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Transculturation in British Art, 1770–1930, edited by Julie F. Codell

This collection of essays provides a welcome addition to the literature on artistic interactions that have occurred in and around the margins of the ‘British World’. It relates well to the central remit of the ‘British Art: Global Contexts’ series to reflect upon how ‘British’ artists went about creating objects in response to various ‘transcultural’ experiences. According to Julie F. Codell’s helpful definition, ‘Transculturation is a complex term that embraces time, space, place, culture, nation, and globalisation’ (p.2). The essays weave a subtle and yielding intellectual fabric out of such diverse material with the essential argument that ‘transcultural products, more than simple mixes of national cultures, are complex works of unresolved and unfinished possible meanings, and such art opens up atopic spaces and moments of transcultural surprise on the local level that are not solely determined by political, social and racial tensions’ (p.11). Codell’s introductory chapter sits apart from the others by providing a valuable topographical survey of relevant theories for transculturalist scholars (contrasting ‘transculturation’ with alternative concepts of cultural ‘hybridisation’ and ‘acculturation’). Ultimately she positions the term as a methodological framework rather than a teleological goal or ideological principle and this generates a commendable degree of flexibility and utility in the interpretation of alternative meanings for objects, seeking out common characteristics and conditions without imposing universalist or normative structures for understanding British visual culture. This allows for a constantly changing discourse in which objects retain or alter their relevance according to cultural contingencies. Long-ignored sculptures, for example, are reborn to newly assertive ethnic and political groups or are retrieved from the oblivion of the museum storeroom as their geopolitical importance is recognized. Such developments promise scholarly liberation not only through the rehabilitation of objects, artists and audiences but also through the engendering of an awareness of the organic flow of history with the creation and recreation of new meanings for works as they pass through different places and times, through these ‘transcultural experiences’. This book rejects any encyclopaedic intentions and thus divides its content into two perspectival sections that look at objects whose ‘transcultural’ meanings have changed largely through either the agency of passing time (in the first part) or physical relocation (in the second). The chapters covering different media are equally comprehensive and represent a refreshingly broad although inevitably uneven spread: five on painting, three on sculpture, two on photography, two on aspects of the graphic arts and one on architecture. The editor and contributors are mindful of the