Niharika Dinkar
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781526139634
- eISBN:
- 9781526150387
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7765/9781526139641.00006
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
The introduction examines the empire of light formulated at the intersection of industrial and imperial visual technologies during the era of the industrialisation of light. It argues that this had a ...
More
The introduction examines the empire of light formulated at the intersection of industrial and imperial visual technologies during the era of the industrialisation of light. It argues that this had a profound impact on public life and practices of seeing, instituting new regimes of visibility. It asks how this was a legacy of Enlightenment ideas of light and evaluates its reception and negotiation by Indian artists.Less
The introduction examines the empire of light formulated at the intersection of industrial and imperial visual technologies during the era of the industrialisation of light. It argues that this had a profound impact on public life and practices of seeing, instituting new regimes of visibility. It asks how this was a legacy of Enlightenment ideas of light and evaluates its reception and negotiation by Indian artists.
Niharika Dinkar
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781526139634
- eISBN:
- 9781526150387
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7765/9781526139641.00011
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
Countering the predominantly literary analysis of Parsi theatre, this chapter reassesses theatre as the site of many experiments with visual technologies as the proscenium stage introduced a fixed ...
More
Countering the predominantly literary analysis of Parsi theatre, this chapter reassesses theatre as the site of many experiments with visual technologies as the proscenium stage introduced a fixed grammar of the curtain into the fluid spaces of premodern performance. Framed like a painting, the stage introduced illusionist painting, directional lighting and lavish costumes to present stories with verisimilitude, enticing viewers into its world. Exploring links between Parsi theatre and Ravi Varma’s paintings, the chapter discusses melodrama as an alternative aesthetic mode that bound viewers and performers. Finally, it proposes limits to the gaze of darshan as a visual trope in analyses of theatre and mythological imagery, arguing that innovative optics of theatre and painting were influenced by and in conversation with technologies of the spectacle within imperial networks.Less
Countering the predominantly literary analysis of Parsi theatre, this chapter reassesses theatre as the site of many experiments with visual technologies as the proscenium stage introduced a fixed grammar of the curtain into the fluid spaces of premodern performance. Framed like a painting, the stage introduced illusionist painting, directional lighting and lavish costumes to present stories with verisimilitude, enticing viewers into its world. Exploring links between Parsi theatre and Ravi Varma’s paintings, the chapter discusses melodrama as an alternative aesthetic mode that bound viewers and performers. Finally, it proposes limits to the gaze of darshan as a visual trope in analyses of theatre and mythological imagery, arguing that innovative optics of theatre and painting were influenced by and in conversation with technologies of the spectacle within imperial networks.
Ryan Bishop
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748643073
- eISBN:
- 9780748689071
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748643073.003.0002
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter examines cinema’s engagement with ubran-based industrialization, linking its audience and their modes of mechanized production to those that made cinema possible and does so by using ...
More
This chapter examines cinema’s engagement with ubran-based industrialization, linking its audience and their modes of mechanized production to those that made cinema possible and does so by using Chaplin and Keaton as complementary directors who engaged with mechanization. Cinema’s capacity to engage the increasingly thin line between animate and inanimate entities, between the organic and the mechanical / electric, was rendered even thinner by the technologies that altered labour and vision. The numerous connections between the machine of the factory and the vision machine of the cinema factory/industry system reveal the many roles of visual technology within the cultural politics of the first few decades of cinema, leading to a self-reflexive examination of the status of the image, and cinema’s engagement and thematising of its own power.Less
This chapter examines cinema’s engagement with ubran-based industrialization, linking its audience and their modes of mechanized production to those that made cinema possible and does so by using Chaplin and Keaton as complementary directors who engaged with mechanization. Cinema’s capacity to engage the increasingly thin line between animate and inanimate entities, between the organic and the mechanical / electric, was rendered even thinner by the technologies that altered labour and vision. The numerous connections between the machine of the factory and the vision machine of the cinema factory/industry system reveal the many roles of visual technology within the cultural politics of the first few decades of cinema, leading to a self-reflexive examination of the status of the image, and cinema’s engagement and thematising of its own power.
Ryan Bishop
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748643073
- eISBN:
- 9780748689071
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748643073.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Cinema mostly taught viewers how to understand cinema, constantly thematizing its addresses to and relationship to its audience. Comic cinema has provided a self-reflexive critique of this ...
