Overview

The Islamic world's artistic traditions experienced profound transformation in the 19th century as rapidly developing technologies and globalizing markets ushered in drastic changes in technique, style, and content. Despite the importance and ingenuity of these developments, the 19th century remains a gap in the history of Islamic art. To fill this opening in art historical scholarship, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean charts transformations in image-making, architecture, and craft production in the Islamic world from Fez to Istanbul. Contributors focus on the shifting methods of production, reproduction, circulation, and exchange artists faced as they worked in fields such as photography, weaving, design, metalwork, ceramics, and even transportation. Covering a range of media and a wide geographical spread, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean reveals how 19th-century artists in the Middle East and North Africa reckoned with new tools, materials, and tastes from local perspectives.

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9780253060334

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This book is a timely contribution to pressing debates about visual cultures of modernity across the modern Mediterranean. With a geographic diversity reaching from the Ottoman capital across North Africa, the essays in this book address a rich range of themes, from emergent forms of modern historicism to original readings of objects and images that trouble entrenched assumptions about aesthetic value. So too, this book's revisionary perspective makes clear the necessity to address the diversity of visual culture, from painting to photography, from craft work to infrastructure. The collective enterprise of this anthology transforms our understanding of what it meant to be modern across the Islamic Mediterranean.--Mary Roberts, author of Istanbul Exchanges: Ottomans, Orientalists and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture, University of Sydney

Author Information

Margaret S. Graves is Associate Professor of Art History and Adjunct Associate Professor in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at Indiana University. She is author of Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament, and Architecture in Medieval Islam (winner of the 2019 Annual Book Prize, International Center of Medieval Art, and the 2021 Karen Gould Prize, Medieval Academy of America). Alex Dika Seggerman is Assistant Professor of Islamic Art History at Rutgers University–Newark. She held postdoctoral fellowships at Smith College, Hampshire College, and Yale University. She is author of Modernism on the Nile: Art in Egypt between the Islamic and the Contemporary.

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