Janet Neary
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823272891
- eISBN:
- 9780823272945
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823272891.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
Fugitive Testimony traces the African American slave narrative across the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries in order to rethink the epistemological limits of the form and to theorize the complicated ...
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Fugitive Testimony traces the African American slave narrative across the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries in order to rethink the epistemological limits of the form and to theorize the complicated interplay between the visual and the literary throughout its history. Gathering an archive of ante- and post-bellum literary slave narratives and visual art, the book redraws the genealogy of the slave narrative in light of its emergence in contemporary art and brings visual and performance theory to bear on the genre’s central problematic: that the ex-slave narrator must be both object and subject of the narrative to provide an eyewitness account of his or her own enslavement. The book takes as its starting point the evocation of the slave narrative in works by a number of current-day visual artists, including Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker, and Ellen Driscoll, and uses the representational strategies of these artists to decode the visual work performed in 19th-century literary narratives by Elizabeth Keckley, Solomon Northup, William Craft, and Henry Box Brown. Focusing on slave narratives’ textual visuality and aspects of narrative performance, rather than the intermedial, semiotic traffic between images and text, the book argues that ex-slave narrators and the contemporary artists under consideration use the logic of the slave narrative form against itself to undermine the evidentiary epistemology of the genre and offer a model of visuality as intersubjective recognition rather than objective division.Less
Fugitive Testimony traces the African American slave narrative across the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries in order to rethink the epistemological limits of the form and to theorize the complicated interplay between the visual and the literary throughout its history. Gathering an archive of ante- and post-bellum literary slave narratives and visual art, the book redraws the genealogy of the slave narrative in light of its emergence in contemporary art and brings visual and performance theory to bear on the genre’s central problematic: that the ex-slave narrator must be both object and subject of the narrative to provide an eyewitness account of his or her own enslavement. The book takes as its starting point the evocation of the slave narrative in works by a number of current-day visual artists, including Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker, and Ellen Driscoll, and uses the representational strategies of these artists to decode the visual work performed in 19th-century literary narratives by Elizabeth Keckley, Solomon Northup, William Craft, and Henry Box Brown. Focusing on slave narratives’ textual visuality and aspects of narrative performance, rather than the intermedial, semiotic traffic between images and text, the book argues that ex-slave narrators and the contemporary artists under consideration use the logic of the slave narrative form against itself to undermine the evidentiary epistemology of the genre and offer a model of visuality as intersubjective recognition rather than objective division.
Martin Meisel
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199215492
- eISBN:
- 9780191695957
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199215492.003.0014
- Subject:
- Literature, Drama
A competent reader of plays will experience a sensation of visuality, tied less to an idea of the mediating stage than to the world directly evoked by the text of the play. Such a sensation of ...
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A competent reader of plays will experience a sensation of visuality, tied less to an idea of the mediating stage than to the world directly evoked by the text of the play. Such a sensation of visuality makes for a virtual space constituted as of the moment by what is immediately pertinent; a space more or less intimate, depending on what is going forward, while the rest of what would make up a complete visual world is felt, not as an absence or incompleteness, but as a vague potentiality. This chapter discusses the following topics: sound that is not speech, indirect seeing, visible speech, masks and markings, dress code, the object in view, and movement and configuration.Less
A competent reader of plays will experience a sensation of visuality, tied less to an idea of the mediating stage than to the world directly evoked by the text of the play. Such a sensation of visuality makes for a virtual space constituted as of the moment by what is immediately pertinent; a space more or less intimate, depending on what is going forward, while the rest of what would make up a complete visual world is felt, not as an absence or incompleteness, but as a vague potentiality. This chapter discusses the following topics: sound that is not speech, indirect seeing, visible speech, masks and markings, dress code, the object in view, and movement and configuration.
Ana Carden‐Coyne
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199546466
- eISBN:
- 9780191720659
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199546466.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
This chapter examines the traumatic and pleasurable aspects of war. Visual culture — films, art, war writing, and surgical literature — influenced the ‘cultural memory’ of the ‘war-wrecked’ body, to ...
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This chapter examines the traumatic and pleasurable aspects of war. Visual culture — films, art, war writing, and surgical literature — influenced the ‘cultural memory’ of the ‘war-wrecked’ body, to which reconstruction responded. The chapter illuminates the context in which painful narratives and violent images resonated from the individual to society through cultural forms. It questions the use of trauma theory in comprehending reactions to war in the past. Trauma theory does not account for the ‘pleasure culture of war’ and the curiosity around the wounded body. The chapter argues that the ‘culture shock’ of modern warfare visualized violence and suffering, and this was part of the search for meaning. Audiences found visual culture informative, comforting, and entertaining, even if the authenticity of images was uncertain. Pain and suffering were part of a spectacle that sustained the power of visual memory through the production of culture.Less
This chapter examines the traumatic and pleasurable aspects of war. Visual culture — films, art, war writing, and surgical literature — influenced the ‘cultural memory’ of the ‘war-wrecked’ body, to which reconstruction responded. The chapter illuminates the context in which painful narratives and violent images resonated from the individual to society through cultural forms. It questions the use of trauma theory in comprehending reactions to war in the past. Trauma theory does not account for the ‘pleasure culture of war’ and the curiosity around the wounded body. The chapter argues that the ‘culture shock’ of modern warfare visualized violence and suffering, and this was part of the search for meaning. Audiences found visual culture informative, comforting, and entertaining, even if the authenticity of images was uncertain. Pain and suffering were part of a spectacle that sustained the power of visual memory through the production of culture.