More
Cinema mostly taught viewers how to understand cinema, constantly thematizing its addresses to and relationship to its audience. Comic cinema has provided a self-reflexive critique of this auto-technological or auto-medial training, allowing audiences to glimpse the many ways they were being conditioned and articulated in the mechanical era by this quintessential example of art form become industry. Comic cinema then considers through its own medial relations to the construction of human perception and consciousness (or aesthetics). Comedy and Cultural Critique in American Film adds to the conversation of film comedy in two primary, interrelated ways. One is it argues for the centrality of comedy in film as a means for staging (or attempting) cultural criticism. Another focuses on the powerful and sustained shifts in visual culture emergent in the 20th century that cinema helped generate, foster, and question. As a result, comedic film often addresses technology (industrial, mechanical, visual, digital, military, etc.) and techne generally that constitute the grounds of possibility for cinema itself that fall into its purview of self-reflexive cultural criticism. Cinema becomes an important site for producing and critiquing visual technology within US and global cultural politics, examining the status of the mechanically-produced and reproduced moving image, and the thematizing of its own power. In so doing, cinema simultaneously represents itself as a unique medium that is also part of a larger trajectory of visual and audiovisual technologies that have contributed not only to cinema’s formation but also created media environment in which it must function.Less
Cinema mostly taught viewers how to understand cinema, constantly thematizing its addresses to and relationship to its audience. Comic cinema has provided a self-reflexive critique of this auto-technological or auto-medial training, allowing audiences to glimpse the many ways they were being conditioned and articulated in the mechanical era by this quintessential example of art form become industry. Comic cinema then considers through its own medial relations to the construction of human perception and consciousness (or aesthetics). Comedy and Cultural Critique in American Film adds to the conversation of film comedy in two primary, interrelated ways. One is it argues for the centrality of comedy in film as a means for staging (or attempting) cultural criticism. Another focuses on the powerful and sustained shifts in visual culture emergent in the 20th century that cinema helped generate, foster, and question. As a result, comedic film often addresses technology (industrial, mechanical, visual, digital, military, etc.) and techne generally that constitute the grounds of possibility for cinema itself that fall into its purview of self-reflexive cultural criticism. Cinema becomes an important site for producing and critiquing visual technology within US and global cultural politics, examining the status of the mechanically-produced and reproduced moving image, and the thematizing of its own power. In so doing, cinema simultaneously represents itself as a unique medium that is also part of a larger trajectory of visual and audiovisual technologies that have contributed not only to cinema’s formation but also created media environment in which it must function.
Deborah Weinstein
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801451416
- eISBN:
- 9780801468155
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801451416.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
This chapter focuses on the visual technologies—particularly one-way mirrors and training films—that play a vital role in bringing together the realms of family life and therapeutic culture. It ...
More
This chapter focuses on the visual technologies—particularly one-way mirrors and training films—that play a vital role in bringing together the realms of family life and therapeutic culture. It explores two domains in which family therapists incorporated these technologies: educational programs to train new family therapists, and research efforts to understand and treat delinquency as a clinical problem. Family therapists turned to visual technologies not just for their seeming objectivity and superiority in recounting family events or therapy sessions. They incorporated these technologies because such tools enabled them to engage with the performative dimensions of family pathology itself. Equipped with visual technologies, family therapy training programs, clinical practices, and research projects solidified this alignment of how to know and what to know.Less
This chapter focuses on the visual technologies—particularly one-way mirrors and training films—that play a vital role in bringing together the realms of family life and therapeutic culture. It explores two domains in which family therapists incorporated these technologies: educational programs to train new family therapists, and research efforts to understand and treat delinquency as a clinical problem. Family therapists turned to visual technologies not just for their seeming objectivity and superiority in recounting family events or therapy sessions. They incorporated these technologies because such tools enabled them to engage with the performative dimensions of family pathology itself. Equipped with visual technologies, family therapy training programs, clinical practices, and research projects solidified this alignment of how to know and what to know.
Joseph Jaconelli
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780198252580
- eISBN:
- 9780191681387
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198252580.003.0009
- Subject:
- Law, Criminal Law and Criminology
This chapter is devoted to the reporting of trials to those persons who were not present in the courtroom in the specific context of radio and television coverage of the proceedings. It is already ...
