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The University of California, Santa Barbara’s Art History Graduate Student Association presents its 45th Annual Academic Symposium: Haunting the Canon: The Super-phenomena in Art on Friday, April 23 from 9am-12pm. Read on to learn more and to register for the symposium!
The University of California, Santa Barbara's Art History Graduate Student Association presents its 45th Annual Academic Symposium: Haunting the Canon: The Super-phenomena in Art
When: Friday, April 23, 2021 from 9am-12pm PST
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Robb HernaÌndez, Associate Professor of English at Fordham University
Religious historian and theorist Jeffrey J. Kripal conceptualizes "super-phenomena" as that which pertain to the unknown and impossible in Western thought: "spirits, possession, vision, deification, the miraculous, magical powers, and the paranormal" (Religion: Super Religion, xviii). These otherworldly themes are the subject of recent scholarship and exhibitions, including "Past Futures: Science Fiction, Space Travel, and Postwar Art of the Americas" (Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 2015), "Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas" (UCR ARTSblock, 2017), and "Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art" (Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2020). Together, these projects generate new pathways for meaningful cultural analyses and visual dialogues that revise and haunt the canon of art history.
This year's symposium concerns a broad spectrum of super-phenomena and futurist thinking to foster alternative critical directions that move beyond colonialist conceptions of mystical, spiritual, and otherworldly subjects. Their goal is to promote discussion with other fields - historical, social, political, cultural, scientific, technological - to engage new perspectives and strategies of alternate world-making.
Anticipated topics include but are not limited to:
- Haunting, monstering, and revenge
- Decolonial futurisms
- Science fiction and posthumanism
- Ghosts in the museum: politics of collecting and display
- Theories of magic and belief systems
- Myth, legend, and lore
- Astrology and cosmology
- Magic(al) Realism
- Superstition, miracles, and ritual
- Totems, votive practices, and relics
- Surrealism, the psychic, and the psychological
- Orientalism, cultural appropriation, and Western magic shows
- Performance, theatricality, and the carnivalesque
- Transmutation/transfiguration and alchemy
- Liminality, thresholds, and rites of passage
- Camp and the uncanny
- The paranormal and extraterrestrial
Click here to register
