Enfilade

New Book | Facing Georgetown’s History

Posted in books by Editor on December 17, 2021

From Georgetown UP:

Adam Rothman and Elsa Barraza Mendoza, eds., with a foreword by Lauret Savoy, Facing Georgetown’s History: A Reader on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation (Georgetown: Georgetown University Press, 2021), 368 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1647120962, $30.

A microcosm of the history of American slavery in a collection of the most important primary and secondary readings on slavery at Georgetown University and among the Maryland Jesuits

Georgetown University’s early history, closely tied to that of the Society of Jesus in Maryland, is a microcosm of the history of American slavery: the entrenchment of chattel slavery in the tobacco economy of the Chesapeake in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the contradictions of liberty and slavery at the founding of the United States; the rise of the domestic slave trade to the cotton and sugar kingdoms of the Deep South in the nineteenth century; the political conflict over slavery and its overthrow amid civil war; and slavery’s persistent legacies of racism and inequality. It is also emblematic of the complex entanglement of American higher education and religious institutions with slavery.

Important primary sources drawn from the university’s and the Maryland Jesuits’ archives document Georgetown’s tangled history with slavery, down to the sizes of shoes distributed to enslaved people on the Jesuit plantations that subsidized the school. The volume also includes scholarship on Jesuit slaveholding in Maryland and at Georgetown, news coverage of the university’s relationship with slavery, and reflections from descendants of the people owned and sold by the Maryland Jesuits.

These essays, articles, and documents introduce readers to the history of Georgetown’s involvement in slavery and recent efforts to confront this troubling past. Current efforts at recovery, repair, and reconciliation are part of a broader contemporary moment of reckoning with American history and its legacies. This reader traces Georgetown’s “Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation Initiative” and the role of universities, which are uniquely situated to conduct that reckoning in a constructive way through research, teaching, and modeling thoughtful, informed discussion.

Adam Rothman is a professor in Georgetown University’s Department of History. He is the author of Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery, which was named the Humanities Book of the Year by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities and received the American Civil War Museum’s book award. He is also the author of Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South and the coauthor of Major Problems in Atlantic History. He served on Georgetown’s Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation in 2015-16, and is currently the principal curator of the Georgetown Slavery Archive. He was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress in 2018, where he created the podcast African-American Passages: Black Lives in the 19th Century.

Elsa Barraza Mendoza is a PhD candidate in history at Georgetown University and the assistant curator of the Georgetown Slavery Archive. She is a former Fulbright-Garcia Robles fellow. Her research has been supported by the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. She is currently writing her dissertation on the history of slavery on Georgetown’s campus.

Lauret Savoy is the David B. Truman Professor of environmental studies at Mount Holyoke College, where she explores the marks of history on the land. The author of Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape, she also descends from people enslaved by Jesuits.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments
Editors’ Note

Foreword, Lauret Savoy

Introduction, Adam Rothman

Part 1 | History

Essays
1  Craig Steven Wilder, War and Priests: Catholic Colleges and Slavery in the Age of Revolution
2  Robert Emmet Curran, ‘Splendid Poverty’: Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1805–38
3  Elsa Barraza Mendoza, Catholic Slave Owners and the Development of Georgetown University’s Slave Hiring System, 1792–1862
4  James O’Toole, Passing: Race, Religion, and the Healy Family, 1820–1920

Documents
5  Enslaved People Named in a Deed, 1717
6  A Sermon on the Treatment of Slaves, 1749
7  Edward Queen Petitions for Freedom, 1791
8  Isaac Runs Away from Georgetown College, 1814
9  A Jesuit Overseer Calculates the Cost of Slave Labor, 1815
10  Baptism of Sylvester Greenleaf at Newtown, 1819
11  Fr. James Ryder, SJ, Criticizes Abolitionism, 1835
12  The Society of Jesus Sets Conditions on the Sale of the Maryland Slaves, 1836
13  Articles of Agreement between Thomas Mulledy, Henry Johnson, and Jesse Batey, 1838
14  A Jesuit Priest Witnesses Anguish at Newtown, 1838
15  Bill of Sale for Len, 1843
16  A Jesuit Priest Reports on the Fate of the Ex-Jesuit Enslaved Community in Louisiana, 1848
17  Aaron Edmonson, the Last Enslaved Worker at Georgetown, 1859–62
18  Labor Contract at West Oak Plantation, Iberville Parish, Louisiana, 1865
19  Photograph of Frank Campbell, ca. 1900

