Geronimo Cristobal

Category: Essay

  • Pearls in Jean Fouquet’s Melun Madonna

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    Painted ca. 1452–58 as the right wing of the Melun Diptych, Madonna and Child Surrounded by Seraphim and Cherubim by Jean Fouquet constitutes a singular contribution to the visual culture of the French court. Executed in oil on panel, the painting presents a Marian figure suspended between celestial abstraction and courtly specificity. Seated on a…

  • The Queen’s Cosmopolitical Portrait

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    Imagine standing before a grand portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, resplendent in a gown adorned with pearls, her hand resting confidently on a globe. Behind her, two seascapes depict the English navy’s triumph over the Spanish Armada. This is the Armada Portrait, painted around 1588 to commemorate England’s naval victory and to project the queen’s…

  • The Place of Shells: Making and Unmaking Archipelagic Southeast Asia

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    Summary This essay traces how vernacular spatial logics in Southeast Asia—expressed through myths, maritime movement, and ritual orientations—shaped understandings of sovereignty before the imposition of colonial borders. Drawing on the figure of the pearl as a model of layered accretion, it explores how societies in the Philippine archipelago organized space through concentric and relational forms…

  • Muhammadan Mysticism in Sumatra

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    R.L. Archer’s 1937 article, “Muhammadan Mysticism in Sumatra,” provides an early and detailed inquiry into the forms of Islamic mysticism as they emerged and took root in the Malay world. Drawing principally on Malay-language manuscripts held in Leiden and elsewhere, Archer situates these texts within a broader genealogy of Sufi metaphysics, while also attending to…

  • Manila’s Monument to Queen Isabel II

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    The statue of Queen Isabel II is one of few public artworks that survive from the time of Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines. Located in front of Puerta Isabel II in Intramuros, Manila, this bronze monument has weathered the vicissitudes of Philippine history and the shifting tides of politics and empire. Commissioned in the…

  • Marca Demonio de las Comparaciones: Die anachronistische Substitution des Kris Joloano in Rizal und Amorsolo

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    Diese Studie untersucht die anachronistische Präsenz des Kris Joloano in José Rizals Noli Me Tangere (1887) und Fernando Amorsolos Marca Demonio, dem Etikett für den Ginebra San Miguel-Likör, das 1917 geschaffen wurde. Aufbauend auf Nagels und Woods Untersuchung von Anachronismen während der Renaissance positioniert die Analyse die neugierige Einfügung eines Kris Joloano als zeitliche Brücke,…

  • Pearls in Islamic Art from the Umayyads to the Ottomans

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    In Islamic art and culture, pearls symbolize divine light, purity, and paradise, and serve as markers of spiritual authority and sovereign power. Nacreous objects were central to trade networks across the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean, integrating them into Islamic artistic and economic systems. Historical studies tell of their layered significance: as royal emblems in Late…

  • Galo Ocampo’s Brown Madonna

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    Fig. 29 Galo Ocampo, Brown Madonna, 1938 Photo: UST Museum Collection A few years after Rising Philippines, Galo B. Ocampo advanced his fusion of local iconography and modernist style by reimagining the Madonna and Child as unmistakably Filipino. Depicted with Filipino features, traditional dress, and surrounded by native vegetation, Ocampo roots this iconic Catholic image…

  • Filipino Muslim Perceptions of Their History and Culture as Seen Through Indigenous Written Sources

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    Samuel K. Tan’s Filipino Muslim Perceptions of Their History and Culture as Seen Through Indigenous Written Sources examines the historiographical landscape of Filipino Muslim history, emphasizing indigenous written sources over colonial records. Tan highlights the limitations of oral traditions, which vary across ethnic groups, and critiques colonial sources for their biased perspectives that framed Muslims…

  • Edades and the fabricated history of his Armory Show conversion to Modern Art

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    Nicola Kanmany John’s dissertation has critically examined the narrative surrounding the Filipino artist Victorio Edades’s Armory Show conversion to Modern Art. Edades is often regarded as the “father of Philippine modernism” and Kanmany John’s findings challenges the claim that a Seattle exhibition inspired by the 1913 Armory Show of New York fundamentally shifted Edades’ artistic…

