UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
SCHOOL OF ART HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY
BA(Hons) History of Art
BA(Hons) in History of Modern Art
Thomas
A Dowson
This series of six lectures makes up one theme within the course ‘Introduction to Art History’. The aims and objectives of the course as a whole are equally applicable here, but specifically this theme is intended to introduce you to issues of cultural diversity in Art and Architecture. You will be exposed to specific case studies from Africa and Asia, as well as issues such as colonialism, post-colonialism and representation. These lectures can also be seen as introductory lectures to courses offered in the second and third level, where the various traditions and issues are covered in much greater depth.
Despite the noteworthy research of some individuals, the disciplinary culture of art history is still widely thought of as elitist and somewhat Eurocentric. This lecture explores how it is that we come to conceptualise a Western - non-Western dichotomy in the study of art, the intellectual and empirical origins of such a distinction – i.e. from Lascuax to the Louvre. And how a history of the West comes to stand for a history of humanity. And, finally, how we might overcome such Eurocentric thinking.
‘It’s Not Where You’re From, It’s Where You’re At!’ Postcoloniality and
Art History – Natasha Eaton
In the last twenty years postcolonial studies has dramatically influenced the theories and practices of art history. This lecture traces the genealogy of this highly politicised discourse from Orientalism to notions of hybridity and diaspora, paying special attention to the visual representations of South Asians through folk art, ethnography, photo-journalism and cinema. It argues that identities are messy, complex and contradictory – (structured as much by the global as by the local), so that art history must radically rethink differences that are not about pure otherness.
Babba, H. Anish Kapoor, London: University of
California Press, 1998
Gilroy, P. Diaspora.
In K. Woodward (ed.) Identity and
Difference, London: Sage, 1997
Hall, S.
Representing the other. In S.Hall (ed.) Representation,
London: Sage, 1997
Kabir, N.M. Bollywood, London: Sage, 2001
King, C (ed.). Views of Difference: Different Views of Art,
London: Yale University Press, 1999
Loomba, A. Colonialism/Postcolonialism, London:
Routledge, 1998
Nochlin, L. The Imaginary
Orient. In L. Nochlin, The Politics of
Vision, London: Thames and Hudson, 1991
Thomas, N. Colonialism’s Culture, Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1994
The arts of Africa
have been collected for centuries and, since the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, have played a key role in constructing Western notions of Africa and
African identities. Today, collections of
African ‘art’ are
displayed in diverse contexts in British museums. Some are displayed for their
aesthetic qualities alone, making no mention of the historical circumstances of
their acquisition or subsequent history
within the museum. Other displays make some reference to (aspects of) the social and political histories of African objects, as well as to their technical and formal attributes. This lecture questions the ways in which
African ‘art ’ is
represented, interpreted and displays within the Westernizing frame of museums
in Britain.
Clifford,
J. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth
Century Ethnography, Literature and art, Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1988
Court, E. Africa on
Display: exhibiting art by Africans. In E. Barker (ed.) Contemporary Cultures of Display, London: Yale University Press,
1999
Price, S. Primitive art in civilised places,
Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989
Staniszewski,
M.A. Believing is seeing: creating the
culture of art. New York: Penguin Books, 1995
This lecture explores
palace architecture of the Islamic Dynasties from the Umayyad Empire to the
Ottoman Empire.
Bloom, J and S.
Blair, The Art and Architecture of Islam,
1250-1800, Yale, Yale University Press, 1994
Hillenbrand, R. Islamic Architecture: Form, Function and Meaning,
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994
Necipoglu, G. Architecture, Ceremonial and Power: The
Topkapi Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1991
Visual art and
architecture have always played important roles in identifying similarity and
difference between peoples and cultures as well as in mediating, imposing and
contesting power. Using landscape art,
images of the land, and architectural projects, this lecture discusses
different ways of defining, imaging and delimiting space during the high period
of Western colonialism (19th-20th centuries) and
indicates some of the so-called ‘postcolonial’ responses to these artistic and
architectural practices.
Eisenman, S. Gauguin’s Skirt, London: Thames and
Hudson, 1997
Mitchell, W.J.T.
Imperial Landscape. In Mitchell (ed), Landscape
and Power, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994
Thomas, N. Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture,
London: Thames and Hudson, 2000
Identity and
Difference: Representing Bodies in Colonial India, c.1760-c.1860
– Natasha Eaton
This session excavates the body as site for cross-cultural negotiations between Indian courtly and British pictorial traditions. It explores the critical entanglement of Mughal aesthetics with the visual ethnography of the early colonial state by suggesting that hybridity, mimicry and difference were fundamental to the representation of Selves and Others. Reading painting and photography against the grain, it examines the changing status of Indians as both painters and as the subjects of an ‘imperial objectivity’, as well as their strategies of resistance to colonialism’s artistic demands.
Cohn, B. The Past in
the Present: India as a Museum of Mankind, History
and Anthropology 11/1:1-38, 1998
Collingham, E. Imperial Bodies, Oxford: Polity, (2001
Hall, S (ed.).
Representing the Other. In S. Hall (ed.), Representation,
London: Sage, (1997)
Pinney, C. Camera Indica, London: Reaktion Books,
1997
Pinney, C. Colonial
Anthropology. In C.A. Bayly (ed.), The
Raj: India and the British, London: National Portrait Gallery Publications,
1990
Thomas, N. Colonialism’s Culture, Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1994