Here are 100 books that Art in the Time of Colony fans have personally recommended if you like
Art in the Time of Colony.
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I’m a scholar who has spent most of his working life looking at the history of North Africa. This passion was formerly directed toward looking at the conditions that Europeans imposed on local populations, but in recent times, I have moved solely to consider forgotten cultures made by indigenous Muslim and Jewish populations. Making this move has been the best, riskiest, and most rewarding choice I’ve ever made in my career, and I am now a cheerleader for the incredible forms of art made by ordinary people in these societies.
This is a book that changed my sense as to what we could know of the past. Its unlocking of the “secret” or lost religious codes of Persian miniature painting has proved utterly game-changing in the field of Islamic art.
I love it for the incredible beauty of its argumentation, as well as the gorgeousness of its close readings of medieval illuminated painting.
In terms of elucidating inner meaning and symbolism, the study of medieval Islamic art has lagged almost a full century behind that of medieval Western art. This groundbreaking work suggests how it might at last prove possible to crack the allegorical code of medieval Islamic painting during its Golden Age between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. Barry focuses his study around the work of Bihzad, a painter who flourished in the late fifteenth century in the kingdom of Herat, now in Afghanistan. Bihzad became the undisputed master of the "Persian miniature" and an almost mythical personality throughout Asian Islam. By…
I’m a scholar who has spent most of his working life looking at the history of North Africa. This passion was formerly directed toward looking at the conditions that Europeans imposed on local populations, but in recent times, I have moved solely to consider forgotten cultures made by indigenous Muslim and Jewish populations. Making this move has been the best, riskiest, and most rewarding choice I’ve ever made in my career, and I am now a cheerleader for the incredible forms of art made by ordinary people in these societies.
Have you ever read a book about a place which then allowed you to see that location in utterly new and thrilling ways?
As well as being a great study of a wonderful artistic culture, this is, for me, one of the greatest studies of a city and the place of its people, their beliefs, and their art in making it unique.
If that was not enough, it also constitutes one of the most important bodies of conceptual and theoretical thinking about the nature and character of Islamic art.
"A Saint in the City" examines the elaborate visual culture of the Mourides, a Senegalese Sufi movement based upon the mystical teachings of Sheikh Amadou Bamba (1953-1927). In the boldly visual city of Dakar, images abound despite the fact that Senegal is largely a Muslim country. Vibrant street murals, calligraphy and calligrams, didactic posters, drawings that protect and heal, advertising images, colourful clothing, Web sites, intricate glass paintings, and innovative architecture all attest to the transformative potency that expressive culture has for Mourides. One image is ubiquitous throughout urban Senegal: the portrait of Sheikh Amadou Bamba, based upon a colonial…
I’m a scholar who has spent most of his working life looking at the history of North Africa. This passion was formerly directed toward looking at the conditions that Europeans imposed on local populations, but in recent times, I have moved solely to consider forgotten cultures made by indigenous Muslim and Jewish populations. Making this move has been the best, riskiest, and most rewarding choice I’ve ever made in my career, and I am now a cheerleader for the incredible forms of art made by ordinary people in these societies.
I love the open-mindedness of this book and the way in which it can open your mind as a reader.
Can pictures think for themselves? How do pictures communicate with each other and with their audiences? These are the kinds of questions that this pathbreaking work opens up to its audience.
It also changed my sense as to how photography and painting/prints relate to each other, as well as providing a strong defence of the idea that deep cultural critique can be founded upon the study of quite ordinary objects and texts.
'Photos of the Gods' is a comprehensive history of India's popular visual culture. Combining anthropology, political and cultural history, and the study of aesthetic systems, and using many intriguing and unfamiliar images, the book shows that the current predicament of India cannot be understood without taking into account this complex, fascinating, and until now virtually unseen, visual history.
I’m a scholar who has spent most of his working life looking at the history of North Africa. This passion was formerly directed toward looking at the conditions that Europeans imposed on local populations, but in recent times, I have moved solely to consider forgotten cultures made by indigenous Muslim and Jewish populations. Making this move has been the best, riskiest, and most rewarding choice I’ve ever made in my career, and I am now a cheerleader for the incredible forms of art made by ordinary people in these societies.
I love this book (and think you will too) because of the way in which it weaves together architectural, art, social, and religious history so as to tell the story of one of the greatest cities in the Islamic world: Isfahan.
Its beautiful illustrations take readers to a place that many will not have a chance to visit while connecting the beauty of its built environment to cultures that come before and after the Safavid moment.
Its author is THE guide to the topic, and gaining a sense of the history of built environments is of critical importance for anyone interested in the history of Islamic art.