Tonio Hölscher
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780520294936
- eISBN:
- 9780520967885
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520294936.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, History of Art: pre-history, BCE to 500CE, ancient and classical, Byzantine
This book aims to explore the aspects of visuality in Greek and Roman culture, comprising the visual appearance of images as well as the reality of the social world. The face-to-face societies of ...
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This book aims to explore the aspects of visuality in Greek and Roman culture, comprising the visual appearance of images as well as the reality of the social world. The face-to-face societies of ancient Greece and Rome were to a high degree based on civic presence and direct, immediate social interaction in which visual appearance and experience of beings and things was of paramount importance. The six chapters of the book are dedicated to action in space, memory over time, the appearance of the person, conceptualization of reality, and, finally, presentification and decor as fundamental categories of art in social practice.Less
This book aims to explore the aspects of visuality in Greek and Roman culture, comprising the visual appearance of images as well as the reality of the social world. The face-to-face societies of ancient Greece and Rome were to a high degree based on civic presence and direct, immediate social interaction in which visual appearance and experience of beings and things was of paramount importance. The six chapters of the book are dedicated to action in space, memory over time, the appearance of the person, conceptualization of reality, and, finally, presentification and decor as fundamental categories of art in social practice.
Kaitlin M. Murphy
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780823282548
- eISBN:
- 9780823284818
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823282548.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Latin American Studies
This chapter focuses on Who Is Dayani Cristal (2013), a hybrid documentary-fiction film that combines forensic attempts to identify a body found in the southern Arizona desert with the fictional ...
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This chapter focuses on Who Is Dayani Cristal (2013), a hybrid documentary-fiction film that combines forensic attempts to identify a body found in the southern Arizona desert with the fictional retracing of his steps along the migrant trail, running through Central America up to the deadly stretch of desert known as the “corridor of death,” where his body is ultimately found. The author examines the film alongside a range of other contemporary visual and new media texts, including the Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/B.A.N.G. Lab’s 2010 “Transborder Immigrant Tool” and John Craig Freeman’s 2012 “Border Memorial: Frontera de los Muertos.” Within the context of visual economies that simultaneously promote both the radical invisibility and hypervisibility of undocumented border crossers (both alive and deceased), this chapter investigates how visual memory mapping projects work to redirect the gaze toward new ways of seeing and feeling. In so doing, I argue, memory mapping functions as a visual strategy to ask, and to challenge, why certain lives are rendered visible and thus grievable and others not.Less
This chapter focuses on Who Is Dayani Cristal (2013), a hybrid documentary-fiction film that combines forensic attempts to identify a body found in the southern Arizona desert with the fictional retracing of his steps along the migrant trail, running through Central America up to the deadly stretch of desert known as the “corridor of death,” where his body is ultimately found. The author examines the film alongside a range of other contemporary visual and new media texts, including the Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/B.A.N.G. Lab’s 2010 “Transborder Immigrant Tool” and John Craig Freeman’s 2012 “Border Memorial: Frontera de los Muertos.” Within the context of visual economies that simultaneously promote both the radical invisibility and hypervisibility of undocumented border crossers (both alive and deceased), this chapter investigates how visual memory mapping projects work to redirect the gaze toward new ways of seeing and feeling. In so doing, I argue, memory mapping functions as a visual strategy to ask, and to challenge, why certain lives are rendered visible and thus grievable and others not.
Ivy G. Wilson
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195337372
- eISBN:
- 9780199896929
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195337372.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
This book interrogates the representational strategies that 19th-century Americans used in art and literature to delineate blackness as an index to the forms of U.S. citizenship. The book reveals how ...
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This book interrogates the representational strategies that 19th-century Americans used in art and literature to delineate blackness as an index to the forms of U.S. citizenship. The book reveals how the difficult task of representing African Americans—both enslaved and free—in imaginative expression was part of a larger dilemma concerning representative democracy. More specifically, the book analyzes how African Americans manipulated aurality and visuality in art that depicted images of national belonging not only as a mode of critique but as an iteration or articulation of democratic representation itself. Such a turn to culture as a particular arena where African Americans had varying levels of agency is all the more necessary in the years before they were ostensibly granted access to formal political structures with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. Recovering important aspects of the African American presence in the debates about democracy and citizenship, this book focuses on the mutual engagement with the national idioms by both black and white Americans and illustrates how African Americans in particular deployed artistic practices to enact a more egalitarian society.Less
This book interrogates the representational strategies that 19th-century Americans used in art and literature to delineate blackness as an index to the forms of U.S. citizenship. The book reveals how the difficult task of representing African Americans—both enslaved and free—in imaginative expression was part of a larger dilemma concerning representative democracy. More specifically, the book analyzes how African Americans manipulated aurality and visuality in art that depicted images of national belonging not only as a mode of critique but as an iteration or articulation of democratic representation itself. Such a turn to culture as a particular arena where African Americans had varying levels of agency is all the more necessary in the years before they were ostensibly granted access to formal political structures with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. Recovering important aspects of the African American presence in the debates about democracy and citizenship, this book focuses on the mutual engagement with the national idioms by both black and white Americans and illustrates how African Americans in particular deployed artistic practices to enact a more egalitarian society.
