CALL FOR PAPERS
Dublin (25-31 July 1999)
In recent years, academic history writing has become more attentive to the importance of visual evidence. One result of this trend is the appearance of a number of studies which examine the ways in which power and status were represented through iconographical programmes in art, architecture and design. In these efforts, political historians could draw on an iconographical idiom in art history, which places more emphasis on the intellectual content than the stylistic characteristics of images.
Yet historians frequently continue to treat images as post facto illustrations of political arguments, and as idealised depictions of the political status quo. On the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies' Tenth International Congress in Dublin (25-31 July 1999), I am organising a Session which seeks to develop an alternative approach. Under the title "Image and Identity: Visual arguments in eighteenth-century political debates", the session will examine the CONSTITUTIVE role of images in politics. I believe that such an approach will open up a new perspective onto the European political landscape of the eighteenth century in two ways:
1. In eighteenth-century Europe, different types of political regimes produced different types of sources. Emerging 'enlightened absolutist' states like Prussia generated large quantities of those official files which were to become the very basis of historical writing in the nineteenth century, and have thus attracted a large share of modern historians' attention. The politics characteristic of smaller or less bureaucratically centralised political entities in the eighteenth century, however, as well as those of aristocratic and bourgeois opposition groups, were often conducted in a manner of which only fragments were recorded in written sources. In this context, 'images' such as landscape gardens, architecture, town planning, and painting not only represented power as such, but formulated and expressed very differentiated and complex political strategies. The session will demonstrate how these less conspicuous agendas can be elucidated through the examination of their visual representation, and how this necessitates a re-adjustment in our general view of the nature of politics in the eighteenth century.
2. The session will also address the related theme of how such representations informed one another across national boundaries. Visual language played a vital role in the process of cultural transfer which was so crucial in shaping the eighteenth-century political landscape. By focusing on the emulation of 'images' as starting points for the introduction of wider social, economic, and political strategies of 'improvement', this session will question the received view of the Enlightenment as a primarily philosophical movement which was "applied" to politics. By examining visual evidence, papers should unearth a much more complex picture of mutual influence and inspiration between different types of enlightened regimes.
To avoid over-abstraction and to encourage audience participation, I suggest that speakers examine one particular set of images which they view as representative of a broader trend. Ideally, examples should be chosen from different visual genres (such as painting, popular prints, landscape design, architecture or urban planning). Connections between these may be established in individual papers by encouraging a thematic approach, i.e. to examine the representation of one particular idea or argument in a range of related images.
Details of the Dublin Congress and the registration procedure can be found on http://www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/so/dublin/99circ2.en.html. The deadline for submitting papers is . Proposals can be sent directly to me at the address below.
Dr Maiken Umbach
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