Part 2 | Memory and Reconciliation

Essays
20  Ira Berlin, American Slavery in History and Memory and the Search for Social Justice
21  Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Case for Reparations
22  Alondra Nelson, The Social Life of DNA: Racial Reconciliation and Institutional Morality after the Genome

The Working Group
23  Matthew Quallen, Slavery’s Remnants, Buried and Overlooked
24  Toby Hung, Student Activists Sit in outside DeGioia’s Office
25  Report of the Georgetown University Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation, to the President of Georgetown University
26  James Martin, SJ, How Georgetown is Coming to Terms with Slavery in Its Past

The GU272 Descendants
27  Rachel L. Swarns, 272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?
28  Rachel L. Swarns and Sona Patel, ‘A Million Questions’ from Descendants of Slaves Sold to Aid Georgetown
29  Terry L. Jones, Louisiana Families Dig into Their History, Find They Are Descendants of Slaves Sold by Georgetown University
30  Cheryllyn Branche, My Family’s Story in Georgetown’s Slave Past
31  Rick Boyd, Many in Slave Sale Cited by Georgetown Toiled in Southern Maryland

Reconciliation and Reparation
32  Remarks of Sandra Green Thomas at Georgetown University’s Liturgy of Remembrance, Contrition, and Hope
33  Remarks of Fr. Timothy Kesicki, SJ, at Georgetown University’s Liturgy of Remembrance, Contrition, and Hope
34  Terrence McCoy, Her Ancestors Were Georgetown’s Slaves. Now, at Age 63, She’s Enrolled There-as a College Freshman
35  Marc Parry, A New Path to Atonement
36  Jesús A. Rodríguez, This Could Be the First Slavery Reparations Policy in America
37  Javon Price, Changing Perceptions on the GU272 Referendum

Epilogue, Elsa Barraza Mendoza

Timeline
Further Reading
Index

New Book | The Power of Pastiche

Posted in books by Editor on December 16, 2021

From Clemson UP, with distribution by Liverpool UP and OUP:

Alison DeSimone, The Power of Pastiche: Musical Miscellany and Cultural Identity in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2021), 336 pages, ISBN: 978-1942954774, $120 / £90.

In eighteenth-century England, ‘variety’ became a prized aesthetic in musical culture. Not only was variety—of counterpoint, harmony, melody, and orchestration—expected for good composition, but it also manifested in cultural mediums such as songbook anthologies, which compiled miscellaneous songs and styles in single volumes; pasticcio operas, which were cobbled together from excerpts from other operas; and public concerts, which offered a hodgepodge assortment of different types and styles of performance. I call this trend of producing music through the collection, assemblage, and juxtaposition of various smaller pieces as musical miscellany; like a jigsaw puzzle (also invented in the eighteenth century), the urge to construct a whole out of smaller, different parts reflected a growing desire to appeal to a quickly diversifying England. This book explores the phenomenon of musical miscellany in early eighteenth-century England both in performance culture and as an aesthetic. Musical miscellany, in its many forms, juxtaposed foreign and homegrown musical practices and styles in order to stimulate discourse surrounding English musical culture during a time of cosmopolitan transformation.

Alison DeSimone is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She co-edited, with Matthew Gardner, Music and the Benefit Performance in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2019). She has published articles in the A-R Online Anthology, Händel-Jahrbuch, and Early Modern Women. Her article “‘Equally Charming, Equally Too Great’: Female Rivalry, Politics, and Opera in Early Eighteenth-Century London” won the 2018 Ruth Solie Prize for an Outstanding Article on British Music from the North American British Music Studies Association. She is currently an associate editor of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments
List of Figures
List of Musical Examples
List of Tables

Introduction
1  The Performance of Miscellany in Variety Concerts, 1700–1711
2  ‘An Assemblage of Every Kind’: The Pasticcio Opera Tradition as Miscellany
3  Shaping English Identity in the Songbook iscellany
4  Composition, Cosmopolitanism, and Musical Miscellany
5  Variety in Criticism and Aesthetics in Eighteenth-Century England

Notes
Index

New Book | Echo’s Chambers: Architecture and the Idea of Acoustic Space

Posted in books by Editor on December 16, 2021

From the University of Pittsburgh Press:

Joseph Clarke, Echo’s Chambers: Architecture and the Idea of Acoustic Space (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-0822946571, $60.

