Exhibiting American Lives: The Poetics and Politics of (Re-)Presentation

Workshop M: seminar room P109a (2nd floor, Philosophicum)

Pia Wiegmink (Washington/Mainz), Andrea Zittlau (Rostock)

 

1. Christoph Ribbat (Paderborn), "Staring at (the Man Formerly Known as) Lew Alcindor: The Visual Politics of a Basketball Life"

2. Birgit Bauridl (Regensburg), "'Deep-Mapping' the Diversity of New York Lives: The 'City of Memory' Digital Project"

3. Dorothea Gail (Michigan), "'Raisins in My Toast': Fastfood and the 'Musical'-ization of Daily American Consumer Life"

4. Klara-Stephanie Szlezak (Regensburg), "Housing American Poets' Lives: The Biographies of Longfellow and Dickinson Exhibited in Their Homes in Cambridge and Amherst"

5. Amina Grunewald (Berlin), "Peter Morin's Museum: Native Place-Making–Innovative Community-Based Spaces of Life Performance"

6. Juliane Schwarz-Bierschenk, "Exhibiting a 'wish to be known': The (Im)Material Legacy of Boston's East India Trade"

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Contact:

Prof. Dr. Christoph Ribbat
ribbat@mail.upb.de

Klara-Stephanie Szlezak, M.A.
Klara-Stephanie.Szlezak@sprachlit.uni-regensburg.de

Dr. Birgit Bauridl
Birgit.Bauridl@sprachlit.uni-regensburg.de

Amina Grunewald, M.A.
grunewaa@cms.hu-berlin.de

Dorothea Gail, Ph.D.
dgail@umich.edu

Juliane Schwarz-Bierschenk
Juliane.Bierschenk@sprachlit.uni-regensburg.de

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As a critical comment on the quincentenary of Christopher Columbus' arrival in the Americas, the Latino performance artists Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco exhibited themselves as "Two Undiscovered Amerindians" in a golden cage. Staged (among other significant spaces around the world) in The National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, their controversial show addressed the (re)making of the "savage" life for a Western audience and thus commented on the history of museum displays, ethnographic exhibitions, and world fairs in the context of colonial practices of collecting, archiving, and classifying the Other.

This workshop seeks to examine the poetics and politics of representing American lives in the context of various practices and spaces of exhibition and display: From the celebratory heritage performances at Plymouth Plantation to the guided tours through Mount Vernon and Monticello, from the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian to the yet-to-be-built Museum of African American History and Culture, from Carrie Mae Weems' re-collection of the visual archive of African American identities in From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried to Suzan Lori-Park’s dramatization of the life of Sarah Baartman in her play Venus, the (re-)presentation and display of individual lives cannot be looked at in isolation from larger narratives such as colonialism, national identity, and cultural exploitation.

Building on Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s assumption that "life narratives are always symbolic interactions in the world" and that "they are culturally and historically specific," this workshop examines locations, i.e. cultural and political sites of life narratives. In How Societies Remember, Paul Connerton explains that "memories are localised by a kind of mapping. We situate what we recollect within the mental spaces provided … . But these mental spaces … refer back to material spaces." This workshop will scrutinize the specificities of personal, geographical, aesthetic, and institutional spaces within which American lives can be narrated, performed, and presented.
We invite papers discussing the exhibition of American lives in various spaces and produced in the context of various cultural practices ranging from museums, art spaces, libraries, archives, tourist sites, and national monuments to commemoration ceremonies, festivals, pageants, guided tours, site-specific performances, and historical re-enactments. Potential paper topics could include, but are not limited to:

• the multi-layered symbolism of exhibition space throughout time
• the politics of display, i.e. questions concerning the political narratives of display, the agency of those exhibited, and the role of the visitors/audience
• the cultural history of displaying American lives, institutional affiliations and their socio-political contexts, and how contemporary artists re-engage in this history
• aspects of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity in public exhibitions as well as the reification and commodification of the body by means of display
• how exhibited lives are mediated in various media (film, novel, drama, photography etc.)