The Mughal Empire dominated India politically, culturally, socially, economically and environmentally, from its foundation by Babur, a Central Asian adventurer, in 1526 to the final trial and exile of the last emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar at the hands of the British in 1858. Throughout the empire's three centuries of rise, preeminence and decline, it remained a dynamic and complex entity within and against which diverse peoples and interests conflicted. The empire's significance continues to be controversial among scholars and politicians with fresh and exciting new insights, theories and interpretations being put forward in recent years. This book engages students and general readers with a clear, lively and informed narrative of the core political events, the struggles and interactions of key individuals, groups and cultures, and of the contending historiographical arguments surrounding the Mughal Empire.

In May 1950 Isamu Noguchi (1904-88) returned to Japan for his first visit in 20 years. He was, Noguchi said, seeking models for evolving the relationship between sculpture and society-having emerged from the war years with a profound desire to reorient his work "toward some purposeful social end." The artist Saburo Hasegawa (1906-57) was a key figure for Noguchi during this period, making introductions to Japanese artists, philosophies, and material culture. Hasegawa, who had mingled with the European avant-garde during time spent as a painter in Paris in the 1930s, was, like Noguchi, seeking an artistic hybridity. By the time Hasegawa and Noguchi met, both had been thinking deeply about the balance between tradition and modernity, and indigenous and foreign influences, in the development of traditional cultures for some time. The predicate of their intense friendship was a thorough exploration of traditional Japanese culture within the context of seeking what Noguchi termed "an innocent synthesis" that "must rise from the embers of the past." Changing and Unchanging Things is an account of how their joint exploration of traditional Japanese culture influenced their contemporary and subsequent work. The 40 masterpieces in the exhibition-by turns elegiac, assured, ambivalent, anguished, euphoric, and resigned-are organized into the major overlapping subjects of their attention: the landscapes of Japan, the abstracted human figure, the fragmentation of matter in the atomic age, and Japan's traditional art forms. Published in association with The Noguchi Museum. Exhibition dates: Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan: January 12-March 21, 2019 The Noguchi Museum, New York: May 1-July 14, 2019 Asian Art Museum, San Francisco: September 27-December 8, 2019

These are exciting times for Japanese bamboo art. May 2017 saw the opening of Japan House Sao Paulo, whose inaugural exhibition 'Bamboo: The Material That Built Japan' drew over 300,000 visitors. From June 2017 to February 2018 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York mounted another bamboo show that was seen by about 400,000. From 27 November, the Musee du quai Branly in Paris will present the largest-ever exhibition on the subject. This authoritative catalogue of 323 works from the Naej Collection thus appears at a moment when a new global audience has emerged. The Naej Collection is especially strong in works by leading artists from 1850 to 1950, when great craft dynasties were established and first Osaka and then Tokyo emerged as major centres of artistic basketry. The catalogue breaks new ground by combining dramatic photography with precious documentary information drawn from signatures and inscriptions, making it not merely the visual record of a great collection but the essential reference work for a developing field of connoisseurship. Text in English, Japanese and simplified Chinese.

This is a beautifully illustrated book and a lively, entertaining, illuminating discussion of the contribution and effects of East Asian art on American culture. Warren Cohen portrays the assembling of the great American collections of East Asian art, public and private, and the idiosyncrasies of the collectors. Particular attention is focused on how this art became part of the cultural consciousness of the people of the United States, transforming their culture into something more complex than the Western civilization their ancestors brought from Europe. Cohen tells of art collectors, dealers, and historians, of museums and their curators, of art and imperialism, art and politics, art as an instrument of foreign policy. One of America's leading diplomatic historians, Cohen views art as an important part of international relations. He describes the use of art in "cultural diplomacy" to implement policy by China, Japan, and the United States. He argues that "virtually every act in the movement of art between cultures has political implications". The book demonstrates how art collecting interacts with the shifting rhythms of international politics and the business cycle. The recent decline in American economic power, with Japan emerging preeminent, was first obvious in the art world where American collectors found themselves unable to compete with their Japanese and Hong Kong counterparts and watched great works begin to move back across the Pacific.

Over the last forty years, Basil Robinson has established a reputation as a leading authority on the art of Persia. His work on Persian manuscript illumination represents one of the most important contributions made in this century to the study of the development of this pivotal branch of Islamic art, which absorbed the influence of Arab and Chinese painting, and influenced in turn the miniature painting of Mughal India. This first volume concentrates on Persian painting. Seven papers examine the general evolution of painting in Persia from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, "mostly preserved in manuscript illumination, with emphasis on that most characteristic of Persian manuscripts, "the Shah-Nameh, the national epic. Particular attention is paid to the Timurid period and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Four reviews of exhibitions of Persian art follow. Thirteen studies are devoted to a later period, the school of painting that arose under the Qajar rulers, when Persian art flourished in such new and diverse media as oil painting and painted enamels. Vol I Contents: Preface A Survey of Persian Painting 1350-1896 Persian Painting and the National Epic Persian Miniatures and Manuscripts Persian Miniatures of the 16th and 17th Centuries Shah Abbas and the Mughal Ambassador Khan Alam: the Pictorial Record Areas of Controversy in Islamic Painting Book Illustration in Transoxiana: the Timurid Period Some Modern Persian Miniatures Persian Miniatures at the British Museum Persian Painting: A Loan Exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum Persian Miniature Painting from Collections in the British Isles Qajar Art: An Introduction The Court Painters of Fath Ali Shah The Amery Collection of Persian Oil Paintings Persian Royal Portraiture and the Qajars Some Thoughts on Qajar Lacquer Qajar Lacquer Persian Lacquer in the Bern Historical Museum Persian Lacquer and the Bern Historical Museum Casket A Pair of Royal Book-Covers A Lacquer Mirror Case of 1854 Qajar Painted Enamels A Royal Qajar Enamel The Tehran Nizami of 1848 and other Qajar Illustrated Books Inde.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1988.

A fresh perspective on British history from award-winning broadcaster Fatima Manji Why was there a Turkish mosque adorning Britain's most famous botanic garden in the eighteenth century? How did a pair of Persian-inscribed cannon end up in rural Wales? And who is the Moroccan man depicted in a long-forgotten portrait hanging in a west London stately home? Throughout Britain's museums, civic buildings and stately homes, relics can be found that reveal the diversity of pre-twentieth-century Britain and expose the misconceptions around modern immigration narratives. In her journey across Britain exploring cultural landmarks, Fatima Manji searches for a richer and more honest story of a nation struggling with identity and the legacy of empire. 'A timely, brilliant and very brave book' Jerry Brotton, author of This Orient Isle

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. By the 1960s, Hindi-language films from Bombay were in high demand not only for domestic and diasporic audiences but also for sizable non-diasporic audiences across Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean world. Often confounding critics who painted the song-dance films as noisy and nonsensical. if not dangerously seductive and utterly vulgar, Bombay films attracted fervent worldwide viewers precisely for their elements of romance, music, and spectacle. In this richly documented history of Hindi cinema during the long 1960s, Samhita Sunya historicizes the emergence of world cinema as a category of cinematic diplomacy that formed in the crucible of the Cold War. Interwoven with this history is an account of the prolific transnational circuits of popular Hindi films alongside the efflorescence of European art cinema and Cold War-era forays of Hollywood abroad. By following archival leads and threads of argumentation within commercial Hindi films that seem to be odd cases-flops, remakes, low-budget comedies, and prestige productions-this book offers a novel map for excavating the historical and ethical stakes of world cinema and world-making via Bombay.