The Poetics and Politics of Place

This unique collection takes a fresh look at Orientalism by shifting its center from Europe to Ottoman Istanbul and thinking about art in terms of exchange, reciprocity, and comparative imperialisms. This new lens reveals the essential role of the Ottoman city and its patrons and artists in the dialogues that facilitated production, circulation, and consumption of British Orientalist cultures. In this volume, art works are conceptualized as traveling artifacts produced through localized interactions. World renowned scholars and curators analyze the diverse audiences for such art works and the range of differing contexts for their reception both in the 19th century and more recently. In this way, British art is put into a dynamic relationship with an historicized understanding of cultures of collecting and display during the formation of comparative modernities and also with the contemporary postcolonial creation of new national models of exhibition and education.

Featuring stunning visuals, this book puts art history in the context of cultural, visual, and literary studies, challenging the orthodoxies of postcolonial theory with the materiality of multiple imperialisms and modernities to offer a new take on the collection, display, and consumption of Orientalist cultures.

Zeynep Inankur is a professor of art history at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul and coauthor of Constantinople and the Orientalists. Reina Lewis is Artscom Centenary Professor of Cultural Studies at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, and author of Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem. Mary Roberts is the John Schaeffer Associate Professor of British Art at the University of Sydney and author of Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature. Other contributors include Tim Barringer, Edhem Eldem, Ahmet Ersoy, Semra Germaner, Aykut Gürçaglar, Teresa Heffernan, Briony Llewellyn, Nancy Micklewright, Peter Benson Miller, Donald Preziosi, Günsel Renda, Christine Riding, Sarah Searight, Wendy Shaw, and Nicholas Tromans.