Recollecting memories of a person or event related to a specific place has been a recurring theme in Arabic poetry from pre-Islamic times. An enlivening description (waṣf) of such a memorialized place serves as an interesting source for contemplating upon its intricate evocations and visual symbolisms that aim to immortalize precise historical figures or events, subsequently providing a two-layered narrative: of the actual place, and the manner in which it was beheld over the years by perceptive people. One can find a substantial amount of evidence for reconstructing the description of a particular memorial space from this kind of literary tribute. This paper endeavours to present a similar reconstruction of the dynamics between the text and the object, from a few verses of an Arabic poem composed by the Fatimid prince Tamīm (337 AH-374 AH/ 949-984 CE), the eldest son of the Fatimid Caliph al-Muʿizz—in his multisensory experience of the nāʿūrah (waterwheel), a common presence in Fatimid-era gardens, and the connotational representation by which he desires to behold its architectural beauty in the relaxing environment of a garden. The first verse of his poem states: ناعورة أنت أنين الهوى لما شكت حر وساويسها [The water wheel cried with the wail of passion; when it complained of the heat of its anxiety.] The analysis of al-Amīr Tamīm’s poem presented in this paper seeks to provide the beholder of art and architecture with a lens to look beyond the confines of its structural dimensions into a refreshing contemplation of its multitude of meanings. Although art historians have written much about the religious structures of Islam, non-religious structures like the nāʿūra, sometimes go blatantly unnoticed. Like the nāʿūra, al-Amīr Tamīm’s poems elucidate a number of stimulating descriptions of non-religious spaces, that not only widen the scope of our understanding of Islamic art, but also provide new insights into how a non-religious structure could also be observed through a unique universal perspective, which definitely exemplifies but is not limited to—the Islamic philosophy. In the realm of Fatimid art, this kind of universally appealing animation of tangible structures through literature—unpacks rather challenges the long-held notion of restricting its art to being means for religious propagandism, and inspires us to contemplate and rediscover the numerous inspirational manifestations that Islamic art and architecture has to offer.

In the 1830s, the reformist Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II commissioned copies of his imperial portrait (taṣvīr-i hümāyūn) for display in schools, military barracks, and government offices. These large-scale oil-on-canvas paintings were hung with great pomp and circumstance in ceremonies which included military parades, prayers, sacrifices, musical performances, fireworks, and official processions that traced their way from the palace and through the landscape of Istanbul. In this paper, I argue that by analyzing these portraits within their ceremonial context, we can better understand how they operated as a focused source of ideological power within Mahmud II’s wider reform program. Since few physical examples of large-scale taṣvīr-i hümāyūn exist today, the primary methodology that I use in this paper is text-based comparative analysis. This approach differs from the analyses of art historian Günsel Renda, who has done extensive work on situating images of Mahmud II within the greater history of the genre of sultans’ portraiture. My analysis uses untapped primary sources, including archival documents, contemporary newspapers (primarily the Ottoman state-run gazette, Taḳvīm-i Vaḳāyiʿ), and the accounts of foreign travelers, to shed new light on the display, function, and intended audiences of the portraits. Throughout these text sources, the repeated use of phrases such as “miracle-showing,” “sun-like,” and “beauties showing,” refer to the portrait-object as well as the person of the sultan himself, drawing a clear proxy relationship between ruler and image. This relationship may be surprising given the long-held cultural reservations about the public display of portraiture stemming from the religious prohibition of the graven image, a point that did not escape contemporary Ottoman commentators. Nevertheless, descriptions of the portrait-installation ceremonies clearly demonstrate an attention towards representing an official version of appropriate Ottoman religious, bureaucratic, and military identities. As the ideal exemplar of these identities, the sultan-caliph-host – and his proxy portrait – acted as the fulcrum around which individual ceremonial components revolved. By sponsoring repeated iterations of the portrait-installation ceremony in different locations around the city, Mahmud II was inscribing his specific construction of modern Ottoman identity into the streets of Istanbul itself.

