Islamic Archaeology and Art History

2014 ◽  
pp. 4072-4075
Author(s):  
Leslee Katrina Michelsen
Author(s):  
Bethany J. Walker ◽  
Timothy Insoll ◽  
Corisande Fenwick

The following Foreword, written by the three co-editors of this Handbook, situates the field of Islamic archaeology as it is practiced today in the larger study of the Islamic world. It also positions this Handbook in a growing body of scholarship on the archaeology of Islam. The special challenges faced by a newly emerging field, and one that is concerned with relatively recent historical periods and is quite literally global in scale, is presented in honest debate. The relationships of Islamic archaeology with Islamic art history and Islamic history are problematized, and the conceptual problems of Islamization and periodization explicated are and explored. The Foreword closes with a justification for the global scale of this Handbook, which determines its geographical organization.


Author(s):  
Alison L. Gascoigne

This chapter situates Egypt within wider debates arising from the field of Islamic archaeology and provides an overview of the current state of our knowledge based on diverse categories of archaeological evidence. Its overall aim is to argue for more diverse intellectual approaches—socially and scientifically aware and theoretically embedded—to be incorporated into archaeological activity in the country in place of those more closely related to the discipline of art history. The chapter starts with a consideration of evidence from a chronological perspective, noting the current relative lack of focus on the Ayyubid, Mamluk, and Ottoman periods. An inevitably brief digression follows on rural archaeology, for which minimal evidence has been uncovered. Evidence for domestic activity, trade and production, and funerary practices is outlined with a particular focus on artifactual material. The chapter also considers the growth and development of urban centers, both capital and provincial, under Islamic rule. Overall, the chapter highlights a need for a more sustained focus on Egypt’s Islamic-era/medieval archaeology for its own sake, rather than as either the inheritance of the classical world or the foundations of the early modern state.


Author(s):  
Corisande Fenwick

This text provides a brief introduction to the chapters focusing on the Islamic West. Long neglected by Anglophone academics, this region was pivotal in the development of Islamic art history and archaeology as a discipline, but, over the course of the 20th century it came to be regarded as peripheral to broader debates in Islamic archaeology. Since the 1970s, a new generation of Islamic archaeologists working in Europe, North Africa, and the Sahara has transformed our understanding of the region, though the amount and quality of research remains uneven in different countries.


1985 ◽  
Vol 30 (12) ◽  
pp. 962-964
Author(s):  
Pavel Machotka

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-44
Author(s):  
Srajana Kaikini

This paper undertakes an intersectional reading of visual art through theories of literary interpretation in Sanskrit poetics in close reading with Deleuze's notions of sensation. The concept of Dhvani – the Indian theory of suggestion which can be translated as resonance, as explored in the Rasa – Dhvani aesthetics offers key insights into understanding the mode in which sensation as discussed by Deleuze operates throughout his reflections on Francis Bacon's and Cézanne's works. The paper constructs a comparative framework to review modern and classical art history, mainly in the medium of painting, through an understanding of the concept of Dhvani, and charts a course of reinterpreting and examining possible points of concurrence and departure with respect to the Deleuzian logic of sensation and his notions of time-image and perception. The author thereby aims to move art interpretation's paradigm towards a non-linguistic sensory paradigm of experience. The focus of the paper is to break the moulds of normative theory-making which guide ideal conditions of ‘understanding art’ and look into alternative modes of experiencing the ‘vocabulary’ of art through trans-disciplinary intersections, in this case the disciplines being those of visual art, literature and phenomenology.


Author(s):  
renée c. hoogland

Considered odd, obscene, a genius nonetheless, at the time she created her best-known works, French photographer and writer Claude Cahun (1894-1950) cuts a particularly unruly figure in literary criticism and art history. Her recalcitrant faux autobiography Aveux non avenus, [Disavowals, or, Cancelled Confessions] (1930), a book of essays and recorded dreams illustrated with photomontages, have encouraged the artist’s association with High Modernism and Surrealism while her photographic self-portraits have been claimed for an affirmative (feminist) gender politics. However, the proliferous and mercurial nature of Cahun’s disavowed confessions and self-stagings defy easy “domestication.” Instead she constructs a continuously shifting configuration of fragments and collages: assemblages of singularities that are always in a multiplicity, in a pack. Escaping dominant forms of expression, Cahun’s work has nothing to do with recognition or imitation, nor does it constitute a relation of representation. The chapter argues instead that Cahun presents us in both her writing and in her photographic work with the successful experience of becoming in the absence of any final term or form. A becoming-animal that moves beyond destruction into the zone of indiscernibility where a work, or, perhaps, an oeuvre comes into view—an oeuvre that nonetheless remains decidedly outlandish.


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