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The Caribbean imagination as framed within a Dutch historical setting has deep Portuguese-African roots. The Seven Provinces were the first European power, in the first half of the 17th century, to challenge the Iberian countries directly for a share in the slave trade. This book analyzes the philosophy underlying this transoceanic link, when contacts with Africa started to be developed. The ambiguous morality of the `air of liberty? governing the Afro-Portuguese past had its impact on the creole cultures (white, black, Jewish) of the Dutch territories of Suriname and Curacao. Although this influence is gradually disappearing, it is astonishing to witness the engagement with which writers an...
After the heroic nudes of the Renaissance and depictions of the tortured bodies of Christian saints, early seventeenth-century French artists turned their attention to their fellow humans, to nobles and beggars seen on the streets of Paris, to courtesans standing at their windows, to vendors advertising their wares, to peasants standing before their landlords. Realism and Role-Play draws on literature, social history, and affect theory in order to understand the way that figuration performed social positions.
The art of the emblem is a pan-European phenomenon which developed in Western and Central Europe in the early modern period. It adopted meanings and motifs from Antiquity and the Middle Ages as part of a general humanistic impulse. Technological developments in printing that permitted the combination of letterpress with woodblock, and later copperplate, images, ensured that the emblem spread rapidly by way of printed collections. With time, emblematic ideas moved beyond Europe, conveying their insights and wisdom in the compact form of the book. These same books came to influence artists and designers working in the decoration of buildings, furniture, and household items, so that emblems ent...
Based on Dutch archival records and primary and secondary sources in multiple languages, this study integrates indigenous peoples more fully in the Dutch Atlantic by examining Dutch-indigenous alliances in Brazil, the Gold Coast, West Central Africa, and New Netherland.
A lively and personal book that returns the city to political thought Cities shape the lives and outlooks of billions of people, yet they have been overshadowed in contemporary political thought by nation-states, identity groups, and concepts like justice and freedom. The Spirit of Cities revives the classical idea that a city expresses its own distinctive ethos or values. In the ancient world, Athens was synonymous with democracy and Sparta represented military discipline. In this original and engaging book, Daniel Bell and Avner de-Shalit explore how this classical idea can be applied to today's cities, and they explain why philosophy and the social sciences need to rediscover the spirit o...
This lavishly illustrated volume is the first major global history of ornament from the Middle Ages to today. Crossing historical and geographical boundaries in unprecedented ways and considering the role of ornament in both art and architecture, Histories of Ornament offers a nuanced examination that integrates medieval, Renaissance, baroque, and modern Euroamerican traditions with their Islamic, Indian, Chinese, and Mesoamerican counterparts. At a time when ornament has re-emerged in architectural practice and is a topic of growing interest to art and architectural historians, the book reveals how the long history of ornament illuminates its global resurgence today. Organized by thematic s...
"Pineapple Culture is a dazzling history of the world's tropical and temperate zones told through the pineapple's illustrative career."--From publisher description.
Food is more than just nutrition. Its preparation, presentation and consumption is a multifold communicative practice which includes the meal's design and its whole field of experience. How is food represented in cookbooks, product packaging or in paintings? How is dining semantically charged? How is the sensuality of eating treated in different cultural contexts? In order to acknowledge the material and media-related aspects of eating as a cultural praxis, experts from media studies, art history, literary studies, philosophy, experimental psychology, anthropology, food studies, cultural studies and design studies share their specific approaches.
Picturing America: Photography and the Sense of Place argues that photography is a prevalent practice of making American places. Its collected essays epitomize not only how pictures situate us in a specific place, but also how they create a sense of such mutable place-worlds. Understanding photographs as prime sites of knowledge production and advocates of socio-political transformations, a transnational set of scholars reveals how images enact both our perception and conception of American environments. They investigate the power photography yields in shaping our ideas of self, nation, and empire, of private and public space, through urban, landscape, wasteland and portrait photography. The volume radically reconfigures how pictures alter the development of American places in the past, present, and future.
The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment investigates new forms of choreographic dramaturgy and interpretation inherent. Joining junior and senior scholars as well as practitioners in the field, the handbook shows how the recovery of past dances has come to constitute a new branch of contemporary choreographic activity.