Perspectives on Cultural Histories
The promotion of interdisciplinary projects has been one of the key objectives of the Arts Graduate Centre since its foundation. In developing research ideas between Schools and Departments, our university becomes a more diverse and innovative centre of learning.
During 2010 the AGC held an essay prize entitled ‘Perspektiv: Who are you and what can you see?’ which aimed to promote interdisciplinarity among graduate students. Participants were asked to adopt an interdisciplinary approach in a piece of writing that engaged with perspective as a theme. Rather than producing a research-based paper, students were asked to write a creative response to the question ‘who are you and what can you see’?
Submissions were received from a number of departments and disciplines and the success of the essay prize led to an interdisciplinary symposium on Monday 14th June 2010 organised by Zalfa Feghali of American and Canadian Studies. The symposium, called ‘Perspectives on Cultural Histories: an Interdisciplinary Symposium’, ensured productive dialogues between different areas of study, building on the idea that all research contributes to mapping cultural histories in its combination of discipline perspective and context in time and space.
The symposium programme began with the winning essayists, Eireann Lorsung and Linda Marchant, presenting papers that reflected their interpretations of the theme in their life and their work. These personal histories set the scene for academic investigation built around three key themes – Conflict(ed) Histories, Queer(ing) Histories and Methodologies. Postgraduate researchers from American and Canadian Studies, Cultural Studies, French Studies, Film Studies and Theology all considered how their work operates within a cultural-historical framework.
This publication contains a selection of papers from that symposium; Linda Marchant’s prize winning essay ‘When a Picture Writes’, Hocine Dimerdji and Pierre-Alexis Mevel’s paper ‘Translation and the Simulacrum, or the Centrality of Perspective in Translation’ and Leila Becker’s paper ‘From Star Trek to Glee: Queer Perspectives on Slashing Television History’.
Each examines notions of perspective and cultural history from a different intellectual approach. Marchant’s essay is written from the point of view of a photograph and imagines what a picture might say if it were given a voice. Dimerdji and Mevel discuss the concept of perspective as central to the translation project, using the Deleuzian concept of the simulacrum. Becker considers how slash-fiction can establish a new queer perspective for the historical output of television characters. The topics are so different but each paper shares a common goal - to develop an in-depth analysis of the topic by engaging with the idea of perspective.
Whether the essayists are discussing male character pairings in 1970s television programmes, Barthes’ views on photography, or ideas of resemblance and difference in language translation, they engage with cultural history with each contributor asking what we can learn by examining a particular camera angle or listening to a conversation from both objective and subversive perspectives.
Whether the essayists are discussing male character pairings in 1970s television programmes, Barthes’ views on photography, or ideas of resemblance and difference in language translation, they engage with cultural history with each contributor asking what we can learn by examining a particular camera angle or listening to a conversation from both objective and subversive perspectives.
This publication builds on the AGC’s commitment to the promotion of interdisciplinarity, asking the reader to contemplate the notion that interdisciplinarity is itself an exercise in perspective; by engaging with this method and by listening to colleagues from other fields we can increase understanding in our own area of scholarly interest. We hope that with this publication the conversation has been opened for further interdisciplinary dialogues among scholars at the University of Nottingham.
Mary Jane Boland
PhD Candidate
Department of Art History
University of Nottingham
