"Global Perspectives in the Humanities and the Social Sciences"
This is the first of a series of four lectures within the framework of the international seminar Global Perspectives in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, organized by Diana Roig Sanz (Ramón y Cajal Research Fellow), Neus Rotger, Teresa Iribarren and Carles Prado from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) Faculty of Arts and Humanities. Digitizing Global Art History. The Decolonial Potential of a Very “Western” Method will take place at the UOC TIbidabo building (Avinguda Tibidabo, 39-43, 08035 Barcelona), on 6 April, from 2:30 to 3:330 pm in the Josep Laporte room. Entrance is free, but we kindly ask attendees to register here. The seminar programme can be consulted here.
Given by Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel (École Normale Supérieure), one of the world's leading scholars in the field of social art history, this lecture proposes a reflection on the methodologies which might help us to globalize and even to decolonize art history, departing from the modernist canon. As historians like James Elkins have continued to remind us, nothing, or so little, has changed in the way modern and modernist collections are exhibited and in the way the history of art is told. We continue to discuss the same artists, the same places and the same movements, with few moments of self-correction. This is why decolonial thinkers like De Sousa Santos call for a “new ecology of knowledges”, proposing to splice scientific methods with other ways of thinking (non-Cartesian, non-Western, etc.). The decolonization of our minds is a profoundly difficult process. We might begin by decolonizing our methods, thereby putting some distance between ourselves and our research objects and the discourse that has overdetermined them for so long. Quantitative, cartographic, sociological and transnational approaches can help us to do so.
Joyeux-Prunel argues that the “distant reading” of sources with digital methods shows previously unobserved phenomena and helps us to reconsider existing hierarchies in art history. With this horizontal re-reading comes a new perspective. One which nuances national histories through a transnational and global approach. One which attenuates the monocentric tendencies of a discipline that accords an excessive amount of importance to a handful of cities (Paris and New York) and instead emphasizes circulation. One which challenges the relevance of monographic studies and their hagiographic tendency, in favour of a comparative approach where every kind of actor has a relative position. One which cares for the social as much as the history of forms.
Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. She works on the history of the avant-gardes from a global and transnational perspective, an area of research that brought her to challenge the methodologies used in the study of art globalization and explore quantitative and cartographic approaches, digital humanities, and collaborative research. She is the founder and director of the ARTL@S project, launched in 2009.
Global Perspectives in the Humanities and the Social Sciences
This lecture is framed within the international seminar Global Perspectives in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, which aims to analyse the use of “global” and “globalization” in different areas of the humanities and the social sciences. To do so, four world-renowned researchers (Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Jernej Habjan, Peter Wagner and Katja Naumann) will discuss how these concepts have been developed and applied in recent years to their area of study: art history, literary studies, sociology and history. The main goal of the seminar is to discuss, from a transnational and interdisciplinary perspective, the theoretical and methodological approaches that have been produced around these relevant notions.
This seminar, being hosted by the UOC from April to June 2017, is supported by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and the research project MapModern: Mapping Hispanic Modernity. Cross-border Literary Networks and Cultural Mediators (1908-1939), managed by Diana Roig Sanz and funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness.