The Islamic world's artistic traditions experienced profound transformation in the 19th century as rapidly developing technologies and globalizing markets ushered in drastic changes in technique, style, and content.
Despite the importance and ingenuity of these developments, the 19th century remains a gap in the history of Islamic art. To fill this opening in art historical scholarship, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean charts transformations in image-making, architecture, and craft production in the Islamic world from Fez to Istanbul. Contributors focus on the shifting methods of production, reproduction, circulation, and exchange artists faced as they worked in fields such as photography, weaving, design, metalwork, ceramics, and even transportation.
Covering a range of media and a wide geographical spread, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean reveals how 19th-century artists in the Middle East and North Africa reckoned with new tools, materials, and tastes from local perspectives.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Introduction: Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean, by Margaret S. Graves and Alex Dika Seggerman
Part I: Picturing Knowledge
1. Well-Worn Fashions: Repetition and Authenticity in Late Ottoman Costume Books, by Ünver Rüstem
2. Osman Hamdi and the Long Duration of History, by Gülru Çakmak
3. Picturing Knowledge: Visual Literacy in Nineteenth-Century Arabic Periodicals, by Hala Auji
4. The Muybridge Albums in Istanbul: Photography as Diplomacy in the Ottoman Empire, by Emily Neumeier
Part II: Conceptualizing Craft
5. The Double Bind of Craft Fidelity: Moroccan Ceramics on the Eve of the French Protectorate, by Margaret S. Graves
6. The Manual Crafts and the Challenge of Modernity in Late Nineteenth-Century Damascus, by Marcus Milwright
7. The Turn to Tapestry: Islamic Textiles and Women Artists in Tunis, by Jessica Gerschultz
Part III: Aesthetics of Infrastructure
8. Alabaster and Albumen: Photographs of the Muhammad Ali Mosque and the Making of a Modern Icon, by Alex Dika Seggerman
9. Tents and Trains: Mobilizing Modernity in the Late Ottoman Empire, by Ashley Dimmig
10. Precious Metal: The I-Beam in the Late Ottoman Empire, by Peter Christensen
11. November 1869: The Suez Canal Inauguration, by David J. Roxburgh
Timeline
Glossary
Index
About the Author :
Margaret S. Graves is Associate Professor of Art History and Adjunct Associate Professor in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at Indiana University. She is author of Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament, and Architecture in Medieval Islam (winner of the 2019 Annual Book Prize, International Center of Medieval Art, and the 2021 Karen Gould Prize, Medieval Academy of America).
Alex Dika Seggerman is Assistant Professor of Islamic Art History at Rutgers University–Newark. She held postdoctoral fellowships at Smith College, Hampshire College, and Yale University. She is author of Modernism on the Nile: Art in Egypt between the Islamic and the Contemporary.
Review :
Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean combines a compelling and well-researched range of studies that make a valuable contribution to the pluralization of global modernisms in art history, with a focus on nineteenth-century Islamic art and visual culture. This volume is a welcome addition to the literature of Islamic modernity and modern art.
- Berin Golonu (Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide) This attractive volume addresses the recent scholarly shift from the arts and architecture of the lands of Islam in the early caliphates of the Umayyads and Abbasids through the pre-modern Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal dynasties to modern and contemporary times. An introduction by Graves (Indiana Univ.) and Seggerman (Rutgers Univ., Newark) is followed by 11 essays focused on the different ways in which artists, artisans, and patrons in the Mediterranean lands from Morocco to Egypt and the Ottoman Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries engaged with European modernity and the colonial enterprise. The essays are roughly grouped around three topics: the introduction of photography and printing with movable type, new modes of craft production, and transportation by steamship and railroad. As with all such collections, the essays are uneven; some are unexpectedly fascinating—for example those on the exchange of photographic albums between the Ottoman sultan and the University of Pennsylvania to foster archaeological projects, the celebrations surrounding the opening of the Suez Canal, the introduction of Krupps' steel I-beam to Istanbul—but others are laden with academic jargon. (Reprinted with permission from Choice Reviews. All rights reserved. Copyright by the American Library Association.)
- J. M. Bloom (Choice)
