Search

In France, the last decade of the eighteenth century saw an explosion in papers of diverse kinds, put to new political uses. However, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, paper was also instrumentalised to articulate histories of revolutionary participation, as well as changing ideas about revolutionary identification. Some of these were coded as virtuous: paper objects found a place at the heart of sentimental accounts of personal sacrifice, such as that of prison warder Joseph Cange. Conversely, paper was central to claims for culpability or reparation—most strikingly, assorted papers were mobilised as defence against recrimination for involvement in regicide, as discussed here in relation to printmaker and politician Antoine-Louis-François Sergent-Marceau. This essay considers how the apparent abundance that characterised the period's paper ecology, along with new attitudes toward paper's proliferation, preservation and disposal, bore the imprint of political justification, evasion and historical revisionism—all framed by the need to 'pass' as post-revolutionary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The arts of cutting and joining paper (katʿı and vas·s·¯ale) were much prized at the early-modern Ottoman court in Istanbul. This essay takes a single folio of katʿı prepared by the Ottoman paper joinery master (vas·s·¯al) Kalender Efendi (d. 1616) as a starting point from which to explore the essential role of paper in the administration and unification of the Ottoman Empire, shaping the state's relationships with its subjects, and making possible the environment in which Kalender was educated and rose to prominence. Through his skillful manipulation of paper, Kalender created intricate artworks that served as resting place for the eye and mind, astonishing viewers with his skills, and encouraging them to engage in insightful looking. Paper thus served as the locus of intellectual, artistic, and economic encounters, and gave shape to relationships both in the moment and over time [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the material and visual cultural dynamics through which the modern state emerged during the Age of Revolutions in the Atlantic world. It centres upon the emergent rhetoric of the 'written constitution' in Revolutionary North America and the new United States, arguing that this mode of constitution-making represented not the invention that many claimed it to be, but instead a revision of the relationship between document, statecraft and the body in early modern British empire that built upon seventeenth-century English critics of monarchical power. The continuities between the material substrates of empire and nation came to be masked by a rhetoric of disavowal that posited the US constitutional form as both an innovation and a template for the material entanglements of the modern state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue examines paper as it became the definitive material for both artistic practice and jurisprudence. European paper made from pulped rags and linens to create the mythic white empty grounds for design was foundational to early modern European ideas about both sovereignty and the creative act. The materiality of paper—as a surface created from refuse—also introduced a form of ecological thinking into both artistic practice and political theory that recognised the value and revolutionary potential of the material world to create from the detritus of failed projects and revolutions. Surveying artistic production across the European continent and into the Ottoman empire, this series of essays examines paper as both a material force that redefined the limits of the creative act while also being inseparable from the consolidation of new political regimes emerging from the rise of early modern colonialism. Paper was both the tool of dispossession and also the grounds on which the potential of artistic practice was reimagined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]