Organised by Michail Leivadiotis (EXC 2020) and Roland Betancourt (University of California, Irvine), Research Area 1: "Competing Communities".

Universalism in philosophy, theology, social and political thought is a concept in constant evolution and change. The assumption and the claim that human nature and experience can be reduced to a single principle or truth has historically led to the gradual extension of ideals and rights to all human beings, while, critics have raised objections to a construct that tends to flatten the specificities of minorities and individuals.

Religious conceptions of universalism deal with the problem of salvation and the sharing of a singular truth. Empires construct ideologies and representations of universal power to legitimise their expansion. Kant's idea of the universality of morality in relation to human beings as rational agents and the Enlightenment 'project' of the universal validity of reason, gave impetus to an idea of universalism that has reached into modernity with the self-organisation of digital society and the theoretical discourse of posthumanism.

We examine how political claims (translatio imperii), religious politics (ecumenism, uniatism, translatio sancti) and cultural agency (cultural mobility, translatio studii) create new systems of textual and visual imagery. We consider representations of the self as part of a historical and cultural continuum that are structured by textual and visual programmes that commemorate narratives of common purpose, origin or future.

The conference focuses on the mechanisms of visual representation of universalist narratives of the past and the future. We examine shared narratives of spatial and/or temporal commons, imagined geographies, visual narratives and shared imagery that has emerged as celebratory gestures (or dystopian forebodings) towards a universalist understanding of the world. By searching for a common vocabulary, a shared visual code, we aim to highlight conceptualisations of global perceptions of cultural traditions.

We explore the contact zones between cultures, between dogma and heresy, between the sacred and the monstrous, between the scientific and the imaginary, between the political and the fictional. We explore conceptualisations of spatial and/or temporal entanglements, conceptual representations of commonalities, inter-confessional (or even inter-religious) communities of devotion, the rituality of time and sacred spaces. We trace in-betweenness, hybridity and the uncanny as versions of the imagined global. We see artefacts, images, heirlooms, the press, architecture, cyberspace, layout as a field for exercising different understandings of the commons, imagery communities, visual universalisms.

Programme

Friday, 6 December

13:30–14:00 | Arrival and Coffee

14:00–14:30 | Michail Leivadiotis (EXC 2020) and Roland Betancourt (University of California-Irvine): Welcome & Introduction

 14:30–16:00

Daniel Spaulding (University of Wisconsin-Madison): Iconology’s Universals

Jennifer Nelson (University of Delaware): Art as Capitalism’s Canary

16:15–17:45

Fabian Röderer (Universität Hamburg): Universalist Narratives Told by Universalist Media? The Case of Post-War Photo Exhibitions

Sebastian Lederle (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar): Precarious Effects of Universalisation: Hegemony and Political Power in Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope (2016)

18:00–19:30

Jonas Tinius (Saarland University): Curating Minor Universality? Anthropological Reflections on a Concrete Problem

Friederike Schäfer (EXC 2020): Universalist Views in the Exhibition Space—From the Perspective of the Anthropocene Debate

Saturday, 7 December

09:30–10:00 | Arrival and Coffee

10:00–11:30

Olga Toloumi (Bard College): The Chart and the Plan: Presenting the United Nations to the World

Galina Babak (Universität Konstanz): When Two Modernities Coincided Visually: Maik Iohansen on Shop Signs and Soviet Propaganda Posters in 1920s Kharkiv

11:45–13:15

Nicholas Jones (Yale University): Rethinking Luis: Theorising Blackness in Cervantes’s El celoso extremeño (1613) 

Monika Raič (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin): "Alone with the whole world". Loneliness as Illusion and Universal Phenomenon in Gustave Flaubert’s La Tentation de Saint Antoine

13:15–14:15 | Lunch

14:15–15:45

Marisa Bass (Yale University): Jan van der Heyden’s Relativism

Anna Schober de Graaf (Alpen-Adria Universität): The Other as Everybody: Pictorial Figures, Addressing Everyone and Mediating Both Equality and Difference

16:00–17:30

Apostolos Lampropoulos (University Bordeaux Montaigne, CRAL): Dark to Green to Dust: Scaling Universal (Un)homeliness

Katerina Stemni and Andriana Thanou (Freie Universität Berlin): A Universalist Cry: Landscapes of Wail

17:30–18:00 | Michail Leivadiotis and Roland Betancourt: Closing Remarks