Browse Recent Book Reviews

In Cristelle Baskins’s recent monograph, Muley al-Hassan, the Hafsid king of Tunis (r. 1526–43) and vassal to Charles V (r. 1516–66), finally gets his due. Long eclipsed by hegemonic histories of his Habsburg contemporaries, Muley al-Hassan commands the center of Baskins’s narrative of cultural entanglement and territorial contestation in the early modern Mediterranean. But as Baskins signals in the text, the book aims to do more than recalibrate our understanding of the relationship between its titular protagonists, the Hafsids and the Habsburgs. As she traces Muley al-Hassan’s displacement, itineracy, and mythologization across the long sixteenth century, Baskins draws on transdisciplinary… Full Review

In Landscape and the Arts in Early Modern Italy: Theatre, Gardens and Visual Culture, Katrina Grant argues that the theatre exerted a significant but neglected influence on the design and experience of landscape in early modern Italy. In chapter one, Grant discusses the cliché that the arts of the seventeenth century were “theatrical” and suggests that if it is to have any value, this notion needs to be distinguished from modern ideas about the theatre and theatricality. Instead of platitudinous statements about the general “theatricality” of baroque works of art, and the simplistic categorisation of gardens according to the… Full Review

How does one define an intervention? Through critical reflection and response or through rupture and renewal? In the words of scholars Jacqueline Francis, Jeanne Gerrity, and their contributors, an intervention should have all these qualities and more. Copublished by Sternberg Press and the California College of the Arts (CCA) Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage? is the fourth annual edition of A Series of Open Questions. The publication weaves twenty-nine entries, including previously published book excerpts, commissioned media, art, and experimental projects, into a profound meditation on Black feminist ideologies, critical making… Full Review

In Pierrot and His World: Art, Theatricality, and the Marketplace in France, 1697–1945, Marika Takanishi Knowles investigates how art, theater, and commerce converge through a shared aesthetic of performance and surface display, enabling the negotiation of social identities. According to Knowles, a distinct dynamic emerges at the tail end of the seventeenth century, a “marketplace of theatricality as a form of social address” (2). The figure of Pierrot crystallizes this dynamic over the two and a half centuries covered by the book, a continuity all the more striking in this figure’s adaptability to shifting variables across time and historical… Full Review

Alice Tilche’s Adivasi Art and Activism: Curation in a Nationalist Age is an anthropological study of museums and religious conversion movements as disciplinary techniques and resources that variously shape the lives of subjects amidst ongoing conditions of marginalization and dispossession in an Indigenously inhabited region in contemporary India. Drawn from research conducted over 2005–2017 in the western Indian state of Gujarat, home to approximately 8.9 million subjects who self-identify as Adivasi and/or Tribal, the book focuses on the Chhota Udaipur district, where Rathava Adivasis constitute the dominant Tribal community. Here, Tilche tracks how Indian discourses of Indigeneity articulated by non-Adivasi… Full Review

On the east choir screen of Bamberg Cathedral, sculpted pairs of men are framed by carved arches. Though their bodies twist and their garments whirl with heavy pleats, the pairs always manage to face each other. Identified as the apostles on the south side of the choir screen and their Old Testament forebears, the prophets, on the north side, these sculpted men seem to be locked in eternal conversations, suggested by both their hand gestures and their accompanying banderoles. Amongst these twenty-four figures, however, one pair is shown with gently parted lips, an additional detail to suggest they are speaking. … Full Review

Amber Musser’s Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined is a shadow without an originary object—a sourceless cacophony. Musser’s two previous monographs— Sensational Flesh (2014) and Sensual Excess (2018)—established her as a preeminent thinker of and against dialectics: in her oeuvre, she makes it clear how this structure of thinking moves relentlessly forward and also produces, in its movement, a linearization of logic and sense that conforms to (and ultimately produces) a liberal humanist version of subjectivity. Between Shadows and Noise builds on her previous studies both formally and argumentatively. The monograph investigates a series of works that… Full Review

In a world dominated by climate crisis, trees matter. Gregory Bryda’s The Trees of the Cross: Wood as Subject and Medium in the Art of Late Medieval Germany lends historical perspective to our understanding of trees and what they mean to humanity. With a focus on wood as artistic material and medium in late medieval Germany, Bryda explains the polyvalency of arboreal imagery, sharing with us its secret cross-referencing language. Reflecting on the recursive relationship between nature and the Church prior to the Reformation, the author investigates how it was mediated by the wood of the cross, both depicted and… Full Review

In the last chapter of her brilliant book Each One Another: The Self in Contemporary Art, Rachel Haidu quotes at length Yvonne Rainer’s description of her desire to “render the shards of her own life” and incorporate “the new content” of personal feelings, which the choreographer saw as no less than markers of the uniqueness of a human being, into her work beginning in the early 1970s. Rainer elaborates, “On the one hand, this mindset can be characterized as a refusal of narrative and fixed meanings and a distrust of the “telling” and shaping strategies of fiction and history… Full Review

Jerrilynn Dodds’s Visual Histories from Medieval Iberia: Arts and Ambivalence makes a significant contribution to the study of medieval Iberian artistic practices, offering a nuanced reassessment of visual culture in a transcultural context. The book’s primary objective is to explore the fluid artistic interactions between Christians and Muslims on the Iberian Peninsula from the eighth to fourteenth centuries, rejecting rigid historiographical frameworks that impose artificial divisions between these groups. Instead, Dodds proposes an interpretive model grounded in ambivalence, recognizing the complex and often contradictory meanings embedded in artistic production that were simultaneously context-specific and enmeshed in global political and social… Full Review