Affect, Emotion, and Subjectivity in Early Modern Muslim Empires: New Studies in Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Art and Culture: (9 Arts and Archaeology of the Islamic World)

Affect, Emotion and Subjectivity in Early Modern Muslim Empires presents new approaches to Ottoman Safavid and Mughal art and culture. Taking artistic agency as a starting point, the authors consider the rise in status of architects, the self-fashioning of artists, the development of public spaces, as well as new literary genres that focus on the individual subject and his or her place in the world. They consider the issue of affect as performative and responsive to certain emotions and actions, thus allowing insights into the motivations behind the making and, in some cases, the destruction of works of art. The interconnected histories of Iran,Turkey and India thus highlight the urban and intellectual changes that defined the early modern period. Contributors are: Sussan Babaie, Chanchal Dadlani, Jamal Elias, Emine Fetvaci, Christiane Gruber, Sylvia Hougteling, Kishwar Rizvi, Sunil Sharma, and Marianna Shreve Simpson.

Table of Contents:
Preface Note on the Transliteration Acknowledgements List of Figures About The Contributors Introduction Kishwar Rizvi Emotion and Subjectivity in an Early Modern Context Chapter 1 Sussan Babaie Chasing After the Muhandis: Visual Articulations of the Architect and Architectural Historiography Chapter 2 Marianna Shreve Simpson Who’s Hiding Here? Artists and Their Signatures in Timurid and Safavid Manuscripts Chapter 3 Emine Fetvaci Ottoman Author Portraits in the Early-Modern Period Chapter 4 Christiane Gruber In Defense and Devotion: Affective Practices in Early Modern Turco-Persian Manuscript Paintings Chapter 5 Sylvia Houghteling Sentiment in Silks: Safavid Figural Textiles in Mughal Courtly Culture Chapter 6 Chanchal Dadlani The City Built, The City Rendered: Locating Urban Subjectivity in Eighteenth-Century Mughal Delhi Chapter 7 Sunil Sharma Fā’iz Dihlavī’s Female-Centered Poems and the Representation of Public Life in Late Mughal Society Chapter 8 Jamal Elias Mevlevi Sufis and the Representation of Emotion in the Arts of the Ottoman World Index

About the Author :
Kishwar Rizvi is a Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Yale University. She is the author of The Transnational Mosque: Architecture and Historical Memory in the Contemporary Middle East (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), which received the 2017 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association. Other titles include The Safavid Dynastic Shrine: Architecture, Religion and Power in Early Modern Iran (2011) and the Modernism and the Middle East: Architecture and Politics in the Twentieth Century (2008).

Review :
"The essays in the book are well arranged and follow one another in a fluid conversation that makes the book accessible even to readers who may not have specialized knowledge of each of the aesthetic cultures under analysis. Readers are expected to acknowledge the interconnectedness of the early modern globe, especially the circulation of texts, objects, and people, and how this, in specific ways, informed visual orders in localized sites of cultural production. The force of the book, however, lies in the contributors’ shared premise of the multivalent artifact that embodies, indexes, traces, and enacts the dialectics of its own production and reception. This requires a willingness to approach the visual sign or the tactile object with an imaginative sense of multiple and overlapping contexts. The essays are framed by a succinct introduction of themes by Kishwar Rizvi that also doubles as a stand-alone essay on existing discourses around affect, self-representation, portraits, temporality, and mobility... The book’s freshness lies in its attempt to verbalize the affective and the subjective codification of artifacts. As Houghteling sums up, “The methodology for writing more enlivened art histories remains unsolved” (125). But it is precisely such a challenge all the authors answer by compiling and presenting intricate registers of signs and significations within which specific artifacts would have circulated across the intertwined aesthetic cultures of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires." Priyani Roy Choudhury in: Renaissance Quarterly. Vol. LXXI I I , No. 1.