Book by Alexandra Green
This volume draws upon art historical, anthropological, and religious studies methodologies to de... more This volume draws upon art historical, anthropological, and religious studies methodologies to delineate the structures and details of late Burmese wall paintings and elucidate the religious, political, and social concepts driving the creation of this art form. The combination of architecture, paintings, sculpture, and literary traditions created a complete space in which devotees could interact with the Buddha through his biography. Through the standardization of a repertoire of specific forms, codes, and themes, the murals were themselves activating agents, spurring devotees to merit-making, worship, and other ritual practices, partially by establishing normative religious behavior and partly through visual incentives. Much of this was accomplished through the manipulation of space, and the volume contributes to the analysis of visual narratives by examining how the relationships between word and image, layouts, story and scene selection, and narrative themes both demonstrate and confirm social structures and changes, economic activities, and religious practices of seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century Burma. The visual material of the wall painting sites worked together with the sculpture and the architecture to create unified spaces in which devotees could interact with the Buddha. This analysis takes the narrative field beyond the concept that pictures are to be “read” and shows the multifarious and holistic ways in which they can be viewed. To enter temples of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries was to enter a coherent space created by a visually articulated Burmese Buddhist world to which the devotee belonged by performing ritual activities within it.
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Peer-reviewed papers by Alexandra Green
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Journal of Burma Studies, 2011
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Rethinking Visual Narratives from Asia: Intercultural and Comparative Perspectives, 2013
The introduction to the volume Rethinking Visual Narratives from Asia challenges traditional narr... more The introduction to the volume Rethinking Visual Narratives from Asia challenges traditional narratological methodologies, arguing for a broader and more flexible framework in the assessment of Asian visual narratives.
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Rethinking Visual Narratives from Asia: Intercultural and Comparative Perspectives, 2013
The paper compares and contrasts the differing narrative structures of Thai and Burmese wall pain... more The paper compares and contrasts the differing narrative structures of Thai and Burmese wall paintings from the late 17th century into the early 19th century.
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Journal of the History of Collections, 2015
The formation and development of the British Museum’s collection of Burmese objects provides nume... more The formation and development of the British Museum’s collection of Burmese objects provides numerous insights into British experiences of Burma from the macroscopic level of colonial annexation to the individual predilections of collectors. The variety of the collection meshes with the institution’s role as a museum of civilization. Yet the eclectic collection reveals the country’s relative unimportance within the British colonial project in India and collapses the colonial premise of museums as a locus of encyclopaedic knowledge organized along systematic lines. Conceptions of archaeology, geo-political importance, art, and ethnography have all contributed to the shape of the collection, as have stereotyped images of Burma. The collection encapsulates nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial, archaeological/art historical, ethnographic and museological endeavours and discourses, and indicates what may occur to collections as these ideas alter, as they have done over the course of nearly 200 years.
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Journal of the Siam Society, 2018
In the field of Southeast Asian shadow theatre, the performance and social side of the topic has ... more In the field of Southeast Asian shadow theatre, the performance and social side of the topic has been addressed, but there have been relatively few publications that examine puppet iconography.1 The trend has been for studies of the social contexts, political associations, performance traditions, and so forth, which are all essential for comprehending iconography, yet which have left a lacuna in shadow theatre studies.2 Here, I propose to initiate an exploration into shadow puppet imagery to begin to address this issue within the frame of collecting history. I explore the British Museum’s shadow puppets in comparison with other collections of similar material in order to expand the historic picture of puppet development. The focus in this paper is upon the Thai and Malay shadow puppets, because of their iconographic similarities that date to at least the 19th century and the fact that they have been less well studied than Javanese and Balinese examples.
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Edited volumes by Alexandra Green
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Rethinking Visual Narratives covers topics from the first millennium BCE through the present day,... more Rethinking Visual Narratives covers topics from the first millennium BCE through the present day, testifying to the enduring significance of visual stories in shaping and affirming cultural practices in Asia. Contributors analyze how visual narratives function in different Asian cultures, and reveal the multiplicity of ways that images can be narrated. The study of local art forms advances our knowledge of regional iterations and theoretical boundaries, illustrating the importance of pictorial stories to the cultural traditions of Asia. Contributors include Dominik Bonatz, Sandra Cate, Yonca Kösebay Erkan, Charlotte Galloway, Mary Beth Heston, Yeewan Koon, Sonya S. Lee, Leedom Lefferts, Dore J. Levy, Shane McCausland, Julia K. Murray, Catherine Stuer, Greg M. Thomas, Sarah E. Thompson, and Mary- Louise Totton.
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Exhibitions by Alexandra Green
The exhibition Sir Stamford Raffles: Collecting in Southeast Asia 1811-1824 investigates how and ... more The exhibition Sir Stamford Raffles: Collecting in Southeast Asia 1811-1824 investigates how and why Raffles assembled his collections and touches on ongoing provenance research of his collections at the British Museum. On display is a rich variety of objects from Java and Sumatra collected by Raffles between 1811-1824. Collected in groups (a practice previously only used in natural history), these objects reveal how he understood – and misunderstood – Southeast Asian cultures.
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Book reviews by Alexandra Green
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Book by Alexandra Green
Peer-reviewed papers by Alexandra Green
Edited volumes by Alexandra Green
Exhibitions by Alexandra Green
Book reviews by Alexandra Green