Reconceptualising Material Culture in the Tricontinent

Book excerpt: This edited volume is the first to engage with material culture in the Tricontinent comprising Asia, Africa and Latin America, interrogating how objects help trace an alternate history of these locales. The potential of material culture to redefine postcolonial subjectivities is explored here through an analysis of various objects, both tangible and intangible. The book serves to subvert Eurocentric formulations of material culture and arrives at a uniquely Tricontinental model of material culture studies. The essays gathered here engage with an entire gamut of issues pertaining to the perception and significance of object-oriented ontologies from a multifaceted perspective. The book offers a glimpse into the vast field of material cultural studies through an engagement with various geopolitical locales in Asia, Africa and Latin America, thereby familiarizing the reader with the nuances of non-European material culture(s).