The book, published as part of the series Arts and Archaeology of the Islamic World, is a selection of eight essays that emerged out of a symposium held at Yale University in 2014. All essays concurrently reevaluate the prevalent methodological approaches to the aesthetic cultures of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires. A comparative framework for critically assessing the three empires together has been favored in recent years, following the late turn toward connected histories and connected art histories that reconfigured the study of early modern cultures, wherein active points of cultural contacts became the basis of inquiry. The comparatist moves away from the appellate Islamic and its adjunct Islamicate, which have bound vast sweeps of diverse geographies and cultures together into a rubric with an inherent tendency to collapse diversity into sterile uniformity.
The essays in the book are well arranged and follow one another in a fluid conversation that makes the book accessible even to readers who may not have specialized knowledge of each of the aesthetic cultures under analysis. Readers are expected to acknowledge the interconnectedness of the early modern globe, especially the circulation of texts, objects, and people, and how this, in specific ways, informed visual orders in localized sites of cultural production. The force of the book, however, lies in the contributors’ shared premise of the multivalent artifact that embodies, indexes, traces, and enacts the dialectics of its own production and reception. This requires a willingness to approach the visual sign or the tactile object with an imaginative sense of multiple and overlapping contexts.
The essays are framed by a succinct introduction of themes by Kishwar Rizvi that also doubles as a stand-alone essay on existing discourses around affect, self-representation, portraits, temporality, and mobility. By referencing the shared intellectual and aesthetic traditions of the three courtly cultures, she provides the template followed in the book. The first three essays, written by Sussan Babaie, Marianna Shreve Simpson, and Emine Fetvaci, respectively, build distinctive methods for analyzing the articulation of the self through modes of insertions within the semantics of visual arrangements. For instance, Babaie's essay moves beyond the meticulous decoding of inscriptions on epigraphic panels on important religious structures bearing the architect's name and demonstrates how the very placement of “signatory panels” (21) on the architectural facade became a verbalization of the architect's self in relation to the power structures of late Timurid and Safavid Iran.
While these three essays are primarily, though not exclusively, concerned with subjective intentionality in production and reception, the two essays that follow push deeper into terrains of consumption, affect, and emotion. Christiane Gruber analyzes affective practices in the viewing of images of religious or historical significance, such as those of the Prophet or those of a community's perceived enemies. Her essay argues that these practices leave physical traces of piety or repulsion on the very pages of manuscript paintings but often with unintentional consequences wherein the “pictorial debris” (118) of iconophilia becomes the same as those of iconoclasm. Sylvia Houghteling's essay dwells on the accruement of an intimate and immersive range of sensory relationships with textiles, where the corporeality of the wearer's/handler's body becomes part of the textile's very fabric. The inclusion of her essay as the sole study of early Mughal aesthetics strategically dislodges the canonical tropes of Mughal art with their excessive focus on monuments and imperial manuscripts from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Subsequent essays by Chanchal Dadlani and Sunil Sharma create an embedded experience of eighteenth-century Mughal Delhi by emphasizing the historical transformations in spatial contours, language, and visual representation that mirrored far more widespread changes in the experience of the urban self and subjectivity. Jamal J. Elias's essay marks the end of this imaginative historiographic conversation on the relationship between aesthetics, the expressive, and the subjunctive. He pushes the theoretical boundary of the anthology further by demonstrating a methodology of reading emotions as artifact—i.e., not emotions expressed as a corollary function of visual representation but as enacted through somatic representations of figures cued through specific visual signs.
The book's freshness lies in its attempt to verbalize the affective and the subjective codification of artifacts. As Houghteling sums up, “The methodology for writing more enlivened art histories remains unsolved” (125). But it is precisely such a challenge all the authors answer by compiling and presenting intricate registers of signs and significations within which specific artifacts would have circulated across the intertwined aesthetic cultures of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires.
