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Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century

Art, Mobility, and Change

Kristel Smentek editor Wendy Bellion editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Published:23rd Feb '23

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Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century cover

Material Cultures of the Global 18th Century collects ground-breaking essays by a diverse roster of art historians to showcase innovative research on understudied objects that illuminate the global material worlds of eighteenth-century art.

Things change. Broken and restored, reused and remade, objects transcend their earliest functions, locations, and appearances. While every era witnesses change, the eighteenth century experienced artistic, economic, and demographic transformations that exerted unique pressures on material cultures around the world. Locating material objects at the heart of such phenomena, Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century expands beyond Eurocentric perspectives to discover the mobile, transcultural nature of eighteenth-century art worlds. From porcelain to betel leaves, Chumash hats to natural history cabinets, this book examines how objects embody imperialism, knowledge, and resistance in various ways. By embracing things both elite and everyday, this volume investigates physical and technological manipulations of objects while attending to the human agents who shaped them in an era of accelerating global contact and conquest. Featuring ten essays, the volume foregrounds diverse scholarly approaches to chart new directions for art history and cultural history. Ranging from California to China, Bengal to Britain, Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century illuminates the transformations within and between artistic media, follows natural and human-made things as they migrate across territories, and reveals how objects catalyzed change in the transoceanic worlds of the early modern period.

With ten vibrant studies that treat a striking array of media across an ambitious geographic scope, this volume charts some of the liveliest directions in today’s eighteenth-century art history, which has decisively embraced the everyday object and the dynamism of change as a generative critical lens. * Nancy Um, Associate Director for Research and Knowledge Creation, Getty Research Institute, USA *
A new history of eighteenth-century art is being written in books like Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century. Ten highly original, meticulously researched, and conceptually exciting essays encourage us to think expansively about material culture’s role in shaping global history. * Stacey Sloboda, Paul H. Tucker Professor of Art History, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA *
This important volume puts material culture and its protean meaning-making at the center of eighteenth-century art history. Bellion's and Smentek's lucid introduction, and the innovative scholars they bring into conversation, are united by their admirable attentiveness to objects and voices from around the globe. * Amy Freund, Associate Professor and The Kleinheinz Family Endowed Chair in Art History, Southern Methodist University, USA *

ISBN: 9781350259034

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

288 pages