CFP

PLS POST THE FOLLOWING CALL FOR PAPERS FOR COLLEGE ART ASSOCIATION'S ANNUAL CONFERENCE IN FEBRUARY, 2009 (LOS ANGELES, CA)
CALL FOR PAPERS: CAA ANNUAL CONFERENCE, Los Angeles, CA, FEB.’09

Session Title: Taking it to the Streets: The Theatre of Public Piety
Chair: Prof. Tina Waldeier Bizzarro, Rosemont College, Rosemont, PA
ATSAH Affiated

Roadside shrines of saints and other members of the heavenly Christian
community punctuate Italy’s streets and alleyways. Anchored and vigilant just above the pedestrian’s eye-level, these effigies are often graced with fresh flowers and ex-votos, as they guard and protect their neighboring communities. Even today, prophylactic effigies housed in edicole throughout Sicily become the dramatis personae of the sacred drama during weeks of festa or celebrations of the lives of saints and the Holy Family. Specially dressed and accoutered for these events—much like their neighbors within local churches—the statues descend from their niches, awakening to participate in and celebrate the feasts of their birth and death as well as those parts of the liturgical year which commemorate the Christian foundation mythology of their communities. Their passage is signaled by a panoply of ritualized events that submerge the participants in sacred time.

These street shrines lie at an interesting juncture of portrait and iconic art, popular culture, and the faith ritual of pilgrimage, conversion, and renewal, springing from ideas regarding the inherent power of the effigy and its link to the bearer via verisimilitude. This session proposes to explore the performative role of popular shrines and images, constituting their own officially sanctioned but liminal sacred space, in the multi-layered and ritually-centered faith system of civic life, in which festa and pilgrimage are central. This session welcomes papers which explore church ritual which spills out from the walls of the church into the democratized and popular spaces of the square and street, e.g. festa, procession, pilgrimage, from the eleventh through the eighteenth centuries. While concentrating on Western European phenomena, studies of Latin American ritual are also welcome.

Pls send proposals to: rosieselavy@yahoo.com