What is Islamic Art? | Wendy Shaw

E533 | What is an image in Islam? Is its permissibility the main preoccupation of Islamic discourses? In this episode, Wendy M.K. Shaw revisits the foundations of art history and considers their colonial and Eurocentric roots. She discusses the stories of art and artists that circulated in the Islamic world, not all of which were accompanied with images, in order to understand what the role of art and the artist were conceived of the pre-modern Islamic world. Redefining concepts such as the image, perspective, art, and history, she sketches the alternative Islamic perceptual culture in which seeing with the ear and seeing with the heart are central to understanding this world as the manifestation of the divine. More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2022/11/shaw.html Wendy M. K. Shaw (Ph.D. UCLA, 1999) has served as a professor in the United States, Turkey, Switzerland, and Germany. She researches postcolonial art historiography and decolonial art history of the Islamic world and the modern Middle East. She is author of Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (University of California Press, 2003), Osmanlı Müzeleri (İletişim Yayınları, 2006), Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (IB Tauris, 2011), Osmanlı Resmi (Bozlu Sanat, 2022). What is “Islamic” Art: Between Religion and Perception (Cambridge University Press, 2019, Honorable Mention for the 2020 Albert Hourani Book Award of the Middle East Studies Association and the 2021 Iran Book Award), and Loving Writing (Routledge, 2021). Zeinab Azarbadegan is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her research focuses on the intersection of inter-imperial relations and history of science, technology, and medicine, in nineteenth century Ottoman Iraq CREDITS Episode No. 533 Release Date: 3 November 2022 Sound production by Zeinab Azarbadegan Music: Nima JanMohammadi - Dastgah-i Shur, The Sounds of Tarab - Bowmazan Ya Mahaba Bi Kidude, Kamancha Sayat - Nova Images and bibliography courtesy of Wendy M. K. Shaw available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2022/11/shaw.html