Books in the Objects/Histories series

An historical examination of the early-twentieth-century Indian Craze, a widespread interest in Native American art, that explores its importance for Native Americans, Euro Americans, and the history of modernism.

Contests the idea that Orientalist art simply expresses the politics of Western domination and argues instead that it was often produced through cross-cultural interactions. This title includes essays that demonstrate how marginalized voices and viewpoints within Western Orientalism decentered and destabilized colonial authority.

Moving the critical debate about photography away from its Euro-American center of gravity, this title breaks with the notion that photographic history is best seen as the explosion of a Western technology advanced by the work of singular individuals.

The Echo of Things is a compelling ethnographic study of what photography means to the people of Roviana Lagoon in the western Solomon Islands and a provocative inquiry into our own understandings of photography.

In Remote Avant-Garde Jennifer Loureide Biddle interrogates the avant-garde art of Aboriginal communities in the Australian desert, showing how it is an act of survival in the face of state occupation and a means to revive at-risk vernacular languages and cultural heritages.

Combining visual culture and postcolonial studies, this reader shows that an appreciation of the role of visual experience is necessary for understanding how colonialism worked and how colonized subjects spoke to imperial rulers.

A look at how prominent Indian visual artists created modern art for the postcolonial nation in the years between India's independence in 1947 and 1980.

This lavishly illustrated art history situates the work of pioneering mid-twentieth-century Native American artists within the broader canon of American modernism.

A beautifully illustrated look at the aesthetics and implications of the visual images used to sell Jamaica and the Bahamas to tourists as "tropical paradises" from the 1880s through the 1930s.

The photographs of Aborgines taken at Coranderrk Station were circulated across the western world and were mounted in exhibition displays and classified among other ethnographic "data" within museum collections. This book reveals how western society came to understand Aboriginal people through these images.

Suitable for those interested in art history, theories of gender, and postcolonial studies, this book contests the idea that Orientalist art simply expresses the politics of Western domination and argues instead that it was often produced through cross-cultural interactions.

In the early twentieth century, a group of elite Eastern-coast women turned to the American Southwest in search of an alternative to European-derived concepts of culture. This book provides a narrative of the growing influence that this network of women had on the Native American art market to investigate the social construction of value.

A generously illustrated ethnography arguing that popular photographic practices have played a crucial role in the making of modern national subjects in postcolonial Java.

The indigenous peoples of the Pacific nations of Vanuatu and New Zealand are reconfiguring global cultural and intellectual property regimes as they successfully advance claims to ancestral practices such as ephemeral sand drawings.

Brings to light a body of harem imagery that was created through a dynamic process of cultural exchange. The author focuses on images produced by nineteenth-century European artists and writers who were granted access to harems in the urban centres of Istanbul and Cairo. These Europeans were "intimate outsiders" within the women's quarters.

Scholars of Asia, most of whom are anthropologists, examine the transformations precipitated or accelerated by the spread of photography across East and Southeast Asia.

Scholars of Asia, most of whom are anthropologists, examine the transformations precipitated or accelerated by the spread of photography across East and Southeast Asia.

Calendar art appears in all manner of contexts in India: in chic elite living rooms, middle-class kitchens, urban slums, and village huts. This book examines the power that calendar art wields in Indian mass culture, arguing that its meanings derive as much from the production and circulation of the images as from their visual features.

Suitable for art historians, as well as those in cultural anthropology, cultural studies, museum studies, and performance studies, this book tells the story of how the acrylic "dot" paintings of central Australia were transformed into objects of international high art, eagerly sought by upscale galleries and collectors.

Prompting a reevaluation of canonical understandings of twentieth century art history, Mapping Modernisms provides an analysis of how indigenous artists and art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas became recognized as modern.

Natasha Eaton theorizes the relationship between art and empire through analysis of the interconnected visual cultures of British and Mughal empires in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century India.

Focusing on the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962) and the historical continuities it presented with the experience of the Second World War, this book highlights decolonization's formative effects on art and related theories of representation, both political and aesthetic.

Examines the work of more than forty Chicana artists across a variety of media including painting, printmaking, sculpture, performance, photography, and other installations forms. This book describes how Chicana artists invoke a culturally hybrid spirituality to question and confront racism, bigotry, patriarchy, and homophobia.

Photographic historian Edwards looks at the popularity of the amateur photographic survey movement in England between the mid-1880s and the end of World War I, when over a thousand amateur photographers took well over 50,000 photographs documenting nearby churches, cottages, and other local features. Edwards sees this movement as a form of popular history.

An examination of visual art in post-independence Senegal. It explores the complex interplay of cultural nationalism, negotiations of postcolonial identity, and an emergent artistic modernism. Highlighting the distinctive cultural history that shaped Sengalese modernism, it reveals its innovations, diversity, and dynamism.