Winner of the Houshang Pourshariati Iranian Studies Book Award 2009 This beautifully illustrated history of Safavid Isfahan (1501-1722) explores the architectural and urban forms and networks of socio-cultural action that reflected a distinctly early-modern and Perso-Shi'i practice of kingship. An immense building campaign, initiated in 1590-91 at the millennial threshold of the Islamic calendar (1000 A.H.), transformed Isfahan from a provincial, medieval, and largely Sunni city into an urban-centered representation of the first Imami Shi'i empire in the history of Islam. The historical process of Shi'ification of Safavid Iran and the deployment of the arts in situating the shifts in…
I started my career as an academic social scientist and seem set to end it as a gardener, small-scale farmer, and accidental ecological activist. I’ve learned a lot of things along the way from these different parts of my life that I channel in my writing. I don’t claim much expertise. In fact, I think claims to expert knowledge that can ‘solve’ modern problems are a big part of our modern problems. I’ve always been interested in how people and communities try to figure things out for themselves, often by picking up the pieces when big ideas have failed them. My writing arises out of that.
It’s easy to get caught up in the immediate issues around food, farming, and the need to transition to localism.
Yunkaporta’s book weaves them into a far larger tapestry concerning the need for renewable long-term culture. I like the way he sharpens indigenous knowledge unsentimentally into a practical tool with a purpose that’s potentially available to everyone, not a mystical cosmology available only to a few.
Endlessly thought-provoking ruminations on how to live from a local ecological base, and how modern culture disrupts us from doing so.
Winner, Small Publishers' Adult Book of the Year, Australian Book Industry Awards 2020
This remarkable book is about everything from echidnas to evolution, cosmology to cooking, sex and science and spirits to Schrödinger’s cat.
Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from an Indigenous perspective. He asks how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently?
Sand Talk provides a template for living. It’s about how lines and symbols and shapes can help us make sense of the world. It’s about how we learn and how we remember. It’s about…
As a Jew growing up in the United States, I’ve spent a long time reflecting on how genocide, culturecide, and assimilation operate across majority-minority relations. My focus on Indigenous politics in my career as a political scientist stems from a devotion to pluricultural democracy as a way that people can live together well. I want to be part of a world where we can bring our whole selves to our societies and don’t have to cut out certain parts of our identities to be accepted. And I like to read well-researched, compellingly written books that offer insight into how communities do that.
Ka’m-t’em both describes how communities can heal from colonization, and is itself a product of that healing. This book brings up so many emotions: shame around White violence, hope to build a community of support for Indigenous peoples, and longing for a decolonized future. The chapters featuring youth voices at the end of the book are particularly moving, as we hear from teenagers in their own words as to why they are willing to fight for their identities, and what everyone can do to help.
Many generations ago, along the Klamath River, there lived a wise woman who wove the most beautiful baskets known to humankind. Her baskets were woven so tightly that water could not penetrate them. She was aging and had many experiences to share. Through prayer, she began to weave a basket for the people. The wise woman worked day after day, weaving, praying, and singing. As her strong hands moved gracefully over her materials, she shared a story to be retold, a song to be sung again, and a lesson to be learned. When she finished, she had created a large…
I have been a historian of the Indigenous world for more than two decades, but I have learnedso much since I expanded my perspective from Mesoamerica and the Aztec-Mexica into the wider history of Native peoples. There are literally hundreds of Indigenous communities across the world and so there is always more to learn. I have been incredibly privileged to learn by listening to Indigenous people – in person, in print, and on digital and social media. I hope these books can offer some starting points to set you on a similar journey of discovery, opening up some new ways of thinking and of seeing both the past and the present.
In this humane call to action, Anishnaabe author Patty Krawec combines an accessible introduction to the European invasion of the Americas with practical suggestions for grappling with these histories and their legacy.
Weaving the stories of her ancestors with personal accounts and historical context, Krawec makes a case for how Christian and Indigenous worldviews can become compatible, and makes suggestions for how we can all become better kin to each other. I devoured this book and have been recommending it to everyone ever since.
The invented history of the Western world is crumbling fast, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec says, but we can still honor the bonds between us. Settlers dominated and divided, but Indigenous peoples won't just send them all "home."
Weaving her own story with the story of her ancestors and with the broader themes of creation, replacement, and disappearance, Krawec helps readers see settler colonialism through the eyes of an Indigenous writer. Settler colonialism tried to force us into one particular way of living, but the old ways of kinship can help us imagine…
I’ve been a socialist for my entire adult life and a wise-ass for even longer. As a writer I’ve found a way to combine these two passions, using humor to introduce complex economic and political ideas to a new audience, as well as poke fun at politicians, CEOs, and even myself and my fellow activists. Not all of the books on this list use humor the way I do, but they have all helped me keep my sunny disposition by giving me inspiration that the socialist cause is more dynamic and multifaceted than ever.
