With the turn towards visual and material culture, art and architectural historians have put to task the periphery-metropole binary, questioning the applicability and validity of art historical categories such as “artist,” “art,” and “genius” in colonial artworks. Inherent in this binary was the belief that hermetically sealed “superior” civilizations bestowed culture upon socially backward and morally corrupt societies in far away places. The discipline has already acknowledged that this unidirectional movement of culture is more myth than fact and that the periphery was not just a passive receptor of metropolitan models, but rather, a mutually constitutive body in a global network of artistic ideas, material exchanges, and aesthetic concerns. Attuned to the asymmetrical and incongruent relationship between colonial artworks and canonical art historical categories, scholars have offered a myriad of models, such as “mestizaje,” “prime object,” or “mutual entanglement” to name but three, as methodological inroads for locating and scrutinizing the production of art and architecture in a colonial context.

Open to any geographic location and time period, the aim of this panel is to engage in a trans-regional discussion about the interpretative frames employed in the study of colonial African, Asian, and Latin American art and architecture. In doing so, the session chair welcomes papers that examine historical and historiographical themes, concepts, or problems from a methodological standpoint that aid understanding strategies for considering colonial visual and material culture.