This paper examines hand-colored lithographed Shahnama books in nineteenth-century Iran to provide new perspectives on the relationships between manuscript and printed book productions in Qajar Iran (1789-1925). This study introduces a group of visual materials gathered from various museum collections and auction catalogues, along with a focused analysis of a unique hand-colored lithographed copy from the National Library and Archives of Iran (NLAI, Ms 14002-6). I will first offer an outline describing the practice of hand-coloring lithographed materials in nineteenth-century Iran. This brief introduction contextualizes the hand-coloring practice within the tradition of Iran’s manuscript painting production and compares it to similar examples outside of Iran and to other mediums, such as hand-colored photographs. I will then analyze the NLAI copy, through which I will describe how the act of hand-coloring—a complex process of artistic negotiation—brought the mediums of manuscript paintings and lithograph illustrations into direct conversation, quite literally existing on the same page. By considering other manual embellishments, marginalia, artists’ potential entrepreneurial motivations, and lithographed books as transregional commodities connecting Iran and India, this paper contributes to discussions on creative and flexible artistic responses to the introduction of lithography. This focused study of hand-colored lithographed books aims to portray a more engaged relationship between traditional manuscript and emerging printed book industries. So far, scholars have identified various ways in which lithographed books have closely followed manuscript formats—illumination designs, illustrations, and colophon layouts—while incorporating new elements like title and index pages. In these discussions, manuscripts are largely depicted as a passive and unchanging medium. Yet, illustrated manuscripts continued to be produced well into the nineteenth century and artists most likely moved freely between manuscript and lithographed book projects. In this paper, I thus aim to complicate our current understanding by highlighting the shared, ongoing dialogues between contemporaneous manuscript paintings and lithographed illustrations. This paper represents a part of my dissertation project, a systematic study on illustrated Shahnama manuscripts in nineteenth-century Iran.

Thesis: The rejection of Rifat Chadirji’s revamped Iraqi flag in 2004 was caused by issues common in other national redesign efforts, not factors related to transitional governance. Methodology: Comparative vexillology. Vexillology is the auxiliary historical science concerned with flags. Abstract: Following the American-led conquest of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the ruling Coalition Provisional Authority undertook a multitude of reform-minded projects in Baghdad. Well-known schemes, including de-Ba’athification and the empowerment of Shi’i politicos, had far-reaching consequences throughout the Iraq War. One overlooked episode involved a concerted effort to resign the national flag in 2004. Under the interim Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) auspices, several flag proposals were considered, including moderate redesigns and amalgamations of previous flags. Rifat Chadirji, the father of Iraqi architecture, produced the winning submission. Based in part on Canada’s flag, it was a radical redesign. It eschewed the familiar Pan-Arab color scheme, Ba’thi stars, and takbir of Islam. Instead, Chadirji’s flag featured a white field and a centralized crescent blue moon. Additionally, three stipes symbolized its waterways (blue) and Iraqi Kurds (yellow). The proposed flag was lambasted and summarily rejected by Iraqis throughout the country. Without a viable alternative, the IGC approved a modest reboot, swapping the handwritten takbir for a block-letter version in kufi script. Why did Iraqis reject Rifat Chadirji’s project in 2004? What might the redesign efforts of other national flags say about Iraqi identity in the immediate aftermath of the occupation? Rather than examine previous Iraqi flags, this paper uses comparative vexillology to look globally for answers. Flags are not created in a political vacuum. When designing national symbols, governments are often constrained by history, identity, and culture. While concurrent to upheavals in Iraqi governance, the redesign's resistance is not surprising when considered alongside the examples of Jamaica, Canada, South Africa, and New Zealand.

This talk critically reflects on the deployment and weaponization of citizen video cameras in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — an asymmetrical conflict in which filming is both highly legal and widely ubiquitous. It draws on over eight years of research and unprecedented access to the citizen-recorded video archives of B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization that distributes cameras to Palestinians living in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip and gathers the footage. A camera is given to a Palestinian with the conviction that “seeing is believing,” or that visual recordings will cause change to the sociopolitical order. While much has been written about the counter-hegemonic potential of visual technologies in the wake of the Arab Spring, this paper complicates the notion that visual recordings alone can cause change. It argues that ​more is at stake in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and other conflicts: often, believing precedes seeing, and therefore seeing fails to alter belief​. This paper highlights visual surveillance and counter surveillance at the citizen level, and how Palestinians originally filmed to “shoot back” at Israelis, who were armed with shooting power via weapons as the occupying force. It also traces how Israeli private citizens began filming back at Palestinians with their own cameras, including personal cell phone cameras, thus creating a simultaneous, echoing counter surveillance. Theoretically, this paper follows in the wake of recent scholarship in visual studies that has proposed an examination of conflict through visuality, from scholars such as Ariella Azoulay, Judith Butler, Gil Hochberg, and Nicholas Mirzoeff among others. The radical act of examining conflict through visuality means foregoing questions of what “really happened” or other such lines of inquiry that assume an underlying, essential truth that can be “re-presented” through the media. Instead a visual studies approach means asking questions of how we see a conflict, visually — in place of how visual media represent what “objectively” occurred. Drawing on over 5,000 hours of footage, only a fraction of which is easily accessible to the public domain, this talk offers a nuanced perspective on the visual, media-driven strategies and battlegrounds of the Israel-Palestine conflict.