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Farewell to Visual Studies
Each of the five volumes in the Stone Art Theory Institutes series brings together a range of scholars who are not always directly familiar with one another’s work. The outcome of each of these convergences is an extensive and “unpredictable conversation” on knotty and provocative issues about art. This fifth and final volume in the series focuses on the identity, nature, and future of visual studies, discussing critical questions about its history, objects, and methods. The contributors question the canon of literature of visual studies and the place of visual studies with relation to theories of vision, visuality, epistemology, politics, and art history, giving voice to a variety of ...
Creolised Science
This rich, deeply researched study offers the first comprehensive exploration of cross-cultural plant knowledge in eighteenth-century Mauritius. Using the concept of creolisation – the process by which elements of different cultures are brought together to create entangled and evolving new entities – Brixius examines the production of knowledge on an island without long-established traditions of botany as understood by Europeans. Once foreign plants and knowledge arrived in Mauritius, they were adapted to new environmental circumstances and a new socio-cultural space. Brixius explores how French colonists, settlers, mediators, labourers and enslaved people experienced and shaped the island's botanical past, centring the contributions of subaltern actors. By foregrounding neglected non-European actors from both Africa and Asia, within a melting pot of cultivation traditions from around the world, she presents a truly global history of botanical knowledge.
Nature on Paper
Over the past two decades, natural things—especially those collected, exchanged, studied, and displayed in museums, such as animals, plants, minerals, and rocks—have emerged as fascinating protagonists for historical research. Nature on Paper follows a different, humbler set of objects that make it possible to trace the global routes and shifting meanings of those natural things: the catalogs, inventories, and other paper tools of information management that form the backbone of collection institutions. Anne Greenwood MacKinney focuses on Prussia from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century, a place and time that witnessed the dramatic restructuring of research, government, and pub...
New Germans, New Dutch
In today’s globalized world, traditions of a national Self and a national Other no longer hold. This timely volume considers the stakes in our changing definitions of national boundaries in light of the unmistakable transformation of German and Dutch societies. Examining how the literature of migration intervenes in public discourses on multiculturality and including detailed analysis of works by the Turkish-German writers Emine Sevgi Özdamer and Feridun Zaimoglu and the Moroccan-Dutch writers Abdelkader Benali and Hafid Bouazza, New Germans, New Dutch offers crucial insights into the ways in which literature negotiates both difference and the national context of its writing.
Madness, Bureaucracy and Gender in Mumbai, India
Regional mental hospitals in India are perceived as colonial artefacts in need of reformation. In the last two decades, there has been discussion around the maltreatment of patients, corruption and poor quality of mental health treatment in these institutions. This ethnography scrutinizes the management of madness in one of these asylum-like institutions in the context of national change and the global mental health movement. The author explores the assembling and impact of psychiatric, bureaucratic, gendered and queer narratives in and around the hospital. Finally, the author attempts to reconcile social anthropology and psychiatry by scrutinising their divergent approaches towards ‘mad narratives’.
Legacies of David Cranz's 'Historie von Grönland' (1765)
This book brings together interdisciplinary scholars from history, theology, folklore, ethnology and meteorology to examine how David Cranz’s Historie von Grönland (1765) resonated in various disciplines, periods and countries. Collectively the contributors demonstrate the reach of the book beyond its initial purpose as a record of missionary work, and into secular and political fields beyond Greenland and Germany. The chapters also reveal how the book contributed to broader discussions and conceptualizations of Greenland as part of the Atlantic world. The interdisciplinary scope of the volume allows for a layered reading of Cranz’s book that demonstrates how different meanings could be drawn from the book in different contexts and how the book resonated throughout time and space. It also makes the broader argument that the construction of the Artic in the eighteenth century broadened our understanding of the Atlantic.
Animal Narratology
Animal Narratology interrogates what it means to narrate, to speak—speak for, on behalf of—and to voice, or represent life beyond the human, which is in itself as different as insects, bears, and dogs are from each other, and yet more, as individual as a single mouse, horse, or puma. The varied contributions to this interdisciplinary Special Issue highlight assumptions about the human perception of, attitude toward, and responsibility for the animals that are read and written about, thus demonstrating that just as “the animal” does not exist, neither does “the human”. In their zoopoetic focus, the analyses are aware that animal narratology ultimately always contains an approximat...
Keywords for Marxist Art History Today
The mood of systemic crisis that has marked the early 21st century has been accompanied by an upsurge in Marxist thought in a whole range of domains and extends to art history. In this volume 19 scholars from different generations, different national contexts and with different relationships to Marxism reflect on the status of 18 "keywords" with special pertinence to Marxist art-historical inquiry today. Starting point of the researches was the knowledge that while certain keywords have been crucial to recent developments in Marxist art history and cultural theory more broadly, others seem to have slipped out of view. The scholars are not so much interested in the "historical semantics" of words – although that plays some role in the essays – as in the present state of Marxist art history.
The Privilege of Crisis
Despite the understanding of scholars that masculinity, far from being a natural or stable concept, is in reality a social construction, the culture at large continues to privilege an idealized, coherent male point of view. The Privilege of Crisis draws on the work of authors such as H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad--as well as contemporary postcolonial writers such as J. M. Coetzee, Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith--to show how recurrent references to a "crisis" of masculinity or the decline of masculinity serve largely to demonstrate and support positions of male privilege.
Reclaiming Biblical Heroines
Although recently more studies have been devoted to the representations of Biblical heroines in modern European art, less is known about the contribution to the portrayals of Biblical women by modern Jewish artists. This monograph explores why and how heroines of the Scripture: Judith, Esther and the Shulamite received a particular meaning for acculturated Jewish artists originating from the Polish lands in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century. It convincingly proves that artworks by Maurycy Gottlieb, Wilhem Wachtel, Ephraim Moses Lilien, Maurycy Minkowski, Samuel Hirszenberg and Boris Schatz significantly differed from renderings of contemporary non-Jewish artists, adopting a “Jewish perspective”, creating complex and psychological portrayals of the heroines inspired by Jewish literature and as well as by historical and cultural phenomena of Jewish revival and the cultural Zionism movement.