Julia Hell
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780226588056
- eISBN:
- 9780226588223
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226588223.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
Connecting post-imperial studies to ruin studies, The Conquest of Ruins reconstructs and analyzes the Roman Empire’s afterlife as Western Europe’s history of neo-Roman mimesis. Each moment in the ...
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Connecting post-imperial studies to ruin studies, The Conquest of Ruins reconstructs and analyzes the Roman Empire’s afterlife as Western Europe’s history of neo-Roman mimesis. Each moment in the European history of imitating Rome, from Charles V to the Nazi empire, generated its own mimetic practices and texts reflecting on Rome and neo-Roman empires. The Romans’ monumentalizing empire-making and theatricality of politics shaped later imitations. These mimetic moments constructed the ancient empire as the ultimate expression of imperial power. At the same time, they also produced a never-ending series of scenes about Rome’s ruination. The first of these ruin scenarios originated with the Roman conquest of Carthage. Representing the ancient Roman metropole as a ruined stage, these scenarios thematize the enigma of Rome’s fall. They also define empire’s time as eschaton or endtime and raise the question of how to ward off the end. Political leaders, imperial theorists, and artists went in search of strategies to fortify their empires. The book traces this obsession with the Roman empire’s end from Augustus to Hitler, Polybios to Schmitt, Virgil to Riefenstahl, and Roman to Nazi architecture. The author combines intellectual history with literary/visual and psychoanalytic approaches. She proposes a model of imperial mimesis and the neo-Roman imaginary and analyzes the theatrical form of ruin scenarios across different media. She also develops a notion of realism proper to the political aesthetics of neo-Roman empires. This realism draws on the “absent presence” of ruins and mimesis as a mode of representation demanding recognition and imitation.Less
Connecting post-imperial studies to ruin studies, The Conquest of Ruins reconstructs and analyzes the Roman Empire’s afterlife as Western Europe’s history of neo-Roman mimesis. Each moment in the European history of imitating Rome, from Charles V to the Nazi empire, generated its own mimetic practices and texts reflecting on Rome and neo-Roman empires. The Romans’ monumentalizing empire-making and theatricality of politics shaped later imitations. These mimetic moments constructed the ancient empire as the ultimate expression of imperial power. At the same time, they also produced a never-ending series of scenes about Rome’s ruination. The first of these ruin scenarios originated with the Roman conquest of Carthage. Representing the ancient Roman metropole as a ruined stage, these scenarios thematize the enigma of Rome’s fall. They also define empire’s time as eschaton or endtime and raise the question of how to ward off the end. Political leaders, imperial theorists, and artists went in search of strategies to fortify their empires. The book traces this obsession with the Roman empire’s end from Augustus to Hitler, Polybios to Schmitt, Virgil to Riefenstahl, and Roman to Nazi architecture. The author combines intellectual history with literary/visual and psychoanalytic approaches. She proposes a model of imperial mimesis and the neo-Roman imaginary and analyzes the theatrical form of ruin scenarios across different media. She also develops a notion of realism proper to the political aesthetics of neo-Roman empires. This realism draws on the “absent presence” of ruins and mimesis as a mode of representation demanding recognition and imitation.
Sarah Robertson
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781496824325
- eISBN:
- 9781496824370
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496824325.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
After briefly outlining the work of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers and writers during the Great Depression, the chapter turns to rephotography projects, namely that of Dale ...
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After briefly outlining the work of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers and writers during the Great Depression, the chapter turns to rephotography projects, namely that of Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, to explore the FSA’s legacy. The chapter interrogates the relationship and tension between aesthetics and activism as it examines several contemporary photo-narratives focused on Appalachia. In addition to critically discussing the work of Appalshop, it questions the representation of the poor in photo-narratives by, amongst others, Shelby Lee Adams, Tim Barnwell and Susan Lipper. The chapter focuses on questions of counter-visuality as it presents contemporary life-writing by writers such as Dorothy Allison, Rick Bragg, Barbara Robinette Moss and Janisse Ray, as a vehicle for producing counter-visual legacies.Less
After briefly outlining the work of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers and writers during the Great Depression, the chapter turns to rephotography projects, namely that of Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, to explore the FSA’s legacy. The chapter interrogates the relationship and tension between aesthetics and activism as it examines several contemporary photo-narratives focused on Appalachia. In addition to critically discussing the work of Appalshop, it questions the representation of the poor in photo-narratives by, amongst others, Shelby Lee Adams, Tim Barnwell and Susan Lipper. The chapter focuses on questions of counter-visuality as it presents contemporary life-writing by writers such as Dorothy Allison, Rick Bragg, Barbara Robinette Moss and Janisse Ray, as a vehicle for producing counter-visual legacies.
