Images of Tibet in the 19th and 20th Centuries, edited by Monica Esposito, is a major collection of twenty-five essays in more than 800 pages on the varied images of Tibet in Europe, North America, and Asia from the seventeenth to the early twenty-first century (despite the title's more limited chronological claim). “Image” here has a number of more or less distinct connotations, though most essays treat either popular constructions and appropriations of motifs having to do with Tibet or national academic traditions of the study of Tibet, and most treat “Tibet” not as a natural but as a constructed and contested category with rhetorical and political force. Editor Monica Esposito styles the book as “the first attempt to explore various manifestations of the images of Tibet from a more global point of view, one that includes religious, aesthetic, and intellectual-historical dimensions” (p. xiii), a characterization that is generally,...
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