Edges of Empire: Orientalism and Visual Culture

Edges of Empire focuses on the intersection between modernization, modernism, and Orientalism. It is a timely reassessment of the history and legacy of Orientalist art and visual culture. The essays in this volume explore the connections and cross–fertilizations that occur across cultural boundaries via the analysis of Ottoman and North African art practices, as well as the visual culture of European Orientalism. Contested identities and new definitions of self are highlighted in relation to topics as diverse as nineteenth–century monuments to empire, cultural cross–dressing, performance and display at the international exhibitions, and contemporary museological practice. This is a groundbreaking anthology that will be of great interest to scholars and students of art history, architecture, museum studies, and cultural and postcolonial studies.

Series Editor′s Preface. List of Illustrations. Notes on Contributors. Acknowledgements. Introduction: Visualising Culture across the Edges of Empire. (Mary Roberts and Jocelyn Hackforth–Jones). 1. Commemorating the Empire: From Algiers to Damascus. (Zeynep Çelik). 2. Out of the Earth, Egypt′s Statue of Liberty?. (Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby). 3. Cultural Crossings: Sartorial Adventures, Satiric Narratives and the Question of Indigenous Agency in Nineteenth–Century Europe and the Near East. (Mary Roberts). 4. "Oriental" Femininity as Cultural Commodity: Authorship, Authority and Authenticity. (Reina Lewis). 5. The Sweet Waters of Asia: Representing Difference/Differencing Representation in Nineteenth–Century Istanbul. (Frederick N. Bohrer). 6. The Work of Translation: Turkish Modernism and the "Generation of 1914". (Alastair Wright). 7. Stolen or Shared: Ancient Egypt at the Petrie Museum. (Sally MacDonald). 8. Andalusia in the Time of the Moors: Regret and Colonial Presence in Paris, 1900. (Roger Benjamin). Bibliography (Hannah Williams). Index.

Jocelyn Hackforth–Jones is Professor of Art History and Provost at Richmond, The American International University in London. She is the author of (Re)Forming Identities: Intercultural Education and the Visual Arts (1998). Mary Roberts is the John Schaeffer Lecturer in British Art at the University of Sydney. She has co–edited two books: Orientalism’s Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography (2002) and Refracting Vision: Essays on the Writings of Michael Fried (2000).

"A pioneering collection of essays that offers a truly transnational approach to cross–cultural exchange. With great clarity and imagination, Edges of Empire forces us to re–think Orientalism both historically and politically." Michael Hatt, Yale University