History of art Books
Duke University Press Warring Visions
Book SynopsisIn Warring Visions, Thy Phu explores photography from dispersed communities throughout Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora, both during and after the Vietnam War, to complicate narratives of conflict and memory. While the visual history of the Vietnam War has been dominated by American documentaries and war photography, Phu turns to photographs circulated by the Vietnamese themselves, capturing a range of subjects, occasions, and perspectives. Phu''s concept of warring visions refers to contrasts in the use of war photos in North Vietnam, which highlighted national liberation and aligned themselves with an international audience, and those in South Vietnam, which focused on family and everyday survival. Phu also uses warring visions to enlarge the category of war photography, a genre that usually consists of images illustrating the immediacy of combat and the spectacle of violence, pain, and wounded bodies. She pushes this genre beyond such definitions by analyzing pictures of fTrade Review“Thy Phu presents a searing and moving lesson in unlearning US imperialism and its entanglement with photography. Through diverse visual archives, she brilliantly shakes core assumptions about photography and war, including the ‘Vietnam War’—actually an ‘American war’ in Vietnam—and what came to be its iconic photographs and overlooked images. Phu's careful work of upsetting imperial geographies and imaginaries of the Cold War (such as North/South) brings that war back home to the South Vietnamese diaspora in a way that presciently speaks to the current moment.” -- Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, author of * Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism *"In this elegant and insightful study, Thy Phu turns to Vietnamese photographers, considering journalistic work, personal and family photos, reenactments, and artistic uses, all with the intent of exploring how Vietnamese people saw themselves and each other through the lens. From the homeland to the diaspora and back, she shows the power of photography to mobilize nations and communities, commemorate loss and absence, and provoke solidarity. What Phu finally shows, so powerfully and persuasively, is that Vietnamese people have always seen and been seen by themselves if not by others.” -- Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of * The Sympathizer *"Intriguing. . . . [Phu] is an elegant, accomplished writer. . . ." -- Thomas A. Bass * Mekong Review *"Warring Visions ... provokes a reevaluation of war photography, of socialist visuality, of memory, loss and diaspora. Reading it has not displaced the lasting power of the image of Kim Phuc from my visual memory, but it has made me think anew about what the stubborn persistence of this image has rendered invisible." -- Hirsch, Marianne * Canadian Literature *"Warring Visions is an effective examination of the multifarious ways that the tool of photography signifies. . . . Valuable for anyone interested in visual culture, archival studies, and diasporic identity against the grain of Western visions of imperialism." -- Collin Hawley * Lateral *"Phu’s book . . . has tremendous importance as a pioneering study of the visual archive produced through national struggle in North and South Vietnam. In fact, I contend that Warring Visions is essential reading for anyone interested in the war and its influence on visual culture." -- Meghan Tibbits-Lamirande * Pacific Affairs *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Note on Language ix Warring Visions: Introduction 1 Part I. Socialist Ways of Seeing Vietnam 1. Aesthetic Form, Political Content 31 2. Revolutionary Vietnamese Women, Symbols of Solidarity 83 Part II. Refractions 3. Reenactment and Remembrance 121 4. Unhomed: Domestic Images and the Diasporic Art of Recollection 147 Epilogue: Visual Reunion 187 Notes 195 Bibliography 213 Index 227
£72.25
Duke University Press Return Engagements
Book SynopsisVi?t Lê examines contemporary art in Cambodia and Vi?t Nam to trace the entwinement of militarization, trauma, diaspora, and modernity in Southeast Asian art.Trade Review“Việt Lê writes with flair and passion of difficult subjects: war, trauma, the art and visual culture of the Vietnamese and Cambodian diasporas. With a critic's nuanced eye and a practitioner's sensitivity, his framings and readings of provocative, complicated work evoke the beauty of the artists' visions and yet always return us to the history and the present of the artists' lives, careers, and countries. Return Engagements is a brilliant work to which I will return.” -- Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of * The Sympathizer *“Việt Lê moves the scholarly conversation about displacement away from the traditional state boundaries toward a much-needed examination of diaspora, (un)settlement, and return while offering a capacious rethinking of refugee-ness, displaced personhood, and diasporic selfhood. Return Engagements is a provocative and compelling work of curatorially driven art criticism.” -- Cathy Schlund-Vials, author of * War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work *"In this elegantly produced study of contemporary art in Cambodia and Vietnam, Việt Lê explores the multiple valences of return—as a yield that is more than financial, a journey that is deeply personal and a recurrence of history that is multi-temporal." -- Penny Edwards * Sojourn *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix Preface xi Acknowledgments xxi Introduction. Risky Returns, Restagings, and Revolution 1 1. What Remains: Silence, Confrontation, and Traumatic Memory 57 2. The Art Part: Việtt Kiều Artists, Divides and Desires in Sài Gòn 105 3. Personal and Public Archives: Fragments and (Post)Colonial Memory 150 4. Town and Country: Sopheap Pich's and Phan Quang's Urban-Rural Developments 189 Epilogue. Leaving and Returns 239 Notes 245 Bibliography 301 Index 315
£75.65
Duke University Press Minor China
Book SynopsisIn Minor China Hentyle Yapp analyzes contemporary Chinese art as it circulates on the global art market to outline the limitations of Western understandings of non-Western art. Yapp reconsiders the all-too-common narratives about Chinese art that celebrate the heroic artist who embodies political resistance against the authoritarian state. These narratives, as Yapp establishes, prevent Chinese art, aesthetics, and politics from being discussed in the West outside the terms of Western liberalism and notions of the “universal.” Yapp engages with art ranging from photography and performance to curation and installations to foreground what he calls the minor as method—tracking aesthetic and intellectual practices that challenge the predetermined ideas and political concerns that uphold dominant conceptions of history, the state, and the subject. By examining the minor in the work of artists such as Ai Weiwei, Zhang Huan, Cao Fei, Cai Guo-Qiang, Carol Yinghua Lu, anTrade Review“How do China and Chinese artists become legible in contemporary global circuits? In this informative study, Hentyle Yapp handles this question and its vast ideological ramifications by gauging late-capitalist art market aesthetics, academic discursive politics, and transnational multimedia dynamics. Most commendably, he asks us not to lose sight of the preemptive liberalist biases advanced by many Western accounts of non-Western cultures." -- Rey Chow, author of * Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture *“Hentyle Yapp's deconstruction of the dialectic of authoritarian regulation and artistic resistance in Chinese art is certain to attract critical attention from scholars in numerous fields. Minor China is an outstanding book that sets a new standard for analyzing non-Western art and politics otherwise.” -- David L. Eng, Richard L. Fisher Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania"In Minor China, Hentyle Yapp establishes a novel framework for analyzing contemporary Chinese art with a focus on its place in the global art market since 1989." -- Stephanie Kays * ARLIS/NA *"The book presents a provocative and theoretically informed study that opens meaningful conversations about a relational experience between the minor and the major. It makes a fresh and significant contribution to the fields of contemporary performance and visual culture, global Chinese studies, Asian American studies, and critical theory at large." -- Ying Xiao * Journal of Asian Studies *"[Minor China] present[s] insightful theoretical and historical perspectives that engage critically with Marxist thought and post-structuralist discourse, as well as gender and queer studies, with contemporary art from greater China and its diasporas. . . and provide[s] readers and scholars of art history, critical theory, institutional critique, gender and queer studies, visual as well as Asian studies, with timely food for thought. . . ." -- Franziska Koch * Art History *"The reach of Minor China goes beyond China and Sinophone studies. The book’s deployment of Asian American and transnational critiques makes it a relevant title for many in the field of Asian American studies, especially those interested in the discussions of aesthetics. . . ." -- Kai Hang Cheang * Journal of Asian American Studies *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. We're Going to Party Like It's 1989: Proper China, Interdisciplinarity, and the Global Art Market 37 2. All Look Same: Ai Weiwei's Multitudes, Comrade Aesthetics, and Racial Anger in a Time of Inclusion 70 3. Minoring the Universal: Affect and the Molecular in Yan Xing's Performances and Liu Ding, Carol Lu, and Su Wei's Curation as Art Practice 103 4. Minor Agencies: Reformulating Demystification and Performativity through the Works of Zhang Huan, He Chengyao and Cao Fei 141 5. Tout-Monde and the Minor: The Cinematic and Theatrical Chinese Woman in Isaac Julien's Ten Thousand Waves 176 Afterword. For Those Minor in and to China: Protests in Hong Kong and Samson Young in Venice 208 Notes 223 Bibliography 245 Index 261
£72.25
Duke University Press Return Engagements
Book SynopsisViệt Lê examines contemporary art in Cambodia and Việt Nam to trace the entwinement of militarization, trauma, diaspora, and modernity in Southeast Asian art.Trade Review“Việt Lê writes with flair and passion of difficult subjects: war, trauma, the art and visual culture of the Vietnamese and Cambodian diasporas. With a critic's nuanced eye and a practitioner's sensitivity, his framings and readings of provocative, complicated work evoke the beauty of the artists' visions and yet always return us to the history and the present of the artists' lives, careers, and countries. Return Engagements is a brilliant work to which I will return.” -- Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of * The Sympathizer *“Việt Lê moves the scholarly conversation about displacement away from the traditional state boundaries toward a much-needed examination of diaspora, (un)settlement, and return while offering a capacious rethinking of refugee-ness, displaced personhood, and diasporic selfhood. Return Engagements is a provocative and compelling work of curatorially driven art criticism.” -- Cathy Schlund-Vials, author of * War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work *"In this elegantly produced study of contemporary art in Cambodia and Vietnam, Việt Lê explores the multiple valences of return—as a yield that is more than financial, a journey that is deeply personal and a recurrence of history that is multi-temporal." -- Penny Edwards * Sojourn *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix Preface xi Acknowledgments xxi Introduction. Risky Returns, Restagings, and Revolution 1 1. What Remains: Silence, Confrontation, and Traumatic Memory 57 2. The Art Part: Việtt Kiều Artists, Divides and Desires in Sài Gòn 105 3. Personal and Public Archives: Fragments and (Post)Colonial Memory 150 4. Town and Country: Sopheap Pich's and Phan Quang's Urban-Rural Developments 189 Epilogue. Leaving and Returns 239 Notes 245 Bibliography 301 Index 315
£21.59
Duke University Press Liquor Store Theatre
