Globalization is no recent phenomenon. People, ideas, and objects have always been on the move, encountering and changing one another as a result. This exhibit presents some of the textual and material residues of these encounters and travels, characteristic of past as well as present human activity and curiosity. Focusing on the years 1400 to 1800, the exhibit examines and looks beyond familiar Eurocentric ideas of exploration, conquest, and "discovery." Using manuscripts, printed books, drawings, maps, and artifacts, Expanding Earth highlights the movements of peoples, ideas, and goods across the world in their own words and in material objects.
To the Ends of the Earth will explore the transmission and translation of material and cultural practices, cartography, exploration, migration (forced and voluntary) and the changing geographies of liminal spaces. A group of international scholars from several disciplines will examine topics including textual production from early modern Italy to twentieth-century Africa, as well as the racialization of space from Victorian England to nineteenth-century California. Keynote address by Michael A. Gomez, New York University, a leading scholar of Africa and the African Diaspora. This exhibition takes place in conjunctions with the exhibition Expanding Earth: Travel, Encounter, and Exchange on display February 9-May 19, 2017.
Schedule
Michael A. Gomez, Professor of History, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, will deliver the opening keynote address. Prof. Gomez is a leading scholar of Africa and the African Diaspora, having served as the director of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) from its inception in 2000 to 2007. He has also served as chair of the History departments at both NYU and Spelman College, and served as President of UNESCO's International Scientific Committee for the Slave Route Project from 2009 to 2011. He is the author of several books, including Pragmatism in the Age of Jihad: The Precolonial State of Bundu (Cambridge University Press, 1992), Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (University of North Carolina Press, 1998) and Black Crescent: African Muslims in the Americas (Cambridge University Press, 2005, Black Caucus of the American Library Association 2006 Literary Awards Winner for Nonfiction Category)
6:45pm Exhibition reception
8:30am Coffee and pastries
9:00-10:30am Session 1
Lawrence Dritsas, The University of Edinburgh
'Regions Beyond': James Moon and missionary collectors in central Africa 1907-1910
Jacco Dieleman, University of California, Los Angeles, Resident Fellow, Princeton
The Geographical Trajectory of Ancient Textual Amulets
Nicholas Gliserman, Haverford College
Misdirection: A 1683 Map of Iroquoia
Chair: Daniel Richter, University of Pennsylvania
10:30-10:45 am Break
10:45am-12:15pm Session 2
Alisha J. Hines, Duke University
Geographies of Freedom: Black Women's Traversals of the Legal, Physical, and Social Boundaries of Slavery and Freedom in the Mississippi River Valley
Ruma Chopra, San Jose State University
The Jamaican Maroons and the Meanings of Migration
Michael Verney, University of New Hampshire
'The Universal Yankee Nation': Proslavery Exploration in South America, 1850-1860
Chair: Alexis Broderick Neumann, University of Pennsylvania
12:15-1:30pm Lunch (on your own)
1:30-2:45pm Session 3
Alison Howard, University of Pennsylvania
The Never-Ending Earth: Terraforming for Survival and Conquest
Trycia Bazinet, Carleton University, Ottawa
Bring it Back to Earth: Decolonization and Settler-Colonial Logics in Space Exploration
Chair: Lynne Farrington, University of Pennsylvania
2:45-3:00pm Break
3:00-5:00pm Session 4
Sarah L. Reeser, University of Toronto
Parts Unknown, Sights Unseen: Maps as Object and Authority in Peter Martyr d'Anghiera's De Orbe Novo
Katherine Parker, Hakluyt Society
From mysterious antipodes to familiar settings: cartography and the narrative of the Anson circumnavigation (1740-44) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
Jinsong Guo, Princeton University
What the Ancients Have Never Done: The Chinese Measurements of Longitude and Altitude under the Mongol Empire and the Early Yuan Dynasty
Nancy Reynolds, Washington University in St. Louis
Into the Desert Waste: Fixing Egypt's Frontiers
Chair: Brian Vivier, University of Pennsylvania
10:00am Coffee and pastries
10:30am-12:00pm Session 5
Adrien Zakar, Columbia University
Mountain Science and the Society of Jesus in Syria and Lebanon (1900-1924)
Hitomi Omata Rappo, Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies, Boston College
Visitors from the 'Antipodes': The Japanese embassy of 1585 as a proof of the triumph of Roman Catholicism
Chair: Mitch Fraas, University of Pennsylvania
12:00-1:30pm Lunch (on your own)
1:45-3:15pm Session 6
Kathryn Taylor, University of Pennsylvania
Reading Ethnography as an Ambassador: The Library and Embassies of Leonardo Donà
Kirsten Schultz, Seton Hall University
Out of Date: Imperial geography, writing, and authority in eighteenth-century Brazil
Lucas Wood, Indiana University at Bloomington
'Estrangez contreez'?: The Foreign, the Familiar and the Production of History in the Fifteenth-Century Canary Islands
Chair: Ann Moyer, University of Pennsylvania
3:15-3:30pm Break
3:15-5:00pm Session 7
Michael Verney, University of New Hampshire
'The Universal Yankee Nation': Proslavery Exploration in South America, 1850-1860
Camille Suarez, University of Pennsylvania
California Fault Lines: Constructing Racial Identities and Citizenship in 19th Century Southern California
Gary McDonogh, Bryn Mawr College and Cindy Wong, College of Staten Island/City University of New York
At the Edge of the City: In Deepest Chinatown
Chair: Gabriel Raeburn, University of Pennsylvania
5:00pm Reception to follow
