The Lives Of Colonial Objects

Download or read book The Lives in Objects written by Jessica Yirush Stern and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2016-12-22 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Lives in Objects, Jessica Yirush Stern presents a thoroughly researched and engaging study of the deerskin trade in the colonial Southeast, equally attentive to British American and Southeastern Indian cultures of production, distribution, and consumption. Stern upends the long-standing assertion that Native Americans were solely gift givers and the British were modern commercial capitalists. This traditional interpretation casts Native Americans as victims drawn into and made dependent on a transatlantic marketplace. Stern complicates that picture by showing how both the Southeastern Indian and British American actors mixed gift giving and commodity exchange in the deerskin trade, such that Southeastern Indians retained much greater agency as producers and consumers than the standard narrative allows. By tracking the debates about Indian trade regulation, Stern also reveals that the British were often not willing to embrace modern free market values. While she sheds new light on broader issues in native and colonial history, Stern also demonstrates that concepts of labor, commerce, and material culture were inextricably intertwined to present a fresh perspective on trade in the colonial Southeast.

Download or read book The Lives of Colonial Objects written by Annabel Cooper and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lives of Colonial Objects is a sumptuously illustrated and highly readable book about things, and the stories that unfold when we start to investigate them. In this collection of 50 essays the authors, including historians, archivists, curators and Maori scholars, have each chosen an object from New Zealand's colonial past. Some are treasured family possessions such as a kahu kiwi, a music album or a grandmother's travel diary, and their stories have come down through families. Some, like the tauihu of a Maori waka, a Samoan kilikiti bat or a flying boat, are housed in museums. Others--a cannon, a cottage and a country road--inhabit public spaces but they too turn out to have unexpected histories. Things invite us into the past through their tangible, tactile and immediate presence: in this collection they serve as 50 paths into New Zealand's colonial history.

Download or read book The Lives of Objects written by Maia Kotrosits and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-09-07 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our lives are filled with objects—ones that we carry with us, that define our homes, that serve practical purposes, and that hold sentimental value. When they are broken, lost, left behind, or removed from their context, they can feel alien, take on a different use, or become trash. The lives of objects change when our relationships to them change. Maia Kotrosits offers a fresh perspective on objects, looking beyond physical material to consider how collective imagination shapes the formation of objects and the experience of reality. Bringing a psychoanalytic approach to the analysis of material culture, she examines objects of attachment—relationships, ideas, and beliefs that live on in the psyche—and illustrates how people across time have anchored value systems to the materiality of life. Engaging with classical studies, history, anthropology, and literary, gender, and queer studies, Kotrosits shows how these disciplines address historical knowledge and how an expanded definition of materiality can help us make connections between antiquity and the contemporary world.

Download or read book The Lives of Chinese Objects written by Louise Tythacott and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the biography of a set of rare Buddhist statues from China. Their extraordinary adventures take them from the Buddhist temples of fifteenth-century Putuo – China’s most important pilgrimage island – to their seizure by a British soldier in the First Opium War in the early 1840s, and on to a starring role in the Great Exhibition of 1851. In the 1850s, they moved in and out of dealers’ and antiquarian collections, arriving in 1867 at Liverpool Museum. Here they were re-conceptualized as specimens of the ‘Mongolian race’ and, later, as examples of Oriental art. The statues escaped the bombing of the Museum during the Second World War and lived out their existence for the next sixty years, dismembered, corroding and neglected in the stores, their histories lost and origins unknown. As the curator of Asian collections at Liverpool Museum, the author became fascinated by these bronzes, and selected them for display in the Buddhism section of the World Cultures gallery. In 2005, quite by chance, the discovery of a lithograph of the figures on prominent display in the Great Exhibition enabled the remarkable lives of these statues to be reconstructed.

Download or read book Marking Time written by Edward Town and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engaging, encyclopedic account of the material world of early modern Britain as told through a unique collection of dated objects The period from 1500 to 1800 in England was one of extraordinary social transformations, many having to do with the way time itself was understood, measured, and recorded. Through a focused exploration of an extensive private collection of fine and decorative artworks, this beautifully designed volume explores that theme and the variety of ways that individual notions of time and mortality shifted. The feature uniting these more than 450 varied objects is that each one bears a specific date, which marks a significant moment—for reasons personal or professional, religious or secular, private or public. From paintings to porringers, teapots to tape measures, the objects—and the stories they tell—offer a vivid sense of the lived experience of time, while providing a sweeping survey of the material world of early modern Britain.

Download or read book The Whole Picture written by Alice Procter and published by Cassell. This book was released on 2020-03-19 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Probing, jargon-free and written with the pace of a detective story... [Procter] dissects western museum culture with such forensic fury that it might be difficult for the reader ever to view those institutions in the same way again. " Financial Times 'A smart, accessible and brilliantly structured work that encourages readers to go beyond the grand architecture of cultural institutions and see the problematic colonial histories behind them.' - Sumaya Kassim Should museums be made to give back their marbles? Is it even possible to 'decolonize' our galleries? Must Rhodes fall? How to deal with the colonial history of art in museums and monuments in the public realm is a thorny issue that we are only just beginning to address. Alice Procter, creator of the Uncomfortable Art Tours, provides a manual for deconstructing everything you thought you knew about art history and tells the stories that have been left out of the canon. The book is divided into four chronological sections, named after four different kinds of art space: The Palace, The Classroom, The Memorial and The Playground. Each section tackles the fascinating, enlightening and often shocking stories of a selection of art pieces, including the propaganda painting the East India Company used to justify its rule in India; the tattooed Maori skulls collected as 'art objects' by Europeans; and works by contemporary artists who are taking on colonial history in their work and activism today. The Whole Picture is a much-needed provocation to look more critically at the accepted narratives about art, and rethink and disrupt the way we interact with the museums and galleries that display it.

Download or read book Treasures in Trusted Hands written by Jos van Beurden and published by CLUES no. 3. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering study charts the one-way traffic of cultural and historical objects during five centuries of European colonialism. Former colonies consider this as a historical injustice that has not been undone.