Browse Recent Book Reviews

Matthew Rarey’s Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic is the latest addition to scholarship on the knowledge produced by African individuals as they skillfully navigated the violent whims of enslavement and racial capitalism. Spanning the fourteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, Insignificant Things tracks an evolving, transatlantic discourse around bolsa de mandinga (translated literally as “mandinga pouch”): amulets with diverse materials contained within a fabric or leather pouch that were used for luck, love, and protection from personal violence. Across the Lusophone Atlantic, bolsas were employed ritualistically by many early modern subjects, but… Full Review

To visit Mexico City’s Plaza de la Constitución (better known as the Zócalo) today is to be immersed in an urban palimpsest spanning seven centuries. The north and east sides of this central plaza are occupied by the National Palace and Cathedral, from which the nation’s political and religious life has been administered since the Viceregal period. In the space between them, dancers and drummers wearing feathered headdresses and seed rattle anklets perform in front of the archaeological site and museum dedicated to the Mexica, or Aztec, Templo Mayor: the most significant ceremonial structure of Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec… Full Review

The book of hours, a type of devotional book that usually contains a collection of prayers, psalms, hymns, and other readings to be recited at specific hours of the day, is one of the most well-preserved artistic products from the late Middle Ages. These books have received extensive scholarly attention as complex cultural products that were often richly illuminated. The Book of Hours and the Body: Somaesthetics, Posthumanism, and the Uncanny is focused on illuminations in several books of hours that could have helped their users reflect on issues of embodiment, gender, being human, and the divine. The methodological framework… Full Review

Myrlande Constant: The Work of Radiance, an exhibition volume published for the eponymous show that ran at the Fowler Museum at UCLA in 2023, stands as a major contribution to the contemporary scholarship on the work of Haitian artists. Other examples over the past several decades published in conjunction with museum and gallery exhibitions include Pòtoprens: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince (2022), Haïti: deux siècles de création artistique (2014), Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou (2012), In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st Century Haiti (2012), and the disciplinary cornerstone of this era of scholarship, Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou (1995)… Full Review

Unsettling Canadian Art History, edited by Erin Morton, is a significant contribution to the fields of art history and Canadian studies. The book’s stated goal is “to offer antiracist, decolonial, feminist, and queer, trans, and Two-Spirit standpoints on histories of colonialism that violently formed the white settler state of Canada” (6). Morton states, in the preface, that she originally intended to write a single-authored book on the subject but recognized that “certain critiques must be collaborative ventures” (x). She reflects on her own positionality as a white settler academic and argues that, as a colonial discipline, Canadian art history… Full Review

The question of “what is photography” is ineluctably tied to another question: “where is photography?" Similarly, for the history of photography in China, questions of photography’s points of origin, routes of circulation, as well as the direction of representational gazes have loomed large. Oliver Moore’s recent book Photography in China: Science, Commerce and Communication is no exception to these concerns, but it intends to provide a different approach: to “[explain] photography’s history from a Chinese viewpoint” (3). While this might seem to imply a nationalistic or cultural identity, what Moore refers to as “Chinese” is rather “several degrees of space”… Full Review

Note from the Editor: To expand the journal’s accessibility, this review is being published in its original Spanish version followed by an English translation by Davis Sharpe and Nicole Halton.  Antes de la llegada de los europeos, muchos de los pueblos que habitaban el área cultural hoy conocida como Mesoamérica –entre los que sobresalen los Nahuas o Aztecas– solían emplear tiras de papel vegetal o de piel de animales plegadas en forma de biombo para registrar, a través de imágenes, conocimientos calendáricos y adivinatorios, cuentas catastrales y tributarias, genealogías, cantares y relatos históricos, entre otros muchos géneros más. Estos libros… Full Review

Upon completing the opera The Wreckers, British composer Ethel Smyth proselytized theaters across Europe to perform the work. It was staged in a German translation at the New Theater in Leipzig in 1906. Three years later, her friend and conductor Thomas Beecham produced it for His Majesty’s Theater in London. In 1958, Beecham published a short text to mark the centenary of Smyth’s birth. Despite his admiration for her work, he described the composer as “a stubborn, indomitable, unconquerable creature” (“Dame Ethel Smyth (1885–1944”), The Musical Times, 1958, 365).  Smyth is one of the hundreds of “creatures” included in Lauren… Full Review

In Voices in Aerosol: Youth Culture, Institutional Attunement, and Graffiti in Urban Mexico, Caitlin Frances Bruce engages in an extended ethnographic case study of graffiti culture in León, Mexico from the mid–1990s to 2018. Through the framework of attunement, Bruce structures the book around themes of frisson, noise, harmonization, amplification, resonance, and susurration to examine the shifts in attitudes towards graffiti in relation to the sociopolitical circumstances of early twenty-first century León. Terminology is paramount to this framing: the book begins with a glossary that defines terms in writing culture, and Bruce consistently uses “graffiti” rather than “street art” to… Full Review

David Hopkins and Disa Persson, the editors of Contagion, Hygiene, and the European Avant-Garde, open their volume with a contradiction central to cultural modernism: while nineteenth-century scientific medicine revolutionized understandings of germs and disease, holding out the promise of a healthier, more hygienic future, urban industrial life was also by its very nature a breeding ground for disease with its crowded cities, polluted skies, and dirty streets. The possibilities of a sanitized society were held in check, in other words, by the realities of an environment that had never been filthier. The fact that by the late nineteenth century… Full Review