Paul Landau and Susan Griffin (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520229488
- eISBN:
- 9780520927292
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520229488.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, World Modern History
Figurative images have long played a critical, if largely unexamined, role in Africa—mediating relationships between the colonizer and the colonized, the state and the individual, and the global and ...
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Figurative images have long played a critical, if largely unexamined, role in Africa—mediating relationships between the colonizer and the colonized, the state and the individual, and the global and the local. This book considers the meaning and power of images in African history and culture. The chapters include specific visual forms, including monuments, cinema, cartoons, domestic and professional photography, body art, world fairs, and museum exhibits. The chapters discuss various modes of visuality in Africa and of Africa, investigating the interplay of visual images with personal identity, class, gender, politics, and wealth. Integral to the argument of the book are over seventy contextualized illustrations. Africans saw foreigners in margarine wrappers, Tintin cartoons, circus posters, and Hollywood movies; westerners gleaned impressions of Africans from colonial exhibitions, Tarzan films, and naturalist magazines. The chapters provide concrete examples of the construction of Africa's image in the modern world. They reveal how imperial iconographies sought to understand, deny, control, or transform authority, as well as the complexity and hybridity of visual communication within Africa itself.Less
Figurative images have long played a critical, if largely unexamined, role in Africa—mediating relationships between the colonizer and the colonized, the state and the individual, and the global and the local. This book considers the meaning and power of images in African history and culture. The chapters include specific visual forms, including monuments, cinema, cartoons, domestic and professional photography, body art, world fairs, and museum exhibits. The chapters discuss various modes of visuality in Africa and of Africa, investigating the interplay of visual images with personal identity, class, gender, politics, and wealth. Integral to the argument of the book are over seventy contextualized illustrations. Africans saw foreigners in margarine wrappers, Tintin cartoons, circus posters, and Hollywood movies; westerners gleaned impressions of Africans from colonial exhibitions, Tarzan films, and naturalist magazines. The chapters provide concrete examples of the construction of Africa's image in the modern world. They reveal how imperial iconographies sought to understand, deny, control, or transform authority, as well as the complexity and hybridity of visual communication within Africa itself.
Andrew Kahn
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198857938
- eISBN:
- 9780191890505
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198857938.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, World Literature
Rightly appreciated as a ‘poet’s poet’, Mandelstam has been habitually read as a repository of learned allusion. Yet as Seamus Heaney observed, his work is ‘as firmly rooted in both an historical and ...
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Rightly appreciated as a ‘poet’s poet’, Mandelstam has been habitually read as a repository of learned allusion. Yet as Seamus Heaney observed, his work is ‘as firmly rooted in both an historical and cultural context as real as Joyce’s Ulysses or Eliot’s Waste Land’. Great lyric poets offer a cross-section of their times, and Mandelstam’s poems represent the worlds of politics, history, art, and ideas about intimacy and creativity. The interconnections between these domains and Mandelstam’s writings are the subject of this book, showing how engaged the poet was with the history, social movements, political ideology, and aesthetics of his time. The importance of the book also lies in showing how literature, no less than history and philosophy, enables readers to confront the huge upheaval in outlook that can be demanded of us; thinking with poetry is to think through the moral compromise and tension felt by individuals in public and private contexts, and to create out of art experience in itself. The book further innovates by integrating a new, comprehensive discussion of the Voronezh Notebooks, one of the supreme achievements of Russian poetry. Mandelstam’s controversial political poetry has been virtually a taboo topic (despite sporadic attempts at assessment). This book considers the full political dimension of works that explore the role of the poet as a figure positioned within society but outside the state, caught between an ideal of creative independence and a devotion to the original, ameliorative ideals of the revolution.Less
Rightly appreciated as a ‘poet’s poet’, Mandelstam has been habitually read as a repository of learned allusion. Yet as Seamus Heaney observed, his work is ‘as firmly rooted in both an historical and cultural context as real as Joyce’s Ulysses or Eliot’s Waste Land’. Great lyric poets offer a cross-section of their times, and Mandelstam’s poems represent the worlds of politics, history, art, and ideas about intimacy and creativity. The interconnections between these domains and Mandelstam’s writings are the subject of this book, showing how engaged the poet was with the history, social movements, political ideology, and aesthetics of his time. The importance of the book also lies in showing how literature, no less than history and philosophy, enables readers to confront the huge upheaval in outlook that can be demanded of us; thinking with poetry is to think through the moral compromise and tension felt by individuals in public and private contexts, and to create out of art experience in itself. The book further innovates by integrating a new, comprehensive discussion of the Voronezh Notebooks, one of the supreme achievements of Russian poetry. Mandelstam’s controversial political poetry has been virtually a taboo topic (despite sporadic attempts at assessment). This book considers the full political dimension of works that explore the role of the poet as a figure positioned within society but outside the state, caught between an ideal of creative independence and a devotion to the original, ameliorative ideals of the revolution.
