Review: Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, and the Secular Imagination by Sebastian Lecourt

Brad Evans, Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University, is the author of Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865–1920 (2005) and Ephemeral Bibelots: How an International Fad Buried American Modernism (2019). He is coeditor, with Aaron Glass, of Return to the Land of the Head Hunters: Edward S. Curtis, the Kwakwaka’wakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema (2013). He has recently begun work on a new project that uses the contested notion of “relational aesthetics” in contemporary art as a frame for thinking through relations and relationality more broadly. The project asks, simply, what are relations and how have they been figured artistically?