It normally makes a great difference to art “history” if a given object is authentic or fabricated. And yet, the fabrication of any given object, to say nothing of a class of objects, carries within its own history: one not always of fraud, but also of gatekeeping on the one hand and exploitation on the other. The story of Islamic era objects that began to flood the museums and the market around the turn of the 20th century is one such story.
Category Archive: Reviews
With the US-Israeli war against Iran into its second month, the publication of Homa Katouzian’s history of the 1979 Iranian revolution couldn’t be timelier. The outcome of the current war may decide the fate of that revolution and the Islamic regime that resulted from it. Katouzian’s conclusion mentions the June 2025 joint US-Israeli attacks targeting Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and notes, with astonishment, that the Iranian people failed to rise up against the regime.
Those hoping that a book called Venice and the Mongols would be a deep-dive into everything Marco Polo will be disappointed, for that most celebrated of Venetians warrants only a single chapter. Authors Nicola Di Cosmo and Lorenzo Pubblici focus rather more on Venice’s forays—commercial and territorial—into the Black Sea, where they ran up against the Mongols in Crimea. After the Fourth Crusade and the Mongol’s westward conquests, “The Pontic area,” write the authors, “became a common space, a nexus between Asia and Europe” at what was respectively the western- and eastern-most expansion of each.
The ARB website has been serving its readers for twenty-five years, and it’s time for an upgrade to take advantage of the latest advances in web technology. From next week the site will have a new, refreshed, appearance.
The Osaka-based Hasegawas used to be a model family—happily married, two sons, a daughter, and a dog. But when the elder son Hajime dies at the age of twenty, their lives start falling apart. Each reacts to loss differently: Kaoru, the younger son and the narrator of the story, leaves to study in Tokyo but struggles to fit in; his sister Miki becomes socially withdrawn; the mother engages in compulsive overeating; and the father just disappears. Four years later, following his sudden return, they gather to spend the New Year holidays together and try to pick up the pieces of what remains of their family.
In London’s Victoria and Albert Museum a 16th-century Iranian carpet reigns over the Islamic collection and mesmerizes visitors. In Threads of Empire, Dorothy Armstrong writes, “The carpet transports us away from South Kensington to wherever our personal Arabian Nights dreams are located.” While the beauty of the pile side of her 12 rugs entrances her, she looks deeply at the knotted side, to explore the complex stories of their origins. Through both picture and pattern she teases out the history of these carpets, which, she argues, can reveal much about the history of our world.
In 2023, University of Minnesota Press released a translation of Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again. The two novellas (published as one volume with a thorough explanatory afterword by translator Jeffrey Angles) add the often-forgotten backstory to one of the world’s most iconic monster movies, often credited solely to the imaginations of director Ishiro Honda and special effects visionary Eiji Tsubaraya. In reality, science fiction author Shigeru Kayama wrote the scenario for the film, meaning he created the movie’s “entire foundation… the plot, characters, themes, and structure”. The publisher returns to the tale of another movie monster with The Luminous Fairies and Mothra, again translated by Angles.
A number of books in English have given us histories of Korean emigration to the United States and Canada, but the story of those who left Korea for Japan in the decades of Japanese imperial rule is relatively unknown. Sayaka Chatani, a professor of history at the National University of Singapore, writes in this book of Korean immigrants and their descendants in Japan who chose after 1948 to support North Korea, despite most of them having roots in South Korea.
Originally published in Japan in 1964, and now translated for the first time into English, Kobo Abe’s The Traitor starts with a writer’s visit to a country town of Akkeshi. There he learns from an innkeeper, Fukuchi, the story of three hundred convicts who escaped into Hokkaido after the end of the brief Boshin War, a power struggle between the Meiji Emperor and the Tokugawa Shogunate. These men are followed by Enomoto Takeaki, an officer in search of the convicts. While the framing is fictional, Enomoto is a real historical figure: a leader of the Shogunate faction and later a prominent member of the Meiji government.
The Korean word “han” is difficult to translate precisely into English, but the concept revolves around a profound sadness, regret, resentment and a loss of a collective identity that arises from historical injustice, such as occupation, war, and separation. It is, in other words, a generational trauma with Korean characteristics. Lisa Lee’s debut novel American Han, set during the time of the first tech boom, is anchored in the despair and rancor that defines the Kim family of the San Francisco Bay. Jane Kim is a third year law student at a second tier law school in San Francisco, when her mother relocates to start a new life for herself, an impulse Jane understands.
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