Tomás Harris Lecture: Jennifer Nelson

Lecture series: 'Art and the Other: The Ends of World Christendom'

Art is a form of cultural production that anticipates shifts in its own context of reception. In the second half of the sixteenth century, elite and bourgeois objects and texts in various media evince a characteristic rupture between documentary/iconographic elements--which reinforce an existing world order and hierarchy--and other, imagined worlds sensually offered as lived experience. This liberatory mismatch reappears in a sinister form in the visual culture surrounding efforts to expand, defend, and police Christian territory in Southeast Asia, New Spain, Southeast Europe, and even the Low Countries. In illustrated encyclopedias, news prints and maps, paintings, and pamphlets, makers deploy documentary elements of pictures and texts in order to establish diagnostic criteria of un-Christian disqualification from full humanity, while enhancing the affective properties of sinful practices for Christian relish in and appropriation of un-Christian behaviors. This exploitative structure is the originary betrayal of art's liberatory promise.

Lecture 1: Test and Taste: The Ship at the End of Christendom

When: Tuesday 21 May, 18:00-21:00
Lecture: Roberts Building, G06 Sir Ambrose Fleming LT (18:00-19:30)
Reception: G02 Foyer, Roberts Building (19:30-21:00)

Seminar: Putting the Art in History: Using Art's Mystique toward Social Justice
[Brief passages for shared discussion from Saidiya Hartman, Michael Ann Holly, Ananda Cohen-Aponte; students urged to bring an image from their own work]

When: Wednesday 22 May, 12:00-14:00
Where: Seminar Rooms 3 and 4, 20 Gordon Square
Open to UCL students only

Lecture 2: Vicaritas: Bruegel's Antisocial Media

When:Thursday 23 May, 18:00-20:00
Where: Roberts Building G06 Sir Ambrose Fleming LT