Decolonizing the Premodern South Caucasus: Historiography, Images, and Experiences

Colonialism and Orientalism have contributed to the systematic historiographical marginalization of the South Caucasus over the past two centuries, transforming the region into a truly marginal province within art history. As a contact zone for the tensions between powerful empires for almost two centuries, the marginalization of this region is an offcast of an extremely unfavorable political situation. Due to this negligible scholarly attention, the art of the region offers technical and visual solutions, as well as objects that are virtually unknown in Europe and the Mediterranean, which might reshape how historians broadly envision some of the lesser documented centuries (especially from the seventh to eleventh century). The often exceptional state of preservation of objects and monuments from this period allows for a much more complex recontextualization of the art history of the “Global Middle Ages.”