Book SynopsisFor six years Maya Stovall staged Liquor Store Theatre, a conceptual art and anthropology video project---included in the Whitney Biennial in 2017---in which she danced near the liquor stores in her Detroit neighborhood as a way to start conversations with her neighbors. In this book of the same name, Stovall uses the project as a point of departure for understanding everyday life in Detroit and the possibilities for ethnographic research, art, and knowledge creation. Her conversations with her neighbors—which touch on everything from economics, aesthetics, and sex to the political and economic racism that undergirds Detroit''s history—bring to light rarely acknowledged experiences of longtime Detroiters. In these exchanges, Stovall enacts an innovative form of ethnographic engagement that offers new modes of integrating the social sciences with the arts in ways that exceed what either approach can achieve alone.Trade Review“For [Maya] Stovall, how we know is the operative question. Through such a simple act, dancing on the sidewalk before these business establishments, she sparks so much one-on-one engagement that has led to long-term dialogues. It is through her performances that she is able to bring into relief what affects the lives of her community: the economic, racial, historic, political, social forces that shape the area's inhabitants and the built environment that surrounds them.” -- Christopher Y. Lew, from the foreword“Maya Stovall's wildly ambitious, experimental, poetic, and multimodal ethnographic engagement reimagines what the ethnographic encounter entails and demands while asking us to reconsider the very nature of scholarly research in urban America.” -- John L. Jackson Jr., Walter H. Annenberg Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania“An important contribution to the conversation on performance ethnography and the ethics of representing racialized bodies in urban space, Liquor Store Theatre is a singular type of immersion across ethnography, historiography, geography, and art.” -- Aimee Meredith Cox, author of * Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship *"The interest many will find here is the unexpectedness and complexity of the lives she reveals. Residents share memories and discuss neighborhood changes, talk about their experiences with family and work, housing, shopping, education, transportation, and their understanding of the forces that have shaped their lives. These are individuals, not subjects, and Stovall offers the particularities that good storytelling requires. Once we are able to see them as individuals, the residents of McDougall-Hunt are hard to ignore." -- Andrea Kirsh * Artblog *"Stovall is an anthropologist by training, and this becomes abundantly clear in the first few pages of Liquor Store Theatre, which is meticulously researched and scintillatingly told. . . . The publication of Liquor Store Theatre therefore becomes a space to unpack the true depth of the project, as well as a site for exploring Stovall’s larger research methodology." -- Alice Bucknell * Pin-Up Magazine *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix Foreword / Christopher Y. Lew xiii Prologue 1 Introduction 25 1. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2014) 47 2. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2014) 58 3. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 1, No. 3 (2014) 70 4. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2015) 76 5. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2015) 87 6. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 2, No. 3 (2015) 99 7. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 3, No. 3 (2016) 107 8. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 3, No. 4 (2016) 120 9. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 3, No. 5 (2016) 133 10. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 3, No. 6 (2016) 156 11. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 3, No. 7 (2016) 165 12. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2017) 178 13. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2017) 187 14. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 4, No. 3 (2017) 202 15. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 4, No. 4 (2017) 211 16. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 4, No. 5 (2017) 217 17. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 4, No. 6 (2017) 224 18. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 4, No. 7 (2017) 233 19. Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2018) 247 Acknowledgments 263 Notes 265 Bibliography 287 Index 299
£28.80
Duke University Press Minor China
Book SynopsisIn Minor China Hentyle Yapp analyzes contemporary Chinese art as it circulates on the global art market to outline the limitations of Western understandings of non-Western art. Yapp reconsiders the all-too-common narratives about Chinese art that celebrate the heroic artist who embodies political resistance against the authoritarian state. These narratives, as Yapp establishes, prevent Chinese art, aesthetics, and politics from being discussed in the West outside the terms of Western liberalism and notions of the “universal.” Yapp engages with art ranging from photography and performance to curation and installations to foreground what he calls the minor as method—tracking aesthetic and intellectual practices that challenge the predetermined ideas and political concerns that uphold dominant conceptions of history, the state, and the subject. By examining the minor in the work of artists such as Ai Weiwei, Zhang Huan, Cao Fei, Cai Guo-Qiang, Carol Yinghua Lu, anTrade Review“How do China and Chinese artists become legible in contemporary global circuits? In this informative study, Hentyle Yapp handles this question and its vast ideological ramifications by gauging late-capitalist art market aesthetics, academic discursive politics, and transnational multimedia dynamics. Most commendably, he asks us not to lose sight of the preemptive liberalist biases advanced by many Western accounts of non-Western cultures." -- Rey Chow, author of * Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture *“Hentyle Yapp's deconstruction of the dialectic of authoritarian regulation and artistic resistance in Chinese art is certain to attract critical attention from scholars in numerous fields. Minor China is an outstanding book that sets a new standard for analyzing non-Western art and politics otherwise.” -- David L. Eng, Richard L. Fisher Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania"In Minor China, Hentyle Yapp establishes a novel framework for analyzing contemporary Chinese art with a focus on its place in the global art market since 1989." -- Stephanie Kays * ARLIS/NA *"The book presents a provocative and theoretically informed study that opens meaningful conversations about a relational experience between the minor and the major. It makes a fresh and significant contribution to the fields of contemporary performance and visual culture, global Chinese studies, Asian American studies, and critical theory at large." -- Ying Xiao * Journal of Asian Studies *"[Minor China] present[s] insightful theoretical and historical perspectives that engage critically with Marxist thought and post-structuralist discourse, as well as gender and queer studies, with contemporary art from greater China and its diasporas. . . and provide[s] readers and scholars of art history, critical theory, institutional critique, gender and queer studies, visual as well as Asian studies, with timely food for thought. . . ." -- Franziska Koch * Art History *"The reach of Minor China goes beyond China and Sinophone studies. The book’s deployment of Asian American and transnational critiques makes it a relevant title for many in the field of Asian American studies, especially those interested in the discussions of aesthetics. . . ." -- Kai Hang Cheang * Journal of Asian American Studies *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. We're Going to Party Like It's 1989: Proper China, Interdisciplinarity, and the Global Art Market 37 2. All Look Same: Ai Weiwei's Multitudes, Comrade Aesthetics, and Racial Anger in a Time of Inclusion 70 3. Minoring the Universal: Affect and the Molecular in Yan Xing's Performances and Liu Ding, Carol Lu, and Su Wei's Curation as Art Practice 103 4. Minor Agencies: Reformulating Demystification and Performativity through the Works of Zhang Huan, He Chengyao and Cao Fei 141 5. Tout-Monde and the Minor: The Cinematic and Theatrical Chinese Woman in Isaac Julien's Ten Thousand Waves 176 Afterword. For Those Minor in and to China: Protests in Hong Kong and Samson Young in Venice 208 Notes 223 Bibliography 245 Index 261
£19.79
Duke University Press Birds and Feathers in the Ancient and Colonial
Book SynopsisThis issue reconstructs the integrated roles of real and symbolic birds and their feathers in ancient and colonial Mesoamerican and trans-Atlantic societies. The contributorswho include biologists, historians, and art historianscombine ethnohistoric methodologies with the physical sciences to analyze pictorial and native-language sources, archival documents, chronicles, feather artworks, and specimens in natural history collections. Contributors explore the semiotics of feathers, highly valued as part of local and imperial economies, in ritual regalia and featherworks. The issue also sheds light on how the shipment of indigenous featherworks and actual birdsboth living and stuffedbrought American birds and indigenous knowledge of them into contact with Europe. By foregrounding indigenous knowledge and value systems, the contributors reexamine the significance of birds and feathers in constructions of the natural world, philosophy and religion, society and economics, and artistic practi
£11.39
Duke University Press Art as Information Ecology
Book SynopsisIn Art as Information Ecology, Jason A. Hoelscher offers not only an information theory of art but an aesthetic theory of information. Applying close readings of the information theories of Claude Shannon and Gilbert Simondon to 1960s American art, Hoelscher proposes that art is information in its aesthetic or indeterminate mode—information oriented less toward answers and resolvability than toward questions, irresolvability, and sustained difference. These irresolvable differences, Hoelscher demonstrates, fuel the richness of aesthetic experience by which viewers glean new information and insight from each encounter with an artwork. In this way, art constitutes information that remains in formation---a difference that makes a difference that keeps on differencing. Considering the works of Frank Stella, Robert Morris, Adrian Piper, the Drop City commune, Eva Hesse, and others, Hoelscher finds that art exists within an information ecology of complex feedback between artworkTrade Review“Masterfully intertwining aesthetics, information theory, and entropy concepts, Jason A. Hoelscher offers an insightful account of the accelerated transformations of art practices in the 1960s. Art as Information Ecology will open new pathways toward a better understanding of the complexities of periodizing contemporary art at a time when artworlds are in more intense communication with other systems. This ambitious book is bound to create ripple effects.” -- Cristina Albu, author of * Mirror Affect: Seeing Self, Observing Others in Contemporary Art *“In Art as Information Ecology, Jason A. Hoelscher digs deep, looking into contemporary artworks in very different ways than ever before: from the premise that art can be a foundation of information that is like a multilayered cake, impossible to finish. I applaud Hoelscher for his in-depth, intense, and focused look into how art is a base for information systems that carry beyond the work themselves.” -- Sharon Louden, artist, educator advocate for artists, and editor of the Living and Sustaining a Creative Life series of books“If the task of humanists presently is to make bridges with STEM, [Art as Information Ecology] is a worthwhile effort in that direction. . . . For too long scholars have theorized about Western art in terms of the evolution from the static and remote icon; Hoelscher proposes to create a discourse that places art in the midst of contemporary intellectualism and to acknowledge how context, ever-changing, partly constitutes the work of art. Recommended.” -- P. Emison * Choice *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Art is Fuzzy Information 1 1. Art and Differential Objecthood 17 2. Aesthetic Entropy Machines 51 3. Butterfly Effects in Information Space 84 4. Information Efflorescence and the Aesthetic Singularity 119 5. Aesthetic Amplification and Adjacent Possibility 150 6. Complex Unities and Complex Boundaries 186 Conclusion. Information Entanglement and the Post-Evental Artworld 220 Notes 235 Bibliography 253 Index 267
£72.25
Duke University Press Black Gathering
Book SynopsisIn Black Gathering Sarah Jane Cervenak engages with Black artists and writers who create alternative spaces for Black people to gather free from interruption or regulation. Drawing together Black feminist theory, critical theories of ecology and ecoaesthetics, and Black aesthetics, Cervenak shows how novelists, poets, and visual artists such as Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Clementine Hunter, Samiya Bashir, and Leonardo Drew advance an ecological imagination that unsettles Western philosophical ideas of the earth as given to humans. In their aestheticization and conceptualization of gathering, these artists investigate the relationships among art, the environment, home, and forms of Black togetherness. Cervenak argues that by offering a formal and conceptual praxis of gathering, Black artists imagine liberation and alternative ways of being in the world that exist beyond those Enlightenment philosophies that presume Black people and earth as given to enclosure and ownership.Trade Review“Extending her rich study of philosophical praxis and the racial politics of wandering, Sarah Jane Cervenak explores daily practices and real-life social happenings as frames for navigating the discourses of death, subjection, and, most vitally, life. Surely this is a gathering; surely this is a beautiful work in Black aesthetics.” -- Kevin Quashie, author of * Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being *“Foregrounding fugitive existence in the reading of key literary texts and artworks, Black Gathering offers a powerful account of how Blackness (as it signals the without of modern representation) releases humans and nonhumans from their modern aesthetic enclosure (as subject and object of uncommitted contemplation) and juridic-economic misfortune (as subject and object of expropriation and extraction).” -- Denise Ferreira da Silva, author of * Toward a Global Idea of Race *“[Black Gathering], laid out in a captivating manner, moves from engagement with the concept of an earthly home and expands into works which explore the cosmos as well as parallel worlds. . . . This book will be of interest to advanced scholars studying the theory of African American artistic contributions.” -- Laura Christine Haynes * ARLIS/NA *“One of the key strengths of the book is its own ‘gathering’: that is, Cervenak takes up artists and works that either have been understudied or are not typically considered in the same context. . . . [Black Gathering] rewards readers interested in Black women’s (literary and visual) art, questions of form, and Black abstraction.” -- Evie Shockley * ISLE *“Black Gathering’s utopianism bespeaks an investment, inherited from performance studies, in what artworks are as well as what they do. Cervenak approaches Black ecologies not from the perspective of animality but from that of property. . . . Art, for Cervenak, generates a commons of sorts: it holds space for Black life, unenclosed.” -- Jean-Thomas Tremblay * GLQ *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Another Beginning Part I. Gathering's Art 1. "For a While at Least": Toni Morrison, Nikki Wallschlaeger, and the Ecoaesthetic Shapes of Home 2. The Art of the Matter: Samiya Bashir and Gabrielle Ralambo-Rajerison's Cosmopoetics Part II. The Art of Gathering 3. Arrangements Against the Sentence: Gayl Jones's Early Literature 4. "A Project From Outside": Leonardo Drew's Sculpture Conclusion: Clementine Hunter's Unscalable Field Notes References Index
