Mary Roberts – författare

Looking at the political significance of cross-cultural encounters refracted through the visual languages of Orientalism, the contributors engage with pressing recent debates about indigenous agency, postcolonial identity, and gendered subjectivities. The very range of artists, styles, and forms discussed in this collection broadens contemporary understandings of Orientalist art. Among the artists considered are the Algerian painters Azouaou Mammeri and Mohammed Racim; Turkish painter Osman Hamdi; British landscape painter Barbara Bodichon; and the French painter Henri Regnault. From the liminal "Third Space" created by mosques in postcolonial Britain to the ways nineteenth-century harem women negotiated their portraits by British artists, the essays in this collection force a rethinking of the Orientalist canon.

This innovative volume will appeal to those interested in art history, theories of gender, and postcolonial studies.

Contributors. Jill Beaulieu, Roger Benjamin, Zeynep Çelik, Deborah Cherry, Hollis Clayson, Mark Crinson, Mary Roberts

Roberts draws on a range of sources, including paintings, photographs, and travelogues discovered in archives in Britain, Turkey, Egypt, and Denmark. She rethinks the influential harem works of the realist painter John Frederick Lewis, a British artist living in Cairo during the 1840s, whose works were granted an authoritative status by his British public despite the actual limits of his insider knowledge. Unlike Lewis, British women were able to visit Ottoman harems, and from the mid-nineteenth century on they did so in droves. Writing about their experiences in published travelogues, they undermined the idea that harems were the subject only of male fantasies. The elite Ottoman women who orchestrated these visits often challenged their guests’ misapprehensions about harem life, and a number of them exercised power as patrons, commissioning portraits from European artists. Their roles as art patrons defy the Western idea of the harem woman as passive odalisque.

Throughout his career, French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu sought to interrogate what he described as the ''social unconscious'', the means by which power is held and transmitted across generations. Bourdieu''s work has been hugely influential in disciplines across the social sciences and humanities for decades, yet Schirato and Roberts argue that few scholars are using his work to its full potential.Bourdieu''s work is so wide-ranging that commentary tends to focus on specific theoretical concepts he developed or his books on particular fields of inquiry. However he continued to develop these concepts in his work across his whole career, and much of the richness of his thinking is lost if this isn''t taken into account. Drawing on recently released lectures, Schirato and Roberts offer a systematic account of Bourdieu''s full body of work, from his early research in Algiers to his last lectures in Paris. They show how Bourdieu continued to develop his concepts of habitus, field, capital, power and socio-cultural reproduction well into his later years. They also offer a nuanced reading of Bourdieu''s thinking about education, class, language, knowledge and culture beyond the individual books Bourdieu published on these topics.This critical introduction to Bourdieu is essential reading for all Bourdieu scholars, and for researchers and thinkers using Bourdieu''s work in their own social and cultural analysis.''A terrific book, which sets out a comprehensive overview of Bourdieu''s oeuvre in a way that no other text I know has done'' - Professor John Frow, University of Sydney

Throughout his career, French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu sought to interrogate what he described as the ''social unconscious'', the means by which power is held and transmitted across generations. Bourdieu''s work has been hugely influential in disciplines across the social sciences and humanities for decades, yet Schirato and Roberts argue that few scholars are using his work to its full potential.Bourdieu''s work is so wide-ranging that commentary tends to focus on specific theoretical concepts he developed or his books on particular fields of inquiry. However he continued to develop these concepts in his work across his whole career, and much of the richness of his thinking is lost if this isn''t taken into account. Drawing on recently released lectures, Schirato and Roberts offer a systematic account of Bourdieu''s full body of work, from his early research in Algiers to his last lectures in Paris. They show how Bourdieu continued to develop his concepts of habitus, field, capital, power and socio-cultural reproduction well into his later years. They also offer a nuanced reading of Bourdieu''s thinking about education, class, language, knowledge and culture beyond the individual books Bourdieu published on these topics.This critical introduction to Bourdieu is essential reading for all Bourdieu scholars, and for researchers and thinkers using Bourdieu''s work in their own social and cultural analysis.''A terrific book, which sets out a comprehensive overview of Bourdieu''s oeuvre in a way that no other text I know has done'' - Professor John Frow, University of Sydney