Transcultural Encounters: Postcolonialism in the Visual Arts

政治和媒体修辞充斥着对源自欧洲边界以外的文化信仰和习俗的简化看法。视觉艺术揭示了最近大量的作品挑战这种对“差异”的负面看法。这些作品探索了由于移民到欧洲而产生的复杂的跨文化身份，以展示文化共存的可能性，同时避免了极端的贫民区化和单向同化。这个项目的主要目的是在欧洲和非欧洲法语地区和国家（包括法国、比利时、瑞士、马格里布、西非和中非、前“印度支那”和加勒比地区）之间复杂和不断变化的关系背景下，追踪一个仍在兴起的“后殖民艺术”经典的演变。它将突出摄影、录像、装置和行为艺术的多样性，其中大部分很少或根本没有受到批评的关注。它将考察这些艺术如何为单一的、静态的“国家”身份概念提供对应物。这个跨学科项目将开拓法语和法语国家研究的新领域，同时也将在广泛的相关领域开拓新的研究领域，包括后殖民研究、艺术史、当代文化史、性别研究和旅行写作研究。

Political and media rhetoric are saturated with reductive perceptions of cultural beliefs and practices which originate from beyond the boundaries of Europe. The visual arts reveal a recent proliferation of works that challenge such negative perceptions of 'difference'. Such work explores the complex cross-cultural identities that have resulted from immigration to Europe in ways that demonstrate the possibility of the co-existence of cultures, while avoiding the extremes of ghettoisation and one-way assimilation. This project aims primarily to trace the evolution of a still-emerging canon of 'postcolonial art' against the complex and shifting background of relations between European and non-European francophone regions and countries, including France, Belgium, Switzerland, the Maghreb, Western and Central Africa, former 'Indochina' and the Caribbean. It will highlight the heterogeneity of a corpus of photography, video, installation and performance art, much of which has received little or no critical attention. It will examine the ways in which such art provides counterpoints to monolithic, static notions of 'national' identity. This interdisciplinary project will develop a new field of French and francophone studies, while also developing new areas of research in a wide range of related fields, including postcolonial studies, art history, contemporary cultural history, gender studies, and studies in travel writing.