Rethinking Place in South Asian and Islamic Art, 1500-Present

Place plays a fundamental role in the structuring of the discipline of Art History. And yet, place also limits the questions art historians can ask and impairs analysis of objects and locations in the interstices of established, ossified categories. The chapters in this interdisciplinary volume investigate place in all of its dynamism and complexity: several call into question traditional constructions regarding place in Art History, while others explore the fundamental role that place plays in lived experience. The particular nexus for this collection lies at the intersection and overlap of two major subfields in the history of art: South Asia and the Islamic world, both of which are seemingly geographically determined, yet at the same time uncategorizable as place with their ever-shifting and contested borders. The eleven chapters brought together here move from the early modern through to the contemporary, and span particular monuments and locations ranging from Asia and Europe to Africa and the Americas. The chapters take on the question of place as it operates in more obvious settings, such as architectural monuments and exhibitionary contexts, while also probing the way place operates when objects move or when the very place they exist in transforms dramatically. This volume engages place through the movement of objects, the evocation of senses, desires, and memories and the on-going project of articulating the parameters of place and location.

Deborah S. Hutton is Professor, Department of Art and Art History, The College of New Jersey, USA. Rebecca M. Brown is Associate Professor, History of Art, Johns Hopkins University, USA.

Introduction: In and Out of Place: Engagements in South Asian and Islamic Art History Deborah S. Hutton and Rebecca M. Brown Part I: Experiencing Place 1. "And in the Soup Kitchen Food Shall Be Cooked Twice Every Day": Gustatory Aspects of Ottoman Mosque Complexes Nina Ergin 2. A Mandir for the Masses or Apparatus of Imperial Authority? The Amba Mata Temple in Udaipur Jennifer Joffee 3. Water in the Expanded Field: Art, Thought and Immersion in the Yamuna river: 2005-2011 Venugopal Maddipati 4. The Global, The Local, The Contemporary, The Collaborative: Ghari/Ghar Pe/At Home, Dharavi, Mumbai, 2012 Atreyee Gupta Part II: Shifting Place 5. Mary on the Moon: Ivory Statuettes of the Virgin Mary from Goa and Sri Lanka Marsha G. Olson 6. From Dictatorship to Democracy: Cordoba's Islamic Monuments in the Twentieth Century Jennifer Roberson 7. Mosque, Dome, Minaret: Ahmadiyya Architecture in Germany since 2000 Alisa Eimen Part III: Defining Place 8. Shangri La: The Archive-Museum and the Spatial Topologies of Islamic Art History Sugata Ray 9. A Thoroughly Modern Major: Photography, Identity, and Politics at the Court of Hyderabad Deborah S. Hutton 10. Useful but Dangerous: Photography and the Madras School of Art, 1850-1873 Deepali Dewan 11. Temporal Transformations: Terracotta and Trash Rebecca M. Brown