Artistic Imagination and Social Imaginaries–Polysemous Readings of Historical Travelling Accounts

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue of Arts (ISSN 2076-0752) inquires into the history and legacy of colonialism, by gathering researchers, artists and activists to read medieval travelling accounts together. We welcome inquiries that probe into texts written in an ethnographic genre describing the period when European theologians, missionaries and merchants had encounters with new-to-them lands and peoples. Particularly accounts written by scholars who started to expand their thinking away from a medieval cosmology that was bound to the rhythms of nature and liturgical cycles that sanctified relationships between creation and Creator—an enchanted social imaginary (Taylor, 2007;1989)—to more extractivist ways of relating to the world. (Pratt, 2008; Mignolo, 1995; 2018). We are not only tracking the western impetus toward Eurocentric scientistic universalism in relation to living with matter, bodies and a created world of minerals, plants and animals (Carter, 2023; Jennings, 2017). We also acknowledge that theology and spiritual practices—both in Europe and elsewhere—have not only inflicted harm through dominion, they have also provided hope in times of trouble and freedom to the oppressed (Thurman, 1996; Freire, 1970; Russell, 1988; Holmes, 2017). This is why we want to listen to, sense, imagine and open up an arena for other stories, those that speak through the artwork, crafts, music, poetry, liturgical and ritual practices that honored local, feminist, traditional and indigenous ways of life. There are also examples of mutual learning and encounters that lead to awe and a sense of knowledge created together with, and for, mutual flourishing. How can we not only hear but also share such narratives?

This Issue stems from a series of transdisciplinary symposia organized under the Praxis of Social Imaginaries project (2023-2027). Here, artistic research methods and works, combined with action- and community-based research, aim to reinterpret the meanings of these accounts for the present. Our research community comprises individuals from diverse scholarly and artistic backgrounds, specializing in both indigenous and traditional knowledge practices, as well as experiences of inclusion and exclusion. We also represent a variety of cultural backgrounds, ages and situated knowledge practices, which have informed our collaborative processes of experimental sessions and community learning.

We pose questions such as the following: ‘What can be learned from descriptions of encounters with “the Other” and unknown lands, creatures and places?’; ‘How can we engage with the minority or silenced voices in these colonial accounts?’; and ‘What role can various artistic practices play in reimagining different worlds and retelling “lost” stories?’

Through these polysemous readings, we aim at investigating new and innovative ways of how past narratives can support the acknowledgement of present-day power imbalances. We suggest that a move away from text-centered archives as the only source of historical writing together with a performative paradigm of investigation may open up new ways of understanding both the past and the present. We invite authors willing to explore permeability within disciplinary thinking and sensory practices like eating, smelling, touching, moving with and singing the texts to expand the embodied ways of knowing together with both human and non-human others.

Background

The theoretical and methodological context of this Special Issue can be understood as a threefold cord where history, art and indigenous and traditional epistemologies are intertwined. Firstly, we build on the work of Geraldine Heng, who argues that race and racism in the medieval period were formed along religious and cultural lines before the formation of epidermal characteristics. Additionally, Willie James Jennings states that a theological social imaginary, formed through encounters between those who stood at the centre of the establishments of medieval institutions and those at the borders of that world, created ‘racial optics’ and global extractive exploitation practices (Heng, 2018; Jennings, 2010; Carter, 2008). Our project returns to foundational texts from this period to learn from the past, understand the present and inspire future changes.

The chosen travel accounts of this project document a period when the medieval Christian cosmology, which focused on reading the world polysemously, evolved into a universalizing theoretical and dogmatic structure, from which the social imaginary of Western university sciences emerged (Mignolo, 2021; Liboiron, 2021; Harrison, 2001).

In this Special Issue, we explore encounters with several key texts:

• William of Rubruck: Itinerarium fratris Willielmi de Rubruquis de ordine fratrum Minorum (1253);
• Marco Polo’s Travels (1300);
• Ibn Khaldun’s travels in Africa, found in The Muqaddimah (1377);
• Bartolomé de las Casas: A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542);
• Olaus Magnus (1490-1553) Description of the Northern Peoples.

In addition to the historical texts, artistic practices and creating a dialogue with the arts are essential to our work. Following the path pioneered by Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vazquez, on speaking about the need for a decolonial AestheSis (2013), this Special Issue invited contributions that centre the sensory over the visual and permeability over siloed systems of knowledge. Kathryn Dickason’s (2023) recent work shows that the artwork accompanying some of these travel accounts, and the depictions of artistic practices within them, entangle stories of dance with extreme forms of otherization, evoking subhumanity. So, a simple turn from text to art is not enough if we want to open new vistas. Instead, many authors argue that dance or other performative practices carry the capacity to revolt against colonial authorities, opening important inquiries into how different arts and otherization practices are entangled (Alzaldúa, 1987; Wilson, Rivera, 2021).

We also build on the work of the medievalists Sheeta Chaganti (2023) and Carol Symes (2011), who urge scholars to consider the gap between what is visible on manuscript pages and what might have been visible or audible in the past. They ask, ‘What is the relationship between what was written down and what was really going on?’ (Symes, 2011;33). Pioneering authors like Barbara A. Holmes (2017) and Saidiya Hartman (2008; 2022) suggest that researchers must look beyond written records to ethically give a voice to oppressed people.

