The Art, Materiality and Representation conference will be held 1 to 3 June 2018 at the British Museum, Clore Centre and SOAS, Senate House. We invite scholars, artitsts and craft makers to submit abstracts for our panel “Art and Craft and the Politics of Re-inventing Tradition in Postcolonial Spaces”. Our panel number on the conference announcement is panel P097.

ART AND CRAFT AND THE POLITICS OF RE-INVENTING TRADITION IN POSTCOLONIAL SPACES By Chuu Krydz Ikwuemesi (PhD) and Chidi Ugwu (PhD), University of Nigeria, Nsukka Indigenous peoples all over the world have various means of expressing their art and ethno-aesthetics. For the Igbo of eastern Nigeria, for instance, their heritage cannot be fully discussed without a look at the almost extinct uli body and wall painting practiced by Igbo women. In Australia as well as Japan, indigenous peoples continue to re-invent their culture and heritage through the soft power of art and craft. In the Igbo experience, the decline of uli art in the postcolonial period is a reflection of the sorry state of cultural heritage in Igbo land and Nigeria in general. In response to this decline, the United States Embassy in Nigeria recently supported workshops for students and village women to adapt uli motifs in craft, utility design and econo-art and to create a new frontier in the creative industries, while challenging notions of contemporaneity and modernity. Using the uli experiment, Australian and Ainu successes and other similar cases as examples, this panel invites papers on the capacity of craft and econo-art to embody, promote and renew cultural experiences, ethno-aesthetics and heritage in the bid to confront the challenges and conflicts at the heart of postcoloniality. All proposals must be made via the online form that can be found on each panel page.

Proposals should consist of a paper title, a (very) short abstract of <300 characters and an abstract of 250 words. On submission the proposal, the proposing author (but not any co-authors listed) will receive automated email confirming receipt. If you do not receive this email, please first check the login environment (click login on the left on the conference website) to see if your proposal is there. If it is, it simply means confirmation got spammed or lost; and if it is not, it means you need re-submit, as process went wrong somewhere. Deadline is January 20, 2018. For more information, contact admin at therai.org.uk or visit www.therai.org.uk.