The concept of realism in visual representation has been defined and deployed largely within the domain of the Western artistic canon. In the field of art history, the term is often used in ways that depend on implicit, culturally coded assumptions about its connection with the formal markers of optical-naturalism. The Persianate tradition of pictorial representation by contrast, has been traditionally characterized in modern scholarship as stylized and decorative, with little acknowledgment of an interest in realism in its own visual language. Furthermore, normative Euro-centric attitudes have perpetuated the assumption that an engagement with realism entered Persianate artistic practices with the advent of Europeanizing modes of depiction in Safavid and Mughal spheres of production around the late sixteenth-century. This dissertation explores the topic of realism from the perspective of Persianate visual culture. In so doing, it proposes to refine our understanding of the concept in terms that accommodate the varied artistic production of cultures that laid claims to cultivating representational realism in their own primary sources. The first chapter draws on multi-disciplinary discussions to challenge art historical treatments of pictorial realism as a style, in favor of a functional definition of the concept as an emergent quality rooted in formal strategies that activate particular patterns of mirror-response in their audiences. The second and third chapters reject the principle of evaluating the realism of Persianate representations according to their degree of proximity to European models. The second chapter discusses the structural conditions of change in visual habitus in cases of inter-cultural encounter between foreign modes of representation and the resulting works of aesthetic hybridity. The third chapter presents material evidence of early modern Safavid and Mughal albums as discourses of aesthetic heterogeneity. The fourth chapter explores the local Persianate roots of realism, including the changes these realism strategies underwent in the early modern period. The fifth and final chapter develops case studies of two seventeenth-century Mughal and Safavid drawings, which cultivate representational enlivenment in depicting harrowing moments of death. The discussion delves in greater detail into the particular patterns of realism developed in the seventeenth-century Persianate visual culture. / History of Art and Architecture

For the past decade and even earlier, globalization has been a popular buzzword in academia and has provoked a number of intellectual discussions concerning its nature and effects. In these discussions concepts such as cultural imperialism, cultural homogenization, and indigenization appear which are perceived by-products of globalization in many cases. While some debate the moral implications of globalization and these related phenomena few prefer to take a more neutral stance and simply investigate the objects that are born from the combination two distinct cultural traditions. My research investigates the cultural flow between the United States and Japan which can be considered 'cultural sharing'. In this context, globalization is a phenomenon that can happen on equal footing and can support the exchange of distinct cultural ideas as a beneficial and voluntary process. In the last century, both Japan and the United States have borrowed cultural items from one another and localized them. The step after borrowing and localization occurs when parties from each country work together with the intent of creating a joint project. Kingdom Hearts stands as a prime example of this because the Japanese company Square and the American company Disney collaborated in order to create a product which represents a hybridization of both cultures.