World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the Indian Ocean ed. by Prita Meier and Allyson Purpura (review)

World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the Indian Ocean is an enormously important contribution to the field of art history. This opinion does not stem from the vantage point of a seasoned African art historian or the authority that accompanies such a position. It is informed instead by a different but equally important perspective: that of a very new scholar, tenaciously scouring and gathering insights from those who have eminently forged the trails of knowledge ahead of her. However, armed with earnest and fresh inquiries, this particular scholar studies a segment of the field in a region of the world where such pathways have been relatively faint or wispy at best. Thankfully, a solid foundation is now established in the groundbreaking work of editors Prita Meier and Allyson Purpura, who begin to address this lacuna with their hefty and expansive compilation of essays. Twenty-one diverse writers (including the editors) span disciplines, geographies, theories, and styles to deftly reveal and underscore the ways that "Swahili arts prompt us to 'un-discipline' art historical canons and museological frameworks that have long kept Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas apart—and in place" (p. 14).

World on the Horizon is the companion publication to the 2017–2018 exhibition of the same name, publicized as

the first major traveling exhibition dedicated to the arts of the Swahili coast and their historically deep and enduring connections to eastern and central Africa, the port towns of the western Indian Ocean, and, given their circulation within imperial networks of trade and diplomacy, to Europe and the eastern seaboard of the United States (p. 13).

The exhibition and publication were made possible in part by two major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The format of this book is less a traditional catalogue with glossy images, object biographies, or descriptive documentation, and more a scholarly contribution with a substantial interdisciplinary academic focus. The combination and range of the essays—while diverse in content and style—is more likely to appeal to specialized readers with an interest in these topics rather than a general audience. A similar level of scholarly density in writing was heavily employed in the exhibition labels and wall texts at the first exhibition venue, the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It is unfortunate that those detailed texts do not appear in the edited volume. Their inclusion would have been a welcome and important addition toward the permanent usefulness of this publication as an enduring and sorely needed reference tool and resource.

Nonetheless, this volume offers contributions as a resource that will reach far beyond the many "firsts" it represents. On one level, it holds immense value as the first interdisciplinary study of Swahili arts in its regional focus. The essays include multidirectional perspectives that radiate out from the Swahili coast as a central fulcrum, where objects are particularly considered as elements of Indian Ocean aesthetic systems and convergences. At a broader level, this compilation of essays also elucidates the exceedingly fluid characteristics of regional vocabularies and networks that have existed for millennia along the eastern coast of Africa. Swahili arts and aesthetic histories are slippery and often defy categorization, which may be one of the reasons so few scholars have addressed them to this extent before now. As art historians in all corners of the world increasingly blur the lines of scholarly investigations to reach beyond the categorical "silo" approach, this publication serves as a welcome example for ways to break down boundaries and integrate expansive, global, interdisciplinary relationships of thought.

The structure of the book is loose, without chapter divisions or thematic groupings to organize it. All eighteen essays are clustered together between two short but compelling texts: a thoughtful introduction by the editors, and...