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A detailed look at a genre that combines virtuoso printmaking techniques, sophisticated imagery, and engaging, playful poetry This beautiful volume celebrates the tradition of the Japanese surimono print. Produced from around 1800 until 1840, during the Edo period, surimono (“printed things” in Japanese) combine intricate artwork and playful poetry, and their small print runs and exclusive audiences allowed for lavish yet subtle surface treatments, such as embossing and gilding. Enjoyed for their learned allusions to literature and contemporary culture, surimono continue to delight and perplex scholars with their visual puns and wordplay. Imagery ranges from delicate, domestic still lifes to spirited vignettes of the natural world, while the poems are often lighthearted takes on the classical Japanese waka form. With its rich text and scholarly apparatus—including names and titles in kanji characters as well as transliterations and translations of the poems on the catalogued prints—The Private World of Surimono serves as a critical resource for scholars of Japanese art and history and offers general readers insight into this rare and innovative print form.
Cultural Diplomacy and the Heritage of Empire analyzes the history of the negotiations that led to the atypical return of colonial-era cultural property from the Netherlands to Indonesia in the 1970s. By doing so, the book shows that competing visions of post-colonial redress were contested throughout the era of post-World War II decolonization. Considering the danger this precedent posed to other countries, the book looks beyond the Dutch-Indonesian case to the “Elgin (Parthenon) Marbles” and “Benin Bronzes” controversies, as well as recent developments relating to returns in France and the Netherlands. Setting aside the “universalism versus nationalism” debate, Scott asserts th...
The essays collected in Tattooed Bodies draw on a range of theoretical paradigms and empirical knowledge to investigate tattoos, tattooing, and our complex relations with marks on skin. Engaging with diverse disciplinary perspectives in art history, continental philosophy, media studies, psychoanalysis, critical theory, literary studies, biopolitics, and cultural anthropology, the volume reflects the sheer diversity of meanings attributed to tattoos throughout history and across cultures. Essays explore conceptualizations of tattoos and tattooing in Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Lacan, Agamben, and Jean-Luc Nancy, while utilizing theoretical perspectives to interpret tattoos in literary works by Melville, Beckett, Kafka, Genet, and Jeff VanderMeer, among others. Tattooed Bodies prompts readers to explore a few significant questions: Are tattoos unique phenomena or an art medium in need of special theoretical exploration? If so, what conceptual paradigms and theories might best shape our understanding of tattoos and their complex ubiquity in world cultures and histories?
Whether they graphically depict an individual's or a community's beliefs, express the defiance of authority, or brand marginalized groups, tattoos are a means of interpersonal communication that dates back thousands of years. Evidence of the tattoo's place in today's popular culture is all around--in advertisements, on the stereotypical outlaw character in films and television, in supermarket machines that dispense children's wash-away tattoos, and even in the production of a tattooed Barbie doll. This book explores the tattoo's role, primarily as an emblem of resistance and marginality, in recent literature, film, and television. The association of tattoos with victims of the Holocaust, slaves, and colonized peoples; with gangs, inmates, and other marginalized groups; and the connection of the tattoo narrative to desire and violence are discussed at length.
“The great value of [this work] is the uniformly high quality of papers and their revelation of contemporary trends in Oceanic art research.” —Ethnoarts
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