Eric Kit-wai Ma
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9789888083459
- eISBN:
- 9789882209329
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888083459.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
This chapter summarizes the history of transborder imaginations of South China and Hong Kong by examining the production processes of media representations in which Hong Kong visual producers have ...
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This chapter summarizes the history of transborder imaginations of South China and Hong Kong by examining the production processes of media representations in which Hong Kong visual producers have changed from the role of a ‘teacher’ in the 1970s to the role of a ‘co-producers’ in the 2000s. This interplay is a form of ‘transborder visuality’, which refers to the transfer of visual culture from one geographic location to another. It can be seen as a crucial nexus of cultural globalization at a time when China is catching up with the developed world. Applying the concept of ‘image apparatus’ helps us better understand the complicated nerves, nodes, and social networks that facilitate the production of modern, flexible, and sophisticated visual images in the global visual economy.Less
This chapter summarizes the history of transborder imaginations of South China and Hong Kong by examining the production processes of media representations in which Hong Kong visual producers have changed from the role of a ‘teacher’ in the 1970s to the role of a ‘co-producers’ in the 2000s. This interplay is a form of ‘transborder visuality’, which refers to the transfer of visual culture from one geographic location to another. It can be seen as a crucial nexus of cultural globalization at a time when China is catching up with the developed world. Applying the concept of ‘image apparatus’ helps us better understand the complicated nerves, nodes, and social networks that facilitate the production of modern, flexible, and sophisticated visual images in the global visual economy.
Kate Mondloch
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816665211
- eISBN:
- 9781452946504
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816665211.001.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Visual Culture
Media screens—film, video, and computer screens—have increasingly pervaded both artistic production and everyday life since the 1960s. Yet the nature of viewing artworks made from these media, along ...
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Media screens—film, video, and computer screens—have increasingly pervaded both artistic production and everyday life since the 1960s. Yet the nature of viewing artworks made from these media, along with their subjective effects, remains largely unexplored. This book aims to address this gap, offering a historical and theoretical framework for understanding screen-reliant installation art and the spectatorship it evokes. Examining a range of installations created over the past fifty years that investigate the rich terrain between the sculptural and the cinematic, including works by artists such as Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Doug Aitken, Peter Campus, Dan Graham, VALIE EXPORT, Bruce Nauman, and Michael Snow, the book traces the construction of screen spectatorship in art from the seminal film and video installations of the 1960s and 1970s to the new media artworks of today’s digital culture. This book identifies a momentous shift in contemporary art that challenges key premises of spectatorship brought about by technological objects that literally and metaphorically filter the subject’s field of vision. As a result it proposes that contemporary viewers are, quite literally, screen subjects and offers the unique critical leverage of art as an alternative way to understand media culture and contemporary visuality.Less
Media screens—film, video, and computer screens—have increasingly pervaded both artistic production and everyday life since the 1960s. Yet the nature of viewing artworks made from these media, along with their subjective effects, remains largely unexplored. This book aims to address this gap, offering a historical and theoretical framework for understanding screen-reliant installation art and the spectatorship it evokes. Examining a range of installations created over the past fifty years that investigate the rich terrain between the sculptural and the cinematic, including works by artists such as Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Doug Aitken, Peter Campus, Dan Graham, VALIE EXPORT, Bruce Nauman, and Michael Snow, the book traces the construction of screen spectatorship in art from the seminal film and video installations of the 1960s and 1970s to the new media artworks of today’s digital culture. This book identifies a momentous shift in contemporary art that challenges key premises of spectatorship brought about by technological objects that literally and metaphorically filter the subject’s field of vision. As a result it proposes that contemporary viewers are, quite literally, screen subjects and offers the unique critical leverage of art as an alternative way to understand media culture and contemporary visuality.
David Der-wei Wang
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231164528
- eISBN:
- 9780231536301
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231164528.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter analyzes and complicates the symbolic link between the sinograph and visuality, most (in)famously embodied in the pictographic bias that equates Chinese writing and imagistic mimesis. It ...
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This chapter analyzes and complicates the symbolic link between the sinograph and visuality, most (in)famously embodied in the pictographic bias that equates Chinese writing and imagistic mimesis. It first scrutinizes early film and media theories that use ideographic and hieroglyphic writing to envision the new medium of moving pictures, giving rise to a whole tense critical tradition that attempts to keep image and text apart, while incessantly defining one through the other at the same time. It then explores examples of concrete poetry from Brazil, France, and Taiwan to show that the link between writing and visuality is not a simple equation, but rather a complex field in which different ideas about the visual and the graphic as well as different languages, media, and cultures interact.Less
This chapter analyzes and complicates the symbolic link between the sinograph and visuality, most (in)famously embodied in the pictographic bias that equates Chinese writing and imagistic mimesis. It first scrutinizes early film and media theories that use ideographic and hieroglyphic writing to envision the new medium of moving pictures, giving rise to a whole tense critical tradition that attempts to keep image and text apart, while incessantly defining one through the other at the same time. It then explores examples of concrete poetry from Brazil, France, and Taiwan to show that the link between writing and visuality is not a simple equation, but rather a complex field in which different ideas about the visual and the graphic as well as different languages, media, and cultures interact.
