London (United Kingdom), Eccles Centre for American Studies, The
British Library, Euston Road, July 10, 2015
Deadline: Apr 27, 2015

Call for Papers
Facing America: a Visual Art and American Studies Symposium

Keynote speakers: Professor David Peters Corbett (UEA) and Professor
Celeste-Marie Bernier (Nottingham)

"The face is a veritable megaphone."
"How do you dismantle the face? [...] This takes all the resources of
art, and art of the highest kind."
- Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, the face is indeed culturally, socially
and historically very loud. So what would be at stake in dismantling it,
or thinking about it critically? What regimes has the face propped up?
Who or what might be exposed by its interrogation?

Nowhere more than in the practice of art has the face played a prominent
role. This symposium thus invites reflections on the face in American
art and visual culture. The face in all its many formations and
deformations may be considered: from faces in portraiture to the face as
landscape, the face of the earth, or the disappearance of faces in big
data. Rhetorics of expression, pathos, belonging, recognition,
encounter, identity, and threat are often articulated in facial terms.
How have these rhetorics been figured in American art and visual
culture? Conventionally it's the eye that has loomed large in the study
of art; what would it mean to turn to the face?

Facing America is organised by SAVAnT (Scholars of America Visual Art
and Text), a research network fostering collaboration and dialogue
between American Studies and Art History. Papers might therefore wish to
question the public faces of these disciplines, exploring their
intersections and divergences.

Approaches might include but are in no way restricted to: notions of the
portrait; Michael Fried's sense of pictorial "facingness;" the face in
psychoanalysis; the face as mask; the face in representations and
contestations of national, racial, ethnic, sexual, gender and class
identities; the virtual or simulated face; the de-faced face; the
abstracted face; or the metaphorical face.

Abstracts of 200 words for papers of 20 minutes and very brief bio are
required. Please send by April 27th to: facingamericasymposium@gmail.com