Reflecting on the HECAA at 25 conference in Journal18 five years ago, Nancy Um proposed a new agenda for a global eighteenth-century art history. The field should, Um wrote, “query, perhaps even destabilize, the easy relationships that are often assumed between people, places, and things, rather than reifying an assumed affinity between geographic sites and those who inhabit them or the things that came from them.” Um was not alone in recognizing “the global” as the topic of the 2018 conference. Daniela Bleichmar noted this in her keynote address, admitting that repeated references to “the global” had made her “itchy,” as she grappled with the dissonance between what scholars who invoked the term laid claim to in theory and what they achieved in practice. Is “the global,” she asked, simply a stand-in for “colonialism”? Or, we might query, does scholarship that aims to interpret eighteenth-century art “globally” study multi-sited, transregional contexts of making and movement; or are individual sites of European colonization, binary relationships of power, and European reception the focus? One approach is not intrinsically more “right” than another, but, as Um suggests, they are doing different kinds of political work.
What Um envisioned for a global history of eighteenth-century art was not diversification through “geographic accumulation,” but rather that the complexities of transregional connections among materials, makers, places, and cultures would force reconsideration of the very ways we define art and practice the study of it. Sugata Ray, writing in the same year, also addressed the differences between the study of materials produced in spaces other than Europe and art history produced from a global perspective. “How,” he asked, “might we write art histories that account for dissonances in diverse global perspectives without reiterating Europe’s art history as art history…?”[1]
Six years on, Ray’s and Um’s ambitious aims remain unresolved and, at HECAA@30, were largely undiscussed. At the 2023 conference, “the global” appeared to be an accepted category rather than debated as a methodology. The origin of an art work (that is, an object’s identity as having been made in a place beyond Europe) seemed sufficient to fulfill definitions of “the global,” as few presentations engaged with sources (literary, historiographic, visual) based in anything other than Euro-American traditions. Possibilities that “the global” could be understood as a method, perhaps even a form of “comparative” art history, were muted in favor of analyses that privileged, even as they critiqued, European colonization and European reception. My own effort to create a panel on art of the eighteenth-century “Chinese diaspora” —unsuccessful despite the work of my co-chair Michele Matteini and the support of the HECAA@30 planning committee—underscored, for me, how siloed, geographically and linguistically, art history remains. Why do scholars whose research is global in scope, but based in languages other than European ones, feel that HECAA is not the right venue for their work? In what ways does this silo-ing reflect the dynamics of our own classrooms and the politics of our campuses?
A number of papers at HECAA@30 did discuss art that moved transregionally, but a “global” approach to that movement, one that requires in-depth study of connected localities beyond Europe, did not take shape. Instead, to focus on just one of the conference’s named themes, “materiality” emerged as a key means of reckoning with the diversity and interdependence of the eighteenth-century world.
In several of the panels, as well as in Edward Cooke’s recent Global Objects, materials were presented as agents of their own artistic production.[2] Taking seriously matter’s role in creating form, speakers discussed substances as varied as limestone and hawksbill sea turtle shells to consider how material facilitates, and also potentially subverts, the political and social goals of human agents. When this interpretation is applied transregionally, when objects composed of similar materials are studied across national and temporal boundaries—a strategy that Cooke adopts and calls “horizontal”–then materiality, as a method, may be seen to aim for some of Um’s same goals. That is, by studying objects from the perspective of “shared cultures of making” across regional divisions, assumed affinities between location and culture may be disrupted, metropole/periphery binaries questioned, and conventional definitions of “art” overturned.
But the horizontal approach also has its dangers, including a potential to homogenize, or even erase, what Michael Yonan has called the “semantic” logic of objects.[3] What makes Global Objects horizontal is not its focus on the physical properties of an object’s matter, but that in order to make claims for materials acrossregional/cultural/temporal localities, the book eschews the semantic. Pushed to an extreme, we could imagine that, with this horizontal approach, global histories of objects could be written without attending to the specifics of individual sites of making, transmission, or use—that the objects could “speak” across divisions of human-made language. In contrast, a “vertical” approach to materiality requires an engagement with both the semantic and the material, and assumes not only that the physical properties of things play a role in their own formation, but also that these properties work with or against the norms and beliefs of the site-specific cultures in which they are made and through which the travel. Anne Gerritsen’s recent book City of Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World is an example of this latter approach.[4] Studying the city of Jingdezhen vertically, Gerritsen explores the local meanings of what is often considered to be the most global of commodities, blue-and-white porcelain. In doing so, her work debunks the persistent trope, founded in European ideology, that blue-and-white porcelain can be conflated with all of “China.”
Language, as written and spoken texts, is essential in making claims to knowledge in the vertical model, and language is also at root, for me, in the shift in methodological focus between the HECAA conferences of 2018 and 2023. The question is not whether “the global” should be pursued, but an insecurity about who (or what) can speak about it. Discussions of subjective experiences within the academy, on the one hand, and the decentering of human agents, on the other, represent some ways that participants appeared to confront this question in 2023. Similarly, the horizontal approach to materiality—as it privileges the haptic over the visual and physical experience over textual documentation, while also allowing for the possibility that objects “speak for themselves”—serves the aims of a moment in which dives into multiple localities not “our own” seem particularly fraught.
Dawn Odell is Professor of Art History at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR
[1] Sugata Ray, “Introduction: Translation as Art History,” Ars Orientalis 48 (2018): 2, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/a/ars/13441566.0048.001?view=text;rgn=main
[2] Edward Cooke, Global Objects: Toward a Connected Art History (Princeton University Press, 2022).
[3] Michael Yonan, “Toward a Fusion of Art History and Material Culture Studies,” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Fall-Winter 2011), 232-248.
[4] Anne Gerritsen, City of Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Cite this note as: Dawn Odell, “Who (or What) Speaks in a Global History of Art?” Journal18 (October 2024), https://www.journal18.org/7431.
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