  • The Ottoman Influence in Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring

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    This brilliant short visual essay on Things that Talk has resurrected a forgotten facet of one of Western art’s most iconic pieces, Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl earring. Most standard scholarship does not mention this except in a brief mention in Encyclopedia Brittanica and an indirect reference to Dutch trade in the far east in…

  • Poseidon’s poisoned gifts

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    On John Steinbeck’s The Pearl and the bizarre Pearl of Lao Tzu By the time John Steinbeck published The Pearl in 1947, his reputation as a chronicler of the dispossessed was well established. The Grapes of Wrath had cemented his place as a writer who could capture the harsh realities of those on the fringes…

  • The Pearl-Diving Mermaid’s Transcorporeality: An Introduction

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    Louis Renard, mermaid, from Poissons écrevisses et crabs… (Amsterdam, Reiner & Josué Ottens, 1754), State Library Victoria, RARESEF 597 R29 Mermaids have long been intertwined with the imagery of pearls, frequently portrayed like Boticelli’s Venus as dwelling within bivalve shells or scouring the ocean depths for treasures. This connection casts mermaids, whose dual corporeality symbolizes…

  • The Wisdom of Uz

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    William Blake (1757 – 1827), There Was a Man in the Land of Uz (The Book of Job), 1821 This essay sets directions towards the writing of a material history of the Land of Uz, the setting of the Book of Job, by revisiting textbook historical and archaeological records of the Levant and relevant ancient…

  • The Kingdoms of Israel and Ophir

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    and the power of a fabricated diplomatic history             And they came to Ophir, and fetched from thence gold, four hundred and twenty talents, and brought it to King Solomon.                                                                                    — I Kings 9:28.            On July 30th of this year (2023), a most bizarre headline appeared in one of the leading news publications in the…

  • An Archaeology led by Strawberries

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    Atalay, Sonia. “An Archaeology led by Strawberries” in Archaeologies of the Heart. Kisha Supernant, Jane Eva Baxter, Natasha Lyons, and Sonya Atalay, editors. 2020. Springer, New York. xiv + 280. Hieronymus Bosch (circa 1450–1516), The Garden of Earthly Delights, central panel inside (left side), detail: People sit around a large strawberry, c.1490 and 1500 A…

  • Death and Mortuary Rituals in Mainland Southeast Asia

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    W. Higham, Charles F. “Death and Mortuary Rituals in Mainland Southeast Asia: From Hunter-Gatherers to the God Kings of Angkor.” Chapter. In Death Rituals, Social Order and the Archaeology of Immortality in the Ancient World: ‘Death Shall Have No Dominion’, edited by Colin Renfrew, Michael J. Boyd, and Iain Morley, 280–300. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,…

  • Less is More

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    Unknown Flemish artist, Triumph of Fortitude, ca. 1535 Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco In explaining how his practice of writing history operates, historian Carlo Ginzburg turns to architect Mies van der Rohe’s adage: “Less is more.”[1] He explains his method using the metaphor of the dilation of a camera lens: “By knowing less, by…

  • Keyword: Primitivism

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    For a fictional volume called Keywords for Southeast Asian Studies         Abstract This article focuses on the historiography of Primitivism in Southeast Asian Studies, understood as the interest shown in non-Western cultures by the European avant-garde. Emerging with the development of anthropology, this movement instigated a protracted debate between ethnology and aesthetic studies. I present examples…

  • Muslim Cool: Race, Religion and Hip Hop in the United States (Su’ad Khabeer, 2016)

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    Eritrea / Colonia Italiana – Muslim brotherhood PPC Military Post to Italy 1935 Photo: Ebay Su’ad Khabeer’s Muslim Cool: Race, Religion and Hip Hop in the United States examines how intersecting ideas of Muslimness and Blackness challenge and reproduce the meanings of race in the US. Confronted by pervasive stereotypes and increased prejudice in post-9/11 America, the group…