Holmes suggests that there is always an available language, 'whether it is drum talk or the mumbled laments of the stricken.’ Silence is a world in itself, and from this world of silence, speech learns to form itself in various ways. To retrieve lost legacies, we must return to the past to see what remains in the present. Often, something occurred in the past 'so deep, so powerful, and so rich’ that it affected the rest of the world (Holmes 2017:49). The arts can play a pivotal role in these investigations.

Our last and third point of view is raised by the scholars and practitioners in our community that have indigenous or traditional and situated knowledge perspectives to bring to the investigations. In contemporary research, decolonial methodologies offer alternative means of knowledge circulation, especially for researchers interested in alternative forms of inquiry. Popular frameworks include the following:

• Patricia Hill Collins: Situated Knowledge;
• Santos Boaventura: Epistemologies of the South;
• Linda Smith: Decolonizing Methodologies in Indigenous Research;
• Shawn Wilson: Research Is Ceremony : Indigenous Research Methods;
• Gloria Anzaldua: Borderlands—La frontera : The New Mestiza;
• Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vazquez: Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings.

These approaches, categorized as decolonial research methodologies, use methods such as

• Taking everyday experiences, bodies and social movements as text;
• Privileging storytelling and oral historicity;
• Granting epistemic justice to testimonials.

Our community values traditional forms of art and artistic research practices, as well as the embodied knowledge found in crafts, gardening and cooking. We aim to explore the ‘cracks’ in colonial power structures through art, storytelling and re-telling historical accounts from new perspectives (Anzaldua 1987; Mignolo, 2013). This is what we call a polysemous reading practice based on artistic interventions.

We invite contributions to this Special Issue that align with some or all of the methods described above and which address the following themes:

• Arts and Othering: Exploring how art has been used to depict and challenge the concept of ‘otherness’.
• Medieval Travel Accounts Re-visited/Re-interpreted: Re-examining medieval travel narratives to uncover new insights and perspectives.
• Landscapes and Mapping: Analyzing medieval and indigenous approaches to geography and cartography.
• Geography in Context: Studying the significance of crossings (sea, land and rivers) and landmarks in medieval geography.
  • Hospitality and Ceremony: Exploring the customs and rituals of hospitality in medieval and indigenous societies.
• Rituals, Celebrations and Festivities: Investigating the role of rituals and celebrations in movements between the medieval and today.
  • Medieval Traveling Through the Senses: Delving into the sensory experiences of medieval travelers, including sights, sounds, smells, tastes and tactile impressions.
• Character Through Clothing, Food and Gestures: Understanding identities through their material culture and social practices in the medieval and today.
  • Contemporary manifestions of medieval encounter misunderstandings—land ownership, nomadic paths, borders and blockages.
  • Ecologies—medieval experiences of other-than-human encounters and contemporary perspectives (animism, other-than-human personhood and posthuman ecologies).

References

Alzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands-La Frontera : The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Book Company, 1987.

Carter, J. Kameron. Race: A Theological Account. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Carter, J. Kameron. The Anarchy of Black Religion: A Mystic Song. Durhamn and London: Duke University Press, 2023.

Chaganti, Seeta. “Dance, Institution, Abolition.” postmedieval. Special issue: Legacies of medieval dance Volume 14, issue 2-3 (2023): 267–89. 10.1057/s41280-023-00276-0

Dickason, Kathryn. “The Colonization of Medieval Dance.” Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 54:1 (2023): 313–58.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 1970.

Harrison, Peter. The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14. 10.1215/-12-2-1

Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. WW Norton & Company, 2022.

Heng, Geraldine. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Holmes, Barbara A. Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church.

Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017.

Jennings, Willie James. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. New Haven / London: Yale University Press, 2010.

Jennings, Willie James. “Disfigurations of Christian Identity: Performing Identity as Theological Method.” In Disfigurations of Christian Identity: Performing Identity as Theological Method, 67–67. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Liboiron, Max. Pollution is Colonialism. Duke University Press, 2021.

Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. University of Michigan Press, 1995.

Mignolo, Walter D. The Politics of Decolonial Investigations. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.

Mignolo, Walter D.; Walsh, Catherine E. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.

Mignolo, Walter D.; Rolando Vazquez. “Decolonial Aesthesis: Colonial Wounds/decolonial Healings.” Decolonial AestheSis in Social Text (2013):

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes

Travel Writing and Transculturation. London, New York: Routledge, 2008.

Rivera, Mayra. “Embodied Counterpoetics: Sylvia Wynter on Religion and Race.” In Embodied Counterpoetics: Sylvia Wynter on Religion and Race, edited by An; Eleanor Craig Yountae, Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.

Russell, Letty M.; Kwok Pui-lan; Ada Maríia Isasi-Díiaz; Katie Geneva Cannon, ed.

Inheriting Our Mothers’ Gardens: Feminist Theology in Third World Perspective

Louisville, Kentucky: The Westminster Press, 1988.

Symes, Carol. “The Medieval Archive and the History of Theatre: Assessing the Written and Unwritten Evidence for Premodern Performance.” Theatre Survey 52, no. 1 (2011): 29–58.

Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self–the Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1989.

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge Massachusetts and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.

Thurman, Howard. Jesus and the Disinherited. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996. Wilson, Shawn. Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Halifax &

Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2008.

Dr. Laura Hellsten
Dr. Eduardo Abrantes
Guest Editors

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• colonialism
• artistic research
• medieval travel accounts
• practices of inclusion/exclusion
• decolonial methodologies
• social imaginaries
• transdisciplinary collaborations
• indigenous and traditional knowledge practices
• embodiment