£72.25
Duke University Press Nervous Systems
Book SynopsisThe contributors to Nervous Systems reassess contemporary artists' and critics' engagement with social, political, biological, and other systems as a set of complex and relational parts: an approach commonly known as systems thinking.Trade Review“A vital and much-needed contribution to the literature on art and systems discourse. If the history of art has largely treated systems theory in terms of its technocratic implications in the 1960s, Nervous Systems expands the field to postwar and contemporary art, addressing race, gender, ecology, and global networks as among its most urgent questions.” -- Pamela M. Lee, author of * Think Tank Aesthetics: Midcentury Modernism, the Cold War, and the Neoliberal Present *“Nervous Systems is one of the most impressive and conceptually nuanced collections of art historical essays that I have ever had the pleasure of reading. A model of what contemporary arts scholarship can look like, this volume is eminently readable and, most of all, teachable.” -- Jonathan Eburne, author of * Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas *Table of ContentsForeword / Judith Rodenbeck vii Acknowledgments ix After the Breakdown: Sixty Years of Systems Art / Johanna Gosse and Timothy Stott 1 Section I: Systems Aesthetics to Systems Politics 1. Jack Burnham Redux: Reappraising System Aesthetics / Luke Skrebowski 31 2. The Artist as "Weatherman": Hans Haacke's Critical Meteorology / John Tyson 55 3. Desalineación: Open Systems as Social Transformation in Tucumán Arde / Christine Filippone 78 Section II: Nervous Interfaces 4. The Irresolutions of Charles Gaines / Kris Cohen 103 5. Light and Space as Institutional Critique / Dawna Schuld 125 6. One among Many: Experiencing Complexity in Participatory Art Systems / Cristina Albu 148 Section III: The Contemporary Art World Described as a System 7. Abstraction, Dispersion, Deflation, and Noise: Liam Gillick's Disappointing Systems / Francis Halsall 173 8. Aesthetic Action as Planetary Praxis: Mel Chin's The Arctic Is . . . / Amanda Boetzkes 192 9. Mapping, SEA STATE, and State Violence on the Shores of Singapore / Brianne Cohen 213 10. Toward Infrastructure Art: Containerization, Black Box Logistics, and New Distribution Complexes / Jaimey Hamilton Faris 235 Selected Bibliography 261 Contributors 277 Index 281
£75.65
Duke University Press Consuelo Jimenez Underwood
Book SynopsisThe contributors to this volume examine the artistic practice of Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, whose innovative art and urgent engagement with a range of pressing contemporary issues mark her as one of the most vital artists of our time.Trade Review"With the publication of the important book . . . art lovers are treated to a full account of the life, creative processes, vision, and accomplishments of a great Latina artist. . . . The editors . . . have greatly enhanced our knowledge of an important American artist of craft and fine arts." -- Ricardo Romo * Latinos in America *"It is a joy to see Jimenez Underwood’s work as a teacher addressed and to read about her influence on students. Essays are supported by excellent images and a strong introduction. A significant notes section points to additional research. This excellent resource will be good for courses that expand on the understandings of textile art and art history. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals." -- L. L. Kriner * Choice *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations xi Preface. The Art of Necessity / Luis Valdez xv Acknowledgments xvii Introduction / Laura E. Pérez and Ann Marie Leimer 1 I. Spinning—Making Thread 1. The Hands of Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: A Filmmaker's Reflections / Carol Sauvion 25 2. Charged Objects: The Multivalent Fiber Art of Consuelo Jimenez Underwood / Christine Laffer 35 II. Weaving—Hand Work 3. History/Whose-Story? Postcoloniality and Contemporary Chicana Art / Constance Cortez 53 4. A Tear in the Curtain: Hilos y Cultura in the Art of Consuelo Jimenez Underwood / Amalia Mesa-Bains 71 5. Prayers for the Planet: Reweaving the Natural and the Social—Consuelo Jimenez Underwood's Welcome to Flower-Landia / Laura E. Pérez 80 6. Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: Welcome to Flower-Landia / María Ester Fernández 91 7. Between the Lines: Documenting Consuelo Jimenez Underwood's Fiber Pathways / Emily Zaiden 100 8. Flags, the Sacred, and a Different America in Consuelo Jimenez Underwood's Fiber Art / Clara Román-Odio 111 9. Garments for the Goddess of the Américas: The American Dress Triptych / Ann Marie Leimer 123 10. Space, Place, and Belonging in Borderlines: Countermapping in the Art of Consuelo Jimenez Underwood / Karen Mary Davalos 142 11. Decolonizing Aesthetics in Mexican and Xicana Fiber Art: The Art of Consuelo Jimenez Underwood and Georgina Santos / Cristina Serna 161 12. Reading Our Mothers: Decolonization and Cultural Identity in Consuelo Jimenez Underwood's Rebozos for Our Mothers / Carmen Febles 181 13. Weaving Water: Toward an Indigenous Method of Self- and Community Care / Jenell Navarro 198 III. Off the Loom—Into the World 14. Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: Artist, Educator, and Advocate / Robert Milnes 221 15. Being Chicanx Studies: Lessons for Racial Justice from the Work and Life of Consuelo Jimenez Underwood / Marcus Pizarro 239 16. Blue Río Tapestries / Verónica Reyes 244 Notes 261 Bibliography 290 Contributors 304 Index 311
£80.75
Duke University Press No Machos or Pop Stars
Book SynopsisGavin Butt tells the story of the post-punk scene in the northern English city of Leeds, showing how bands ranging from Gang of Four, Soft Cell, and Delta 5 to Mekons, Scritti Politti, and Fad Gadget drew on their university art school education to push the boundaries of pop music.Trade Review"A fascinating, informed and highly readable account. . . ." -- Rupert Loydell * International Times *"This is an important book. . . . It reminds us of—and perhaps implicitly yearns for—a time when a university art school education was free, open, inclusive, and multidisciplinary, where theory was able to re-energise practice and offered new paths out of the cul-de-sacs of art practice, where a local scene that was largely self-supporting and independent could be local without ever being parochial, where contemporary debates arising out of feminism, race, and left-wing politics could be acted out in an exciting form of ‘praxis’ and where competition between educational institutions could be collapsed, where a small city like Leeds could host a self-supporting creative eco-system where students were able to freely cross-pollinate." -- Aidan Winterburn * Tribune Magazine *“No Machos or Pop Stars is an account of the plethora of post-punk bands that emerged out of the ‘Leeds experiment.’ . . . The range and richness of Butt’s research is evident throughout.” -- Peter Suchin * Art Monthly *"As a history of educational ideas and systems this book is excellent. As a work of cultural history it is superb. . . this is also a book about music and musicians and it is full to the brim with insightful anecdotes and recollections from those who were active participants within this pre-figurative artistic community. It is a deft piece of writing and structural organisation, and there is no shortage of visual materials either. . . . No Machos or Pop Stars is extremely thorough and thoroughly readable." -- Richard Thomas * The Wire *"More powerful than [Butt's] scholarship, and his own voluminous interviewing of those in the scene, is his clear passion. He writes as someone moved by the music, weird, wonderful, and varied, that Leeds spawned, groups like Delta 5, Gang of Four, Soft Cell, Scritti Politti, Fad Gadget, and the Mekons." -- George Yatchisin * California Review of Books *"Written with both scholarly precision and an evident fan's enthusiasm, the book is a serious history of popular modernism in West Yorkshire, as well as a social sketch of artists and young people reacting to a collapsing society with a rarely matched intellectual, aesthetic and social application. . . . A welcome feature of No Machos—which is sadly unusual in many books related to punk and post-punk—is a contextualisation of the environment that created these scenes." -- Marcus Barnett * Corridor 8 *Table of ContentsPreface: Class Acts ix Acknowledgments xv Introduction: The Art School Dance Goes On 1 Part I. Avant-Garde and Punk 1. Beginning at a Dead End 23 2. Anarchy at the Poly 56 Part II. Forming a Band 3. Punk Bohemians 75 4. Debating Society 105 5. Why Theory? 126 6. “No Machos or Pop-Stars Please” 146 7. Electric Shock 171 8. Rehearsals for the Mutant Disco 198 Epilogue: The Limits of Experiment—1981 and After 225 Notes 245 Discography 267 Bibliography 271 Index 283
£73.95
Duke University Press Dragging Away
Book SynopsisLex Morgan Lancaster traces the formal and material innovations of contemporary queer and feminist artists, showing how they use abstraction as a queering tactic for social and political ends.Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 1. Edging Geometry 34 2. Feeling the Grid 60 3. Flaming Color 86 4. Transforming Everyday Matter 110 Epilogue. Dragging the Flag 133 Notes 147 Bibliography 165 Index 177
£71.10
Duke University Press Crisis Vision
Book SynopsisTorin Monahan explores a range of critical surveillance art to theorize the racializing dimensions of contemporary surveillance.Trade Review"A methodical and insightful account of the cultural production of differential systems of oppression that characterize the surveillant present. . . . What’s notable throughout is the incisiveness of Monahan’s critique which refuses to shy away from scrutiny even as he lauds each artwork for its investigation of crisis vision." -- Gary Kafer * Journal of Cultural Economy *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. Avoidance 21 2. Transparency 43 3. Complicity 69 4. Violence 90 5. Disruption 115 Conclusion 139 Notes 147 Bibliography 179 Index 205
£70.55
Duke University Press To Be Nsalas Daughter
Book SynopsisChérie N. Rivers shows how colonial systems of normalized violence condition the way we see and, through collaboration with contemporary Congolese artists, imagines ways we might learn to see differently.Table of ContentsPreface xvi 1. Elegy of Nsala 1 2. To See Nsala's Daughter 3 3. To Decompose 9 4. To Replicate 29 5. To Contradict 47 6. To Create 65 7. To Love Nsala's Daughter 81 Gratitude 89 Notes 93 Bibliography 99 Index 101 Illustration Credits 105
£59.50
Duke University Press Dont Look Away
Book SynopsisBrianne Cohen considers the role of contemporary art in developing a public commitment to ending structural violence in Europe.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. Preventing Violence in European Public Spheres 33 2. Harun Farocki, Civil Imagination, and Securitarian Publics 60 3. Thomas Hirschhorn, Imagined Communities, and Counterpublics 95 4. Henry VIII's Wives, Populism, and Preventive Publics 130 Conclusion 170 Notes 183 Bibliography 213 Index 227
£70.55
Duke University Press Probing Arts and Emergent Forms of Life
