The journal Perspective: actualité en histoire de l’art will devote its n ° 2023 – 1 to the question of obscurity in its multiple meanings – shadow, darkness, non-knowledge, negativity .
A discipline based on the study of the visible, art history is necessarily interested in what is brought to light and can be seen. However, the opposition between light and shadow, in its physical evidence as well as in its symbolic scope, structures human thought to a large extent. Many primordial myths associate the appearance of light and the banishment of darkness with the evolution of life and societies. Likewise, subsequent developments in philosophy and the human sciences – one thinks in particular of the Age of Enlightenment – made the partition between light and dark a framework of thought of major importance. Thus, in conscience or in spite of ourselves, we are the heirs of this division which, from original myths to contemporary positivisms, from biblical accounts to the constitution of the human sciences in university disciplines, polarizes our relationship to the world and to its study. Luminosity ends up becoming a virtue: clarity, lucidity, radiance, carry a positive charge while their opposites are associated with the negative qualities of darkness, even evil.
For this issue coordinated with the Indian art historian Kavita Singh, the journal Perspective wishes to question the developments in art history in the light of the classic and largely unthought-of association between, on the one hand, knowledge, positivity, clarity, and, on the other hand, non-knowledge, negativity, obscurity, as this association still determines all of our mental structures, our imaginations and our scientific paradigms.
Please send your proposals (a summary of 2,000 to 3,000 characters, a provisional title, a short bibliography on the subject and a biography of a few lines) to the editorial address ( revue-perspective@inha.fr ) before December 13, 2021 . Authors of selected proposals will be informed of the decision of the Editorial Board in February 2022, while Articles will be put to the 1st June 2022. Submitted papers will be definitively accepted following an anonymous peer review process.
To learn more, visit the journal page on the INHA website and browse Perspective online here
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