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Ancient Ink

The Archaeology of Tattooing

By Lars Krutak, Aaron Deter-Wolf

The human desire to adorn the body is universal and timeless. While specific forms of body decoration and the motivations for them vary by region, culture, and era, all human societies have engaged in practices...

School Photos in Liquid Time

Reframing Difference

By Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer

From clandestine images of Jewish children isolated in Nazi ghettos and Japanese American children incarcerated in camps to images of Native children removed to North American boarding schools, classroom photographs of schoolchildren are pervasive even...

Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination

By Bertram D. Ashe, Ilka Saal

From Kara Walker’s hellscape antebellum silhouettes to Paul Beatty’s bizarre twist on slavery in The Sellout and from Colson Whitehead’s literal Underground Railroad to Jordan Peele’s body-snatching Get Out, this volume offers commentary on contemporary...

Sámi Media and Indigenous Agency in the Arctic North

By Coppélie Cocq and Thomas A. DuBois

Digital media–GIFs, films, TED Talks, tweets, and more–have become integral to daily life and, unsurprisingly, to Indigenous people’s strategies for addressing the historical and ongoing effects of colonization. In Sámi Media and Indigenous Agency in...

The Gender of Caste

Representing Dalits in Print

By Charu Gupta

Caste and gender are complex markers of difference that have traditionally been addressed in isolation from each other, with a presumptive maleness present in most studies of Dalits (“untouchables”) and a presumptive upper-casteness in many...

Citizens of Beauty

Drawing Democratic Dreams in Republican China

By Louise Edwards

In the early twentieth century China’s most famous commercial artists promoted new cultural and civic values through sketches of idealized modern women in journals, newspapers, and compendia called One Hundred Illustrated Beauties. This genre drew...

Spectacle

By Bruce Magnusson, Zahi Zalloua

Global media and advances in technology have profoundly affected the way people experience events. The essays in this volume explore the dimensions of contemporary spectacles from the Arab Spring to spectatorship in Hollywood. Questioning the...

Migrating the Black Body

The African Diaspora and Visual Culture

By Leigh Raiford, Heike Raphael-Hernandez

Migrating the Black Body explores how visual media—from painting to photography, from global independent cinema to Hollywood movies, from posters and broadsides to digital media, from public art to graphic novels—has shaped diasporic imaginings of...

Black Women in Sequence

Re-inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime

By Deborah Elizabeth Whaley

Black Women in Sequence takes readers on a search for women of African descent in comics subculture. From the 1971 appearance of the Skywald Publications character “the Butterfly” - the first Black female superheroine in...

Art and Intimacy

How the Arts Began

By Ellen Dissanayake

To Ellen Dissanayake, the arts are biologically evolved propensities of human nature: their fundamental features helped early humans adapt to their environment and reproduce themselves successfully over generations. In Art and Intimacy she argues for...

The Odyssey of China's Imperial Art Treasures

By Jeannette Shambaugh Elliot and David Shambaugh

The Odyssey of China's Imperial Art Treasures traces the three-thousand-year history of the emperor's imperial collection, from the Bronze Age to the present. The tortuous story of these treasures involves a succession of dynasties, invasion...

Shaping the Lotus Sutra

Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China

By Eugene Y. Wang

The Lotus Sutra has been the most widely read and most revered Buddhist scripture in East Asia since its translation in the third century. The miracles and parables in the "king of sutras" inspired a...

Black Tigers

A Grammar of Chinese Rubbings

By Kenneth Starr

Since at least the early sixth century C.E., ink rubbings of stone, metal, clay tiles, and wood inscriptions and pictorial images have been used in China to make precise copies of culturally valued material. These...

Bioart and the Vitality of Media

By Robert E. Mitchell

Bioart -- art that uses either living materials (such as bacteria or transgenic organisms) or more traditional materials to comment on, or even transform, biotechnological practice -- now receives enormous media attention. Yet despite this...

Arctic Spectacles

The Frozen North in Visual Culture, 1818-1875

By Russell Alan Potter

When every land seems already explored, and space travel has declined in scope and prestige, the northern exploits of our Victorian forebears offers a pleasantly distant mirror from which to regard our own time. The...

Art by the Book

Painting Manuals and the Leisure Life in Late Ming China

By J. P. Park

Sometime before 1579, Zhou Lujing, a professional writer living in a bustling commercial town in southeastern China, published a series of lavishly illustrated books, which constituted the first multigenre painting manuals in Chinese history. Their...

Homo Aestheticus

Where Art Comes From and Why

By Ellen Dissanayake

“Dissanayake argues that art was central to human evolutionary adaptation and that the aesthetic faculty is a basic psychological component of every human being. In her view, art is intimately linked to the origins of...

Vigilant Things

On Thieves, Yoruba Anti-Aesthetics, and The Strange Fates of Ordinary Objects in Nigeria

By David T. Doris

Winner of the 2012 Melville J. Herskovits award (African Studies Association)

Throughout southwestern Nigeria, Yoruba men and women create objects called aale to protect their properties—farms, gardens, market goods, firewood—from the ravages of thieves. Aale are...

Carl Hagenbeck's Empire of Entertainments

By Eric Ames

The name of Carl Hagenbeck is as evocative in Europe as that of P. T. Barnum or Walt Disney in North America. Hagenbeck was the nineteenth century's foremost animal trader and ethnographic showman, known for...

The Landscape of Words

Stone Inscriptions from Early and Medieval China

By Robert E. Harrist, Jr.

Winner of the Levenson Prize sponsored by the Association for Asian Studies

Shortlisted for the 2009 ICAS Book Award

Silk and bamboo are easily ruined,
But metal and stone are hard to destroy.

Placed on a high mountain

[The writing]...