Book SynopsisIn Probing Arts and Emergent Forms of Life Michael M. J. Fischer calls for a new anthropology of the arts that attends to the materialities and technologies of the world as it exists today. Fischer examines the work of key Southeast and East Asian artists within the crucibles of unequal access, geopolitics, reverberating past traumas, and emergent socialities. He outlines the work of artist-theorists---including Entang Wiharso, Sally Smart, Charles Lim, Zai Kuning, and Kiran Kumar---who speculate about changing the world in ways that are attuned to its cultivation, repair, and rethinking in the Anthropocene. Their artistic vocabulary not only undoes Western art models and categories; it probes the unfolding future, addresses past trauma, and creates contested, vibrant, and flourishing spaces. Throughout Indonesia, Korea, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam---and from Kumar’s experimental dance to Kuning’s rattan and beeswax ghost ships to Lim’s videography of SingTrade Review"[A] dynamic ethnography of prominent works by contemporary artists in Asia ... Probing Arts and Emergent Forms of Life goes far beyond introducing innovative artists and describing their artworks. It situates contemporary Asian art within ethnographic and geo-political contexts." -- Robin Visser * Journal of Contemporary Asia *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. Challenging Art as Cultural Systems 12 2. Synthetic Realism: Postcinema in the Anthropocene 31 3. Feminage, Warang, and the Nervous System (Hauntology and Curation) 71 4. Nomadic Video in Turbulent Sea States: How Art Becomes Critique 100 5. Water Notes on Rattan Strings 132 6. Raw Moves and Layered Communication across the Archipelago Seas 165 Epilogue. Probing Art and Emerging Forms of Life 197 Appendix. The Year 2020 and the Camouflage Painting Series: Conversations with Entang Wiharso 215 Notes 221 References 253 Index 281
£73.95
Duke University Press Insignificant Things
Book SynopsisIn Insignificant Things Matthew Francis Rarey traces the history of the African-associated amulets that enslaved and other marginalized people carried as tools of survival in the Black Atlantic world from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Often considered visually benign by white Europeans, these amulet pouches, commonly known as “mandingas,” were used across Africa, Brazil, and Portugal and contained myriad objects, from herbs and Islamic prayers to shells and coins. Drawing on Arabic-language narratives from the West African Sahel, the archives of the Portuguese Inquisition, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European travel and merchant accounts of the West African Coast, and early nineteenth-century Brazilian police records, Rarey shows how mandingas functioned as portable archives of their makers’ experiences of enslavement, displacement, and diaspora. He presents them as examples of the visual culture of enslavement and critical to conceptualizTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Significance, Survival, and Silence 1 1. Labels 31 2. Contents 72 3. Markings 124 4. Revolts 171 Epilogue 208 Notes 217 Works Cited 249 Index 275
£70.55
Duke University Press At the Pivot of East and West
Book SynopsisIn At the Pivot of East and West, Michael M. J. Fischer examines documentary filmmaking and literature from Southeast Asia and Singapore for their para-ethnographic insights into politics, culture, and aesthetics. Women novelists—Lydia Kwa, Laksmi Pamuntjak, Sandi Tan, Jing Jing Lee, and Danielle Lim—renarrate Southeast Asian generational and political worlds as gendered psychodramas, while filmmakers Tan Pin Pin and Daniel Hui use film to probe into what can better be seen beyond textual worlds. Other writers like Daren Goh, Kevin Martens Wong, and Nuraliah Norasid reinvent the detective story for the age of artificial intelligence, use monsters to reimagine the Southeast Asian archipelago, and critique racism and the erasure of ethnic cultural histories. Continuing his project of applying anthropological thinking to the creative arts, Fischer exemplifies how art and fiction trace the ways in which taken-for-granted common sense changes over time, speak to the transTrade Review“Michael M. J. Fischer’s pathbreaking use of literature and documentary films to construct Asian ethnographies that splinter binaries and identities makes Asia, and Singapore in particular, far more fractal and dense with images and possibilities than it normally appears in social science literature. For those who know or thought they knew Singapore, this book will be a surprise. For those who don’t, Fischer introduces Singapore as having a mature, edgy, and politically engaged art scene as vibrant as any in Asia.” -- Gregory Clancey, author of * Earthquake Nation: The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity, 1868–1930 *“Michael M. J. Fischer’s extraordinary writing demonstrates how much of the inner life of a society becomes manifest by placing novels and films within the domain of ethnographic investigation. Providing access to powerful, often haunting dimensions of both individual lives and societies that are simply not available in such rich form elsewhere, this book has the potential to transform ethnographic practice.” -- Byron J. Good, author of * Medicine, Rationality, and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Reader’s Guide and Manifesto 1 1. Oiled Hinges: Sounds and Silences in Documentary Films of Social Change 47 2. Filmic Stutter, Taped Counter-Truths, and Musical Sutures: Knots of Recovery 76 3. White Ink, Family Systems, Forests of Illusion, and Aging: Knots of Passion 111 4. Miniatures: Small Kindnesses across Poisonous Knowledges 141 5. Blue Widow with Green Stripes: Pivots in Widening Horizons 155 6. Filmic Obsessive Repetitions, Dissociations, and Power Relations 194 7. Meritocracy Blues, Chimeras, and Analytic Monsters 212 Afterword. Portals to the Future: MRT Stations, Universities, and the Peopling of Technologies 243 Exergue. Bangarra Dance Theatre and the Historical Hinge in Australia 257 Notes 269 References 313 Index 337
£81.90
Duke University Press Cold War Camera
Book SynopsisCold War Camera explores the visual mediation of the Cold War and illuminates photography’s role in shaping the ways it was prosecuted and experienced. The contributors show how the camera stretched the parameters of the Cold War beyond dominant East-West and US-USSR binaries and highlight the significance of photography from across the global South. Among other topics, the contributors examine the production and circulation of the iconic figure of the “revolutionary Vietnamese woman” in the 1960s and 1970s; photographs connected with the coming of independence and decolonization in West Africa; family photograph archives in China and travel snapshots by Soviet citizens; photographs of apartheid in South Africa; and the circulation of photographs of Inuit Canadians who were relocated to the extreme Arctic in the 1950s. Highlighting the camera’s capacity to envision possible decolonialized futures, establish visual affinities and solidarities, and advance Trade Review"Cold War Camera takes readers from South Africa to Ethiopia, Vietnam to Palestine and Iran, from Chile to China, the Arctic Circle, and beyond. Its reach is sweeping, revealing a world entirely, if differentially, impacted as its most powerful quarreled to suture their place at the top. Just as it sheds light on this rich and storied past, Cold War Camera illuminates the present, proving that the tension and violence associated with the 'official' Cold War-era never ceased but only took on different forms." -- Liz Hallgren * International Journal of Communication *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xv Cold War Camera: An Introduction / Thy Phu, Andrea Noble, and Erina Duganne 1 Visual Alliances 1. Ernest Cole's House of Bondage, the United States Information Agency, and the Cultural Politics of the World War / Darren Newbury 33 2. Icon of Solidarity: The Revolutionary Vietnamese Woman in Vietnam, Palestine, and Iran / Thy Phu, Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandi, and Donya Ziaee 67 3. Group Material's "Art for the Future": Visualizing Transnational Solidarity at the End of the Global Cold War / Erina Duganne 113 4. Interrogating the Cold War's Geo-Politics from Down South: Chile from Within (1990) and the Construction of a Situated Visuality / Ángeles Donoso Macaya 143 5. Decolonization and Nonalignment: African Futures, Lost and Found / Jennifer Bajorek 167 Photo Essays 6. Bifurcated and Parallel Histories / Tong Lam 195 7. Preservation of Terror / Eric Gottesman 203 Structures of Seeing 8. Ending World War II: The Visual Literacy Class in Cold War Human Rights / Ariella Aïsha Azoulay 213 9. “Planted There Like Human Flags”: Photographs of the High Arctic and Cold War Anxiety, 1951–1956 / Sarah Parsons 239 10. Urban Albums, Village Forms: Chinese Family Photographs and the Cold War / Laura Wexler, Karintha Lowe, and Guigui Yao 263 11. Travel, Space, and Belonging in Soviet Domestic Photo Collections of the Cold War Era / Oksana Sarkosova and Olga Shevchenko 293 12. Exhibiting Ethnic Minorities, Democratizing History: Cold War Legacies and the Jews in Poland's Visible Sphere / Gil Pasternak and Marta Ziętkiewicz 327 Bibliography 359 Contributors 389 Index 395
£22.79
Duke University Press Insignificant Things
Book SynopsisIn Insignificant Things Matthew Francis Rarey traces the history of the African-associated amulets that enslaved and other marginalized people carried as tools of survival in the Black Atlantic world from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Often considered visually benign by white Europeans, these amulet pouches, commonly known as “mandingas,” were used across Africa, Brazil, and Portugal and contained myriad objects, from herbs and Islamic prayers to shells and coins. Drawing on Arabic-language narratives from the West African Sahel, the archives of the Portuguese Inquisition, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European travel and merchant accounts of the West African Coast, and early nineteenth-century Brazilian police records, Rarey shows how mandingas functioned as portable archives of their makers’ experiences of enslavement, displacement, and diaspora. He presents them as examples of the visual culture of enslavement and critical to conceptualizTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Significance, Survival, and Silence 1 1. Labels 31 2. Contents 72 3. Markings 124 4. Revolts 171 Epilogue 208 Notes 217 Works Cited 249 Index 275
£18.89
Duke University Press At the Pivot of East and West
Book SynopsisIn At the Pivot of East and West, Michael M. J. Fischer examines documentary filmmaking and literature from Southeast Asia and Singapore for their para-ethnographic insights into politics, culture, and aesthetics. Women novelists—Lydia Kwa, Laksmi Pamuntjak, Sandi Tan, Jing Jing Lee, and Danielle Lim—renarrate Southeast Asian generational and political worlds as gendered psychodramas, while filmmakers Tan Pin Pin and Daniel Hui use film to probe into what can better be seen beyond textual worlds. Other writers like Daren Goh, Kevin Martens Wong, and Nuraliah Norasid reinvent the detective story for the age of artificial intelligence, use monsters to reimagine the Southeast Asian archipelago, and critique racism and the erasure of ethnic cultural histories. Continuing his project of applying anthropological thinking to the creative arts, Fischer exemplifies how art and fiction trace the ways in which taken-for-granted common sense changes over time, speak to the transTrade Review“Michael M. J. Fischer’s pathbreaking use of literature and documentary films to construct Asian ethnographies that splinter binaries and identities makes Asia, and Singapore in particular, far more fractal and dense with images and possibilities than it normally appears in social science literature. For those who know or thought they knew Singapore, this book will be a surprise. For those who don’t, Fischer introduces Singapore as having a mature, edgy, and politically engaged art scene as vibrant as any in Asia.” -- Gregory Clancey, author of * Earthquake Nation: The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity, 1868–1930 *“Michael M. J. Fischer’s extraordinary writing demonstrates how much of the inner life of a society becomes manifest by placing novels and films within the domain of ethnographic investigation. Providing access to powerful, often haunting dimensions of both individual lives and societies that are simply not available in such rich form elsewhere, this book has the potential to transform ethnographic practice.” -- Byron J. Good, author of * Medicine, Rationality, and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Reader’s Guide and Manifesto 1 1. Oiled Hinges: Sounds and Silences in Documentary Films of Social Change 47 2. Filmic Stutter, Taped Counter-Truths, and Musical Sutures: Knots of Recovery 76 3. White Ink, Family Systems, Forests of Illusion, and Aging: Knots of Passion 111 4. Miniatures: Small Kindnesses across Poisonous Knowledges 141 5. Blue Widow with Green Stripes: Pivots in Widening Horizons 155 6. Filmic Obsessive Repetitions, Dissociations, and Power Relations 194 7. Meritocracy Blues, Chimeras, and Analytic Monsters 212 Afterword. Portals to the Future: MRT Stations, Universities, and the Peopling of Technologies 243 Exergue. Bangarra Dance Theatre and the Historical Hinge in Australia 257 Notes 269 References 313 Index 337
£21.59
Duke University Press The Sovereign Self