Elizabeth Abel
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520261174
- eISBN:
- 9780520945869
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520261174.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
Interracial eating and interracial sex: what joins this provocative pair? If drinking fountains and restrooms might be considered the pillars of the social body, sites of collective eating could be ...
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Interracial eating and interracial sex: what joins this provocative pair? If drinking fountains and restrooms might be considered the pillars of the social body, sites of collective eating could be thought of as its metaphoric stomach, an even more fundamental and therefore more highly regulated site of social incorporation. Buttressed against the threat perceived in new waves of immigration during the 1920s, the restaurant wall became a figure of a national frontier, redrawn down the center of the counter when the economic pressures of the 1930s forced the racial barrier to the interior. This structure required photographers to align themselves with one side of the racially marked division or the other. This was an especially vexing dilemma during the Depression, whose widening social rifts bolstered a national faith in photography's inclusive and reparative power. The visual politics of the nation dovetailed with and found an emblematic scenario in the visual politics of segregated eating. The threads of race, gender, and visuality converge—with ironic consequences—in Dorothea Lange's photograph of a Mississippi lunch counter.Less
Interracial eating and interracial sex: what joins this provocative pair? If drinking fountains and restrooms might be considered the pillars of the social body, sites of collective eating could be thought of as its metaphoric stomach, an even more fundamental and therefore more highly regulated site of social incorporation. Buttressed against the threat perceived in new waves of immigration during the 1920s, the restaurant wall became a figure of a national frontier, redrawn down the center of the counter when the economic pressures of the 1930s forced the racial barrier to the interior. This structure required photographers to align themselves with one side of the racially marked division or the other. This was an especially vexing dilemma during the Depression, whose widening social rifts bolstered a national faith in photography's inclusive and reparative power. The visual politics of the nation dovetailed with and found an emblematic scenario in the visual politics of segregated eating. The threads of race, gender, and visuality converge—with ironic consequences—in Dorothea Lange's photograph of a Mississippi lunch counter.
Bettina Bildhauer
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780197266144
- eISBN:
- 9780191860027
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266144.003.0014
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This chapter argues for the first time that Quentin Tarantino based his film Inglourious Basterds in part on the medieval tale of the Nibelungs, as mediated chiefly through Fritz Lang’s Nibelungen. ...
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This chapter argues for the first time that Quentin Tarantino based his film Inglourious Basterds in part on the medieval tale of the Nibelungs, as mediated chiefly through Fritz Lang’s Nibelungen. Inglourious Basterds can therefore be fruitfully read as an instance of medievalism, perpetuating as well as re-evaluating the widespread association of the Middle Ages with violence. An awareness of this intertext allows a nuanced interpretation of Inglourious Basterds’ stance on the power as well as manipulability of visual signs, always seen in the context of their materiality. Tarantino’s adaptation also allows fresh perspectives on the medieval Song of the Nibelungs, especially on its depiction of violent revenge. These in turn throw into relief Tarantino’s interpellation of the viewer through violence and other techniques to prevent the passive spectator position that popular culture is often accused of demanding. The film succeeds in subtly altering the conventions of cinematic representations of premodernity, and in re-appropriating a tainted national origin myth for an international audience.Less
This chapter argues for the first time that Quentin Tarantino based his film Inglourious Basterds in part on the medieval tale of the Nibelungs, as mediated chiefly through Fritz Lang’s Nibelungen. Inglourious Basterds can therefore be fruitfully read as an instance of medievalism, perpetuating as well as re-evaluating the widespread association of the Middle Ages with violence. An awareness of this intertext allows a nuanced interpretation of Inglourious Basterds’ stance on the power as well as manipulability of visual signs, always seen in the context of their materiality. Tarantino’s adaptation also allows fresh perspectives on the medieval Song of the Nibelungs, especially on its depiction of violent revenge. These in turn throw into relief Tarantino’s interpellation of the viewer through violence and other techniques to prevent the passive spectator position that popular culture is often accused of demanding. The film succeeds in subtly altering the conventions of cinematic representations of premodernity, and in re-appropriating a tainted national origin myth for an international audience.
J. P. Telotte
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- August 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190949655
- eISBN:
- 9780190949693
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190949655.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This book considers the impact that the new art of film had on the development of the emerging science fiction (SF) genre during the pre- and early post-World War II era, during the time that the ...
