Arpeggio 2021 Fall Speaker Symposium: “Inclusion/Exclusion: A Panel on Cultural Practices and Responses to Otherness and Marginalization”

In the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests against racial injustice, we are compelled to examine how culture can perpetuate structures of exclusion and violence. The built environment, visual media, as well as hegemonic intellectual discourse and cultural institutions have long been complicit in the "Othering" of those whose skin color, gender, sexuality, age, nationality, ability or religion (among other identities) have challenged the status quo. How have individuals and collectivities relegated to the margins responded to the epistemic violences of the canon? And how can we dismantle the normative assumptions of our disciplines in order to work toward justice and equality in representation, both visual and political? These are some of the guiding questions of this year's Arpeggio symposium. This panel will bring together three guest speakers - specialists in art and architectural history - who prioritize marginalized perspectives and whose work makes valuable contributions to deconstructing mechanisms of exclusion experienced in visual and material cultural production across time and place.

1:00 PM Introduction with opening remarks by Richard J. Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art & Art History, Duke University
1:20 PM Zirwat Chowdhury (University of California, Los Angeles), "The Margin's Paternity"
2:10 PM Ana María León (University of Michigan), "The Settler Colonial Exhibitionary Complex"
3:15 PM Lyneise Williams (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), "Erasure: Glamorous Misdirections and Technical Obliterations in Early Twentieth-Century Mass Media and Contemporary Archives
4:05 PM Panel discussion

Zoom link for registration: https://duke.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUvceqppjwrEtPYCiUb-OWBJhB72BEOI…

This event has been generously sponsored by the following Duke departments: Art, Art History, and Visual Studies; Asian and Middle Eastern Studies; Cultural Anthropology; Computational Media, Arts & Cultures; Duke University Libraries; International Comparative Studies; Information Science + Studies; Romance Studies.