Book SynopsisIn The Sovereign Self, Grant H. Kester examines the evolving discourse of aesthetic autonomy from its origins in the Enlightenment through avant-garde projects and movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kester traces the idea of aesthetic autonomy—the sense that art should be autonomous from social forces while retaining the ability to reflect back critically on society—through Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Marx, and Adorno. Kester critiques the use of aesthetic autonomy as the basis for understanding the nature of art and the shifting relationship between art and revolutionary praxis. He shows that dominant discourses of aesthetic autonomy reproduce the very forms of bourgeois liberalism that autonomy discourse itself claims to challenge. Analyzing avant-garde art and political movements in Russia, India, Latin America, and elsewhere, Kester retheorizes the aesthetic beyond autonomy. Ultimately, Kester demonstrates that the question of aesthetic autonomy has Trade Review“An extraordinarily knowledgeable explanation for those outside the art world, as well as those critically within it, of the philosophical traditions and social contradictions within which artists do their work. This is a book to own.” -- Susan Buck-Morss, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkTable of ContentsIntroduction 1 I. From Beauty to Dissensus 1. Freedom and Sovereignty 19 2. Communism and the Aesthetic State 48 II. Negation and Performativity 3. From Vanguard to Avant-Garde 85 4. Activism and Autonomy in the 1960s 108 III. Autonomy since the 1980s 5. The Rise of the Neo-Avant-Garde 145 6. The Hirschhorn Monument: Autonomy as Brand and Alibi 180 Conclusion. Aesthetics beyond Semblance 212 Notes 219 Works Cited 243 Index 259
£73.95
Duke University Press Citizens of Photography
Book SynopsisCitizens of Photography explores how photography offers access to forms of citizenship beyond those available through ordinary politics. Through contemporary ethnographic investigations of photographic practice in Nicaragua, Nigeria, Greece, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Cambodia, the PhotoDemos Collective traces the resonances between political representation and photographic representation. The authors emphasize photography as lived practice and how photography’s performative, transformative, and transgressive possibilities facilitate the articulation of new identities. They analyze photography ranging from family albums and social media to state and public archives, showing how it points to new destinations in the context of social movements, the aftermath of atrocity and civil war, and the legacies of past injustices. By foregrounding photography’s open-ended and contingent nature and its ability to subvert and reconfigure conventional political identiTrade Review“Ambitious in its theoretical and ethnographic reach, this vital volume robustly explores the unruly political potentialities of photography while laying out multiple directions for a future anthropology of photography. Citizens of Photography is a landmark book.” -- Karen Strassler, author of * Demanding Images: Democracy, Mediation, and the Image-Event in Indonesia *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction. Photographing; or, the Future of the Image / Christopher Pinney 1 1. “The Truth Is in the Soil”—The Political Work of Photography in Northern Sri Lanka / Vidhya Buthpitiya 63 2. Visual Citizenship in Cambodia—From Apocalypse to Visual “Political Emancipation” / Sokphea Young 111 3. Photography, Citizenship, and Accusatory Memory in the Greek Crisis / Konstantinos Kalantzis 150 4. Insurgent Archive—The Photographic Making and Unmaking of the Nicaraguan Revolutionary State / Ileana L. Selejan 192 5. “We Are Moving with Technology”—Photographing Voice and Belonging in Nigeria / Naluwembe Binaisa 234 6. Citizenship, Contingency, and Futurity—Photographic Ethnographies from Nepal, India, and Bangladesh / Christopher Pinney 273 Bibliography 319 Contributors 337 Index 339
£77.35
Duke University Press Beyond the Sovereign Self
Book SynopsisGrant H. Kester continues the critique of aesthetic autonomy begun in The Sovereign Self, showing how socially engaged art provides an alternative aesthetic with greater possibilities for critical practice.Trade Review“In a superlative demonstration of a hypothesis in action, Grant H. Kester’s definitive study Beyond the Sovereign Self effectively melts down, then reimagines our stagnated concepts of aesthetic autonomy and avant-gardism in a dauntless bid to retheorize the increasingly entangled, if not indistinguishable, realms of twenty-first-century social activism and art.” -- Gregory Sholette, author of * The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art *“With characteristic thoroughness, Grant H. Kester articulates the radical potential in challenging the cherished notion of art’s autonomy. Centering dialogic and activist art practices, he insightfully argues that the social labor of cultural resistance necessarily operates in generative forms of collectivity and dissensus.” -- Jennifer A. González, coeditor of * Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1 I. Within and Beyond the Canon 1. The Incommensurablity of Socially Engaged Art 33 2. Escrache and Autonomy 54 II. From Object to Event 3. Dematerialization and Aesthetics in Real Time 85 4. The Aesthetic of Answerability 105 III. A Dialogical Aesthetic 5. Social Labor and Communicative Action 137 6. Our Pernicious Temporality 171 7. Being Human as Praxis 202 Conclusion. Beyond the White Wall 229 Notes 235 Works Cited 255 Index 271
£73.95
Duke University Press Citizens of Photography
Book SynopsisCitizens of Photography explores how photography offers access to forms of citizenship beyond those available through ordinary politics. Through contemporary ethnographic investigations of photographic practice in Nicaragua, Nigeria, Greece, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Cambodia, the PhotoDemos Collective traces the resonances between political representation and photographic representation. The authors emphasize photography as lived practice and how photography’s performative, transformative, and transgressive possibilities facilitate the articulation of new identities. They analyze photography ranging from family albums and social media to state and public archives, showing how it points to new destinations in the context of social movements, the aftermath of atrocity and civil war, and the legacies of past injustices. By foregrounding photography’s open-ended and contingent nature and its ability to subvert and reconfigure conventional political identiTrade Review“Ambitious in its theoretical and ethnographic reach, this vital volume robustly explores the unruly political potentialities of photography while laying out multiple directions for a future anthropology of photography. Citizens of Photography is a landmark book.” -- Karen Strassler, author of * Demanding Images: Democracy, Mediation, and the Image-Event in Indonesia *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction. Photographing; or, the Future of the Image / Christopher Pinney 1 1. “The Truth Is in the Soil”—The Political Work of Photography in Northern Sri Lanka / Vidhya Buthpitiya 63 2. Visual Citizenship in Cambodia—From Apocalypse to Visual “Political Emancipation” / Sokphea Young 111 3. Photography, Citizenship, and Accusatory Memory in the Greek Crisis / Konstantinos Kalantzis 150 4. Insurgent Archive—The Photographic Making and Unmaking of the Nicaraguan Revolutionary State / Ileana L. Selejan 192 5. “We Are Moving with Technology”—Photographing Voice and Belonging in Nigeria / Naluwembe Binaisa 234 6. Citizenship, Contingency, and Futurity—Photographic Ethnographies from Nepal, India, and Bangladesh / Christopher Pinney 273 Bibliography 319 Contributors 337 Index 339
£21.59
Duke University Press The Politics of Collecting
Book SynopsisIn The Politics of Collecting, Eunsong Kim traces how racial capitalism and colonialism situated the rise of US museum collections and conceptual art forms. Investigating historical legal and property claims, she argues that regimes of expropriation—rather than merit or good taste—are responsible for popular ideas of formal innovation and artistic genius. In doing so, she details how Marcel Duchamp’s canonization has more to do with his patron’s donations to museums than it does the quality of Duchamp’s work, and she uncovers the racialized and financialized logic behind the Archive of New Poetry’s collecting practices. Ranging from the conception of philanthropy devised by the robber barons of the late nineteenth century to ongoing digitization projects, Kim provides a new history of contemporary art that accounts for the complicated entanglement of race, capital, and labor behind storied art institutions and artists. Drawing on history, theo
£75.65
Duke University Press After Caliban
£85.00
New York University Press Black Patience
Book Synopsis2024 College Language Association Book Award Winner2023 Hooks National Book Award Winner (Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change)Honorable Mention, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present 2023 Book PrizeHonorable Mention, 2023 John W. Frick Book Award (American Theatre and Drama Society)Finalist, 2022 George Freedley Memorial Award of the Theatre Library Association.Finalist, Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History (ASTR)Finalist, ATHE Outstanding Book AwardA bold rethinking of the Civil Rights Movement through the lens of Black theaterFreedom, Now! This rallying cry became the most iconic phrase of the Civil Rights Movement, challenging the persistent command that Black people waitin the holds of slave ships and on auction blocks, in segregated bus stops and schoolyardsfor their long-deferred liberation. In Black Patience, Julius B. Fleming Jr.Trade ReviewDemonstrates how temporality as an analytic helps us understand the dynamics of antiblack racism within a political economy of black subjugation. By uncovering little-known plays or unexpected black spaces where plays were produced, Julius Fleming expands the Civil Rights Movement’s literary canon and indexes the multiple registers of ‘patience’ mobilized by blacks and whites within white supremacy and black resistance. Beautifully written and meticulously researched, Black Patience is a tour de force. * E. Patrick Johnson, author of Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women *Offers crucial insight into debates about black political action by carefully and convincingly locating progress in the ephemerality of the now. Adding a distinctive and powerful addition to the history and critical understanding of the Civil Rights Movement, Julius Fleming details the impact of direct action in the present to establish the importance of black theatre to black freedom. * Soyica Diggs Colbert, Georgetown University *Creating a new framework to understand the classical phase of the civil rights movement is no easy task given the number of published books on the topic. However, through his focus on temporality and the links between time and affect—patience is, definitionally, about time—Fleming has done just that. * Journal of Southern History *Fleming successfully accomplishes what he describes as a key purpose of the book: “to map a new cultural and political history of the Civil Rights Movement” (41). * American Literary History *
£62.90
New York University Press Black Patience
Book Synopsis2024 College Language Association Book Award Winner2023 Hooks National Book Award Winner (Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change)Honorable Mention, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present 2023 Book PrizeHonorable Mention, 2023 John W. Frick Book Award (American Theatre and Drama Society)Finalist, 2022 George Freedley Memorial Award of the Theatre Library Association.Finalist, Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History (ASTR)Finalist, ATHE Outstanding Book AwardA bold rethinking of the Civil Rights Movement through the lens of Black theaterFreedom, Now! This rallying cry became the most iconic phrase of the Civil Rights Movement, challenging the persistent command that Black people waitin the holds of slave ships and on auction blocks, in segregated bus stops and schoolyardsfor their long-deferred liberation. In Black Patience, Julius B. Fleming Jr.Trade ReviewDemonstrates how temporality as an analytic helps us understand the dynamics of antiblack racism within a political economy of black subjugation. By uncovering little-known plays or unexpected black spaces where plays were produced, Julius Fleming expands the Civil Rights Movement’s literary canon and indexes the multiple registers of ‘patience’ mobilized by blacks and whites within white supremacy and black resistance. Beautifully written and meticulously researched, Black Patience is a tour de force. * E. Patrick Johnson, author of Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women *Offers crucial insight into debates about black political action by carefully and convincingly locating progress in the ephemerality of the now. Adding a distinctive and powerful addition to the history and critical understanding of the Civil Rights Movement, Julius Fleming details the impact of direct action in the present to establish the importance of black theatre to black freedom. * Soyica Diggs Colbert, Georgetown University *Creating a new framework to understand the classical phase of the civil rights movement is no easy task given the number of published books on the topic. However, through his focus on temporality and the links between time and affect—patience is, definitionally, about time—Fleming has done just that. * Journal of Southern History *Fleming successfully accomplishes what he describes as a key purpose of the book: “to map a new cultural and political history of the Civil Rights Movement” (41). * American Literary History *
