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Emanuel Mayer’s ambitious The Ancient Middle Classes: Urban Life and Aesthetics in the Roman Empire, 100 BCE–250 CE is divided into two distinct methodological parts. The first (chapters 1–3) is a synthesis of significant trends in the economic history of the Roman imperial period that emphasizes the abundant presence of a prosperous mercantile class across the Roman Empire. Adopting Max Weber’s definition of the middle class as a well-defined group that “shared cultural traits as well as economic opportunities” (18), Mayer proceeds to collect a wealth of archaeological evidence to demonstrate that ancient cities were dominated by production-oriented commercial classes… Full Review

There is no other way of making sensuous man rational except by first making him aesthetic. (Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Twenty-third Letter) In 2002, Jacques Rancière published an essay in the New Left Review discussing Schiller’s famous fifteenth letter from On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes,” New Left Review 14 [March/April 2002]: 133–51). Written in 1795, just after the French Revolution had turned to Terror, Schiller tried to resolve the discrepancy between nature and cultural refinement, positing that the human need to play can bridge… Full Review

The Florentine Codex, also known as the Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (1576–77), is unrivaled in its centrality to an understanding of the contact period of central Mexico. Although it has been amply appreciated and studied since the late nineteenth century, its ongoing ethnographic, linguistic, and historical utility cannot be overstated. The Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún spearheaded the encyclopedic colonial project in collaboration with a team of indigenous scribes and painters. His final edition has a richly laden content recorded in three modes: Spanish, Nahuatl (the Aztec language), and an extraordinary array of images that constitute a… Full Review

At major Maya cities of the eighth century, surfaces of buildings and monuments undulated with images of nobles performing ritual gestures, often amid cosmological frameworks. Springing feathers and bulging ornaments patterned the surfaces, invading the blocks of hieroglyphic texts that framed them. These complex visual phenomena were given a degree of consistency in two principal ways. Maya artist-scribes expressed the semantic congruence between art and writing with an aesthetic focus on calligraphic line that distinguished Maya art and architecture from that of other contemporary Mesoamerican societies (Adam Herring, Art and Writing in the Maya Cities, A.D. 600–800: A Poetics of… Full Review

Monumental stone sculpture, a ubiquitous art form throughout Mesoamerica, is among the most distinctive material features in various Pre-Columbian cultures. Unsurprisingly, stone monuments have traditionally received considerable attention from Mesoamerican scholars in a variety of disciplines. Despite this privileged position in Mesoamerican cultural history, few previous studies have tackled issues related to the function and meaning of monumental stone sculpture in the critical Preclassic period, a time of dramatic social and political transformation, and even fewer have attempted to link the art-historical study of formal transitions in sculptural programs to the anthropological consideration of sociopolitical processes. In Sculpture and… Full Review

Mughal painting is no stranger to the museum gallery, or to the exhibition catalogue. Persian Miniature Painting (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), the publication that followed the seminal 1931 exhibition of Persianate art held at Burlington House, London, featured entries for paintings by the sixteenth-century Mughal masters ‘Abd al-Samad and Mir Sayyid ‘Ali, as well as for two folios from the large-scale Hamzanama (Book of Hamza) manuscript produced for Emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605). Mughal painting really came into its own decades later, thanks in large part to The Grand Mogul: Imperial Painting in India: 1600–1660 (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine… Full Review

Camera Constructs is a brimful compendium packed with a rich variety of relational investigations into photography, architecture, and urban space. The book enters a field that has grown considerably since the mid-1980s, when architectural historians heeded Marshall McLuhan’s (and other media theorists’) dictums and began to study architecture and its media, and architecture as medium, with a new seriousness. From early groundbreaking studies to more recent focused treatments, the media content of architecture has been laid bare in written text; Alison and Peter Smithson, neo-avant-garde groups like Archigram and Superstudio, and a range of postmodern architects laid similar cards on… Full Review

Artists whose work engages in critical social commentary have never found a particularly warm reception in Japan, and most of them remain underrepresented. Even today, politically oriented artists find support and exhibition venues more easily overseas. Such has been the case with Tomiyama Taeko (b. 1921), an artist who has devoted her life to art and political activism concerning such issues as Japan’s wartime crimes and its victims in the former colonies. Because of such biting content, her art has been better appreciated outside Japan, primarily in North America and East Asia. Turning ninety-two this year, Tomiyama is far from… Full Review

In Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis, Rubén Gallo details the story of his voyage of discovery to trace the thin lines that connect the great Viennese thinker and founder of psychoanalysis to Mexico, itself represented by artifacts, paintings, publications, and a range of intellectuals affected by a psychoanalysis they variously translated (imaginatively rather than literally) into ways of thinking about modern Mexico. The book is also a substantial work of cultural analysis that both defies the regionalization of culture and area studies by criss-crossing the Atlantic, and it brings into a new perspective aspects of the particularity… Full Review

One cannot wade too deeply into Asian American studies without encountering the generative, foundational, and divisive concept of the model minority, or the representation of Asian Americans as exceptionally successful minorities (particularly in contrast to other ethnic groups). As described in Thy Phu’s Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture, the figure of the model minority both influenced the late sixties blossoming of a pan-ethnic Asian American social movement, and has propelled contemporary scholarship extending from (and expanding beyond) that formative moment (8–11). To even begin summarizing the body of work devoted to defining, contesting, and revising… Full Review