Overview

What do Persian robes of honour, 20th-century still-life painting, fur garments, and 18th-century porcelain all have in common? Prized, possessed and modelled, they highlight the deep connections we share with cultural objects. Establishing new connections between people and things via artistic media and material culture, this highly interdisciplinary volume brings together both established and emerging scholars in the fields of art history, material culture, museum and heritage studies and literary studies to investigate the intersection of the personal with the material. Raising vital questions of cultural identity, belonging and selfhood, Material Selves is the first book of its kind to consider the relationship between people and things across transcultural and transhistorical contexts. It employs innovative methodologies across ten chapters and critically expands on current models for understanding the dynamic relationship between people and things by tracing the central role objects have played in the construction, creation and performance of identity throughout history. Structured around four key sections exploring biography and narrative; adornment and ornament; reclamation and intervention; and subjects and objects, the volume presents a global selection of case studies that explore, amongst other things, Margaret Olley’s enduring fame, the significance of the Khil’a in Safavid Persia and early modern Europe, and 17th-century French painter Charles LeBrun’s royal portraiture. Fusing these with contemporary theories of identity, the contributors provide analyses informed by posthumanism, the environmental humanities, race and gender. At the same time, they confront vital questions of identity, agency, and materiality, and highlight the way in which we use objects to tell stories, construct myths and make sense of our place in the world. In doing so, the book illuminates a wide range of cultural and chronological settings whilst giving close attention to the mobility of people and things between, across, and through time and place.

Full Product Details

9781350416482

Table of Contents

Reviews

This rich and vibrant cornucopia of bottom-up, object driven studies brings fresh perspectives to the study of human-thing relations. Employing a diversity of examples and theoretical outlooks, the inter-disciplinary approach will stimulate research in material culture studies, archaeology and anthropology, museum and literary studies, sociology and media studies as much as in art history. * Ian Hodder, Dunlevie Family Professor Emeritus in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University, USA * This wide-ranging series of essays, spanning historical dress, jewellery, and contemporary artistic expression, shifts scholarly attention from object-centred exposition to the discursive narrative around objects in the construction of subjecthood. Through a series of relationships always in contextual flux, object and human biographies intertwine to reveal the formation of material selves. * Edward S. Cooke, Jr., Charles F. Montgomery Professor of the History of Art, Yale University, USA *

""This rich and vibrant cornucopia of bottom-up, object driven studies brings fresh perspectives to the study of human-thing relations. Employing a diversity of examples and theoretical outlooks, the inter-disciplinary approach will stimulate research in material culture studies, archaeology and anthropology, museum and literary studies, sociology and media studies as much as in art history."" --Ian Hodder, Dunlevie Family Professor Emeritus in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University, USA ""This wide-ranging series of essays, spanning historical dress, jewellery, and contemporary artistic expression, shifts scholarly attention from object-centred exposition to the discursive narrative around objects in the construction of subjecthood. Through a series of relationships always in contextual flux, object and human biographies intertwine to reveal the formation of material selves."" --Edward S. Cooke, Jr., Charles F. Montgomery Professor of the History of Art, Yale University, USA

Author Information

Alex Burchmore is Lecturer in Art History and Curatorial Studies at the Australian National University, Australia. He is the author of New Export China: Translations Across Time and Place in Contemporary Chinese Porcelain Art (2023).

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