A room’s acoustic character seems at once the most technical and the most mystical of concerns. Since the early Enlightenment, European architects have systematically endeavored to represent and control the propagation of sound in large interior spaces. Their work has been informed by the science of sound but has also been entangled with debates on style, visualization techniques, performance practices, and the expansion of the listening public. Echo’s Chambers explores how architectural experimentation from the seventeenth through the mid-twentieth centuries laid the groundwork for concepts of acoustic space that are widely embraced in contemporary culture. It focuses on the role of echo and reverberation in the architecture of Pierre Patte, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Carl Ferdinand Langhans, and Le Corbusier, as well as the influential acoustic ideas of Athanasius Kircher, Richard Wagner, and Marshall McLuhan. Drawing on interdisciplinary theories of media and auditory culture, Joseph L. Clarke reveals how architecture has impacted the ways we continue to listen to, talk about, and creatively manipulate sound in the physical environment.

Joseph L. Clarke is assistant professor of art history at the University of Toronto and a licensed architect. His scholarship explores how modern architecture has defined itself as a discipline through particular techniques, theories, and representational conventions.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments
Note on Translations

Introduction: ‘The Night Shall Be Filled with Music’
1  Domesticating Echo: Clamors in Print
2  Spaces Heard and Seen: Constructing Acoustic Naturalism
3  The Catacoustic Imagination: Enchantment by Immersion
4  Redeeming the Senses: The Acoustics of Total Art
5  Listening Out of Place: Modern Architecture and acoustique électronique
Conclusion: On Further Reflection

Notes
Bibliography
Index

New Book | Inessential Colors: Architecture on Paper

Posted in books by Editor on December 15, 2021

From Princeton UP:

Basile Baudez, Inessential Colors: Architecture on Paper in Early Modern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 288 pages, ISBN: ‎978-0691213569, $65.

The first comprehensive account of how and why architects learned to communicate through color

Architectural drawings of the Italian Renaissance were largely devoid of color, but from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth, polychromy in architectural representation grew and flourished. Basile Baudez argues that colors appeared on paper when architects adapted the pictorial tools of imitation, cartographers’ natural signs, military engineers’ conventions, and, finally, painters’ affective goals in an attempt to communicate with a broad public.

Inessential Colors traces the use of color in European architectural drawings and prints, revealing how this phenomenon reflected the professional anxieties of an emerging professional practice that was simultaneously art and science. Traversing national borders, the book addresses color as a key player in the long history of rivalry and exchange between European traditions in architectural representation and practice.

Featuring a wealth of previously unpublished drawings, Inessential Colors challenges the long-standing misreading of architectural drawings as illustrations rather than representations, pointing instead to their inherent qualities as independent objects whose beauty paved the way for the visual system architects use today.

Basile Baudez is assistant professor of architectural history in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. His books include Architecture et tradition académique and A Civic Utopia: Architecture and the City in France, 1765–1837.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction

Prologue: Architectures in Black and White
1  Imitative Colors
2  Conventional Colors
3  Affective Colors
Conclusion: The Anxiety of the Architect

Appendix: The Draftsman’s Tools

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Image Credits

 

Exhibition | Les Adam: La Sculpture en Héritage

Posted in books, catalogues, exhibitions by Editor on December 14, 2021

Now on view at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy:

Les Adam: La Sculpture en Héritage
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy, 18 September 2021 — 9 January 2022

Curated by Pierre-Hippolyte Pénet and Guilhem Scherf

Originally from Nancy, the Adam family is the largest dynasty of French sculptors of the 18th century. Over three generations, its members worked in Rome, Paris, Versailles, and Berlin in the service of the Pope and European monarchs such as Louis XV, Louis XVI, Frederick II of Prussia, and Catherine II of Russia. This the first retrospective devoted to them brings together one hundred masterpieces from national and international institutions as well as from private collections, bearing witness to the Adam family’s virtuosity at the heart of Europe during the Enlightenment.

