The Routledge Companion to Art and Challenges to Empire by Burns, Emily C.; Rudy Price, Alice M.;

Short description:

This companion analyzes interactions between the arts and global imperial relationships from around 1800 through the 20^th century.

Long description:

This companion analyzes interactions between the arts and global imperial relationships from around 1800 through the twentieth century.

By excavating layers and identifying legacies, the essays reveal inherent fractures in colonial perspectives. Tremendous multi-directional imperialisms and inter-imperial dialogues characterize the period, as do protests and anticolonial activity. How does the materializing of empire expose its logics of cultural superiority and its faultlines and instabilities? The essays in this volume explore how the arts, visual culture, and material culture, however subtly, tested empire’s hegemonic limits, whether by exposing fragilities, unmasking ruptures, or through intentional subversions. While this volume’s chapters at times trace evidence of strident anticolonial voices, most consistently they show visual, textual, material, and performative practices pointing to the instability of imperial ambition and activity. The theme of geological stratification shapes the essay structure as authors consider the modes of artistic interaction in the context of imperialism as well as the legacies of empire. 

The book will be of interest to graduate students, researchers, and professors, and may be used in classes focused on art history, imperialism, and colonialism.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Instability and Resistance: Collaging Empire and its Challenges  Part I: What Breaks Down the Rock: Fissures and Eruptions  1. The Art of Returning Home: Lars Hætta’s Miniature Duodji  2. Art and Identity Caught Between Two Powers: How Dante’s Image Became a Symbol of Colonial Resistance in Malta  3. The Uncertainties of Empire: Horace Vernet in Algeria, 1833  4. Alphonse de Lamartine, the Haitian Revolution and Imperialism: The Contingencies of France’s Empire in Lamartine’s Toussaint Louverture  5. Pablita Velarde: Extractive Economies of Empire and Indigenous Resistance  6. Prefabricated Promises: The Te Pahi House  7. The Art of Empire: Amrita Sher-Gil’s Two Girls (1939)  Part II: The Detritus: Layers of Empire  8. The Fabric of Empires: Delacroix, Trade, and the Women of Algiers  9. Ivan Aivazovsky’s Imperial Sublime: The Politics and Aesthetics of Romantic Landscape Painting in the Age of Empire  10. Race and the Problem of Impressionist Skin  11. Unity in Diversity: The Austro-Hungarian Art and Art-Industry Exhibition 1899-1900 in St. Petersburg  12. Her Works: Chinese Embroidery and Australian Art Needlework at the First Australian Exhibition of Women’s Work in 1907  13. New Displays in the Old Capital: The Architecture of Bursa Expositions in the Turn-of-the-Century Ottoman Empire  Part III: Human Impact on Sediment: Afterimages  14. What’s In a Photo? Frederick Douglass and Ram Singh II, Maharaj of Jaipur. Or: Lateral Art History and The Postindian Trickster, An Experiment in Method  15. Backdrops as Middle Ground: Photographic Portraiture and the Sites of Native American Resistance  16. Public Shared Places and Private Absent Divides. Identity and Space of Colonial Urbanism Under Portuguese, French, and Danish Rules: Diu, Pondicherry and Tranquebar  17. Art, Agriculture and Colonialism – Revisiting 19^th-Century Danish Landscape Painting in Museums  18. Visualizing Colonial Dispossession: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Imperial Impressionism, and the Art of Empire  19. Drawing Made Easy: Akinọla Laṣekan and Colonial Art Education in Nigeria  20. Cultural Erasure: How Western Art Institutions Perpetuate Russian Imperialism  21. Living Cultural Legacies: North American Indigenous Arts of the Northeast under Imperial Rule