Forging New Directions through Bridge-Building: (Post-)Migration and Transcultural Studies.

Description

In this panel, anthropologist Cathrine Bublatzky (Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, University of Heidelberg) and art historian Anne Ring Petersen (Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, UCPH) discussed how (post)migrant and diasporic perspectives can be used to broaden and refine the transcultural approach. They also related the overarching methodological and theoretical issue of transculturality to the challenges associated with the study of contemporary art and culture in migration contexts and ‘the postmigrant condition’ (Schramm et al. 2019) by engaging with two specific sets of visual practice: photography and art in public space. They unpacked the topic by introducing their individual approaches to bridging transcultural and (post)migration studies in short statements before engaging with each other’s work in a short dialogue that merged into an open discussion.
In her present project on Iranian artists and documentarian photographers in the European diaspora, Bublatzky developed a critical view on diaspora aesthetics (Werbner and Fumanti 2013) from the perspectives of transcultural and (post)migrant studies. She argued that photography cultivates a sensorium, a productive space of distinctive “visualities” or “ways of seeing” that provides possibilities of critical engagement and encounters in (post)migration societies. Considering photography fundamentally as social practice, it positions photographers and artists as denizens in (post)migration worldmaking (Meskimmon 2017). As such photography offers multiple potential as a medium of memory, nostalgic, and critical engagement and conditions how people produce and make sense of photographic images to connect with members of different diasporic groups and/or their personal experiences and knowledge. This, as Bublatzky argued, unifies in a transcultural and (post)migrant situation that goes beyond national identity formation.
Ring Petersen used her new research project ‘Togetherness in Difference: Reimagining Identities, Communities and Histories through Art’ as a point of departure for considering how some of the limits of the postmigrant and transcultural approaches can be overcome by coupling them: the risk of methodological nationalism associated with the postmigrant focus on conflicts, conditions and phenomena internal to the nation-state; and the potentially homogenising group-oriented approach to transcultural identity formation in anthropological and sociological diaspora studies, which have often provided the authorising concept of transculturality for art history ‒ a concept that is counterproductive to studies in the highly individualised practices of contemporary artists. In her statement, Ring Petersen focused on art in public urban space and proposed that, by dint of its ‘popular’ modes of address to multiple publics, public art has the potential to offer communities new points of identification beyond monocultural nationalism and to express a postmigrant and transcultural sense of belonging.

Period	31 Oct 2019
Event title	New Directions in Transcultural Studies
Event type	Conference
Location	Heidelberg, GermanyShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International