About this Event
How can visual culture from Mongol Iran under the Ilkhanids (1256–1335) complicate and expand a more “global” understanding of medieval race, class, and gender? This talk explores this question in two parts. The first part draws on dispersed illustrated folios and preparatory drawings associated with the late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Ilkhanid context, particularly those preserved in the Diez Album. Putting Stuart Hall’s theory of race in dialogue with these representations, I trace how artists experimented and developed a visual grammar to mark bodies, differentiate social identities, and communicate understandings of race, class, gender, and status within the expansive, multireligious, and multiethnic Ilkhanate. Doing so allows me to use the Ilkhanid context to expand the analytical possibilities of critical race studies. The second part of my talk develops this intervention one step further by turning to the Bodleian Samak-i ʿAyyār (Samak the Trickster), a Persian manuscript commissioned around 1330–35 in Shiraz during the later Ilkhanid period. I recover how the manuscript deploys racialized, ethnicized, gendered, and classed representations of Chinese female javānmards (manly youths) to criticize the deficiencies of male rule and reimagine new possibilities of ideal masculine sovereignty as contingent upon the moral authority of the “foreign” woman. These representations invite us to rethink the boundaries of javānmardī (young-manliness)—a Persianate chivalric ethical ideal traditionally understood by scholars and alternative grammars of gendered authority in fourteenth-century Iran.
Bio:
Dr. Amanda Caterina Leong is the Getty Mongol Connections Postdoctoral Fellow and Project Manager at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She is a specialist in the arts of the medieval and early modern Persianate world and was the inaugural Ebrahimi fellow of Persian Art at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art.
Image: Detail, Ruzafzun kills her father in the presence of Khorshid Shah. 14th century, ca. 1330. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Ouseley 379, fol. 169b. (Photo: © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.
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Event venue & nearby stays
West Court, Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
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