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The first of the book's four case studies examines the long‐standing cartoon ministry of Californian Jack Chick. Situating Chick's work in the history of the comics genre and in the visual culture of American religions, this chapter explores the specific narrative structures of Chick's political vision alongside the particular demons he portrays in his graphic art. The chapter also includes a detailed biography of Chick, a history of American comics, and a close reading of the Chick canon. The chapter concludes by documenting Chick's sense of social decline and religious fear, themes that acquire power as the Religion of Fear develops over time.

This chapter considers the cultural ecology of composite animals. Paleolithic and Neolithic societies sometimes created durable images of composite beings, and the few surviving candidates have often been accorded great prominence in modern interpretations. Yet they remain strikingly isolated. If the popularity of minimally counterintuitive images is to be explained by their core cultural content and its appeal to universal cognitive biases, the question that arises is: Why did composite figures fail so spectacularly to “catch on” across the many millennia of innovation in visual culture that precede the onset of urban life? Much hinges here upon our conceptualization of the “counterintuitive” and its role in cultural transmission. To determine what kind of “cultural ecology” the composite animal belongs to, the chapter examines composites in early dynastic Egypt before discussing the relationship between the spread of urban civilization and the widespread transmission of images depicting composite beings.

Based on an anthropological study of the childbearing experiences in the United States, this chapter examines the importance and meaning of fetal ultrasound imaging, or sonograms, for the American middle class. Expectant parents in the United States consume fetal images as “baby pictures.” Sonographers compose fetal images using portraiture conventions. This chapter explores this seeing itself as a cultural and social practice that is shaped by expectations and experiences surrounding kinship and personhood.

The story of the First World War is usually about suffering and traumatic memories. This introductory chapter sets out the main themes of the book, exploring the ways in which people recovered from war — and how ideals of beauty, sexual liberation, and human resilience supported social, medical, and cultural imagery that renewed faith in humanity. By rebuilding the body through the classical imaginary and the erotic expression of modern life, western civilization would be reconstructed.

This chapter introduces the intrinsic purpose and aim of the book: the imagining of Africa through popular culture. The book focuses on three case studies, each of which has repackaged African visual culture for the American consumer. These cases involve Mattel’s world of Barbie, the 1996 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and the Walt Disney World Resort. The study focuses primarily on the way in which visual culture reinforces, challenges, and represents social relations, especially as they have been articulated around racialized identities in the past twenty years. The first task in this study, then, is the analysis of how three companies used African visual culture, and how they have generated ideological understandings of Africa for an American public. The second task involves the investigation of the way that African visual culture focuses Americans’ understanding of themselves, particularly around black and white racialized identities.

Recent years have witnessed growing academic interest in material culture as a particularly rewarding approach to reinterpreting the German past. That Germany served as one of the twentieth century's busiest construction sites of political experimentation and utopian ventures of all stripes meant that the built environment was crucial for conveying new dreams of political power, place and possibility. Yet it is less well-known is that the 20th century placed great premium on the domestic interior. This chapter considers the issue of interior design and the construction of an East German Wohnkultur, or domestic ‘living culture,’ as both socialist ideal and lived reality. Attention will also be paid to the flourishing 1960s cottage industry of East German etiquette books as further efforts to stylize the socialist self and to remake home life as an outpost of socialist civilization.

Feminist responses to Antigone's choice to rebel against masculine authority have largely refocused the text as a discourse of gender difference in order to expose patriarchy's victimization of women. This chapter, while acknowledging feminine defiance as a crucial aspect of the text's internal contradictions, equally recognizes that Antigone's performance of the burial rites situates her firmly within paternalistic constructions of femininity. In classical art, contemporary (roughly) with Sophocles' play, defiance becomes invisible: only the traditional feminine role is portrayed. A long visual tradition follows from the classical one, always casting the ancient heroine in this same, typically feminine role, and this tradition serves as a perfect example of the modern feminist critique of the history of images, in which women are robbed of their agency. Such endemic aversion to the depiction of overt defiance is, it is proposed, symptomatic of the broader cultural response to the play's revelation of two discrete, but mutually dependent feminine constructs: one demands Antigone's submission to a patriarchal definition of femininity that would require her to relinquish her autonomous perception of her feminine role, and the other involves her wilful conformance to that self‐generated identity. Meyer proposes in this chapter to demonstrate that by politicizing Antigone in the most conservative fashion, images reinforce patriarchal gender and kinship hierarchies, implying a perception of the dangers of what the author interprets here as expressions of ‘excess’ femininity, and underlining the need for continuing oppression in the interests of masculine political systems and social stability.

Proposing a sideways move from approaches to the ‘cultural technologies’ of colonialism, which continue to relegate representation to a secondary ‘super-structural’ status, the essay explores a number of case studies that might affirm William Blake's provocation that ‘Empire follows Art’. Investigations of eighteenth-century image flows, debates over the most appropriate imperial architectural styles, photographic controversies around indigo production, and the ‘aesthetic’ nature of Gandhi's political project permit the testing of the trichotomy of ‘transculturation’, ‘purification’, and ‘autonomy’ which, it is suggested, may offer a nuanced alternative to the dichotomies established by the debates around Edward Said's Orientalism. Three final examples are intended to illustrate the proposal that the study of visual and material modalities points towards what might most productively be considered to be an alternative mode of historiography.