Originaire de Nancy, la famille Adam est la plus grande dynastie de sculpteurs français du XVIIIe siècle. Sur trois générations, ses membres déploient leurs talents auprès des plus grands mécènes et participent à plusieurs chantiers majeurs. Formés en Lorraine dans le contexte d’essor artistique des règnes des ducs Léopold et Stanislas, Jacob Sigisbert Adam, ses trois fils Lambert Sigisbert, Nicolas Sébastien et François Gaspard ainsi que leurs neveux Sigisbert François, Pierre Joseph et Claude Michel dit Clodion, œuvrent à Rome, Paris, Versailles ou Berlin au service du pape et des monarques européens comme Louis XV, Louis XVI, Frédéric II de Prusse ou Catherine II de Russie. Première rétrospective à leur être consacrée, l’exposition réunit cent chefs-d’œuvre issus d’institutions nationales, internationales mais aussi de collections particulières. Permettant de dévoiler plusieurs sculptures prestigieuses inédites qui témoignent de la virtuosité de la famille Adam au cœur de l’Europe des Lumières, elle est accompagnée d’un catalogue de référence sur le sujet.

Commissariat: Pierre-Hippolyte Pénet, conservateur du patrimoine chargé des collections du XVe au XVIIIe siècle, palais des ducs de Lorraine – Musée lorrain, et Guilhem Scherf, conservateur général du patrimoine, adjoint au directeur du département des Sculptures, musée du Louvre.

The full press packet is available here»

Pierre-Hippolyte Pénet and Guilhem Scherf, eds., Les Adam: La Sculpture en Héritage (Paris: Snoeck Édition, 2021), 343 pages, ISBN: 978-9461616234 35€.

New Book | Enduring Presence: William Hogarth’s Afterlives

Posted in books by Editor on December 13, 2021

From Peter Lang:

Caroline Patey, Cynthia Roman, and Georges Letissier, Enduring Presence: William Hogarth’s British and European Afterlives, 2 vols. (Bern: Peter Lang, 2021), 674 pages, ISBN: 978-1800791558, £60 / $91.

Long after his death in 1764, William Hogarth is still our contemporary. Far from leading a secluded existence in museums and academies, his legacy of vibrant images and provocative ideas remains a powerful source of inventiveness and inspiration for the artists of today, as once for those of yesterday, be it on page, stage, canvas, or digital formats.

After approaching the artist by way of his challenging aesthetic philosophy and his resistance to normative categories, this two-book set considers Hogarth’s pioneering sense of performativity, which has long made him the treasured interlocutor of actors and playwrights, from David Garrick to Bertolt Brecht, or Nick Dear. His work has permeated film, television, the graphic novel, art, and narrative, which all bear witness to his versatile and powerful use of images and its resonance in the modern and contemporary age. Brimming as it is with energy, plenty, affliction, entropy, and empathy, Hogarth’s contradictory universe of chaos and beauty is in tune with ours and resonates vividly with contemporary passions and struggles. The twenty-eight essays in this collection chart the teeming legacies of William Hogarth and explore the ways in which his works and ideas were and are revisited and appropriated in the UK and across Europe. For the eighteenth-century artist lives on as an unforgotten presence, whose invigorating and challenging memory energizes multiple expressive forms, including drama, visual arts, literature, film, graphic novels, and TV serials.

Caroline Patey is Professor of English Literature at the Università degli Studi in Milan, Italy. Her research interests include Renaissance culture, late Victorian literature, Modernism, and the interactions between art, museums, and literature. Cynthia E. Roman is Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Paintings at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. Her research interests include the production, circulation, and collecting history of prints in eighteenth-century Britain. Georges Letissier is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Nantes University, France. His field of speciality is nineteenth-century literature (Charles Dickens, George Eliot) and contemporary British fiction (Will Self, Graham Swift, Sarah Waters, and Jeanette Winterson).

 

Reimagining the Ballet des Porcelaines

Posted in books, exhibitions by Editor on December 10, 2021

The Ballet des Porcelaines cast in the Venetian Room, Albertine Headquarters, Cultural Services of the French Embassy, NYC. From left to right: Daniel Applebaum (Prince); Georgina Pazcoguin (Princess); Tyler Hanes (Sorcerer). Photo by Joe Carrotta.

◊    ◊    ◊    ◊    ◊

As part of the media preview of the exhibition Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, guests were given a special chance to see the first performance in centuries of the Ballet des Porcelaine. A publication, noted below, is forthcoming. Additional information about the performance, including credits, is available here.

