Panel III: Visual Subjects: Art and Identity in Byzantium

Recorded on February 24, 2023.
In the second book of the Annals, the Roman historian Tacitus describes the Armenians as an ambigua gens - an “ambiguous race.” According to Tacitus, not only did Armenia defy definition, but its volatile political history between Rome and Persia reflected the inherent ambiguity of the Armenian gens. Neither Roman nor Persian, Greek nor barbarian, Armenia simply did not fit into one of the established hierarchies the Romans used to order their world and to situate their subjects within the existing hierarchies of their empire.
By drawing the experiences of Armenians into dialogue with other minoritized populations in the Roman empire, Sasanian Persia, and other empires of the Mediterranean, this workshop explores how hierarchies of citizenship, race, and belonging functioned as technologies of imperial rule across a variety of case studies. In particular, it seeks to contribute to critical conversations on the study of race in the ancient and late ancient Mediterranean, thereby shedding light on the ways in which imperial subjects fashioned their individual and communal subjectivities both diachronically and synchronically.
How, then, might the “ambiguity” of the Armenian ambigua gens illuminate not only the experiences of empire, but also the ontology of empires themselves in the premodern Mediterranean? How did imperial hierarchies of citizenship and belonging shape daily life at the center and on the periphery? And how did imperial subjects engage with, manipulate, or even reject these imperial hierarchies in order to navigate their place in their local and supra-local imperial contexts? This workshop brings together scholars from multiple academic disciplines to reconsider the dynamics of imperialism and to propose new historical paradigms to decenter, decolonize, and deconstruct the historiography of empires in the premodern Mediterranean.
Panel III: Visual Subjects: Art and Identity in Byzantium
Respondent: Bryan Miller, University of Michigan
Paroma Chatterjee, University of Michigan
"Image-Breaking as Otherness in Byzantium: Business as Usual?"
Christina Maranci, Harvard University
"Breaking Down Byzantium with Nerses III Catholicos (c.641 - c.661)"