Responses
Absence and Abundance: Thinking Ahead From HECAA@30 – by Jennifer Van Horn
The Power of Storytelling and Story-Listening: Reflections on HECAA@30 – by Karen Lipsedge
Everything in Between: Reflections on HECAA@30 – by Emily C. Casey and Matthew Gin
The Ethics of Study and Display of Ivory Objects – by Deepthi Murali
Who (or What) Speaks in a Global History of Art? – by Dawn Odell
Material Art History and Black Feminist Pedagogies – by Kathryn Desplanque
Provocations from HECAA@30 – by Elizabeth Saari Browne and Dana Leibsohn
In October 1725, a Jiwere (Otoe) leader named Aguiguida found himself at Versailles watching the fountains play. Invited by French men eager to secure allies amongst those who lived on the Central Plains of North America, this visit had been designed to impress. Along with a tour of Parisian sites and a meeting with the king, Aguiguida and his fellow travelers received gifts aplenty: dress coats with silver ornaments, plumed hats, royal medallions; also rifles and swords, and a painting depicting their audience with the monarch. The visitors had meant to offer their own gifts, but most of these were lost in a shipwreck off the coast of America.[1] Today, no material creations from their trip exist, neither those meant for Louis XV nor those offered the delegates.
By the 1720s, people had been traveling from the Americas to European courts for centuries. Itineraries varied, but when Aguiguida met Louis, it was as much trope as history. So why does this story still surprise? Indeed, who does it still surprise? These kinds of questions surfaced at the recent 30th-anniversary convening of HECAA (Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture) in October 2023, “Materials, Environments, and Futures.” This particular eighteenth-century narrative circles around colonial and imperial histories and how creations of earthen and animal materials, of voyages across (and art lost to) land and sea, and of material cultures of global exchange and of war are implicated in such enterprises. But Aguiguida’s trans-Atlantic voyage and visit also pose other questions for historians of art and architecture: about archival absences, affective relationships, and presumed and real (im)balances of power embedded in materials, in pedagogical relationships, and in the Academy. It is these themes the following essays address.
Because institutional histories frame and undergird so much academic and museum work on the eighteenth century, we offer in this introduction a few HECAA@30 facts. HECAA@30 was the second independent HECAA conference. The first took place in Dallas in 2018, and essays related to that event also appear in Journal18. Guided by the conversations and debates fostered at that first gathering, HECAA@30 sought to address inequities of representation in eighteenth-century scholarship, particularly vis-à-vis traditional geographies, materials, and subjectivities: visits were taken to the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford and to Benefit Street in Providence, while in museums, galleries, and plenary panels, people discussed pastel painting, Jewish ritual silver, Indigenous imprints, and ivory. In casting its net so widely, the point was not simply greater inclusiveness. The conference intentionally cultivated the tensions that such disparate settings and histories create and the challenges they present to interpreters of the past.
What emerged during the conference was, indeed, a spectrum of voices and of possible “Futures,” both for eighteenth-century art history and for HECAA. Animal materiality, activism in house museums and classrooms, and the different ways that DEI thinking unfolds across national topographies and scholarly generations were among the topics discussed, all very much of the 2020s. But questions with longer legacies got their due. Does a global approach seem beyond debate these days? How can scholars judiciously engage the material realities of their historical objects of study whilst recognizing pressing, contemporary concerns about social and environmental justice? What roles can digital technologies have in the classroom? And what of the increasingly tenuous job market (roughly 15% of HECAA@30 attendees identified as contingent scholars, or, as one attendee described themselves, “radically underemployed and eminently employable”)?
The six essays published here take the form of provocations focused on the shape and future of histories of eighteenth-century art and architecture. All of the authors participated in HECAA@30, which was sited in Cambridge, Boston, and Providence. We—as members of the organizing committee and in consultation with other organizers—solicited this suite of essays and these authors to mark the occasion of the conference, to limn the broad field in which historians of eighteenth-century art and architecture currently work, and to test the boundaries of our disciplines especially as cast through HECAA.
In the spirit of provocations, we encouraged the authors, whose own histories as scholars of the eighteenth century are diverse, to be bold in crafting their contributions, to write creatively and critically about their experiences and practices navigating institutional spaces and their ambitions as interpreters. This ask we view as a field-marker in and of itself, for what constitutes boldness and risk today will not be the same a decade from now.
It is rumored that when Aguiguida and his companions got home, their tales of France met with disbelief. New kinds of evidence—something beyond foreign guns and medallions—were required to explain where they had been, and what they suspected (or maybe hoped or feared) might be coming. Disciplinary stakes are hardly colonial stakes, but there is a lesson here: to make the world knowable, especially one in flux, may take more than the usual evidence. And the stakes can be high. As the essays here suggest, viable methods for knowing and understanding eighteenth-century worlds may come from experience, from absence (not only presence), from the material world, from our engagements with students, and even concepts that are widespread but about which we do not agree.
At HECAA@35, perhaps we will revisit such themes, but we might also be captivated by others.
Elizabeth Saari Browne is Assistant Professor of Art History and Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia in Athens, GA
Dana Leibsohn is the Alice Pratt Brown Professor of Art at Smith College in Northampton, MA
[1] On this event and those who traveled with Aguiguida, see, for instance,”Relation de l’arrivée en France de quatre Sauvages de Missicipi, de leur sejour, & des audiences qu’ils ont eues du Roi, des Princes du Sang, de la Compagnie des Indes, avec les complimens qu’ils ont fait, les honneurs & les presens qu’ils ont reçûs, &c.,” Mercure de France (December 1725); and Garrett Wright, “‘To the Other Side of the Sun,’: Indigenous Diplomacy and Power in the Midcontinent,” Kansas History 41, no. 4 (Winter 2018/2019): 197-209.
Cite this note as: Elizabeth Saari Browne and Dana Leibsohn, “Provocations from HECAA@30” Journal18 (October 2024), https://www.journal18.org/7433.
License: CC BY-NC
Journal18 is published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC International 4.0 license. Use of any content published in Journal18 must be for non-commercial purposes and appropriate credit must be given to the author of the content. Details for appropriate citation appear above.
