritage. Ministers and the Bey himself constituted rich collections, the most famous of which belonged to the main Tunisian families of the 19th century. The result of ongoing sustained effort, these collections had a notoriety exceeding the country, guaranteeing the fame of their owners on a transnational level, as when they were exhibited in World’s Fairs of 1855 and 1873. The Tunisian ruling class quickly became aware of the stakes of their cultural heritage, formerly ignored, which became an important referent of national identity before the French colonization in 1881.
Ridha Moumni is a historian of art and archaeology specializing in antiquity and early and modern Tunisian art. Trained in classical archaeology, he earned his Ph.D. at the Sorbonne University before joining the Villa Medici as a fellow at the French Academy. While in Rome, he began working on indigenous archaeology in Carthage in the 19th century, and on early modern Tunisian art. He returned to Tunis in 2014, where he worked as an independent curator and organized exhibitions of photography and modern art. As an Aga Khan Fellow in the Department of Art History at Harvard University, Dr. Moumni currently works on collecting practices in the Ottoman era, as well as art and nation-building in postcolonial Tunisia.
Date: Wednesday, March 30th Time: 12:30-2:30pm Location: Online
This event will take place as a live Webinar at 12:30pm ET (New York time). To register as an attendee, please use the following link: https://nyu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_zThwngeBQsKcU6o7Md5TJQ Only registered attendees will be able to access this event.
Silsila: Center for Material Histories is an NYU center dedicated to material histories of the Islamicate world. Each semester we hold a thematic series of lectures and workshops, which are open to the public. Details of the Center can be found at:
FRIDAY, 1 APRIL 2022, at 1 PM (EST) via ZOOM Webinar:
On April 15, 2019, the world watched in horror as Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris went up in flames. Soon after, medieval architectural historians and restoration specialists began the work of restoring this Gothic masterpiece. Join the Valencia College Humanities Speaker Series and the medieval art and technology historians of AVISTA (The Association Villard de Honnecourt for the Interdisciplinary Study of Medieval Technology, Science, and Art), with special guest Dany Sandron of the Sorbonne Université, for an inside look at the progress made in the last three years and discover how modern scholars address the many questions posed in the restoration of a millennium of architectural and cultural history.
This talk will feature:
(Keynote speaker): Dany Sandron, of the Sorbonne Université
(Panelist): Jennifer Feltman, of AVISTA (Reims specialist, and our Publications Director)
(Panelist): Lindsay Cook, of AVISTA (Translator of the book on Notre-Dame by Dany Sandron and our sadly departed member, Andrew Tallon)
Notre-Dame Reconstruction (ZOOM Webinar)
Friday, Apr 1, 2022, 01:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Poems into Pictures: Representing the Song of Hiawatha In Black Diaspora Art
An epic in its time, The Song of Hiawatha by Henry W Longfellow had a long afterlife in visual art. My paper focuses on the work of Robert S Duncanson, Robert Douglass Jr. and Edmonia Lewis, three artists who included representations of Native Americans in their artistic production. Thinking of these works as sites of convergence, I examine their intermediality – the ways these artists translated poetry into paint and marble – in their depiction of colonial encounters. In working through their acts of translation I want to ask how these artists negotiate acts of reading and looking, and what do their representations – troubling as they might appear to us now – reveal about constructions of freedom in the United States, not in relation to the state, but as it could be envisaged in cross-cultural encounters between African American and Native Americans in the pre and post Civil War years?
Fields of Vision 