RECYCLE
The 2007-08 John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Seminar

Click here for more information on the seminar's year-end event with guest artists

Co-Convened by:
Neil De Marchi, Professor of Economics
Mark Anthony Neal, Professor of African and African American Studies
Annabel J. Wharton, William B. Hamilton Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies

PROJECT DESCRIPTION AND CONVENERS
The Recycle seminar considers why and how used objects, ideas, places, images, practices are profitably or problematically reappropriated and put to different purposes. Through the empirical and theoretical consideration of specific historical salvage – texts, works, products, sites, methods, practices – either in the past or in the present, the seminar will investigate the cultural and economic life of things and ideas. What do these instruments give up and what do they retain, what do they receive and what do they impose? Are there patterns or cycles of reuse and how do knowing agents join and modify them? How do changes in the work that objects perform document shifts in their political and economic circumstances? We invite considerations of market, agency, and politics in an effort to extract treatments of reuse from the clichéd conceptions of tradition, influence and transmission. Those terms, and others like them, assume an improbable passivity on the parts of both the object and its appropriator in the transactions that they purportedly describe.

The following examples from the conveners’ current research suggest something of the range of topics and approaches that we hope will characterize the seminar.

Neil De Marchi, Professor of Economics, has interests in the emergence of art and financial markets and cultural economics.

Australian Aboriginal paintings from the Western Desert embody cultural meanings that cannot be conveyed to non-Aboriginals. An international dealer and auction market has emerged partly on the basis that these paintings are marketed, especially to US buyers, as abstract fine art. Curious circumstances contributed to this. Some early depictions of Ancestral Beings and other “dear” knowledge evoked criticism from other Aboriginals as not for general viewing. In response the offending makers desisted from figural representation and hid other precious knowledge behind a matrix of circles and connecting lines – parallel and diagonal – filled in with dots. The new paintings seemed to non-Aboriginal viewers like exercises in visual grammar. This history raises puzzling issues applicable to other markets. Because Aboriginal painters participate in the market knowing that their work is interpreted in alien terms, are they trading their identity for cash? Does Aboriginal culture and identity now, in fact, depend on the market? What are the consequences of reusing local cultural objects as global economic goods?

Mark Anthony Neal, Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Program in African and African-American Studies works on black popular culture, black feminist and queer theory and black intellectual production.

In order to attack old assumptions of the relationship between “high” and “low” culture I consider the ways that cultural texts and icons are recycled in the service of popular art. For example, the music industry reformulates previously recorded songs and random mass media utterings for contemporary consumption through the practice of sampling and remixing. This practice has been particularly common in hip-hop, which can be described as a sonic collage brilliantly exhibiting producers’ broad musical palate. Sampling and remixing also extends to the recycling of popular iconography and vernacular language use, including figures like the "pimp" (and the act of pimping) and pejoratives like the word "nigger".

Annabel Wharton, William B. Hamilton Professor of Art History, works on art, architecture and material culture from late antiquity to modernity.

The Hospital de los Reyes Católicos was founded in 1492 in Santiago de Compostela for the care of the sick and indigent pilgrims to the great shrine of St. James, “Scourge of the Moors.” It was built with plunder from newly conquered Muslim Granada. Under Franco, the hospital was converted into a luxury hotel as part of an economic and propaganda recovery effort by the Spanish fascists, who also reprocessed the crusading myths of the Christian Reconquest. An analysis of the hospital’s historical form and social function provides the basis for describing the economic and ideological implications of the recycling of a structure originally intended to house the pious traveler and now occupied by the wealthy tourist. It also raises broader questions concerning the market’s abuse of traditional sites, the remaking of history, and the manipulation of religion.

As should be clear, each of the conveners are approaching the concept of “recycle” from very different historical, disciplinary, and methodological perspectives. We invite colleagues doing research on still other periods and topics or with different theoretical dispositions to join with us in a year of vigorous intellectual exchange. We seek proposals from scholars committed to a broader and fuller understanding of the economic and cultural conditions by which products of the past are remade in response to the demands of a later moment.

The seminar will meet weekly. Some meetings will be devoted to presentations by seminar participants or to readings chosen by the group. Others will involve outside visitors, film screenings, and other activities. Collaboratively and collectively, it is our hope and intention to make the seminar a lively, varied, and congenial forum for thought and conversation.

Duke Arts and Sciences Faculty Fellows

Pedro Lasch, Assistant Professor of the Practice, Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Peter M. McIsaac, Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor, Germanic Languages and Literature
Rebecca L. Stein, Assistant Professor, Cultural Anthropology
Susan G. Sterrett, Assistant Professor, Philosophy
Kenneth J. Surin, Professor and Chair, Program in Literature

Duke Professional School Faculty Fellow

Catherine Fisk, Professor, School of Law

UNC-Chapel Hill Institute for the Arts & Humanities (IAH) Exchange Fellow

Richard Langston, Assistant Professor, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures

Duke Library Fellow

Ernest "Erik" Zitser, PhD, Librarian for Slavic and East European Studies, Bostock/Perkins Library

National Humanities Center Fellow

Ellen Gruber Garvey, Associate Professor of English, New Jersey City University

Postdoctoral Fellows

Jane E. Anderson, PhD (2003), Law, University of New South Wales
Andrew Russell, PhD (2007), History of Science and Technology, Johns Hopkins University

Graduate Fellows:

Alisha Gaines, English
Sarah Lincoln, English
Britt M. Rusert, English