Towards a "Pacific Turn" in American Art History

As a sequel to the panel “The Pacific as Agent” from the CAA 112^th Annual Conference, “Towards a ‘Pacific Turn’ in American Art History” expands on last year’s presentations regarding the underrepresented relationships between American art and the Pacific. Art practices ranging from Yankee scrimshaws and Pacific tattooing traditions to Philippine piña textiles and documentary projects on the global shipping industry demonstrate that circum-Pacific movement has always shaped the art and social life of the U.S. Using this recognition of the Pacific’s agency as a point of departure, this panel seeks to move from acknowledgement and inclusion to re-orientation: What would it look like to relocate the epistemic locus of the subfield’s indistinct yet readily understood descriptor “American” within the Pacific’s slow currents? As a way of initiating the “Pacific Turn,” we propose that scholars, practitioners, and curators reconceptualize the Pacific Ocean as a central space and method for decolonizing American art. This decolonizing project involves not only critiquing U.S. imperialism and Europe-facing theory and practice but also reclaiming effaced agents, practices, and sites from both historical and current U.S. colonies, ports, and sea routes outside the continent. We invite papers that problematize American art scholarship’s distance from its historical and present-day entanglements with Pacific horizons, interrogating, among others, portrayals of U.S.-Pacific expansions, uneven formations of Asia-Pacific/American art, modalities of circum-Pacific movements of individuals, objects, and visions, and American museums’ colonial(izing) collections, from the era of the Spanish Manila-Acapulco Galleon Trade in the sixteenth century to modern and contemporary periods.