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.