Iconohistories of the American West

Severin Fowles
Associate Professor, Barnard College

Europeans of the sixteenth century brought much more than the guns, germs, and steel that stand at the heart of our dominant histories of the American West. The colonists also introduced a swirl of new images organized around logics that were foreign to indigenous communities and often strongly dissonant with their own understandings of what an image is and how images work. In this talk, Fowles draws upon a decade-long archaeological survey of the rock art of the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument to map out the major transformations in image production in northern New Mexico over the past 5,000 years.

Wednesday, November 7, 6–7:30 pm

“‘Of a Remarkably Down-Cast Countenance, and a Black and Copper Coloured Mixt Complexion”: Fugitive Slave Advertisements and/as Portraiture in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Canada

Charmaine A. Nelson
Professor of Art History, McGill University

Found throughout the Transatlantic World, fugitive slave advertisements demonstrate the ubiquity of African resistance to slavery. While such newspaper notices have been exhaustively studied since the 1970s in the Caribbean, South America, and in the USA on a state-by-state basis, scholars of Canadian slavery have mainly studied the fugitive slave archive for other ends. In this talk, Nelson proposes the study of Canadian (Nova Scotia and Quebec) and Jamaican fugitive slave advertisements, alongside portraiture and genre studies as a means of comparing the visual dimensions of creolization in slave minority and slave majority sites of the British Atlantic world.

Tuesday, November 13, 6–7:30 pm

Symposium—Khipus: Writing Histories In and From Knots

This symposium brings together eight Andean scholars to discuss and debate the question of whether or not, and if so how, we might draw on knotted cord accounts from the pre-Inka Wari, the Inka empire, and those from Andean subjects of the Spanish Colonial state in order to begin to understand how Andean peoples constructed representations of their own societies.

Friday, February 1, 9:30 am–5:40 pm

Race Work Made Material: An Archaeology of African American Women’s Social Activism in the Twentieth Century

Anna S. Agbe-Davies
Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Wednesday, February 27, 6–7:30 pm

Archaeological fieldwork at two sites (the Phyllis Wheatley Home for Girls, in Chicago, and the childhood home of rights activist Pauli Murray, in Durham, NC) provides new insights into settings where race, gender, and civic activism are front and center. The former was a charitable institution run by African American women to aid others navigating the Great Migration northward. The latter housed the multigenerational family that profoundly shaped Murray’s sense of justice and human rights. This presentation brings together material and archival evidence to consider the circumstances under which ordinary people, day in and day out, responded to the challenges posed by the patriarchal and racist ideologies of their day.