Art in the Service of Colonialism

Art in the Service of Colonialism
Author: Hamid Irbouh
Publisher: I. B. Tauris
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2013-04-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781780760360

Art in the Service of Colonialism throws new light on how nothing in the Moroccan French Protectorate (1912-1956) escaped the imprints of metropolitan ideology and how the French transformed and dominated Moroccan society by looking at how the arts and crafts were transformed in the colonial period. The French established vocational and fine art schools, revived local methods for producing crafts, imposed modern systems of industrial production and pedagogy and reinvented old traditions. By marrying the old with the new, they revitalized arts and crafts and made them saleable commodities. Hamid Irbouh examines and analyses these processes and demonstrates how Moroccan artists have struggled to exorcise French influences and rediscover their authentic visual culture since decolonization.

Art in the Service of Colonialism

Art in the Service of Colonialism
Author: Hamid Irbouh
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2013-03-25
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0857725157

In the Moroccan French Protectorate (1912-1956), the French established vocational and fine art schools, imposed modern systems of industrial production and pedagogy and reinvented old traditions. Hamid Irbouh argues that the French used this systematic modernisation of local arts and crafts regulation to impose their control. He looks in particular at the role and place of women in the structures of art production and education created by the French- that transformed and dominated Moroccan society during the colonial period. French women infiltrated the Moroccan milieu, to buttress colonial ideology, yet at critical moments, Moroccan women rejected traditional roles and sabotaged colonial plans. Meanwhile, the contradictions between reformist goals and the old order added to social dislocations and led to rebellion against French hegemony. Irbouh examines and analyses these processes and demonstrates how Moroccan artists have struggled to exorcise French influences and rediscover an authentic visual culture since decolonisation. This book reveals that the weight of colonial history continues to weigh heavily on artistic practice and production.

Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850-1922

Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850-1922
Author: Partha Mitter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 538
Release: 1994
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780521443548

Partha Mitter's book is a pioneering study of the history of modern art on the Indian subcontinent from 1850 to 1922. The author tells the story of Indian art during the Raj, set against the interplay of colonialism and nationalism. The work addresses the tensions and contradictions that attended the advent of European naturalism in India, as part of the imperial design for the westernisation of the elite, and traces the artistic evolution from unquestioning westernisation to the construction of Hindu national identity. Through a wide range of literary and pictorial sources, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India balances the study of colonial cultural institutions and networks with the ideologies of the nationalist and intellectual movements which followed. The result is a book of immense significance, both in the context of South Asian history and in the wider context of art history.

The Whole Picture

The Whole Picture
Author: Alice Procter
Publisher: Cassell
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2020-03-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1788402219

"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.

Return to the Postcolony

Return to the Postcolony
Author: T. J. Demos
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013-04-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 3943365425

In the wake of failed states, growing economic and political inequality, and the ongoing US- and NATO-led wars for resources, security, and economic dominance worldwide, contemporary artists are revisiting former European colonies, considering past injustices as they haunt the living yet remain repressed in European consciousness. With great timeliness, projects by Sven Augustijnen, Vincent Meessen, Zarina Bhimji, Renzo Martens, and Pieter Hugo have emerged during the fiftieth anniversary of independence for many African countries, inspiring a kind of “reverse migration”—a return to the postcolony, which drives an ethico-political as well as aesthetic set of imperatives: to learn to live with ghosts, and to do so more justly.

Arts-Based Methods for Decolonising Participatory Research

Arts-Based Methods for Decolonising Participatory Research
Author: Tiina Seppälä
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2021-04-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000392546

In an effort to challenge the ways in which colonial power relations and Eurocentric knowledges are reproduced in participatory research, this book explores whether and how it is possible to use arts-based methods for creating more horizontal and democratic research practices. In discussing both the transformative potential and limitations of arts-based methods, the book asks: What can arts-based methods contribute to decolonising participatory research and its processes and practices? The book takes part in ongoing debates related to the need to decolonise research, and investigates practical contributions of arts-based methods in the practice-led research domain. Further, it discusses the role of artistic research in depth, locating it in a decolonising context. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, design, fine arts, service design, social sciences and development studies.

Art in the Time of Colony

Art in the Time of Colony
Author: Dr Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2014-04-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1409455963

It is often assumed that the verbal and visual languages of indigenous people had little influence upon the classification of scientific, legal, and artistic objects in the metropolises and museums of nineteenth-century colonial powers. However, as this book demonstrates, it is a fallacy that colonized locals merely collected material for interested colonizers. Through an analysis of particular language notations and drawings hidden in colonial documents and a reexamination of cross-cultural communication, the book writes biographies for five objects that exemplify the tensions of nineteenth century history.

The Colonial Art of Demonizing Others

The Colonial Art of Demonizing Others
Author: Esther Lezra
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2014-03-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317800842

The Colonial Art of Demonizing Others examines European mistranslations and misrepresentations of black freedom dreams and self-activity as monstrous in the period of modern imperial consolidation –roughly from 1750 to 1848. This book argues that Europe’s archives of self-understanding are haunted by the traces of Black radical resistance. Just as Europe’s economy came to depend upon the raw materials, markets, and labor it secured from the colonies, European culture came to be based on fantasies and phobias derived from the unruly and unmanageable aftershocks of colonial violence and counter-insurgency. Rather than assert that European nationalist and abolitionist discourses are on the side of emancipatory movements, the book shows the limits of the promise of that discourse, and the continuation of those limitations that makes the continued pursuit of that promise a questionable activity. This book does not wish to salvage the emancipatory promises of European discourse, but considers the more difficult and uncomfortable question of why emancipatory movements represented the struggles of anticolonial and radical blackness the way they did. The Colonial Art of Demonizing Others privileges the political reading not only of literary texts but also of historical documents and visual culture.