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This book considers the impact that the new art of film had on the development of the emerging science fiction (SF) genre during the pre- and early post-World War II era, during the time that the genre was trying to locate an identity, develop its key themes, and even settle on a name. Focusing on the primary venue for early SF literature, the popular pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories, and Astounding Stories, it traces this early film/literature relationship by examining four common features of the pulps: stories that involve film or the film industry; film-related advertising; editors’ commentaries and readers’ remarks on film; and cover and story illustrations. All these features demonstrate an interest and even a fascination with the movies, which, as many of SF’s readers, writers, and editors recognized, demonstrated a modernist agenda similar to that which characterized the literature. By surveying these haunting traces of another medium in early SF discourse, this book shows how that cinematic influence penetrated and, both consciously and unconsciously, helped shape the experience of SF, as well as the cultural idea of SF during this formative period.Less
This book considers the impact that the new art of film had on the development of the emerging science fiction (SF) genre during the pre- and early post-World War II era, during the time that the genre was trying to locate an identity, develop its key themes, and even settle on a name. Focusing on the primary venue for early SF literature, the popular pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories, and Astounding Stories, it traces this early film/literature relationship by examining four common features of the pulps: stories that involve film or the film industry; film-related advertising; editors’ commentaries and readers’ remarks on film; and cover and story illustrations. All these features demonstrate an interest and even a fascination with the movies, which, as many of SF’s readers, writers, and editors recognized, demonstrated a modernist agenda similar to that which characterized the literature. By surveying these haunting traces of another medium in early SF discourse, this book shows how that cinematic influence penetrated and, both consciously and unconsciously, helped shape the experience of SF, as well as the cultural idea of SF during this formative period.
Erika Hanna
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- March 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198823032
- eISBN:
- 9780191861857
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198823032.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History, Social History
During the twentieth century, men and women across Ireland picked up cameras, photographing days out at the beach, composing views of Ireland’s cities and countryside, and recording political events ...
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During the twentieth century, men and women across Ireland picked up cameras, photographing days out at the beach, composing views of Ireland’s cities and countryside, and recording political events as they witnessed them. Indeed, while foreign photographers often focused on the image of Ireland as a bucolic rural landscape, Irish photographers—snapshotter and professional alike—were creating and curating photographs of Ireland which revealed more complex and diverse images of Ireland. Snapshot Stories explores these stories. It examines a diverse array of photographic sources, including family photograph albums, studio portraits, and the work of photography clubs and community photography initiatives, alongside the output of those who took their cameras into the streets to record violence and poverty. It shows how Irish men and women used photography in order to explore their sense of self and society, and examines how we can use these images to fill in the details of Ireland’s social history. Through exploring this rich array of sources, it asks what it means to see—to look, to gaze, to glance—in modern Ireland, and explores how conflicts regarding vision and visuality have repeatedly been at the centre of Irish life.Less
During the twentieth century, men and women across Ireland picked up cameras, photographing days out at the beach, composing views of Ireland’s cities and countryside, and recording political events as they witnessed them. Indeed, while foreign photographers often focused on the image of Ireland as a bucolic rural landscape, Irish photographers—snapshotter and professional alike—were creating and curating photographs of Ireland which revealed more complex and diverse images of Ireland. Snapshot Stories explores these stories. It examines a diverse array of photographic sources, including family photograph albums, studio portraits, and the work of photography clubs and community photography initiatives, alongside the output of those who took their cameras into the streets to record violence and poverty. It shows how Irish men and women used photography in order to explore their sense of self and society, and examines how we can use these images to fill in the details of Ireland’s social history. Through exploring this rich array of sources, it asks what it means to see—to look, to gaze, to glance—in modern Ireland, and explores how conflicts regarding vision and visuality have repeatedly been at the centre of Irish life.
William A. Callahan
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- February 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190071738
- eISBN:
- 9780190071776
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190071738.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, International Relations and Politics, Political Theory
Visual images are everywhere in international politics. But how are we to understand them? Callahan uses his expertise in theory and filmmaking to explore not only what visuals mean, but also how ...
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Visual images are everywhere in international politics. But how are we to understand them? Callahan uses his expertise in theory and filmmaking to explore not only what visuals mean, but also how visuals can viscerally move and connect us in “affective communities of sense.” Sensible Politics explores the visual geopolitics of war, peace, migration, and empire through an analysis of photographs, films, and art. It then expands the critical gaze to consider how “visual artifacts”—maps, veils, walls, gardens, and cyberspace—are sensory spaces in which international politics is performed through encounters on the local, national, and world stages. Here “sensible politics” isn’t just sensory, but looks beyond icons and ideology to the affective politics of everyday life. This approach challenges the Eurocentric understanding of international politics by exploring the meaning and impact of visuals from Asia and the Middle East. Sensible Politics thus decenters our understanding of social theory and international politics by (1) expanding from textual analysis to highlight the visual and the multisensory; (2) expanding from Eurocentric investigations of IR to a more comparative approach that looks to Asia and the Middle East; and (3) shifting from critical IR’s focus on inside/outside and self/Other distinctions. It draws on Callahan’s documentary filmmaking experience to see critique in terms of the creative processes of social-ordering and world-ordering. The goal is to make readers not only think visually, but also feel visually—and to creatively act visually for a multisensory appreciation of politics.Less
Visual images are everywhere in international politics. But how are we to understand them? Callahan uses his expertise in theory and filmmaking to explore not only what visuals mean, but also how visuals can viscerally move and connect us in “affective communities of sense.” Sensible Politics explores the visual geopolitics of war, peace, migration, and empire through an analysis of photographs, films, and art. It then expands the critical gaze to consider how “visual artifacts”—maps, veils, walls, gardens, and cyberspace—are sensory spaces in which international politics is performed through encounters on the local, national, and world stages. Here “sensible politics” isn’t just sensory, but looks beyond icons and ideology to the affective politics of everyday life. This approach challenges the Eurocentric understanding of international politics by exploring the meaning and impact of visuals from Asia and the Middle East. Sensible Politics thus decenters our understanding of social theory and international politics by (1) expanding from textual analysis to highlight the visual and the multisensory; (2) expanding from Eurocentric investigations of IR to a more comparative approach that looks to Asia and the Middle East; and (3) shifting from critical IR’s focus on inside/outside and self/Other distinctions. It draws on Callahan’s documentary filmmaking experience to see critique in terms of the creative processes of social-ordering and world-ordering. The goal is to make readers not only think visually, but also feel visually—and to creatively act visually for a multisensory appreciation of politics.
