Visual and Media Histories
About the Book Series
This series takes as its starting point notions of the visual, and of vision, as central in producing meanings, maintaining aesthetic values, and relations of power. Through individual studies, it hopes to chart the trajectories of the visual as an activating principle of history. An important premise here is the conviction that the making, theorising, and historicising of images do not exist in exclusive distinction of one another.
Opening up the field of vision as an arena in which meanings get constituted simultaneously anchors vision to other media such as audio, spatial, and the dynamics of spectatorship. It calls for closer attention to inter-textual and inter-pictorial relationships through which ever-accruing layers of readings and responses are brought alive.
Through its regional focus on South Asia the series locates itself within a prolific field of writing on non-Western cultures, which have opened the way to pluralise iconographies, and to perceive temporalities as scrambled and palimpsestic. These studies, it is hoped, will continue to reframe debates and conceptual categories in visual histories. The importance attached here to investigating the historical dimensions of visual practice implies close attention to specific local contexts which intersect and negotiate with the global, and can re-constitute it. Examining the ways in which different media are to be read into and through one another would extend the thematic range of the subjects to be addressed by the series to include those which cross the boundaries that once separated the privileged subjects of art historical scholarship from the popular – sculpture, painting, and monumental architecture – from other media: studies of film, photography, and prints, on the one hand; advertising, television, posters, calendars, comics, buildings, and cityscapes on the other.
Documenting Industry: Photography, Aesthetics and Labor in India
1st Edition
Edited
By Ranu Roychoudhuri, Rebecca M. Brown
March 19, 2025
Whether a smoky portrait of a coal mine or a sweeping shot of workers building an immense dam, photographs of established and emerging industries fundamentally shaped the visual culture and politics of South Asia in the decades after independence. This volume engages with the image of the laboring ...
Nation, Region, Modernity: The Art of K. Venkatappa
1st Edition
Edited
By Deeptha Achar, Pushpamala N.
January 29, 2025
This volume explores the Indian artist, K. Venkatappa’s life (1886–1965), his works and the political and cultural contexts that influenced and inspired his art. It looks at the artist’s style and examines the question of modernity in Indian art through the interstices of the regional and the ...
Chakshudana or Opening the Eyes: Seeing South Asian Art Anew
1st Edition
Edited
By Pika Ghosh, Pushkar Sohoni
December 19, 2024
Chakshudana or rituals of opening the eyes are practiced across multiple South Asian communities by artists, sculptors, and priests. The ritual offers gods access to the mortal world. This practice, applied to the study of material and visual culture, offers a distinctive perspective to interrogate...
Modern Art in Pakistan: History, Tradition, Place
1st Edition
By Simone Wille
April 25, 2019
Modern Art in Pakistan examines interaction of space, tradition, and history to analyse artistic production in Pakistan from the 1950s to recent times. It traces the evolution of modernism in Pakistan and frames it in a global context in the aftermath of Partition.A masterful insight into South ...
Women Architects and Modernism in India: Narratives and Contemporary Practices
1st Edition
By Madhavi Desai
April 17, 2019
Studies on architecture in South Asia continue to ignore women in canonical histories of the discipline. This book attempts to recover the stories of the women architects whose careers nearly parallel the development of modernism in colonial and postcolonial India. Writing their experiences into ...
Barefoot across the Nation: M F Husain and the Idea of India
1st Edition
Edited
By Sumathi Ramaswamy
February 14, 2019
This book is the first inter-disciplinary engagement with the work of Maqbool Fida Husain, arguably India’s most iconic contemporary artist today, whose life and work are intimately entangled with the career of independent India as a democratic, secular and multi-ethnic nation. For more than half a...
No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in South Asia
1st Edition
Edited
By Saloni Mathur, Kavita Singh
December 21, 2017
This volume brings together a range of essays that offer a new perspective on the dynamic history of the museum as a cultural institution in South Asia. It traces the museum from its origin as a tool of colonialism and adoption as a vehicle of sovereignty in the nationalist period, till its role in...
Garden and Landscape Practices in Pre-colonial India: Histories from the Deccan
1st Edition
Edited
By Daud Ali, Emma J. Flatt
December 18, 2015
This book presents a set of new and innovative essays on landscape and garden culture in precolonial India, with a special focus on the Deccan. Most research to date has concentrated on the comparatively well preserved gardens and built landscapes of the celebrated Mughal empire, giving the ...