Impressions and Exchanges in Transoceanic Journeys from the 16th to the 19th Century
This call for papers is for a series of three conferences to be held in Paris and Salamanca in the spring of 2024, proposing a different perspective for the Atlantic Routes and the objects and spaces associated with early modern global exchange.
Traveling objects
“The material culture of the Atlantic routes, encounters of men, cultures and things.”
- Paris, Institut national d’histoire de l’art.
- On February 21, 2024.
New towns and old settlements in Latin America
“City planning, architecture, building decorations and the men who made them in the shadow of the European influence.”
- Paris, Institut national d’histoire de l’art.
- On April 17, 2024.
Leaving a trail
“The voice of memories, reports and maps beyond the fascination and fear for and of the New World.”
- Salamanca, Palacio de Maldonado – Centro de Estudios Brasileños, Universidad de Salamanca.
- On May 15, 2024.
This project aims to revisit the topic of transoceanic relations between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries while posing new questions. The project does not propose an approach purely targeted to how European society had received and used the travel reports and products arrived from American lands, but instead seeks to evaluate the influences and consequences - cultural, technical, artistic and social - that the exchanges had had overseas on local populations. It also probes how items and symbols closely linked to the cultures of the American territories had been reinterpreted and deprived of their original meaning in the new environment in which they had been introduced to after being brought to Europe, thus also involving the sphere of memory and the Intangible Cultural Heritage.
If the common thread proposed is that of the activity of the Dutch West India Company, the project also aims to consider the whole vast cultural, diplomatic, artistic, scientific, anthropological and gastronomic panorama that the approach to such a topic necessarily brings, and will therefore also evaluate the interactions with travels and exchanges also made by other European states and kingdoms in the period considered.
The second meeting will focus more on the urban installations and the architectural and social aspects of the new settlements, while the third which will concern travelers, travel impressions and cartography, a first opportunity for comparison will be dedicated to the material aspects, therefore to the objects that have been used and obtained in exchanges, explorations or raids, and to the engineering aspects, which concern the ships used to transport them.
Submissions
Please send an abstract for a 20-minute unpublished contribution and a short bio by October 15, 2023, to [email protected], specifying in the object the title of the workshop you are applying for.
Possible topics include collecting, memory, travel literature, material culture, engineering, anthropology. Presentations will be in English, French, Spanish or Portuguese and will last a maximum of 20 minutes.
The organizers, Maddalena Bellavitis and José Manuel Santos Pérez, director of the Centro de Estudios Brasileños of the Universidad de Salamanca, will notify the selected proposals at the end of October 2023.