More
This chapter is devoted to the reporting of trials to those persons who were not present in the courtroom in the specific context of radio and television coverage of the proceedings. It is already commonplace in some legal systems for court hearings, under controlled conditions, to be open to radio and television coverage. In some countries, the applicable conditions are such that material is produced in sufficient abundance to maintain in existence a regular programme, or even a whole network, devoted to the broadcast of trial proceedings. The example of such jurisdictions has prompted the call for the admission to the English courtroom of audio-visual technology with a view to the transmission of the proceedings. Such proposals for change as have been advanced have been in favour of permitting the televising of court proceedings, and it is this aspect of the subject that forms the principal focus of this chapter.Less
This chapter is devoted to the reporting of trials to those persons who were not present in the courtroom in the specific context of radio and television coverage of the proceedings. It is already commonplace in some legal systems for court hearings, under controlled conditions, to be open to radio and television coverage. In some countries, the applicable conditions are such that material is produced in sufficient abundance to maintain in existence a regular programme, or even a whole network, devoted to the broadcast of trial proceedings. The example of such jurisdictions has prompted the call for the admission to the English courtroom of audio-visual technology with a view to the transmission of the proceedings. Such proposals for change as have been advanced have been in favour of permitting the televising of court proceedings, and it is this aspect of the subject that forms the principal focus of this chapter.
Curtis Marez
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780816672318
- eISBN:
- 9781452954288
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816672318.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
Chapter One centers an important case study in the history of farm worker visual culture: as part of a strike in the late 1940s, union organizer Ernesto Galarza constructed influential photo collages ...
More
Chapter One centers an important case study in the history of farm worker visual culture: as part of a strike in the late 1940s, union organizer Ernesto Galarza constructed influential photo collages that both criticized agribusiness and projected an alternate world of union organizing.Less
Chapter One centers an important case study in the history of farm worker visual culture: as part of a strike in the late 1940s, union organizer Ernesto Galarza constructed influential photo collages that both criticized agribusiness and projected an alternate world of union organizing.
Deirdre Loughridge
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226337098
- eISBN:
- 9780226337128
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226337128.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Philosophy of Music
This book is about the changing audiovisual culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and its significance for the emergence of musical romanticism. The period from Haydn’s early ...
More
This book is about the changing audiovisual culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and its significance for the emergence of musical romanticism. The period from Haydn’s early career to Beethoven’s maturity – roughly 1760 to 1810 – witnessed the cultural diffusion of visual technologies such as magnifying instruments, peepshows, shadow-plays and magic lanterns. From their initial homes in fairgrounds, laboratories and popular scientific literature, these devices moved into domestic spaces, public spectacles and the basic vocabulary of a wide range of discourses, including the language used to discuss music. This book trace the processes of dissemination and reception by which these devices facilitated changes in musical perception. Through relations that include analogy, substitution and accompaniment, the conjunctions of visual technologies and music helped cultivate new modes of listening. They also promoted notions of extending the senses and mastering invisible forces as alternative frameworks to mimesis and expression for making sense of music. By showing that musical romanticism embedded aspects of audiovisual culture, this book addresses one of the grand narratives of music history: that by aligning music purely with the ear and purging its material dimensions, romanticism spurred the development of a culture of serious music. Instead, this book shows how pivotal texts of musical romanticism evidence the entwinements of sight and sound, looking and listening, from which music gained status as the most metaphysical and otherworldly of the arts.Less
This book is about the changing audiovisual culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and its significance for the emergence of musical romanticism. The period from Haydn’s early career to Beethoven’s maturity – roughly 1760 to 1810 – witnessed the cultural diffusion of visual technologies such as magnifying instruments, peepshows, shadow-plays and magic lanterns. From their initial homes in fairgrounds, laboratories and popular scientific literature, these devices moved into domestic spaces, public spectacles and the basic vocabulary of a wide range of discourses, including the language used to discuss music. This book trace the processes of dissemination and reception by which these devices facilitated changes in musical perception. Through relations that include analogy, substitution and accompaniment, the conjunctions of visual technologies and music helped cultivate new modes of listening. They also promoted notions of extending the senses and mastering invisible forces as alternative frameworks to mimesis and expression for making sense of music. By showing that musical romanticism embedded aspects of audiovisual culture, this book addresses one of the grand narratives of music history: that by aligning music purely with the ear and purging its material dimensions, romanticism spurred the development of a culture of serious music. Instead, this book shows how pivotal texts of musical romanticism evidence the entwinements of sight and sound, looking and listening, from which music gained status as the most metaphysical and otherworldly of the arts.
Simon Naylor (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226487267
- eISBN:
- 9780226487298
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226487298.003.0014
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
This chapter explains how the cartographic enterprise can be read as a “form of territorial acquisition” on the part of mapping geologists, focusing the mapping of geology of Cornwall, England. It ...
