Taking into account the destructive powers of globalization, Making Worlds considers the interconnectedness of the world in the early modern period.
This collection examines the interdisciplinary phenomenon of making worlds, with essays from scholars of history, literary studies, theatre and performance, art history, and anthropology. The volume advances questions about the history of globalization by focusing on how the expansion of global transit offered possibilities for interactions that included the testing of local identities through inventive experimentation with new and various forms of culture. Case studies show how the imposition of European economic, religious, political, and military models on other parts of the world unleashed unprecedented forces of invention as institutionalized powers came up against the creativity of peoples, cultural practices, materials, and techniques of making. In doing so, Making Worlds offers an important rethinking of how early globalization inconsistently generated ongoing dynamics of making, unmaking, and remaking worlds.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
Angela Vanhaelen and Bronwen Wilson
Part One: Material Flows
2. The Early Modern Fold: Pleated Media in Japan’s Encounter with Europe
Kristopher Kersey
3. From Textile to Text: Cloth, Slavery, and the Archive in the Dutch Atlantic
Carrie Anderson
4. Drawing Worlds in Smoke, Powder, and Fumes: Bodies and Trifles in Il Tabacco, the Courtly Ballet Staged in Turin (1650)
Elisa Antonietta Daniele
5. From Hot Reverence to Cold Sweat: Christian Art and Ambivalence in Early Modern Japan
Benjamin Schmidt
6. Eggs, Cheese, and (Francis) Bacon
Helen Smith
Part Two: In-Between Spaces
7. The Cabinet and the World: Non-European Objects in Early Modern European Collections
Daniela Bleichmar
8. Le Jeu du monde: Games, Maps, and World Conquest in Early Modern France
Ting Chang
9. The World Contained in an Imperial Ottoman Album
Emine Fetvaci
10. World Building, the Folger Folios, and the University of British Columbia
Patricia Badir
Part Three: Other Worlds
11. Ascetic Ecology: Landscape of a Desert Saint
Lyle Massey
12. The End of All: Worldliness, Piety, and the Social Life of Maps in the Post-Reformation English Household
Gavin Hollis
13. Enlightenment Cosmology: A Medialogical Interpretation
J.B. Shank
14. Masked Alliances: Global Politics and Economy in the Art and Performance Rituals of Mexico’s Indigenous People
John M.D. Pohl and Danny Zborover
15. Unease with the Exotic: Ambiguous Responses to Chinese Material Culture in the Dutch Republic
Thijs Weststeijn
Contributors
Index
"The essays in this impressive volume focus our attention on the ‘in-between spaces’ of the global early modern, where differing vantage points came into contact and jostled against one another. By emphasizing how these spaces were negotiated through the lives of things such as folding fans, eggs, and board games, they show how early modernity, even as it resulted in the destruction of many societies, initiated a creative process of world-making."