£22.79
New York University Press The Unintended
Book SynopsisReimagines photography through the long history of ideas of expressionThe end of the nineteenth century saw massive developments and innovations in photography at a time when the forces of Western modernityindustrialization, racialization, and capitalismwere quickly reshaping the world. The Unintended slows down the moment in which the technology of photography seemed to speed itselfand so the history of racial capitalismup. It follows the substantial shifts in the markets, mediums, and forms of photography during a legally murky period at the end of the nineteenth century. Monica Huerta traces the subtle and paradoxical ways legal thinking through photographic lenses reinscribed a particular aesthetics of whiteness in the very conceptions of property ownership. The book pulls together an archive that encompasses the histories of performance and portraiture alongside the legal, pursuing the logics by which property rights involving photographs are affirmed Trade ReviewWhen you look at a photograph, whose expression do you see? This is a question of perception, but it is also a question of property rights. The Unintended considers ‘stories about photography’s history as property’ and shows how much is at stake when someone claims to own an image. Expression gives way to possession, and matters of law, credit, identity, and aesthetics all hang in the balance. Monica Huerta seems to deliver a surprising analytic turn on every page. This book made my head spin. -- Caleb Smith, author of Thoreau’s Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American CultureWholly original and exciting. Tracking photography’s intersection with property law in the late nineteenth century U.S., The Unintended evolves genuinely new possibilities for thinking about the medium’s role in the construction of race. Monica Huerta addresses the workings of capital in relation to the medium—not only photography’s status as a commercial practice, but also how it took up and redefined the ways bodies could be regarded as property. Closely historicized yet wide-ranging in its implications, Huerta’s book models a profoundly ethical attention to what the photographic archive can reveal. -- Dana Luciano, Rutgers University
£22.79
New York University Press The Unintended
Book SynopsisReimagines photography through the long history of ideas of expressionThe end of the nineteenth century saw massive developments and innovations in photography at a time when the forces of Western modernityindustrialization, racialization, and capitalismwere quickly reshaping the world. The Unintended slows down the moment in which the technology of photography seemed to speed itselfand so the history of racial capitalismup. It follows the substantial shifts in the markets, mediums, and forms of photography during a legally murky period at the end of the nineteenth century. Monica Huerta traces the subtle and paradoxical ways legal thinking through photographic lenses reinscribed a particular aesthetics of whiteness in the very conceptions of property ownership. The book pulls together an archive that encompasses the histories of performance and portraiture alongside the legal, pursuing the logics by which property rights involving photographs are affirmed Trade ReviewWhen you look at a photograph, whose expression do you see? This is a question of perception, but it is also a question of property rights. The Unintended considers ‘stories about photography’s history as property’ and shows how much is at stake when someone claims to own an image. Expression gives way to possession, and matters of law, credit, identity, and aesthetics all hang in the balance. Monica Huerta seems to deliver a surprising analytic turn on every page. This book made my head spin. -- Caleb Smith, author of Thoreau’s Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American CultureWholly original and exciting. Tracking photography’s intersection with property law in the late nineteenth century U.S., The Unintended evolves genuinely new possibilities for thinking about the medium’s role in the construction of race. Monica Huerta addresses the workings of capital in relation to the medium—not only photography’s status as a commercial practice, but also how it took up and redefined the ways bodies could be regarded as property. Closely historicized yet wide-ranging in its implications, Huerta’s book models a profoundly ethical attention to what the photographic archive can reveal. -- Dana Luciano, Rutgers University
£66.60
New York University Press Archiving an Epidemic
Book SynopsisHonorable Mention, 2021 Latinx Studies Section Outstanding Book Award, given by the Latin American Studies AssociationWinner, 2020 Latino Book Awards in the LGBTQ+ Themed SectionFinalist, 2019 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ StudiesCritically reimagines Chicanx art, unmasking its queer afterlife Emboldened by the boom in art, fashion, music, and retail culture in 1980s Los Angeles, the iconoclasts of queer Aztlánas Robb Hernández terms the group of artists who emerged from East LA, Orange County, and other parts of Southern California during this perioddeveloped a new vernacular with which to read the city in bloom. Tracing this important but understudied body of work, Archiving an Epidemic catalogs a queer retelling of the Chicana and Chicano art movement, from its origins in the 1960s, to the AIDS crisis and the destruction it wrought in the 1980s, and onto the remnants and legacies of these artistTrade ReviewA much-needed publication on queer Chicanx art and artists in Southern California during the 1970s and 1980s, as well as a study of loss, memory, and memorialization in the wake of the AIDS crisis...Hernandez’s work to reassemble the “wreckage” of AIDS art and performance allows us to imagine archival methods beyond institutions in performative and creative ways that look to infinite and speculative recastings of history for those the archive left behind. * Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture *Hernández has created a methodology that is built from an understanding that archives are always flawed endeavors, especially given that so much art and performance created in response to AIDS has been lost or destroyed. Instead, he utilizes an approach that embraces degradation and incompletion. By meticulously attending to absences and failures in the work he studies, Hernández’s book offers an innovative new methodology for archival practice ... Hernández’s examination of queer Chicanx avantgarde practices is urgent and long overdue. * The Drama Review *Provides a detailed, sensitive, and textured account of the precarious histories of queer Chicanx artists during the first decades of the ongoing AIDS crisis. This remarkable book offers new ways of thinking about how to reconstruct such histories by attending to the emotional and spatial qualities of the archives, homes, detritus, mementos, and memories that Hernández explores with the reader. While Archiving an Epidemic is a groundbreaking historical recovery of queer art in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s, it is also a reflection on loss, absence, silence, and the threat of erasure. Not only will this book be an essential text in the literatures on queer art, Chicanx art, and the AIDS pandemic, it should be read by anyone confronting archives and their limits. Indeed, no one studying American art and culture of the late twentieth century can afford not to read this book. -- David J. Getsy, School of the Art Institute of ChicagoHernández queers the archive while also stepping outside its institutional limits and into the realm of the absences and shards of human loss from AIDS. In doing so, Hernández develops an alternative methodology for 'queer detrital analysis' that brings the body and space to bear. A tour de force in its archival and critical breadth, this book vividly reimagines the American avant-garde since the 1960s through queer Chicanx artists, groups, and spaces in Southern California. -- Chon Noriega, University of California, Los Angeles
£21.84
New York University Press Chicanao Remix
Book SynopsisRewrites our understanding of the last 50 years of Chicana/o cultural production. Chicana/o Remix casts new light not only on artistssuch as Sandra de la Loza, Judy Baca, and David Botello, among othersbut on the exhibitions that feature their work, and the collectors, curators, critics, and advocates who engage it. Combining feminist theory, critical ethnic studies, art historical analysis, and extensive archival and field research, Karen Mary Davalos argues that narrow notions of identity, politics, and aesthetics limit our ability to understand the full capacities of Chicana/o art. She employs fresh vernacular concepts such as the errata exhibit, or the staging of exhibits that critically question mainstream art museums, and the remix, or the act of bringing new narratives and forgotten histories from the background and into the foreground. These concepts, which emerge out of art practice itself, drive her analysis and reinforce the rejection of familiar narratives that evaluate ChiTrade ReviewChicana/o Remixis sure to become the definite resource on Chicana/o and Latinx art across the disciplines. With impressive knowledge and sensibility toward the subject, Davaloselucidates the key debates around the evaluation and representation of Chicana/o art, and the strategies used by Chicano/a artists, curators, and collectors to challenge dominant aesthetic structures. The result is a revealing analysis of the art world and a must-read for anyone interested in the expanding definitions of Latinx visual culture. -- Arlene Dávila,author of Culture Works: Space, Value, and Mobility Across the Neoliberal Americas
£23.74
New York University Press The Filipino Primitive
Book SynopsisHow museums' visual culture contributes to knowledge accumulationSarita See argues that collections of stolen artifacts form the foundation of American knowledge production. Nowhere can we appreciate more easily the triple forces of knowledge accumulationcapitalist, colonial, and racialthan in the imperial museum, where the objects of accumulation remain materially, visibly preserved. The Filipino Primitive takes Karl Marx's concept of primitive accumulation, usually conceived of as an economic process for the acquisition of land and the extraction of labor, and argues that we also must understand it as a project of knowledge accumulation. Taking us through the Philippine collections at the University of Michigan Natural History Museum and the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum, also in Michigan, See reveals these exhibits as both allegory and real case of the primitive accumulation that subtends imperial American knowledge, just as the extraction of Filipino labor contributes to American Trade ReviewThe Filipino Primitiveis generative and captivatingly relevant amid the current global crises over income inequality, border disputes, and belonging. With fascinating incisiveness, Sarita Echavez See invites us to rethink theft and debt through cultural archives andproductions. -- Allan Punzalan Isaac,author of American Tropics: Articulating Filipino AmericaAn ambitious, necessary, and timely book,SaritaEchavez See exposes the workings of modern racial representation as a site of accumulation and dispossession.The Filipino Primitiveis a crucial read for anyone interested in a critique of the history, structures, and practices of American imperial-racial power. -- Denise Ferreira da Silva,author of Toward a Global Idea of Race
£23.74
New York University Press The Sanctuary of Hermes and Aphrodite at Syme
Book Synopsis
£59.50
New York University Press The Content of Our Caricature