The Red Nation is a revolutionary Indigenous organization that is part of the historic 21st-century revival of Indigenous culture and political resistance that has emerged across the Americas to block oil pipelines, prevent mining projects, and basically lead the fight to save us all from climate extinction. This is their manifesto.
The Red Deal engages with many of the ideas of the “Green New Deal” proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others, but starts from the standpoint of Indigenous people across the world. As a result, it puts the fight against climate change in the context of 500 years of capitalism and colonialism, and makes an inspiring case why everyone who wants a sustainable economy should support Indigenous people’s fights for their land and freedom.
When the Red Nation released their call for a Red Deal, it generated coverage in places from Teen Vogue to Jacobin to the New Republic, was endorsed by the DSA, and has galvanized organizing and action.
Now, in response to popular demand, the Red Nation expands their original statement filling in the histories and ideas that formed it and forwarding an even more powerful case for the actions it demands.
One-part visionary platform, one-part practical toolkit, the Red Deal is a platform that encompasses everyone, including non-Indigenous comrades and relatives who live on Indigenous land. We-Indigenous, Black and people of…
Between the two of us, we have written over a dozen books and won numerous prizes. Wilson, when not writing critically-acclaimed music or explaining how to catch a haggis, has received the Ontario Historical Association’s Joseph Brant Award for King Alpha’s Song in a Strange Land.Reid, who wisely passed up the chance of a law career in order to play an extra year of soccer, received the C. P. Stacey Award for African Canadians in Union Blue. Both writers believe that sports offer a valuable lens by which to examine a society’s core values.
Most Canadians are likely unaware that Canada has an official national summer game and that it is lacrosse. Even fewer realize that the sport reflects a tangled story of appropriation and reappropriation that exposes complex relationships between European and Indigenous peoples.
In a provocative and creative book, Downey, an Indigenous historian, uses First Nations storytelling and his own rigorous research to follow the transformation of lacrosse by Anglophone Montrealers and their exclusion of Indigenous players.
By the end of the nineteenth century, lacrosse was the most popular sport in Canada, before giving way to hockey. Then, almost a century later, the sport was reclaimed by a new generation of Indigenous athletes and activists who used the game as part of a broader cultural and spiritual renewal.
For these athletes, the current goal is to have the Haudenosaunee Nationals recognized as an independent participant at the Olympic Games in 2028.
Lacrosse has been a central element of Indigenous cultures for centuries, but once non-Indigenous players entered the sport, it became a site of appropriation - then reclamation - of Indigenous identities. The Creator's Game focuses on the history of lacrosse in Indigenous communities from the 1860s to the 1990s, exploring Indigenous-non-Indigenous relations and Indigenous identity formation. While the game was being appropriated in the process of constructing a new identity for the nation-state of Canada, it was also being used by Indigenous peoples to resist residential school experiences, initiate pan-Indigenous political mobilization, and articulate Indigenous sovereignty. This engaging and innovative…
I am an Australian writer with a passion for all books about the South Pacific. Thirty years ago, I embarked on a two-year mission to the Kingdom of Tonga, and soon after, my job as a naturalist on cruise ships took me to many beautiful, fascinating, and often very remote island nations in that region. Nowadays, my jobs as a writer, scientist, high school teacher, and mother leave little room to navigate to that beautiful part of the world, but I continue to read whatever seems even slightly related to the South Pacific Theme. I hope you enjoy the books on this list as much as I have!
Although this book is set in 1952, I picked it because I have a soft spot for Easter Island. In the 1990s, when working on a cruise ship, I was fortunate enough to visit this remote place and was deeply fascinated by the Moai statues and how society can function so far from the mainland.
Dr. Verdugo, a doctor recruited to the island, gives a vivid account of the culture shock he experienced there, and the carefree, simple culture of the locals. This mirrored my own experience on Tin Can Island in Tonga, as did his insights into the importance of family ties, tradition, and the solitude one experiences on such a remote island.
LIFE AND SOLITUDE IN EASTER ISLAND. The exotic Easter Island: Isla de Pascua as it's known to Chileans, Rapa Nui as it's known to the natives, and Te Pito O Te Henua to their ancestors who erected the mysterious moai statues which placidly stand guard throughout this most isolated island on Earth. Although Easter Island is still a rustic place by current standards, today you'll find running water, electricity, money, plus other amenities, and a growing population of several thousand, most of whom came from the mainland. But a mere 50 years ago, Easter Island had none of these. In…
