That HECAA meets only every five years makes it a useful yardstick of changes within the discipline. If HECAA at 25 reflected a burgeoning trend towards reimagining scholarship on eighteenth-century art and architecture in more expansive global terms, HECAA@30 remained fixed on the vast world beyond Europe but with an urgent focus on issues of race, (de)coloniality, and indigeneity. This is a welcome development for the way it has made space for marginalized perspectives and driven scholarship that embraces a fuller view of the early modern world. These issues will hopefully persist as potent lines of inquiry but what form will they take as scholarship inevitably asks new or different questions in the future? Drawing from our HECAA@30 roundtable, “The Interstitial Eighteenth Century: Objects, Actors, and Ideas In-Between,” we reflect on what we as a discipline might take forward from this moment when renewed attention to race, (de)coloniality, and indigeneity has upended the study of eighteenth-century art and architecture.
For us, in-betweenness offers new interpretive possibilities that consider things in the processes of their becoming and that destabilize familiar taxonomic frameworks by turning to forms of cultural production that resist straightforward classification. Through engagement with a stone Kalaalek object of unknown origin and function, a shipwreck painting by Claude-Joseph Vernet, and a mannequin of a Cantonese merchant, our roundtable’s contributors pointed ways forward methodologically. By unpacking the ambiguities, silences, and tensions that in different ways pervade early modern cultural production, they tested the “in-between” as an analytical approach that extends the possibilities of the study of eighteenth-century art and architecture. Instead of simplistic narratives of history or culture, in-betweenness places our attention on inconsistencies, absences, and ephemeralities. This seems particularly appropriate to the study of the eighteenth century, a time when individuals, nations, and empires navigated between local and global scales in new destabilizing ways.
In conversations with one another and other early career scholars about the in-between as method, we realized that our commitment to this form of inquiry fundamentally grew out of our interests and professionalization. For example, through his work on the production of ephemeral festival architecture in early modern France and the preservation of eighteenth-century enslaved burial grounds, Matt came to realize that his research was leading him towards a more expansive architectural history that looks beyond buildings to consider forms of spatial production that are in different ways lost or difficult to pin down. Emily’s research has long dwelled on an actual in-between space–the ocean. Considering the ocean as a material and imaginative space that prompted eighteenth-century subjects to reckon with their position in a global sphere led her to focus on representations of the ocean that evoked its instability and chaos as an in-between environmental and social space. Likewise, our panelists’ case studies modeled different ways that early modern production of knowledge, art, and material objects can reflect the in-between nooks and crannies of culture.
As we pursued these lines of research, we were simultaneously navigating the precarity of the Academy itself. For Matt this meant two years as a visiting assistant professor at the height of the pandemic, and for Emily this meant getting a tenure-track job only to have the position eliminated through programmatic prioritization. While both of us have since transitioned into tenure-track appointments, these experiences navigating precarity left us with an acute awareness of the many ways we were and continue to be caught in between the political, economic, and cultural forces that shape the Academy. When we think of the in-between as method, we recognize that it is situated and born from this lived experience which has obliged us and many of our peers to reckon with our work and the material conditions of what we do.
We are attracted to the in-between because it resists resolution. If as scholars and subjects of our present moment, we live in irresolution, why can’t our scholarship also be like that? By holding various concerns, materials, places, and relationships in tension, the in-between honors the complications of objects and historical moments. The objects our panelists presented and the questions that arose from them challenged traditional scholarly paradigms of physical, temporal, and metaphorical scale as they neither hewed to the structures of grand narrative art history nor retreated to the level of microhistory.
While recent scholarship in the field has emphasized the intrinsic role of empire, colonialism, and capitalism, the method of the in-between refuses simplistic readings of the deep linkages between these forces, material objects, and human lives. Rather, it offers new approaches that acknowledge the historic dynamics at play without forcing them into preconceived or simplistic frameworks of what a diverse or decolonized art history looks like. By dwelling on the discomforts and ambiguities, in-betweenness reveals more fully our present condition. As scholars who continue to deeply reflect on the present material conditions of our labor, we are compelled by how the method of the in-between makes space for contingency and precarity. Speaking to the realities and contingencies of our scholarship is not self-indulgent, but rather a critical political exploration of how our own subjectivities shape our individual and collective contributions to the field and the Academy.
As a period of study, the eighteenth century is defined by wit, invention, violence, and contradiction. Studying the visual and material culture of this era requires reckoning with the multidimensional nature of the objects we study—at once sources of delight and fascination, and material manifestations of systemic oppression and marginalization at multiple scales. In a moment when many speak of diversifying and decolonizing the field and the Academy, an art history of the in-between makes space for the messy realities of history, knowledge production, and lived experience. It offers a capacious container that values many different kinds of research–even those investigations that don’t seem “relevant” to contemporary concerns in a straightforward or immediate way. Rather than rigid frameworks for discussing difficult issues in our research and work, the in-between provides a means for conversation that is inconclusive, generative, and multifaceted.
Emily C. Casey is Hall Assistant Professor of American Art and Culture in the Kress Foundation Department of Art History at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, KS
Matthew Gin is Assistant Professor of Architectural History at the David R. Ravin School of Architecture, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, NC
Cite this note as: Emily C. Casey and Matthew Gin, “Everything in Between: Reflections on HECAA@30” Journal18 (October 2024), https://www.journal18.org/7427.
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