Book SynopsisWinner, 2021 Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award, given by the Society for Cinema and Media StudiesWinner, 2021 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards for Best Academic/Scholarly WorkHonorable Mention, 2021 Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African-American Popular Culture Studies, given by the Popular Culture AssociationWinner, 2020 Charles Hatfield Book Prize, given by the Comic Studies SocietyTraces the history of racial caricature and the ways that Black cartoonists have turned this visual grammar on its headRevealing the long aesthetic tradition of African American cartoonists who have made use of racist caricature as a black diasporic art practice, Rebecca Wanzo demonstrates how these artists have resisted histories of visual imperialism and their legacies. Moving beyond binaries of positive and negative representation, many black cartoonists have used Trade Review[Wanzo] offers a brilliant, concisely written excursion into the fraught nature of African American comic art. * Choice *A singular achievement. Rebecca Wanzo gives shape to new and necessary ways of understanding the development of comic art in the United States that also resonate with broader conversations about blackness and visual narrative. Her study delves into the ambivalent expressions of citizenship, identity, and power that are central to how cartoonists picture race. Along the way, Wanzo bridges aesthetics and cultural theory through expert readings of editorial comics and newspaper strips, superhero serials, underground comix, historical graphic novels, and more. -- Qiana Whitted, co-editor of Comics and the U.S. SouthFrom underground comix to Boondocks, Wanzo brilliantly treats moments in the history of caricature and demonstrates anew how popular culture has perpetuated and popularized generations of grotesque imagery. Wanzo’s gift is in the singular way she reads African American cartoonists who themselves redeployed and engaged the visual grammar of caricature while also interrogating American citizenship. An authoritative, nuanced book. -- Jared Gardner, author of Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First Century StorytellingThe text does a good job at connecting the historical cartoon archive and its stereotypical visual representations of Blacks to current events [...] The Content of Our Caricature invites the reader to a more complex reading of Black representations in caricature that transcends the tendency towards binary oppositions * Visual Studies *Wanzo, like the artists she investigates, reframes caricature so that we might see and read it differently. Because to not see caricature, as Wanzo powerfully concludes, 'will always be a sign of forgetting the monstrosity crafted by historical injuries, a weight carried by all black people perpetually in the wake—and on the brink—of real political change". * INKS *Wanzo’s contribution to this rising field is vital and unique, given her specific focus on the aesthetics of comics art using the artistic tradition of caricature as a way to engage with social and political issues. Wanzo rightly points out how ‘many of the works’ done to date in Black comic studies—several of which emphasize superhero comic books over other genres and formats— ‘focus on cultural histories or pay little attention to aesthetics’. * The Journal of African American History *The Content of our Caricature is unique in its focus on Black cartoonists and their use of Black caricatures in comics, editorial cartoons, graphic biographies, and underground comix…This careful, incisive study describes and shows the range of surprising, amusing, entertaining, antagonistic, outrageous, and offensive ways Black cartoonists represent or consider the paradox of Black citizenship. * American Literary History *The book makes a compelling case for why we should, despite our initial intuitions to look away, engage with what seem like racist representations, stereotypes, and caricatures. Wanzo provides sophisticated textual and literary analyses to argue that African American cartoonists have been questioning, reconstructing, and using racist stereotypes to critique notions of the “ideal citizen” in the United States. * International Journal of Communication *
£62.90
New York University Press The Filipino Primitive
Book SynopsisHow museums' visual culture contributes to knowledge accumulationSarita See argues that collections of stolen artifacts form the foundation of American knowledge production. Nowhere can we appreciate more easily the triple forces of knowledge accumulationcapitalist, colonial, and racialthan in the imperial museum, where the objects of accumulation remain materially, visibly preserved. The Filipino Primitive takes Karl Marx's concept of primitive accumulation, usually conceived of as an economic process for the acquisition of land and the extraction of labor, and argues that we also must understand it as a project of knowledge accumulation. Taking us through the Philippine collections at the University of Michigan Natural History Museum and the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum, also in Michigan, See reveals these exhibits as both allegory and real case of the primitive accumulation that subtends imperial American knowledge, just as the extraction of Filipino labor contributes to American Trade ReviewThe Filipino Primitiveis generative and captivatingly relevant amid the current global crises over income inequality, border disputes, and belonging. With fascinating incisiveness, Sarita Echavez See invites us to rethink theft and debt through cultural archives andproductions. -- Allan Punzalan Isaac,author of American Tropics: Articulating Filipino AmericaAn ambitious, necessary, and timely book,SaritaEchavez See exposes the workings of modern racial representation as a site of accumulation and dispossession.The Filipino Primitiveis a crucial read for anyone interested in a critique of the history, structures, and practices of American imperial-racial power. -- Denise Ferreira da Silva,author of Toward a Global Idea of Race
£66.60
New York University Press Archiving an Epidemic
Book SynopsisHonorable Mention, 2021 Latinx Studies Section Outstanding Book Award, given by the Latin American Studies Association Winner, 2020 Latino Book Awards in the LGBTQ+ Themed Section Finalist, 2019 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies Critically reimagines Chicanx art, unmasking its queer afterlife Emboldened by the boom in art, fashion, music, and retail culture in 1980s Los Angeles, the iconoclasts of queer Aztlánas Robb Hernández terms the group of artists who emerged from East LA, Orange County, and other parts of Southern California during this perioddeveloped a new vernacular with which to read the city in bloom. Tracing this important but understudied body of work, Archiving an Epidemic catalogs a queer retelling of the Chicana and Chicano art movement, from its origins in the 1960s, to the AIDS crisis and the destruction it wrought in the 1980s, and onto the remnants and legacies of these artists in the current moment. Hernández offers a vocabulary for this multi-modal avant-gardeone that contests the heteromasculinity and ocular surveillance visited upon it by the larger Chicanx community, as well as the formally straight conditions of traditional archive-building, museum institutions, and the art world writ large. With a focus on works by Mundo Meza (195585), Teddy Sandoval (19491995), and Joey Terrill (1955 ), and with appearances by Laura Aguilar, David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe, and even Eddie Murphy, Archiving an Epidemic composes a complex picture of queer Chicanx avant-gardisms. With over sixty imagesmany of which are published here for the first timeHernández's work excavates this archive to question not what Chicanx art is, but what it could have been.Trade ReviewA much-needed publication on queer Chicanx art and artists in Southern California during the 1970s and 1980s, as well as a study of loss, memory, and memorialization in the wake of the AIDS crisis...Hernandez’s work to reassemble the “wreckage” of AIDS art and performance allows us to imagine archival methods beyond institutions in performative and creative ways that look to infinite and speculative recastings of history for those the archive left behind. * Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture *Hernández has created a methodology that is built from an understanding that archives are always flawed endeavors, especially given that so much art and performance created in response to AIDS has been lost or destroyed. Instead, he utilizes an approach that embraces degradation and incompletion. By meticulously attending to absences and failures in the work he studies, Hernández’s book offers an innovative new methodology for archival practice ... Hernández’s examination of queer Chicanx avantgarde practices is urgent and long overdue. * The Drama Review *Provides a detailed, sensitive, and textured account of the precarious histories of queer Chicanx artists during the first decades of the ongoing AIDS crisis. This remarkable book offers new ways of thinking about how to reconstruct such histories by attending to the emotional and spatial qualities of the archives, homes, detritus, mementos, and memories that Hernández explores with the reader. While Archiving an Epidemic is a groundbreaking historical recovery of queer art in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s, it is also a reflection on loss, absence, silence, and the threat of erasure. Not only will this book be an essential text in the literatures on queer art, Chicanx art, and the AIDS pandemic, it should be read by anyone confronting archives and their limits. Indeed, no one studying American art and culture of the late twentieth century can afford not to read this book. -- David J. Getsy, School of the Art Institute of ChicagoHernández queers the archive while also stepping outside its institutional limits and into the realm of the absences and shards of human loss from AIDS. In doing so, Hernández develops an alternative methodology for 'queer detrital analysis' that brings the body and space to bear. A tour de force in its archival and critical breadth, this book vividly reimagines the American avant-garde since the 1960s through queer Chicanx artists, groups, and spaces in Southern California. -- Chon Noriega, University of California, Los Angeles
£66.60
New York University Press Chicanao Remix
Book SynopsisRewrites our understanding of the last 50 years of Chicana/o cultural production. Chicana/o Remix casts new light not only on artistssuch as Sandra de la Loza, Judy Baca, and David Botello, among othersbut on the exhibitions that feature their work, and the collectors, curators, critics, and advocates who engage it. Combining feminist theory, critical ethnic studies, art historical analysis, and extensive archival and field research, Karen Mary Davalos argues that narrow notions of identity, politics, and aesthetics limit our ability to understand the full capacities of Chicana/o art. She employs fresh vernacular concepts such as the errata exhibit, or the staging of exhibits that critically question mainstream art museums, and the remix, or the act of bringing new narratives and forgotten histories from the background and into the foreground. These concepts, which emerge out of art practice itself, drive her analysis and reinforce the rejection of familiar narratives that evaluate ChiTrade ReviewChicana/o Remixis sure to become the definite resource on Chicana/o and Latinx art across the disciplines. With impressive knowledge and sensibility toward the subject, Davaloselucidates the key debates around the evaluation and representation of Chicana/o art, and the strategies used by Chicano/a artists, curators, and collectors to challenge dominant aesthetic structures. The result is a revealing analysis of the art world and a must-read for anyone interested in the expanding definitions of Latinx visual culture. -- Arlene Dávila,author of Culture Works: Space, Value, and Mobility Across the Neoliberal Americas
£66.60
New York University Press The Art of Confession
Book SynopsisThe story of a new style of artand a new way of lifein postwar America: confessionalism. What do midcentury confessional poets have in common with today's reality TV stars? They share an inexplicable urge to make their lives an open book, and also a sense that this book can never be finished. Christopher Grobe argues that, in postwar America, artists like these forged a new way of being in the world. Identity became a kind of workalways ongoing, never completeto be performed on the public stage. The Art of Confession tells the history of this cultural shift and of the movement it created in American art: confessionalism. Like realism or romanticism, confessionalism began in one art form, but soon pervaded them all: poetry and comedy in the 1950s and '60s, performance art in the '70s, theater in the '80s, television in the '90s, and online video and social media in the 2000s. Everywhere confessionalism went, it stood against autobiography, the art of the closed booTrade ReviewGrobe helps uncover continuities between Robert Lowell and reality television, revealing that all along confession has been a matter of art as much as truth. … The Art of Confession is itself an impressive performance, written with an eloquence and uncommon verve. -- Los Angeles Review of BooksGrobetraces the history and evolution of modern American confessional art in this impressive and wide-ranging debut. An engrossing . . . work of literary scholarship for the 21st century. * Publishers Weekly *A feeling that Grobe is working to piece things together, and take them apart, to present them to the reader for further contemplation. . . . resonates strongly throughout the book. Seeing the author arrive at his conclusions, rather than present them as a fait accompli, offers a compelling act of reading. * Popmatters *Grobe explores 'the performance of self' in as multifarious a fashion as befits the topic and with just the right balance of theoretical acumen, playfulness, tongue-in-cheek observations, and historical, literary, political, and cultural accuracy. * STARRED Library Journal *A cogent and often entertaining demonstration of what the confessional self looks like as it unfolds over his subjects’ cross-media careers during decades rife with cultural and political significance. -- BiographyI must confess: I loveThe Art of Confession. In clear and stylish prose, with gusto and flourish, andthrough original arguments about the compulsion to confess and the compulsion to perform, Grobe has produced a stunning book. Broadly engaged, yet sharply focused, this workis cultural criticism of the highest standard. -- Nick Salvato,author of Obstruction
