Contested Art Histories and the Archive in Britain and the British Empire

Art histories are shaped by the archives on which they are based; this panel asks us to question

the history of British Art as a field as well as how the stories within it are told through or against

archives. It asks for new methodologies and approaches that engage with and destabilize British

archival histories to recover the agency of non-dominant artistic forms and ideas in shaping

notions of British art. Are there subjugated art historical knowledges that emerged in relation to

or in contestation with dominant archival narratives of individuals and institutions in Britain and

the British colonial world, such as in relation to enslavement, class, ethnicity, gender, religion,

materials, environments? How might they reveal the importance of ritualistic, performative, multilingual,

multi-sensorial, and non-textual ways of archival thinking that informed perceptions of

British art? At the same time as the panel seeks papers that reveal varied types of archival

histories from diverse regions, the panel also calls for problematizing the archive’s canonical art

histories that privileged a particular view of art over subaltern ways of knowing and creating art.

We encourage participants to engage with new ways of thinking and conceptualizing the art

historical archive as both material and imagined history that can question and reconfigure

notions of British art during the age of empire.