Browse Recent Book Reviews

Meha Priyadarshini’s Chinese Porcelain in Colonial Mexico is structured as a spatial-commercial journey, presenting a “typical biography” (sensu Igor Kopytoff in his classic 1986 essay from Cambridge University Press’s The Social Life of Things) of the world’s first “global brand” (to use Craig Clunas’s oft-cited phrase). The book follows Chinese porcelain from production in Jingdezhen, to transpacific shipping from Manila, to consumption in Acapulco and Mexico City, and finally to reproduction in Puebla (one valley east of the viceregal capital), where Chinese porcelain inspired a local off-brand (talavera poblana) that was valued on its own terms by… Full Review

Over the past three decades, scholarship on the history of photography in Africa has done much to overturn monolithic accounts of modernity in the discipline of art history. Today African photography is a common topic of art history PhD dissertations and the regular focus of major books and exhibitions. The significance of this development cannot be overstated. Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa by Jennifer Bajorek can be understood as an important turning point in these developments because it moves beyond topics that are by now familiar, even canonical. Grounded in rigorous theoretical inquiry and years of in-depth… Full Review

In Aquatint Worlds, Douglas Fordham argues that the medium of aquatint, a type of tonal printmaking, unified an aesthetic for picturing travel, in particular the architecture, peoples, and landscapes that came into view with the expansion of the British empire. This is a global and material history and a critical intervention in the history of print. From William Ivins’s description of engraved lines as a “net of rationality” to John Berger’s contemplation of “ways of seeing” art through reproduction, theorists have argued that technologies of print condition the reception of images. Fordham posits that aquatint was one such “worldmaking”… Full Review

FROM THE ARCHIVE: This autumn, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. This week we revisit a crucial volume published in 2019, Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today, as reviewed by Michele Valerie Ronnick. Full Review

Much of the history of Europe and South Asia’s mutual entanglement in the modern era has been written around the rise and fall of the British Raj, which dominated most of the Indian subcontinent for two centuries. In recent years, however, scholars have paid increasing attention to interactions between South Asia and the rest of Europe, on the one hand, and on the other, to the need to understand such interactions in terms of global networks of economic and cultural circulation, including Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The history of relations between France and the Indian subcontinent has been fruitful… Full Review

FROM THE ARCHIVE: This autumn, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. Today, in a piece relevant to the United States' current election season, explore Ila Sheren's review of Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Americas by Macarena Gómez-Barris, about the intersection of art and the wave of progressive governments elected across Latin America in the early twenty-first century. Full Review

As ubiquitous in the ancient Maya world (encompassing modern-day Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and parts of Honduras and El Salvador) as they are today, deer provided a core food source to ancient populations. The Maya developed a complex approach to deer remains and imagery as a result, varying from a focus on economic signifiers to mythological or political content or, given the multivalence of Maya objects, a combination of all three. This heritage lasted beyond the Spanish arrival in the sixteenth century; modern populations continue to demonstrate a rich, enduring ritual tradition (albeit one now also influenced by Catholicism) surrounding the… Full Review

FROM THE ARCHIVE: This autumn, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. Stephennie Mulder examines the impact of genocide on not just a people but also on their very cultural survival through the destruction of precious material artifacts. Read her review of The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice by Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh. Full Review

FROM THE ARCHIVE: This autumn, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. At a crucial juncture for museums and other institutions, we revisit the founding of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture. Read Deborah Ziska‘s review of A Fool’s Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump by Lonnie G. Bunch III. Full Review

Peter Schwenger’s new book is that vital and fateful thing: “a solid first map of a territory previously unknown to academic study,” as one of the prepublication blurbs puts it. “Solid” is uncharitable; “deft” is more just. But “first” is spot on, and the point about academic study correctly identifies the gap Schwenger sets out to fill as well as his target audience. Asemic: The Art of Writing is vital because it charts the rise of an extraordinary creative practice that came into its own in the late 1990s: writing that is “without meaning” but “not without significance” (17). Like… Full Review