Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean

"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

"Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean combines a compelling and well-researched range of studies that make a valuable contribution to the pluralization of global modernisms in art history, with a focus on nineteenth-century Islamic art and visual culture. This volume is a welcome addition to the literature of Islamic modernity and modern art."

~Berin Golonu, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide

"This attractive volume addresses the recent scholarly shift from the arts and architecture of the lands of Islam in the early caliphates of the Umayyads and Abbasids through the pre-modern Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal dynasties to modern and contemporary times. An introduction by Graves (Indiana Univ.) and Seggerman (Rutgers Univ., Newark) is followed by 11 essays focused on the different ways in which artists, artisans, and patrons in the Mediterranean lands from Morocco to Egypt and the Ottoman Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries engaged with European modernity and the colonial enterprise. The essays are roughly grouped around three topics: the introduction of photography and printing with movable type, new modes of craft production, and transportation by steamship and railroad. As with all such collections, the essays are uneven; some are unexpectedly fascinating—for example those on the exchange of photographic albums between the Ottoman sultan and the University of Pennsylvania to foster archaeological projects, the celebrations surrounding the opening of the Suez Canal, the introduction of Krupps' steel I-beam to Istanbul—but others are laden with academic jargon. (Reprinted with permission from Choice Reviews. All rights reserved. Copyright by the American Library Association.)"

~J. M. Bloom, Boston College, Choice