Exhibiting Cultures : The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display

"Throwing open to debate the practices of museums, galleries, and festivals, Exhibiting Cultures probes the often politically charged relationships among aesthetics, contexts, and implicit assumptions that govern how cultural differences and art objects are displayed. This innovative volume brings together museum directors and curators, art historians, anthropologists, folklorists, and historians to examine how diverse settings have appealed to audiences and represented the intentions and cultures of the makers of objects. The essays address such major issues in the politics of culture as how the learned experience of everyday life is used to make exhibitions comprehensible, what happens to minority and exotic arts when they are assimilated into the hegemonic context of the "great" museums, and why ethnographic museums have been neglected in an age of museum expansions" -- p.[4] of cover

How to do multilingual literary history? Lessons from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century north India

How can we conceptualise multingual literary culture and how can we research it? Drawing upon a 3-year AHRC funded project, this essay focuses on the materiality of the marchive, on the spaces and locations in which literature was produced and performed, and on the oral-performative practices and agents that made texts circulate to audiences in ways not bound by the script in which the texts appear to us.Not only are the models of composite culture and language specificity questioned as aresult, but the sites of literary production move from the court to a series of intersections, and areas that were peripheral move into view and connect with others