ABSTRACT
Our anthology's international focus coincides with the global turn in art history, including scholarship that explores themes relating to the formation and varied functions of worldwide networks, the movement of goods, people, customs, and ideas across geographical and cultural boundaries, and the imperial impulse to dominate and subjugate. This chapter demonstrates the problematics of typological projects—the images under question sharply bring into focus the difficulties with artistic attempts to pictorialize categorically the self and other. It contends with the complicated and multifarious issues generated by the production of typological imagery from the early modern period to the contemporary moment. The chapter also demonstrates that the typology often produced a clash between the traditional, in which identity is rooted, and the contemporary, a constantly shifting concept. This temporal interaction solidifies the continued currency of the type, challenging and confounding notions that it is static and outmoded.
