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This groundbreaking volume examines the extraordinary artistic and cultural traditions of the African region known as the western Sahel, a vast area on the southern edge of the Sahara desert that includes present-day Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, and Niger. This is the first book to present a comprehensive overview of the diverse cultural achievements and traditions of the region, spanning more than 1,300 years from the pre Islamic period through the nineteenth century. It features some of the earliest extant art from sub Saharan Africa as well as such iconic works as sculptures by the Dogon and Bamana peoples of Mali. Essays by leading international scholars discuss the art, architecture, archaeology, literature, philosophy, religion, and history of the Sahel, exploring the unique cultural landscape in which these ancient communities flourished. Richly illustrated and brilliantly argued, Sahel brings to life the enduring forms of expression created by the peoples who lived in this diverse crossroads of the world.
What is modernism in Southeast Asia? What is modern art, as embodied in the paintings of Southeast Asia? These questions and more are answered in Reframing Modernism: Painting from Southeast Asia, Europe and Beyond, published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name. Featuring 217 works, in full colour, by 51 Southeast Asian and European artists, from the Centre Pompidou and National Gallery Singapore, as well as other Southeast Asian collections in the region and beyond, this catalogue tells the compelling story of modernism as it developed across continents, and reveals artists' powerful, and sometimes surprising, responses to modernity.
This book explores the history of the Dominican Republic as it evolved from the first European colony in the Americas into a modern nation under the rule of Rafael Trujillo. It investigates the social foundations of Trujillo’s exceptionally enduring and brutal dictatorship (1930-1961) and, more broadly, the way power is sustained in such non-democratic regimes. The author reveals how the seemingly unilateral imposition of power by Trujillo in fact depended on the regime’s mediation of profound social and economic transformations, especially through agrarian policies that assisted the nation’s large independent peasantry. By promoting an alternative modernity that sustained peasants’ free access to land during a period of economic growth, the regime secured peasant support as well as backing from certain elite sectors. This book thus elucidates for the first time the hidden foundations of the Trujillo regime.
The trend of measuring performances is global and pervasive. We all live in quantified societies, in which performances in an ever-growing array of fields–from education to health, work to credit, justice to consumption–are assessed and governed through quantitative techniques. While the disruption brought by the quantitative turn has been widely studied by social scientists, legal research on the issue is minimal. This book aims to fill the gap. The essays herein collected explore how performance measurements interact with the law in different regions and sectors, which legal effects they produce, and for whose benefit.
Despite the fact that, if only by number, small and peripheral cities played an important role in fifteenth and sixteenth-century European print culture, book history has mainly been dominated by monographs on individual big book centres. Through a number of specific case studies, which deploy a variety of methods and a wide range of sources, this volume seeks to enhance our understanding of printing and the book trade in small and peripheral European cities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and to emphasize the necessity of new research for the study of print culture in such cities.
Indonesia is a multicultural and multireligious nation whose heterogeneity is codified in the state doctrine, the Pancasila. Yet the relations between the various social, ethnic, and religious groups have been problematic down to the present day. In several respects, Christians have a precarious role in the struggle for shaping the nation. In the aftermath of the former president Suharto's resignation and in the course of the ensuing political changes Christians have been involved both as victims and perpetrators in violent regional clashes with Muslims that claimed thousands of lives. Since the beginning of the new millennium the violent conflicts have lessened, yet the pressure exerted on Christians by Islamic fundamentalists still continues undiminished in the Muslim-majority regions. The future of the Christians in Indonesia remains uncertain, and pluralist society is still on trial. For this reason the situation of Christians in Indonesia is an important issue that goes far beyond research on a minority, touching on general issues relating to the formation of the nation-state.
This detailed bibliographical dictionary constitutes a virtual encyclopaedia of the Spanish School, covering artists born in Spain as well as those who worked chiefly in Spain. 16,000 years of Spanish art are documented with consideration paid to each artist's birth and death dates; medium; and bibliographical references. This three-volume work lists approximately 10,000 painters, sculptors, draftsmen, printmakers, architects, and applied artists.