Fuyuki Kurasawa
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719079238
- eISBN:
- 9781781702123
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719079238.003.0006
- Subject:
- Political Science, Democratization
This chapter examines the way in which alterity is visually represented in Western media coverage of humanitarian disasters in the global South in terms of either pathologisation or victimization. It ...
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This chapter examines the way in which alterity is visually represented in Western media coverage of humanitarian disasters in the global South in terms of either pathologisation or victimization. It contends that the visual representation and mediation of distant events and persons have had an unprecedented constitutive power for the way that liberal democracy engages with alterity. This chapter establishes the representational and institutional conditions within which a humanitarian scopic regime operates and explores the aporetic nature of this regime's engagement with otherness and the dynamics through which it cannot but simultaneously negate and produce alterity in a manner that problematises the democratic imaginary. It also explores how cosmopolitan visuality posits alterity as both a fundamental problem and a challenge for democracy.Less
This chapter examines the way in which alterity is visually represented in Western media coverage of humanitarian disasters in the global South in terms of either pathologisation or victimization. It contends that the visual representation and mediation of distant events and persons have had an unprecedented constitutive power for the way that liberal democracy engages with alterity. This chapter establishes the representational and institutional conditions within which a humanitarian scopic regime operates and explores the aporetic nature of this regime's engagement with otherness and the dynamics through which it cannot but simultaneously negate and produce alterity in a manner that problematises the democratic imaginary. It also explores how cosmopolitan visuality posits alterity as both a fundamental problem and a challenge for democracy.
Alexandra Green
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9789888390885
- eISBN:
- 9789882204850
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888390885.003.0005
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
As Chapter Four demonstrates, the murals were part of the efflorescence of Nyaungyan and Konbaung dynasty literary activity, visual counterparts to vernacular, Pāli, and dramatic productions. The ...
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As Chapter Four demonstrates, the murals were part of the efflorescence of Nyaungyan and Konbaung dynasty literary activity, visual counterparts to vernacular, Pāli, and dramatic productions. The narratives in the Burmese wall paintings were new tellings of old stories, drawing on Pāli texts and oral traditions, that were shaped to serve the purposes of the temples that housed the murals, reflecting the established repertoire, the desires and goals of donors, and the roles of the artists and monk producers. This chapter explores the various ways in which Burmese wall paintings connected with and related to “words,” both of the written and spoken variety. Textually and visually, Burmese wall paintings incorporated literary concepts in three main ways. First, the prose captions of the murals functioned as glosses to the visual narrative. Secondly, the popularization of drama and narration in Burmese society connected with a focus on an extended narrative format in the murals. Thirdly, the embellishments of descriptive prose and poetry paralleled the illustration of elaborate settings in the murals. The wall paintings formed a nexus of oral, visual, and textual traditions, linking them together through biographical memorialization.Less
As Chapter Four demonstrates, the murals were part of the efflorescence of Nyaungyan and Konbaung dynasty literary activity, visual counterparts to vernacular, Pāli, and dramatic productions. The narratives in the Burmese wall paintings were new tellings of old stories, drawing on Pāli texts and oral traditions, that were shaped to serve the purposes of the temples that housed the murals, reflecting the established repertoire, the desires and goals of donors, and the roles of the artists and monk producers. This chapter explores the various ways in which Burmese wall paintings connected with and related to “words,” both of the written and spoken variety. Textually and visually, Burmese wall paintings incorporated literary concepts in three main ways. First, the prose captions of the murals functioned as glosses to the visual narrative. Secondly, the popularization of drama and narration in Burmese society connected with a focus on an extended narrative format in the murals. Thirdly, the embellishments of descriptive prose and poetry paralleled the illustration of elaborate settings in the murals. The wall paintings formed a nexus of oral, visual, and textual traditions, linking them together through biographical memorialization.
