Browse Recent Book Reviews

Even readers unfamiliar with scholarship on the history of astronomy will quickly recognize Omar W. Nasim’s rich contributions to the field. Observing by Hands: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century convincingly articulates how pencil and paper paralleled the telescope as tools for astronomical observation. That astronomers’ routine paperwork has remained obscure to historians should come as no surprise. Private, unpublished notebooks often appear unintelligible, riddled with seemingly idiosyncratic information. Nasim masterfully proves this to be a misconception. The seemingly most monotonous behaviors necessitated by observational programs can yield, as Nasim shows, important information about conceptions of knowledge production and… Full Review

In Collective Situations: Readings in Contemporary Latin American Art, 1995–2010, editors Bill Kelley Jr. and Grant H. Kester bring together twenty-two texts that show artists carving out spaces for social action where others playing more conventional roles have failed. Art’s imaginative capacity, more than anything else, enables them to do this. But, as the documents in their enormously compelling and useful anthology demonstrate, art’s successes in affecting social and political change are often incomplete and almost always difficult to measure. Even so, the documents they gather attest to the power of art to create freedom and possibility within the… Full Review

What flight of fancy, delusion of grandeur, or insidious demonic force could tempt a contemporary author to write yet another book on Michelangelo (1475–1564)? The depth of Michelangelo’s genius has elicited sustained inquiry in modern art historical research for well over a century. One may ask, is there anything left to see or say? Bernadine Barnes’s new book entitled Michelangelo and the Viewer in His Time yields the answer yes on both counts. This book is not only worth reading, it has the necessary ingredients to remind contemporary Michelangelo scholars of a desirable style of writing and research that places… Full Review

Marking the centenary of the Russian Revolution, 2017 was a year rife with crises and controversies that cast 1917’s legacy as both strikingly familiar and impossibly remote. Alongside a rising tide of authoritarianism and Russia again donning the mantle of American adversary (with the charges led this time not by red-baiting conservatives, but by Democrats and liberal pundits seeking to remedy an election gone terribly wrong), alongside the ongoing fight for women’s rights and civil rights, for equal pay and a living wage, the twentieth century hardly seems to have come and gone, its passage marked instead by a return… Full Review

Marcus Milwright’s Islamic Arts and Crafts: An Anthology stakes an implicit—and sometimes explicit—claim for the place of objects and their production in the eastern Mediterranean and the larger Iranian world. Following the author’s work on a related topic, An Introduction to Islamic Archaeology (2010), it illustrates his mastery of written sources as well as the diverse materials, processes, and objects they discuss. With substantial scholarly apparatus in the form of notes, bibliography, index, and appendix, it will help shape the growing field of Islamic material culture as well as that of Islamic art. Milwright, in the introduction, makes clear the… Full Review

What to do with a retired emperor? Soon after Emperor Akihito announced his intention to abdicate in April 2019, this question captured headlines across Japan. Not merely a response to the unusual circumstances—the last imperial retirement occurred in 1817—the inquiry was advanced as part of a bold appeal: so that he not overshadow his successor, Akihito should leave Tokyo for Kyoto. The proposal was perhaps the most ambitious of many made by Kyoto political groups in recent years to reclaim from Tokyo cultural, political, and economic institutions taken over the course of centuries. The campaign is unlikely to succeed, but… Full Review

Performance art has become a hot topic of research in art history, and it has surged in popularity judging by the number of performance art classes, conferences, and performance studies departments in UK and US universities. This review will consist of appraising two texts that reckon with performance: Diana Taylor’s Performance (2016) and Jennifer Doyle’s Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (2013). Taylor, a performance studies and Spanish professor, focuses strictly on performance art—specifically rethinking aspects of it; the field has been re-formed through new theories. On the other hand, Doyle, an English professor, focuses on… Full Review

It is difficult to assess Margarita Tupitsyn’s new book, Moscow Vanguard Art, 1922–1992, because of its strong spirit of partisanship. It covers wide historical ground and brings in a lot of new material gathered from primary sources, but it is also unabashedly selective, its choices circumscribed by the author’s personal history. A well-known art historian and curator of Russian and Soviet avant-garde art, Tupitsyn belongs to the generation of intellectuals who came of age during the period of stagnation and decline of the Soviet Union. The history she narrates belongs to this period fully and inextricably. Her important contribution… Full Review

According to E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, the terms “performance,” “queer,” and “blacktino” in the title of their coedited book Blacktino Queer Performance signal collaborations: queer as non-normative sexualities; performance as a lens to examine sociocultural phenomena; and blacktino analytics as a “critical optic [which] allows us to maintain the goals of queer-of-color-critique and to ground it in [. . .] black and brown intergroup relations” (7). On the volume’s cover is a seminal moment in queer blacktino performance: Sylvia Riviera and Marsha P. Johnson, foremothers of blacktino transgender activism, at the Christopher Street Liberation Day Gay Pride… Full Review

Olivier Barlet’s 2016 English translation of Les Cinémas d’Afrique des années 2000 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012) offers scholars and students an impressive and comprehensive study of African film made and produced specifically from 1996 to the early 2000s. The four-hundred-plus-page work focuses on the questions and polemics in filmmakers’ work as well as the criticism that dictates the theoretical framework through which scholars understand African cinema. Barlet seeks to couch his study in the transnational contexts of the current trials and turmoil of our time to which African filmmakers are responding. “Africa today,” he writes, does not exist “in isolation… Full Review