In Black Bodies, White Gold Anna Arabindan-Kesson uses cotton, a commodity central to the slave trade and colonialism, as a focus for new interpretations of the way art, commerce, and colonialism were intertwined in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. In doing so, Arabindan-Kesson models an art historical approach that makes the histories of the Black diaspora central to nineteenth-century cultural production. She traces the emergence of a speculative vision that informs perceptions of Blackness in which artistic renderings of cotton-as both commodity and material-became inexorably tied to the monetary value of Black bodies. From the production and representation of "negro cloth"-the textile worn by enslaved plantation workers-to depictions of Black sharecroppers in photographs and paintings, Arabindan-Kesson demonstrates that visuality was the mechanism through which Blackness and cotton became equated as resources for extraction. In addition to interrogating the work of nineteenth-century artists, she engages with contemporary artists such as Hank Willis Thomas, Lubaina Himid, and Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, who contend with the commercial and imperial processes shaping constructions of Blackness and meanings of labor.

This collection of essays revisits gender and urban modernity in nineteenth-century Paris in the wake of changes to the fabric of the city and social life. In rethinking the figure of the flaneur, the contributors apply the most current thinking in literature and urban studies to an examination of visual culture of the period, including painting, caricature, illustrated magazines, and posters. Using a variety of approaches, the collection re-examines the long-held belief that life in Paris was divided according to strict gender norms, with men free to roam in public space while women were restricted to the privacy of the domestic sphere. Framed by essays by Janet Wolff and Linda Nochlin - two scholars whose work has been central to the investigation of gender and representation in the nineteenth century - this collection brings together new methods of looking at visual culture with a more nuanced way of picturing city life. -- .

The commodification of Islamic antiques intensified in the late Ottoman Empire, an age of domestic reform and increased European interference following the Tanzimat (reorganisation) of 1839. Mercedes Volait examines the social life of typical objects moving from Cairo and Damascus to Paris, London, and beyond, uncovers the range of agencies and subjectivities involved in the trade of architectural salvage and historic handicraft, and traces impacts on private interiors, through creative reuse and Revival design, in Egypt, Europe and America. By devoting attention to both local and global engagements with Middle Eastern tangible heritage, the present volume invites to look anew at Orientalism in art and interior design, the canon of Islamic architecture and the translocation of historic works of art.

The Body in Time looks at two different genres in relation to the construction of femininity in late nineteenth-century France: Degas's representation of ballet dancers and the transforming tradition of female portraiture. Class, gender, power, and agency are at stake in both arenas, but they play themselves out in different ways via different pictorial languages. Degas's depictions of anonymous young female ballerinas at the Paris Opera reflect his fascination with the physical exertions and prosaic setting of the dancer's sexualized body. Unlike the standard Romantic depictions of the ballerina, Degas's dancers are anonymous spread-legged workers on public display. Female portraiture and self-portraiture, in contrast, depicted the unique and the distinctive: privileged women, self-assured individuals transgressing gender conventions. Focusing on Degas's representation of the dancer, Tamar Garb examines the development of Degas's oeuvre from its early Realist documentary ambitions to the abstracted Symbolist renderings of the feminine as cypher in his later works. She argues that despite the apparent depletion of social significance and specificity, Degas's later works remain deeply enmeshed in contemporary gendered ways of viewing and experiencing art and life. Garb also looks at the transformation in the genre of portraiture heralded by the "new woman," examining the historical expectations of female portraiture and demonstrating how these expectations are challenged by new notions of female autonomy and interiority. Women artists such as Anna Klumpke, Rosa Bonheur, and Anna Bilinska deployed the language of Realism in their own self-representation. The figure of femininity remained central to the personal, political, and pictorial imperatives of artists across the spectrum of modern aesthetics. Gender and genre intersect throughout this book to show how these categories mutually impact one another.

Before unification, Germany was a loose collection of variously sovereign principalities, nurtured on deep thought, fine music and hard rye bread. It was known across Europe for the plentiful supply of consorts to be found among its abundant royalty, but the language and culture was largely incomprehensible to those outside its lands. In the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries- between the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648 and unification under Bismarck in 1871 - Germany became the land of philosophers, poets, writers and composers. This particularly German cultural movement was able to survive the avalanche of Napoleonic conquest and exploitation and its impact was gradually felt far beyond Germany's borders. In this book, Roderick Cavaliero provides a fascinating overview of Germany's cultural zenith in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He considers the work of Germany's own artistic exports - the literature of Goethe and Grimm, the music of Wagner, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Bach and the philosophy of Schiller and Kant - as well as the impact of Germany on foreign visitors from Coleridge to Thackeray and from Byron to Disraeli. Providing a comprehensive and highly-readable account of Germany's cultural life from Frederick the Great to Bismarck, 'Genius, Power and Magic' is fascinating reading for anyone interested in European history and cultural history.

Iconographies of Occupation is the first book to address how the "collaborationist" Reorganized National Government (RNG) in Japanese-occupied China sought to visualize its leader, Wang Jingwei (1883-1944); the Chinese people; and China itself. It explores the ways in which this administration sought to present itself to the people over which it ruled at different points between 1939 (when the RNG was first being formulated) and August 1945, when it folded itself out of existence. What sorts of visual tropes were used in regime iconography and how were these used? What can the intertextual movement of visual tropes and motifs tell us about RNG artists and intellectuals and their understanding of the occupation and the war? Drawing on rarely before used archival records relating to propaganda and a range of visual media produced in occupied China by the RNG, the book examines the means used by this "client regime" to carve out a separate visual space for itself by reviving pre-war Chinese methods of iconography and by adopting techniques, symbols, and visual tropes from the occupying Japanese and their allies. Ultimately, however, the "occupied gaze" that was developed by Wang's administration was undermined by its ultimate reliance on Japanese acquiescence for survival. In the continually shifting and fragmented iconographies that the RNG developed over the course of its short existence, we find an administration that was never completely in control of its own fate-or its message. Iconographies of Occupation presents a thoroughly original visual history approach to the study of a much-maligned regime and opens up new ways of understanding its place in wartime China. It also brings China under the RNG into dialogue with wider theoretical debates about the significance of "the visual" in the cultural politics of foreign occupation more broadly.