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Stitching Love and Loss

A Gee's Bend Quilt

By Lisa Gail Collins

In 1942 Missouri Pettway, newly suffering the loss of her husband, pieced together a quilt out of his old, worn work clothes. Nearly six decades later her daughter Arlonzia Pettway, approaching eighty at the time...

Adivasi Art and Activism

Curation in a Nationalist Age

By Alice Tilche

As India consolidates an aggressive model of economic development, indigenous tribal people known as adivasis continue to be overrepresented among the country’s poor. Adivasis make up more than eight hundred communities in India, with a...

The City in Time

Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia

By Pamela N. Corey

In The City in Time, Pamela N. Corey provides new ways of understanding contemporary artistic practices in a region that continues to linger in international perceptions as perpetually “postwar.” Focusing on art from the last...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

War Baby / Love Child

Mixed Race Asian American Art

By Laura Kina, Wei Ming Dariotis, Kent A. Ono

War Baby / Love Child examines hybrid Asian American identity through a collection of essays, artworks, and interviews at the intersection of critical mixed race studies and contemporary art. The book pairs artwork and interviews...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Accumulating Culture

The Collections of Emperor Huizong

By Patricia Buckley Ebrey

Winner of the Shimada Prize for Outstanding Work of East Asian Art History

By the end of the sixth century CE, both the royal courts and the educated elite in China were collecting works of art,...

Cinema Remixed and Reloaded

Black Women and the Moving Image Since 1970

By Andrea Barnwell Brownlee and Valerie Cassel Oliver

Cinema Remixed and Reloaded is a daring, bold, innovative look at black women artists and video art. This historical survey examines an intriguing and unbounded scope of work, including experimental film, projections, and installations. Creative...