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In Chapter 3, Tsang Tsou-choi—named “one of the oldest graffiti artists in the world” by the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003—comes into the picture. As a self-proclaimed “king” since the 1950s, Tsang spent decades writing his family’s “(hi)stories” on different surfaces in the streets of Hong Kong, ranging from walls, lampposts and post boxes to electricity boxes. Alongside the writings he produced and the places he reinvented in the city, the connection Tsang made with the local territory and local history is examined in this chapter as a confluence of local relations which reverberate and fluctuate on their own according to different footprints and traces Tsang left in the city and in the mind of his fellow urban dwellers.

The formation and development of the ‘copperplate’ script was one of the distinctive features of the growth of the British mercantile empire in the eighteenth century. Joseph Champion, whose script typified it, popularised in his engraved writing manuals, and reached its apex in The Universal Penman, a large folio of different scripts and forms used in commercial documents. Through it, ‘copperplate’ spread throughout Britain and its dependencies, and from them to other countries in Europe and North America.

Chapter 4 offers analyses of several images from Lalla Essaydi’s photographic series Converging Territories (2004), Les Femmes du Maroc (2006-2008), and Harem (2009), in which she exclusively depicts women from Morocco or the Moroccan diaspora. The chapter focuses on the feminist transnational discourse that emerges from Essaydi’s inscription of her biography—more specifically her experience growing up in a harem and living as an adult woman in Saudi Arabia and the United States—and her training in Western art. The chapter is structured around a set of key questions. Does Essaydi’s juxtaposition of Orientalist tropes and poses from canonical nineteenth-century European Orientalist paintings with the veil, calligraphy, henna tattoos, and Moroccan architecture disrupt or reinforce stereotypes in the depiction of Arab and Muslim women? Can Essaydi’s hybrid language be read as a form of feminist ‘double critique’ that resists Western and Islamic patriarchy? How do Essaydi’s images intervene in relation to the transnational and transcultural discourse and positioning of the ‘Muslimwoman’? What is the economy between the transnational, transglobal and translocal, and the simply local in Essaydi’s images? How do Essaydi’s photographs contribute to the critical (re)thinking of gender in the context of globalization?

Studies the military, palatial, and religious architecture of the later Baghdad Caliphate, with special emphasis on the Abbasid Palace and the Madrasa al-Mustansiriyya. Also discusses briefly the calligraphy and book painting produced in this period.

This chapter chronicles the life of Hongyi, one of the most celebrated and admired Buddhist monks in modern Chinese history. Before becoming a monk, Hongyi, then known as Li Shutong, was famous for being a talented writer and musician. In his late thirties, in a move that was highly unusual for a person of his background and standing, he was ordained as a Buddhist monk and spent the remainder of his life in various monastic settings. Although not an institution-builder, Hongyi’s brand of “sainthood” was widely admired in China, particularly among the elite, for its detachment and spirituality. One of the best expressions of this spirituality is Hongyi’s famous calligraphy, which he applied to Buddhist purposes after his conversion, producing iconic images of Buddhist texts and inscriptions that Birnbaum analyzes in terms of their “coolness.”

Zhao Puchu was the leader of the state-run Buddhist Association of China from the 1950s until his death in 2000. A lay practitioner in pre-Communist Shanghai, Zhao had extensive ties with the Communists (and was perhaps a secret party member) and was thus tasked with the management of the association under the new regime. He performed ably in diplomatic functions when Buddhism served as a tool in forging links with other Buddhist countries in Asia, and was particularly appreciated for his poetry and calligraphy. He served the party loyally and thus presided over considerable destruction of the Buddhist church, particularly during the Cultural Revolution, although he did try to repair some of this damage in later years. After his death, Zhao has been celebrated as a new sort of “saint,” one who administers the faith in the interests of the party-state, and his calligraphy is nearly omnipresent in Buddhist institutions.