Centre for Research into Dynamics of Civilisation

Dynamics of Civilisation

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Events

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The Homoerotics of Orientalism

A conversation with Joseph Boone

Thursday 5th March 2015

Respondents: Natasha Eaton (UCL) and Daniel Orrells (Warwick)

Time: 5pm to 7pm

Location: Gordon House, Room 106

29 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PP

One of the largely untold stories of Orientalism is the degree to which the Middle East has been associated with 'deviant' male homosexuality by scores of Western travellers, historians, writers, and artists for well over four hundred years.  And this story stands to shatter our preconceptions of Orientalism.

Joseph Boone illuminates why and how the Islamicate world became the locus for such fantasies and desires, revealing how the cultural exchanges between Middle East and West have always been reciprocal and often mutual, always amatory as well as bellicose. 

Joseph Allen Boone is Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California and the author of Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism, Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction, and (most recently) The Homoerotics of Orientalism.

All are welcome. The event is free and no registration is required.

Supported by CREDOC.

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Civilisation and its Critiques: An Art-Historical Perspective

Friday 13th March 2015

Time: 4pm to 6.30pm

Location: Chandler G10

2 Wakefield Street, London WC1N 1PF

In 1969, Kenneth Clark’s BBC series Civilisation: A Personal View presented a very traditional British notion of civilisation to a wide and international public. It was sovereign, patrician and western, and it was framed around great works of art. From that point on, Clark’s series became a touchstone for critiques of this limited conception of both civilisation and art, from John Berger’s counter-series Ways of Seeing to other accounts that took up perspectives of class, gender and colonialism.

The BBC’s announcement of plans for a new series offers an opportunity to reconsider this crucial moment and look afresh at the unstable and geographically diverse way these critiques were negotiated within the discipline of Art History. Similar critiques were developed in other countries, but against the background of very different institutional, generational, historical and discursive conditions. Speakers will give short papers on developments in the UK, France and Germany.

Speakers:

Hannah Feldman (Northwestern University, Art History)

Adrian Rifkin (Goldsmiths, Dept of Art)

Frederic Schwartz (UCL, History of Art)

All are welcome. The event is free and no registration is required.

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The shape of ancient civilisation

Ian Morris (Professor of Classics, Stanford University)

Thursday 26th March 2015

Time: 6pm to 7.45pm

Location: Institute of Archaeology Lecture Theatre; 

followed by a reception from 7.45-8.30pm in the Anthropology Common Room

Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT

Since modern scholarship began in the eighteenth century, it has focused not on 'ancient civilisation' but 'ancient civilisations'. Researchers divided the world up into Classics, Egyptology, Assyriology, Indology, Sinology and a host of other regional specialities. Focusing on the details of particular languages and cultural traditions, they emphasized the uniqueness of ancient civilisations rather than global patterns. In this lecture, Ian Morris argues that we are now in a position to tell a coherent story about ancient civilisation at the global level, tracing a ten-thousand-year tale of rising scale, development, peace, and prosperity--to be weighed against a parallel tale of rising inequality. Global antiquity culminated in a massive series of crises that rocked the Old World and then the New. Until we can make sense of ancient civilisation at a global scale, we cannot hope to make sense of the human story as a whole.

Respondents:

Kevin Macdonald (UCL African Archaeology)

Corinna Riva (UCL Mediterranean Archaeology)

All are welcome. The event is free and no registration is required.

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A workshop will be held the following day to discuss these ideas further:

‘Antiquity’ and the dynamics of civilization

Friday 27th March 2015

Time: 1-6pm

Location: Pearson Lecture Theatre, UCL

Ancient history and ancient civilization enjoy an ambiguous status in modern western thought. On the one hand, the very roots of modern civilization are thought to lie in antiquity: Mesopotamia and Egypt, along with China, have traditionally been regarded as the earliest regions to produce cultures complex enough to merit the label ‘civilization’, while Greece and Rome have long been credited with laying the foundations of modern European civilization in particular. On the other hand, antiquity is also widely seen as fundamentally different from the modern world: in the popular imagination, it is a ‘lost world’ of ‘mysteries’ and exotic practices, while among academic historians it is bracketed with the Middle Ages as a pre-modern, pre-industrial world with social, economic and political structures and systems of values different from our own. Both of these contrasting perspectives are encouraged by the label ‘antiquity’, which suggests extreme remoteness in time but also hints at an age of origins.

The workshop addresses the question whether it is meaningful to define all human history before AD 500 (or indeed AD 1500 outside Europe), as ‘ancient’ and to treat this span of time either as the first stage in a largely linear development towards contemporary civilization or as a phase of development separated from modernity by a Great Transformation. Do ‘ancient’ societies have features which they share with one another but which distinguish them from modern (or medieval) society – as for example Max Weber, Karl Polanyi and Moses Finley argued with regard to social and economic structures? Or do the dynamics of civilization within ‘antiquity’ result in societies and cultures that differ structurally from one another but have in some cases important features in common with developments in the medieval and modern world? And how does ‘antiquity’ in modern western history compare to its equivalent in the history of other regions, such as China?

Programme:

1.30-1.40 Introduction by Hans van Wees (UCL)

1.40-2.30 Rethinking Middle Eastern antiquity by Eleanor Robson (UCL)

2.30-3.20 Antiquity and the Middle Ages by David d’Avray (UCL)

3.20-3.50 Tea/coffee

3.50-4.40 Antiquity and China by Wang Mingming (Peking)

4.40-5.00 Response by Ian Morris (Stanford)

5.00-6.00 General discussion

6.00-7.00 Drinks reception

All are welcome. The event is free and no registration is required.