Julie Berger Hochstrasser

This project explores the visual culture of key sites of contact between the Dutch and the many other cultures they encountered through trade and colonization during the seventeenth century, in Indonesia, China, Japan, West and South Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean and Suriname, and North America. Traditional specializations have prevented scholars from approaching this material as interactively as the history demands, but this project remaps our study of this imagery across those boundaries. In structuring this analysis to address visual arts from both sides of these interactions, in their own cultural terms, I reconceptualize the study of Dutch art in this less Eurocentric fashion, and forge new ways of thinking about global visual culture from the early modern period to today.