The original Ballet des Porcelaines, written by the comte de Caylus and staged around 1740 at a château outside of Paris, was based on an Orientalist fairy tale in the same literary milieu as Beauty and the Beast (1740). The story tells of an Asian sorcerer who lives on a ‘Blue Island’ and transforms anyone who dares to trespass into porcelain cups, vases, and other wares. When the sorcerer turns a captive prince into a teapot, a princess comes to rescue her lover by stealing the sorcerer’s wand and turning him into a pagod, an eighteenth-century version of a porcelain bobblehead. Displayed today in museums like The Met, pagods were collectible trinkets that inspired Oriental caricatures in the performing arts. European choreographers mimicked the features and gestures of these porcelain figures, which persist in such iconic, problematic productions as The Nutcracker’s “Chinese Tea” dance.

Scheduled Performances

6 December 2021, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
2–3 March 2022, The University of Chicago
18–19 March 2022, Princeton University
16–17 June 2022, Waddesdon Manor
19–21 June 2022, Royal Pavilion, Brighton
25–26 June 2022, Capodimonte, Naples
28–29 June 2022, Palazzo Grassi, Venice
2–3 July 2022, Sèvres Museum, Paris

Meredith Martin, with contributions by Phil Chan and Charlotte Vignon, Reimagining the Ballet des Porcelaines (Turnhout: Harvey Miller/Brepols, 2022).

In addition to the performance and the book, many readers will find this recorded conversation fascinating as well:

Phil Chan and Meredith Martin, hosted by the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU, “Reimagining the Ballet des Porcelaines: A Story of Magic, Desire, and Exotic Entanglement,” YouTube, posted 9 November 2021, 63 minutes.

Phil Chan and Meredith Martin have reimagined this lost Baroque work with an all-Asian American creative team, aiming to make it meaningful and relevant for a multiracial and contemporary audience. This talk explores their process and performance plans and features performances by Martha Graham Principal Dancer Xin Ying and actor, singer, dancer, choreographer Tyler Hanes.

◊    ◊    ◊    ◊    ◊

Note (added 15 December 2021) — The posting has been updated to include the cast photo by Joe Carrotta.

 

Exhibition | Bordeaux-les-Bains: Les bienfaits de l’eau

Posted in books, catalogues, exhibitions by Editor on December 8, 2021

Chapuy after Bonfin, Vue des Bains Orientaux à Bordeaux, ca. 1798, engraving
(Archives Bordeaux Métropole)

◊    ◊    ◊    ◊    ◊

Now on view at the Bordeax Archives, along with this online component:

Bordeaux-les-Bains: Les bienfaits de l’eau, 18e–20e siècle
Archives Bordeaux Métropole, 19 May 2021 — 25 February 2022

Tour à tour convoitée, redoutée, maltraitée, domestiquée, l’eau—un des quatre éléments naturels de la culture occidentale—redevient au XVIIIe siècle un élément fondamental de l’hygiène. Ce bien naturel précieux multiplie les usages au fil du temps : l’eau qui lave, l’eau qui soigne, l’eau qui fortifie, l’eau qui délasse. Et si l’histoire de Bordeaux est intimement liée à celle de son fleuve, c’est bien l’eau qui en constitue l’essence même.

Depuis l’Antiquité, les Bordelais se baignent dans la Garonne. Au XVIIIe siècle, les pratiques évoluent et les techniques se développent : des bains flottants sur le fleuve aux bains-douches dans les quartiers, des établissements d’hydrothérapie à la natation en piscine. C’est à la découverte de cette histoire méconnue que vous invitent les Archives Bordeaux Métropole autour d’une sélection de documents de toutes natures, témoignages d’une incroyable aventure humaine et collective. L’artiste Laurent Valera propose un contrepoint contemporain avec une nouvelle série d’œuvres en dialogue avec les documents d’archives.

Frédéric Laux and Jean-Cyril Lopez, Bordeaux-les-Bains: Les bienfaits de l’eau, XVIIIe–XXe siècle (Archives Bordeaux Métropole, 2021), 96 pages, ISBN: 978-2360622870, 12€.

 

Print Quarterly, December 2021

Posted in books, exhibitions, reviews by Editor on December 8, 2021

The eighteenth century in the latest issue of Print Quarterly:

Print Quarterly 38.4 (December 2021) . . .