More
This chapter explains how the cartographic enterprise can be read as a “form of territorial acquisition” on the part of mapping geologists, focusing the mapping of geology of Cornwall, England. It highlights the importance of maps spatial instruments and as a visual language and as an important tool in the “visual technology” of the natural sciences. This chapter explains that survey of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall depended on the reductive visual authority of the map as a guide to what could and could not be seen.Less
This chapter explains how the cartographic enterprise can be read as a “form of territorial acquisition” on the part of mapping geologists, focusing the mapping of geology of Cornwall, England. It highlights the importance of maps spatial instruments and as a visual language and as an important tool in the “visual technology” of the natural sciences. This chapter explains that survey of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall depended on the reductive visual authority of the map as a guide to what could and could not be seen.
Timothy Lenoir and Luke Caldwell
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781526107213
- eISBN:
- 9781526120984
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526107213.003.0007
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This chapter examines how control in military contexts is refracted, multiplied, and circulated through the lens of the image. It looks at military developments in networking the battlefield, from ...
More
This chapter examines how control in military contexts is refracted, multiplied, and circulated through the lens of the image. It looks at military developments in networking the battlefield, from visual interface technologies and recruitment games like America’s Army to the Future Combat System that aims to tie all combat forces together through graphical representation. The authors examine the development of imaging technologies that ‘dividualise’ people and tie them into circuits of power that often have little to do with the representational content of the image.Less
This chapter examines how control in military contexts is refracted, multiplied, and circulated through the lens of the image. It looks at military developments in networking the battlefield, from visual interface technologies and recruitment games like America’s Army to the Future Combat System that aims to tie all combat forces together through graphical representation. The authors examine the development of imaging technologies that ‘dividualise’ people and tie them into circuits of power that often have little to do with the representational content of the image.
François G. Richard
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780226252407
- eISBN:
- 9780226252681
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226252681.003.0004
- Subject:
- Anthropology, African Cultural Anthropology
Chapter 4 addresses the construction of peasantries and tradition in colonial ethnography. Although the Seereer have been portrayed as timeless farmers, a close reading of ethnographic archives, ...
More
Chapter 4 addresses the construction of peasantries and tradition in colonial ethnography. Although the Seereer have been portrayed as timeless farmers, a close reading of ethnographic archives, attentive to convergent and dissonant accounts, shows that images of typical peasants greatly underestimate the dynamism of rural culture. The chapter also examines how static portraits of Seereer farmers speak as much to imperial anxieties and colonial preoccupations as to the social existence of people in Siin. Key to these discursive productions was the crystallization of Seereer farmers as creatures of their natural milieu. Landscape here serves as a visual technology of colonial power, which assisted the primitivization of rural Africans while papering over evidence of Seereer cultural dynamism in the colonial and precolonial pasts. To redress these representations, we must instead view tradition as a labile mode of engagement with outside forces of change. Indeed, a close reading of the written record shows considerable vibrancy and heterogeneity in Seereer social and political organization, kinship structures, agricultural ecology and landholding practices, village layouts, cultural economy, and religious orientations – which, in turn, provides a fluid baseline of cultural information to be compared with documentary, oral and archaeological evidence for earlier periods.Less
Chapter 4 addresses the construction of peasantries and tradition in colonial ethnography. Although the Seereer have been portrayed as timeless farmers, a close reading of ethnographic archives, attentive to convergent and dissonant accounts, shows that images of typical peasants greatly underestimate the dynamism of rural culture. The chapter also examines how static portraits of Seereer farmers speak as much to imperial anxieties and colonial preoccupations as to the social existence of people in Siin. Key to these discursive productions was the crystallization of Seereer farmers as creatures of their natural milieu. Landscape here serves as a visual technology of colonial power, which assisted the primitivization of rural Africans while papering over evidence of Seereer cultural dynamism in the colonial and precolonial pasts. To redress these representations, we must instead view tradition as a labile mode of engagement with outside forces of change. Indeed, a close reading of the written record shows considerable vibrancy and heterogeneity in Seereer social and political organization, kinship structures, agricultural ecology and landholding practices, village layouts, cultural economy, and religious orientations – which, in turn, provides a fluid baseline of cultural information to be compared with documentary, oral and archaeological evidence for earlier periods.
Omar W. Nasim
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780226084374
- eISBN:
- 9780226084404
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226084404.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
There can be little doubt that it was because of the giant telescopes that were being built at the end of the 18th and for most of the 19th century that the modern study of nebulae began. Also of ...
