Travel Art And Collecting In South Asia

Filling in gaps in a largely neglected cultural period, this study proposes that Mughal and Hindu visuality interrupted and undermined British cultural and administrative hegemony in India. Close examination of the lives of various objects reveals that, as they moved between temples, palaces, the bazaar, museums, private collections, and traveling exhibitions, these objects demonstrated their slippery agency and their ability to slide out of colonial definitions. Even during this most authoritarian epoch of empire, Natasha Eaton shows, there were spaces, places, and objects that raise important questions of overt and more subtle forms of resistance. Against the grain of a historiography that privileges the Imperial Picturesque, this book also focuses on how colonialists, and later Indian nationalists, traveled to collect or to see collections, and how a vernacular tourism was created that shook up the relationship between collecting and travel. From Sufi travel, to missionary collecting practices, to the political and artistic emergency of the 1857-58 Uprising, this volume illuminates the often strange and hybrid collecting practices that emerged in colonial India.

Travel, Art and Collecting in South Asia questions what are ideas of vertiginous collecting, art-making and museums as expanded fields, including wonder houses and missionary museums (or museobuses) in Britain and South Asia. If the historiography of British India has privileged photography and the 'Imperial Picturesque', the emphasis here is on the formation of a creole modernity, one that considers the relationship between art and labour, including pearlescence and pearl fishing in Sri Lanka, and the iconoclastic/fetish debates and forms of collecting amongst missionaries. Eaton explores these themes alongside the genealogies and modernities of white(ness) in contemporary curating and amateur female practice, and how the museobus or museum as a unique object has informed the work of contemporary artist group Raqs Media Collective. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, Asian history, and imperial and colonial history.

The volume looks at how South Asian art was sourced for external appreciation at a variety of institutions in Europe, North America, and Asia from the mid-19th century onward. These essays speak to the colonial legacies that created such collections but that now must be viewed though a post-colonial lens. The volume also addresses contemporary concerns for todays's museums: collecting, building and practices, provenance, and repatriation.

Presents works of art selected from the South and Southeast Asian and Islamic collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, lessons plans, and classroom activities.

This volume brings together a range of essays that offer a new perspective on the dynamic history of the museum as a cultural institution in South Asia. It traces the museum from its origin as a tool of colonialism and adoption as a vehicle of sovereignty in the nationalist period, till its role in the present, as it reflects the fissured identities of the post-colonial period.

This book examines collecting around the world and how women have participated in and formed collections globally. The edited volume builds on recent research and offers a wider lens through which to examine and challenge women’s collecting histories. Spanning from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first (although not organized chronologically) the research herein extends beyond European geographies and across time periods; it brings to light new research on how artificiallia and naturallia were collected, transported, exchanged, and/or displayed beyond Europe. Women, Collecting and Cultures Beyond Europe considers collections as points of contact that forged transcultural connections and knowledge exchange. Some authors focus mainly on collectors and what was collected, while others consider taxonomies, travel, patterns of consumption, migration, markets, and the after life of things. In its broad and interdisciplinary approach, this book amplifies women’s voices, and aims to position their collecting practices toward new transcultural directions, including women’s relation to distinct cultures, customs, and beliefs as well as exposing the challenges women faced when carving a place for themselves within global networks. This study will be of interest to scholars working in collections and collecting, conservation, museum studies, art history, women’s studies, material and visual cultures, Indigenous studies, textile histories, global studies, history of science, social and cultural histories.

How did scientists, artists, designers, manufacturers and amateur enthusiasts experience and value the sea and its products? Examining the commoditization of the ocean world during the nineteenth century, this book demonstrates how the transaction of oceanic objects inspired a multifaceted material discourse stemming from scientific exploration, colonial expansion, industrialization, and the rise of middle-class leisure. From the seashore to the seabed, marine organisms and environments, made tangible through processing and representational technologies, captivated practitioners and audiences. Combining essays and case studies by scholars, curators, and scientists, Sea Currents investigates the collecting and display, illustration and ornamentation, and trade and consumption of marine flora and fauna, analysing their material, aesthetic and commercial dimensions. Traversing global art history, the history of science, empire studies, anthropology, ecocriticism and material culture, this book surveys the currency of marine matter embedded in the economies and ecologies of a modernizing ocean world.

By studying multiple cultural expressions of Blackness throughout different regions of the Americas, the chapters of this book consider the relationship that social and historical processes such as sovereignty and colonialism have on cultural productions made by and about Black Latin American women. Rosita Scerbo analyzes a range of power dynamics as represented in different artistic media of the Afro-Latin/x American community, including photography, muralism, performance, paintings, and digital art. The book acknowledges that racial and gender equity cannot exist without Intersectionality and that is why the entirety of the chapters focus on cultural and visual productions exclusively created by Afro-descendant women. The Black Latin American women featured in the various chapters, spanning multiple artistic mediums and originating from various Latin American and Caribbean nations, including Mexico, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Brazil, and Cuba, collectively pursue the central aim of foregrounding the Afro-descendant woman’s experience. Simultaneously, they strive to enhance the visibility and acknowledgment of gendered Afro-diasporic culture within the Latin American context. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, gender studies, women’s studies, Latin American studies, African diaspora studies, and race and ethnic studies.