Matthew Darly, The Flower Garden, 1777, etching and engraving with watercolour, 35 × 25 cm (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art).

Elizabeth L. Block, Review of Luigi Amara, The Wig: A Hairbrained History, translated by Christina MacSweeney (Reaktion Books, 2020), p. 436.

Elizabeth Block gives an overview of the 33 brief chapters of Luigi Amara’s The Wig: A Hairbrained History. The chapter “Towering Hairdos” looks at the expensive and impractical styles of wigs in the years before the French Revolution, whilst “Dressing Up Justice” focuses on William Hogarth’s The Bench, 1758–64, an engraving depicting bewigged magistrates. Block praises this work for its entertaining and enjoyable qualities, but highlights its lack of academic rigour, suggesting at the end works to turn to for a more scholarly treatment of the subject.

Richard Taws, Review of the exhibition catalogue William Blake, edited by Martin Myrone and Amy Concannon (Tate, 2019), p. 438.

Reviewing the catalogue for the exhibition William Blake, held at Tate Britain in 2019–20, Richard Taws discusses the book’s five chapters covering the artist’s early artistic milieu, his career as printmaker, his relationship with patronage and display, and his reclamation by a younger generation of artists. It is noted that in the authors’ attempt to demythologise Blake, they are successful in creating a “Blake for all,” who satisfies both a specialist and popular audience.

Exhibition | Dressing with Purpose in Scandinavia

Posted in books, catalogues, exhibitions by Editor on December 7, 2021

From left to right: Eva Aira and Inga Lajla Aira Balto in gávttit from Jåhkåmåhkke and Kárášjohka; Sven Roos in Gagnefsdräkt and Lars-Erik Backman in Leksandsdräkt; Fatima Aakhus and Randi Myrum in Setesdalsbunader. (Photos by Carrie Hertz).

◊   ◊   ◊   ◊   ◊

From the Museum of International Folk Art:

Dressing with Purpose: Belonging and Resistance in Scandinavia
Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, 12 December 2021 — 19 February 2023

Dress helps us fashion identity, history, community, and place. Dress has been harnessed as a metaphor for both progress and stability, the exotic and the utopian, oppression and freedom, belonging and resistance. Dressing with Purpose examines three Scandinavian dress traditions—Swedish folkdräkt, Norwegian bunad, and Sámi gákti—and traces their development during two centuries of social and political change across northern Europe.

By the 20th century, many in Sweden worried about the ravages of industrialization, urbanization, and emigration on traditional ways of life. Norway was gripped in a struggle for national independence. Indigenous Sami communities—artificially divided by national borders and long resisting colonial control—rose up in protests that demanded political recognition and sparked cultural renewal. Within this context of European nation-building, colonial expansion, and Indigenous activism, traditional dress took on special meaning as folk, national, or ethnic minority costumes—complex categories that deserve reexamination today. In this exhibition, visitors will be introduced to individuals who adapt and revitalize dress traditions to articulate who they are, proclaim personal values and group allegiances, strive for sartorial excellence, reflect critically on the past, and ultimately, reshape the societies they live in.

This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support comes from Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation and Swedish Council of America.

Carrie Hertz, ed., Dressing with Purpose: Belonging and Resistance in Scandinavia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021), 258 pages, ISBN: 978-0253058577, $30.

Dedication
Acknowledgements
Map of Scandinavia
A Note on Terms and Place Names

Foreword, Khristaan Villela
Introduction: Can We Talk about Traditional Dress?, Carrie Hertz

Part I. Folkdräkt in Sweden
1  Swedish Folkdräkt, Carrie Hertz
2  They Are at Peace Here, Like Old Friends in Their Caskets: Traditional Dress Collections as Heritage-making, Lizette Gradén

Part II. Bunad in Norway
3  Norwegian Bunad, by Carrie Hertz
4  Headdress and Hijab: Bunad in Multicultural Norway, Camilla Rossing
5  The Transnational and Personalized Bunad of the Twenty-First Century, Laurann Gilbertson

Part III. Gákti in Sápmi
6  Sámi Gákti, Carrie Hertz
7  The Legacy of Ládjogahpir: Rematriating Sápmi with Foremother’s Hat of Pride, Eeva-Kristiina Harlin and Outi Pieski

Conclusion: The Future of Traditional Dress, Carrie Hertz

Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index