  • A Habit of Shores: Seni and Seafaring in Dunia Melayu

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    I am presenting seemingly unrelated variables to tell the story of the SEA and the various shores on which they meet the land. It has been a convention now to present an outline of the presentation and I do so not only to give a semblance of cohesiveness but to trigger your imagination. Warning: We…

  • Gender / Sexuality / Theory of Power

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    Harry Styles at the Grammy Awards in 2021. Boas are a fashion must-have at Styles’ concerts.(Jordan Strauss / Invision / AP) In “Bodies with New Organs” Jasbir Puar examines the neoliberal appropriation of the trans body to reconstitute the pool of able bodied individuals for economic productivity and the development of the national economy. According…

  • Queer Companions (Omar Kasmani, 2022)

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    Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan An illustration of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar’s shrine in Sehwan as it was in mid-1800s. Photo: Sindh Culture Department Lauren Berlant writes that unexpected consequences of communicating with meager signs and gestures are the “secret epitaphs” of intimacy. “Often brief and eloquent,” intimate situations also convey an aspiration…

  • Knot of the Soul (Stefania Pandolfo, 2018)

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    Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam The 72nd chapter of the Qur’an entitled Al-Jinn (The Jinn), as well as the heading and introductory bismillah of the next chapter entitled al-Muzzammil (The Enshrouded One). In Knot of the Soul, Pandolfo ties together seemingly disparate areas of study such as madness and cartography to address, among many others, the compatibility of modern psychology and Islamic eschatology. Towards this end, she…

  • Jinnealogy (Anand Vivek Taneja, 2017)

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    Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi Taneja’s plaiting of themes in contemporary Indian politics and vestiges of unsanctioned Islamic practice reveal the multi-layered undercurrents of Islamic sovereignty that shape the present. Her insights into secularism, political ecology, ethics, and religiosity afford us a deeper look of Islamic ethics and its…

  • Rouge (dir. Stanley Kwan, 1987)

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    Critics hailed Stanley Kwan’s genre defining ghost film Rogue during its Criterion Collection release as a beautiful allegorical melodrama, “the likes of which are no longer done in the West”. Bliss Cua Lim offers a reason why this is the case: “ghostly women embody a strong notion of spatiotemporal nonsynchronism—the existence of noncontemporaneous aspects of…

  • Area/ Region

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    Walker Gavin’s article “The Accumulation of Difference and the Logic of Area” tells us that some of Michel Foucault’s ideas on biopower can still be improved. According to Gavin, Foucault didn’t think past the spatial term “territory” to consider the even more ambiguous term “area”, which according to Gavin is more encompassing of the unboundedness…

  • Semicoloniality, Agency and Occupation

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    The Bogor Botanical Gardens was officially established by the Dutch East Indies Government on May 17, 1817, which became an important part in the history of science in Indonesia. (Wikimedia Commons) In Race and the Education of Desire (1995), Ann Laura Stoler writes about the central role of the construction of race and empires in…

  • Grupos Filipinos Ilustres, 1911

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    Photo: Grupos Filipinos Ilustres, NCCA/ National Museum Collection This lithograph called Grupos Filipinos Ilustres by Guillermo Tolentino from 1911, created the National Pantheon according to historian Resil Mojares. It imagined heroes, intellectuals, artists, activists and politicians together in a studio portrait. It was a popular fixture in homes during the American occupation of the Philippines,…

  • Lingua Franca (2019, dir. Isabel Sandoval)

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    Isabel Sandoval plays Olivia, a caregiver to Olga played by Lynn Cohen. Filipino director and actress Isabel Sandoval paints the portrait of freedom, inspired by her own journey as a transgender migrant in Donald Trump’s America. Alongside filmmakers Lav Diaz and Brillante Mendoza, Sandoval is among a new breed of filmmakers who are committed witnesses…