£23.74
New York University Press The Content of Our Caricature
Book SynopsisWinner, 2021 Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award, given by the Society for Cinema and Media StudiesWinner, 2021 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards for Best Academic/Scholarly WorkHonorable Mention, 2021 Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African-American Popular Culture Studies, given by the Popular Culture AssociationWinner, 2020 Charles Hatfield Book Prize, given by the Comic Studies SocietyTraces the history of racial caricature and the ways that Black cartoonists have turned this visual grammar on its headRevealing the long aesthetic tradition of African American cartoonists who have made use of racist caricature as a black diasporic art practice, Rebecca Wanzo demonstrates how these artists have resisted histories of visual imperialism and their legacies. Moving beyond binaries of positive and negative representation, many black cartoonists have used Trade Review[Wanzo] offers a brilliant, concisely written excursion into the fraught nature of African American comic art. * Choice *A singular achievement. Rebecca Wanzo gives shape to new and necessary ways of understanding the development of comic art in the United States that also resonate with broader conversations about blackness and visual narrative. Her study delves into the ambivalent expressions of citizenship, identity, and power that are central to how cartoonists picture race. Along the way, Wanzo bridges aesthetics and cultural theory through expert readings of editorial comics and newspaper strips, superhero serials, underground comix, historical graphic novels, and more. -- Qiana Whitted, co-editor of Comics and the U.S. SouthFrom underground comix to Boondocks, Wanzo brilliantly treats moments in the history of caricature and demonstrates anew how popular culture has perpetuated and popularized generations of grotesque imagery. Wanzo’s gift is in the singular way she reads African American cartoonists who themselves redeployed and engaged the visual grammar of caricature while also interrogating American citizenship. An authoritative, nuanced book. -- Jared Gardner, author of Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First Century StorytellingThe text does a good job at connecting the historical cartoon archive and its stereotypical visual representations of Blacks to current events [...] The Content of Our Caricature invites the reader to a more complex reading of Black representations in caricature that transcends the tendency towards binary oppositions * Visual Studies *Wanzo, like the artists she investigates, reframes caricature so that we might see and read it differently. Because to not see caricature, as Wanzo powerfully concludes, 'will always be a sign of forgetting the monstrosity crafted by historical injuries, a weight carried by all black people perpetually in the wake—and on the brink—of real political change". * INKS *Wanzo’s contribution to this rising field is vital and unique, given her specific focus on the aesthetics of comics art using the artistic tradition of caricature as a way to engage with social and political issues. Wanzo rightly points out how ‘many of the works’ done to date in Black comic studies—several of which emphasize superhero comic books over other genres and formats— ‘focus on cultural histories or pay little attention to aesthetics’. * The Journal of African American History *The Content of our Caricature is unique in its focus on Black cartoonists and their use of Black caricatures in comics, editorial cartoons, graphic biographies, and underground comix…This careful, incisive study describes and shows the range of surprising, amusing, entertaining, antagonistic, outrageous, and offensive ways Black cartoonists represent or consider the paradox of Black citizenship. * American Literary History *The book makes a compelling case for why we should, despite our initial intuitions to look away, engage with what seem like racist representations, stereotypes, and caricatures. Wanzo provides sophisticated textual and literary analyses to argue that African American cartoonists have been questioning, reconstructing, and using racist stereotypes to critique notions of the “ideal citizen” in the United States. * International Journal of Communication *
£22.79
University of Toronto Press Celebrity Fame and Infamy in the Hellenistic
Book SynopsisModern notions of celebrity, fame, and infamy reach back to the time of Homer''s Iliad. During the Hellenistic period, in particular, the Greek understanding of fame became more widely known, and adapted, to accommodate or respond to non-Greek understandings of reputation in society and culture. This collection of essays illustrates the ways in which the characteristics of fame and infamy in the Hellenistic era distinguished themselves and how they were represented in diverse and unique ways throughout the Mediterranean. The means of recording fame and infamy included public art, literature, sculpture, coinage, and inscribed monuments. The ruling elite carefully employed these means throughout the different Hellenistic kingdoms, and these essays demonstrate how they operated in the creation of social, political, and cultural values. The authors examine the cultural means whereby fame and infamy entered social consciousness, and explore the nature and effect of this impTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction: Distinctives of Hellenistic Celebrity, Fame, and Infamy Riemer A. Faber 1. Fama and Infamia: The Tale of Grypos and Tryphaina Sheila L. Ager 2. Models of Virtue, Models of Poetry: The Quest for “Everlasting Fame” in Hellenistic Military Epitaphs Silvia Barbantani 3. Can Powerful Women be Popular? Amastris: Shaping a Persian Wife into a Famous Hellenistic Queen Monica D’Agostini 4. Remelted or Overstruck: Cases of Monetary Damnatio Memoriae in Hellenistic Times François de Callataÿ 5. Ptolemaic Officials and Officers in Search of Fame Christelle Fischer-Bovet 6. Lemnian Infamy and Masculine Glory in Apollonios’ Argonautica Judith Fletcher 7. The “Good” Poros and the “Bad” Poros: Infamy and Honour in Alexander Historiography Timothy Howe 8. Writing Monarchs of the Hellenistic Age: Renown, Fame, and Infamy Jacqueline Klooster 9. Creating Alexander: The “Official” History of Kallisthenes of Olynthos Waldemar Heckel References Contributors Index
£51.85
University of Toronto Press Journey to Italy
Book SynopsisIn 1775, the young Count de Sade decided to turn a flight from legal trouble into an opportunity to undertake the grand tour. He transformed his sojourns in Florence, Rome, Naples, and their environs into a philosophical travelogue; alongside advice on where to go and what to see, his Journey to Italy would include analyses of local customs and institutions, history and politics, natural phenomena, and the development of the arts. For today’s readers, Journey to Italy provides remarkable portraits of major Italian cities and the surrounding countryside, vivid accounts of aristocratic and popular entertainments, and a clear sense of what it was like to be a tourist in eighteenth-century Italy from scams, rough roads, and unreliable guidebooks to learned interlocutors, balls, and nights at the opera. We witness Sade learning about the lives of Roman emperors, the machinations and misdeeds of pontiffs, the power struggles of the Medici, the ancient libertinTable of ContentsIntroduction: Marquis de Sade’s Grand Tour I. Florence and the Start of the Journey from La Coste II. Rome III. Environs of Rome: Journey to Frascati, Grotta Ferrata, Marino, Castel Gandolfo, Albano, and Ariccia IV. Naples V. Environs of Naples VI. Route from Rome to Naples or from Naples to Rome Dossiers: I. General Material II. Florence III. Rome Correspondence Bibliography Index
£77.35
University of Toronto Press The Persistence of Presence
Book SynopsisThe Persistence of Presence analyzes the relationship between emblem books, containing combinations of pictures and texts, and Spanish literature in the early modern period. As representations of ideas and ideals, emblems are allegories produced in a particular place and time, and their study can shed light on the central cultural and political activities of an era.Bradley J. Nelson argues that the emblem was a primary indicator of the social and political functions of diverse literary practices in early modern Spain, from theatre to epic prose. Furthermore, the disintegration of a unified medieval world view left many seeking the kinds of deep knowledge that could be accessed through symbolic pictures, increasing their cultural significance. In this detailed examination of emblem books, sacred and secular theatre, and Cervantes' critique of baroque allegory in Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, Nelson connects the early history of emblematics with the d
£29.70
University of Toronto Press Painting Stories
Book SynopsisIn this collection of ethnographic short stories spanning thirty years of fieldwork, an anthropologist narrates events that have shaped the lives of artisans in a famous heritage crafts village in Odisha, India.Trade Review“A rare gem – the stories are accessible and appealing to a diverse readership, ranging from anthropologists and South Asia specialists to scholars of traditional art and everyday readers. Concerning the interests of folklorists, Painting Stories transcends mere ingenuity, as it delves deeply into the bedrock of our discipline, namely the exploration of material culture and the intricate customs, traditions, and beliefs that envelop it.” -- Ruzhica Baruh, Memorial University * Journal of Folklore Research Reviews *Table of ContentsIllustrations Glossary Acknowledgements Introduction A Foreign Bird The Sketchbook A Ladies’ Bicycle A Craving for Idlis The Helmet The Wrath of a Deity A Long Journey A Brief Glimpse of Joy A Convenient Arrangement A Friend for Life Too Good to be True Still Standing Just Luck? Something to Celebrate Spectator Bird Voyages through Time Afterword: The Painting of Painting Stories Recommended Readings
£35.10
University of Toronto Press Painting Stories
Book SynopsisIn this collection of ethnographic short stories spanning thirty years of fieldwork, an anthropologist narrates events that have shaped the lives of artisans in a famous heritage crafts village in Odisha, India.Trade Review“A rare gem – the stories are accessible and appealing to a diverse readership, ranging from anthropologists and South Asia specialists to scholars of traditional art and everyday readers. Concerning the interests of folklorists, Painting Stories transcends mere ingenuity, as it delves deeply into the bedrock of our discipline, namely the exploration of material culture and the intricate customs, traditions, and beliefs that envelop it.” -- Ruzhica Baruh, Memorial University * Journal of Folklore Research Reviews *Table of ContentsIllustrations Glossary Acknowledgements Introduction A Foreign Bird The Sketchbook A Ladies’ Bicycle A Craving for Idlis The Helmet The Wrath of a Deity A Long Journey A Brief Glimpse of Joy A Convenient Arrangement A Friend for Life Too Good to be True Still Standing Just Luck? Something to Celebrate Spectator Bird Voyages through Time Afterword: The Painting of Painting Stories Recommended Readings
£18.89
University of Toronto Press The Image of Celestina
Book SynopsisLa Celestina, a Spanish literary masterpiece second only in importance to Don Quixote in Spanish literature, has been shaped by the inclusion of images from its very first edition in 1499. The subsequent five centuries were punctuated by many illustrated editions; imaginary portraits of the eponymous procuress Celestina by painters such as Murillo, Goya, and Picasso; and, more recently, screen and stage adaptations. Celestina became the prototype from which later representations of procuresses and bawds derived. The Image of Celestina sheds light on the visual culture that developed around La Celestina, including paintings, illustrations, and advertisements. Enrique Fernández examines La Celestina as a mixed-media text, incorporating methods from disciplines such as art history and women’s and cinema studies, and considers a variety of images including promotional posters, lobby pictures, and playbills of theatrical and cinematic adTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Summary of La Celestina (c. 1499) Introduction: The Visual Culture of Celestina Five hundred years of images of Celestina The methodological frame of visual studies Organization of the book 1. Illustrating Celestina The first period of illustrated editions of LC (1499 to 1616) Fadrique de Basilea's Comedia de Calisto y Melibea (Burgos, 1499?) The iconographic program of the early illustrations LC title pages The second period of illustrated editions of LC (1842–present) Conclusions: Two periods, two readings 2. Painting Celestina Images of procuresses before LC Dutch painting: Celestina and the Prodigal Son From Goya to Picasso and beyond Conclusion: Reimagining Celestina 3. Advertising Celestina Promotional images of Celestina: Book covers, playbills, and posters LC covers Posters, playbills, and lobby cards Conclusion: Celestina through the prism of advertising Conclusion: Kaleidoscopic Celestina Illustrations Notes Bibliography Secondary sources cited Old edition of LC cited Modern edition of LC cited Images cited Index
£50.15