This chapter discusses the visual culture of 1970s Black America, focusing especially on popular culture artifacts such as film, television, and comics, to make sense of the idea of movement in the postsegregationist United States. It attends to the representation of black people in various locations—from the inner city to the suburbs to a historical memory of the plantation slavery, the middle passage, and an African motherland—in visual forms, including Afrocentrist iconography, photography, and fine art. By attending to popular images, an important if not fuller picture of Black visual politics during the post-civil rights era becomes apparent.

This chapter presents the text of a lecture on Chinese art and festival display given at the British Academy's 2009 Elsley Zeitlyn Lecture on Chinese Archaeology and Culture. This text suggests that Chinese art displayed in museums seem either unrelated to the passage of time or to defy its natural course. It analyzes the bond between Chinese visual culture and its temporal conventions in order to expand the interpretive framework for understanding Chinese pictorial art.

With a focus on early representations of the Boston Massacre and the Battle of Bunker Hill, this chapter argues that the individuals publicly honored as heroes of the Revolutionary War in the period up to the War of 1812 were primarily those with recognized political, social, and cultural authority: elite white men. Early accounts of these pivotal Revolutionary events noted the presence, but not generally the political agency, of people of color. This chapter develops this argument by exploring the commemoration (or lack thereof) of the Revolutionary contributions of Crispus Attucks and black military veterans, including Primus Hall, Peter Salem, Salem Poor, and Edom London. The sources include both visual culture and print culture, including an analysis of John Trumbull's painting of Bunker Hill.

Šāpūr I's prodigious military successes and innovations in Sasanian kingship had a great impact on Sasanian royal identity and visual culture for this reason, as well as the fact that his reign, of all Sasanian rulers, yields the greatest number of triumphal images depicting Roman emperors. His reign is pivotal for Roman and Sasanian agonistic exchange, as it marks the first time in the two realms' relationship that the imperial identity of one king dramatically changed in response to the existence and claims of the other. Under Šāpūr I, Sasanian royal ideology underwent a rapid series of important developments that radically reformed the bounds, claims, and identity of kingship in Iran and had a significant impact on Roman-Sasanian relations. The shock that Šāpūr I's victories brought to the Roman empire and the gain in confidence that they wrought for the Sasanian royal identity were huge. This chapter explores the transformation of the Sasanian empire's visual culture under Šāpūr I, Šāpūr I's capture of Valerian and his army, and the palace complex of Bīšāpūr and Roman architectural ornament.

This chapter examines John Millington Synge’s use of photography in late Victorian and Edwardian Ireland. Drawing on the writings of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, the chapter discusses Synge’s engagement with photography along with that of his contemporary John Joseph Clarke. Through a discussion of the shifting cultural practices of amateur photography and the industrialisation of camera technologies, the influence of street-photography on Synge’s writings are considered with particular reference to the politics of eye-contact in public spaces. These anxieties about ocular exchange became increasingly embedded within Edwardian modernity, and the cultural practices of street-photography became an arena through which face to face encounter between different classes and genders in urban space could be negotiated. This chapter suggests that Synge played out his own version of these apprehensions about ocular exchange and urban modernity through the use of photography in his ethnographic and journalistic writings.

This chapter provides a detailed survey of the vast literature on visual cultures in science, technology and medicine, starting with the term ‘culture’ and then portraying the concept of ‘scopic regimes’ introduced by Martin Jay, against which is positioned the author’s narrower concept of ‘visual domains.’ Visual versus textual elements in scientific representations are discussed, as well as text–image interplay and ekphrasis. Visual rhetorics and argumentation with images are documented with selected examples. Svetlana Alpers’s rich portrayal of the Dutch mapping culture in the early-modern period is taken as a historiographic master narrative. The interplay of images with recording instruments and practices is also covered, before a summary of roughly two dozen crucial insights on early “visual studies.” Finally, the question of where the “visual turn” took the wrong turn is raised. It is from this point that the following chapters take off in developing the author’s own course.

This introductory chapter begins with a survey of the rapidly expanding study of visual representations in science, followed by a discussion of spectroscopy as a prime example of a visual science culture. It describes ten historiographic levels of analysis, which are then documented in the remaining chapters. The mapping metaphor is analysed, and the rhetorics of spectra are studied. The chapter concludes with acknowledgments and a list of abbreviations for the twenty-five archives consulted.

Šāpūr I's rock reliefs and Galerius's palatial structures capitalized on actual victories over specific—even identifiable—sovereigns to craft the royal self-image. After the late third century, in the visual culture of both the Roman and the Sasanian courts, these competitive statements of victory and dominance became more and more abstract and focused increasingly on celebrating the sovereign as victor in a continuous and general sense, paralleling new expressions of divine kingship in both cultures. A new, “fraternal relationship” that emerged between Rome and Iran in the fourth century facilitated a growing familiarity and frequency of contact. Like his Roman “brother,” the Sasanian king of kings also cultivated an institutional sanctity. And like the Roman empire, the Sasanian empire conceived of itself as a universal domain that ruled the entire civilized world under a divine mandate. If the king and his actions instituted cosmological stability, then his enemies must find their parallels in the enemies of divine order. This chapter explores contested images of sacral kingship and cosmic and encrypted images of triumph in the Roman and Sasanian empires.