Nicholas Thomas: 41 books
The Return of Curiosity
What Museums are Good For in the 21st Century
Language: English
Release Date: August 15, 2016
The Spy Museum, the Vacuum Cleaner Museum, the National Mustard Museum—not to mention the Art Institute, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Getty Center: museums have never been more robust, curating just about everything there is and assuming a new prominence in public life. The Return of Curiosity...
Bad Colonists
The South Seas Letters of Vernon Lee Walker and Louis Becke
Language: English
Release Date: August 1, 2012
In Bad Colonists Nicholas Thomas and Richard Eves provide a window into the fantasies and realities of colonial life by presenting separate sets of letters by two late-nineteenth-century British colonists of the South Pacific: Vernon Lee Walker and Louis Becke. Thomas and Eves frame the letters—addressed...
Refracted Visions
Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java
Language: English
Release Date: April 20, 2010
A young couple poses before a painted backdrop depicting a modern building set in a volcanic landscape; a college student grabs his camera as he heads to a political demonstration; a man poses stiffly for his identity photograph; amateur photographers look for picturesque images in a rural village;...
Orientalism's Interlocutors
Painting, Architecture, Photography
Language: English
Release Date: December 6, 2002
Until now, Orientalist art—exemplified by paintings of harems, slave markets, or bazaars—has predominantly been understood to reflect Western interpretations and to perpetuate reductive, often demeaning stereotypes of the exotic East. Orientalism's Interlocutors contests the idea that Orientalist...
Gods in the Bazaar
The Economies of Indian Calendar Art
Language: English
Release Date: April 6, 2007
Gods in the Bazaar is a fascinating account of the printed images known in India as “calendar art” or “bazaar art,” the color-saturated, mass-produced pictures often used on calendars and in advertisements, featuring deities and other religious themes as well as nationalist leaders, alluring...
In Senghor's Shadow
Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960–1995
Language: English
Release Date: November 23, 2004
In Senghor’s Shadow is a unique study of modern art in postindependence Senegal. Elizabeth Harney examines the art that flourished during the administration of Léopold Sédar Senghor, Senegal’s first president, and in the decades since he stepped down in 1980. As a major philosopher and poet...
An Eye for the Tropics
Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque
Language: English
Release Date: March 15, 2007
Images of Jamaica and the Bahamas as tropical paradises full of palm trees, white sandy beaches, and inviting warm water seem timeless. Surprisingly, the origins of those images can be traced back to the roots of the islands’ tourism industry in the 1880s. As Krista A. Thompson explains, in the...
Painting Culture
The Making of an Aboriginal High Art
Language: English
Release Date: December 16, 2002
Painting Culture tells the complex story of how, over the past three decades, the acrylic "dot" paintings of central Australia were transformed into objects of international high art, eagerly sought by upscale galleries and collectors. Since the early 1970s, Fred R. Myers has studied—often...
Culture in the Marketplace
Gender, Art, and Value in the American Southwest
Language: English
Release Date: March 20, 2001
In the early twentieth century, a group of elite East coast women turned to the American Southwest in search of an alternative to European-derived concepts of culture. In Culture in the Marketplace Molly H. Mullin provides a detailed narrative of the growing influence that this network of women had...
Native Moderns
American Indian Painting, 1940–1960
Language: English
Release Date: November 3, 2006
Between 1940 and 1960, many Native American artists made bold departures from what was considered the traditional style of Indian painting. They drew on European and other non-Native American aesthetic innovations to create hybrid works that complicated notions of identity, authenticity, and tradition....
by Nicholas Thomas, Jo-Anne Driessens, Michael Aird
Language: English
Release Date: April 24, 2003
Language: English
Release Date: April 24, 2003
Moving the critical debate about photography away from its current Euro-American center of gravity, Photography’s Other Histories breaks with the notion that photographic history is best seen as the explosion of a Western technology advanced by the work of singular individuals. This collection presents...
Eye Contact
Photographing Indigenous Australians
Language: English
Release Date: January 25, 2006
An indigenous reservation in the colony of Victoria, Australia, the Coranderrk Aboriginal Station was a major site of cross-cultural contact the mid-nineteenth century and early twentieth. Coranderrk was located just outside Melbourne, and from its opening in the 1860s the colonial government commissioned...
Unsettled Visions
Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary
Language: English
Release Date: January 23, 2009
In Unsettled Visions, the activist, curator, and scholar Margo Machida presents a pioneering, in-depth exploration of contemporary Asian American visual art. Machida focuses on works produced during the watershed 1990s, when surging Asian immigration had significantly altered the demographic, cultural,...
Intimate Outsiders
The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature
Language: English
Release Date: December 10, 2007
Until now, the notion of a cross-cultural dialogue has not figured in the analysis of harem paintings, largely because the Western fantasy of the harem has been seen as the archetype for Western appropriation of the Orient. In Intimate Outsiders, the art historian Mary Roberts brings to light a body...