More
There can be little doubt that it was because of the giant telescopes that were being built at the end of the 18th and for most of the 19th century that the modern study of nebulae began. Also of immense significance, however, was the fundamental role-played by paper and pencil. But what role did paper and the hand play in coming to terms with something as mysterious as these deep sky objects? What possibly could these paper implements of the hand contribute to the scientific observation of celestial objects that no hand could ever touch, twist or twirl? And in contrast to pencil and paper, when photography was finally successfully applied to the nebulae very late in the century, how exactly did its methods contrast to the former? In order to answer these and other related questions about the techniques, nature and practices of scientific observation, Observing by Hand investigates the unpublished observing books and paper records of five different nineteenth century observers dedicated to the study of the nebulae: Sir John F. W. Herschel, the third Earl of Rosse, William Lassell, Ebenezer Porter Mason, and Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel. The book argues that rather than being mere aide memoire, hand drawn images operated as tools for seeing better with, for directing observation, for selection and judgement, for stabilizing the image of the phenomena, for consolidating and coordinating hands and eyes, and for making out details otherwise barely perceptible. The work explores the relationship between observing, the act of drawing, and the constitution of scientific phenomena.Less
There can be little doubt that it was because of the giant telescopes that were being built at the end of the 18th and for most of the 19th century that the modern study of nebulae began. Also of immense significance, however, was the fundamental role-played by paper and pencil. But what role did paper and the hand play in coming to terms with something as mysterious as these deep sky objects? What possibly could these paper implements of the hand contribute to the scientific observation of celestial objects that no hand could ever touch, twist or twirl? And in contrast to pencil and paper, when photography was finally successfully applied to the nebulae very late in the century, how exactly did its methods contrast to the former? In order to answer these and other related questions about the techniques, nature and practices of scientific observation, Observing by Hand investigates the unpublished observing books and paper records of five different nineteenth century observers dedicated to the study of the nebulae: Sir John F. W. Herschel, the third Earl of Rosse, William Lassell, Ebenezer Porter Mason, and Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel. The book argues that rather than being mere aide memoire, hand drawn images operated as tools for seeing better with, for directing observation, for selection and judgement, for stabilizing the image of the phenomena, for consolidating and coordinating hands and eyes, and for making out details otherwise barely perceptible. The work explores the relationship between observing, the act of drawing, and the constitution of scientific phenomena.
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846312120
- eISBN:
- 9781846315190
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846315190.002
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
References to visual technology began appearing in American fiction in the 1890s, one example of which is the presence of a device called the ‘visual telegraph’ in John Jacob Astor's novel A Journey ...
More
References to visual technology began appearing in American fiction in the 1890s, one example of which is the presence of a device called the ‘visual telegraph’ in John Jacob Astor's novel A Journey in Other Worlds. The period from the mid-1890s to 1920 marks a transition between such early references to a situation in which film became fully recognized as a cultural medium. This chapter discusses the features of this transition. It examines early treatments of films in the writings of Edith Wharton, Thomas Dixon, and their contemporaries, and considers how cinema gradually assumed its central cultural status.Less
References to visual technology began appearing in American fiction in the 1890s, one example of which is the presence of a device called the ‘visual telegraph’ in John Jacob Astor's novel A Journey in Other Worlds. The period from the mid-1890s to 1920 marks a transition between such early references to a situation in which film became fully recognized as a cultural medium. This chapter discusses the features of this transition. It examines early treatments of films in the writings of Edith Wharton, Thomas Dixon, and their contemporaries, and considers how cinema gradually assumed its central cultural status.
Ruby C. Tapia
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816653102
- eISBN:
- 9781452946153
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816653102.003.0003
- Subject:
- Sociology, Gender and Sexuality
This chapter studies how the “official” and “commemorative” images of Diana Spencer invoke tropes of charity and sympathy to produce racialized mediations of history, memory, motherhood, and U.S. ...
More
This chapter studies how the “official” and “commemorative” images of Diana Spencer invoke tropes of charity and sympathy to produce racialized mediations of history, memory, motherhood, and U.S. national identity. Drawing from cultural theory that establishes visual technologies of memory and forgetting as material forces, the chapter considers images of Diana appearing in “Collector’s Editions” of “American” popular magazines as People and Life to illuminate the visual scripts of race that define the relative social values of maternity and reproduction. It also identifies the visual production of the idealized notions of whiteness, motherhood, and the family, and suggests that they are coproduced and reinforced by different media forms and genres.Less
This chapter studies how the “official” and “commemorative” images of Diana Spencer invoke tropes of charity and sympathy to produce racialized mediations of history, memory, motherhood, and U.S. national identity. Drawing from cultural theory that establishes visual technologies of memory and forgetting as material forces, the chapter considers images of Diana appearing in “Collector’s Editions” of “American” popular magazines as People and Life to illuminate the visual scripts of race that define the relative social values of maternity and reproduction. It also identifies the visual production of the idealized notions of whiteness, motherhood, and the family, and suggests that they are coproduced and reinforced by different media forms and genres.
