Visual Syntax of Race


Book Description

Analyzing the visual syntax and display rhetoric applied in newspaper photos, national historical albums, and museum exhibitions, Noa Hazan shows that although racial thought was and still is verbally suppressed in Israel, it is vividly present in its nonverbal official and public visual sphere. The racist perspective of newspaper editors, book publishers, photographers, and museum curators were morally justified in its time by such patronizing ideals as realistic news coverage or the salvation of Jewish heritage assets. Although their perspectives played a dominant role in establishing a visual syntax of race in Israel, they were not seen as racially discriminating at the time. The racist motifs and actions are revealed here by colligating multiple cases into a coherent narrative in retrospect. This book points to a direct influence of the anti-Semitic discourse in Europe toward Mizrahim in Israel, highlighting the shared visual stereotypes used in both Europe and the fledgling state of Israel. Engraved in their body, these cultural traits were depicted and understood as racial-biological qualities and were visually manipulated to silo Ashkenazim and Mizrahim in Israel as distinct racial types.




Visually Situated Language Comprehension


Book Description

Visually Situated Language Comprehension has been compiled as a state-of the-art introduction to real-time language processing in visually-situated contexts. It covers the history of this emergent field, explains key methodological developments and discusses the insights these methods have enabled into how language processing interacts with our knowledge and perception of the immediate environment. Scientists interested in how language users integrate what they know with their perception of objects and events will find the book a rewarding read. The book further covers lexical, sentence, and discourse level processes, as well as active visual context effects in both non-interactive and interactive tasks and thus present a well-balanced view of the field. It is aimed at experienced researchers and students alike in the hopes of attracting new talent to the field. Thanks to its in-depth methodological introduction and broad coverage it constitutes an excellent course book.




Advertising Empire


Book Description

At the end of the nineteenth century, Germany turned toward colonialism, establishing protectorates in Africa, and toward a mass consumer society, mapping the meaning of commodities through advertising. These developments, distinct in the world of political economy, were intertwined in the world of visual culture. David Ciarlo offers an innovative visual history of each of these transformations. Tracing commercial imagery across different products and media, Ciarlo shows how and why the “African native” had emerged by 1900 to become a familiar figure in the German landscape, selling everything from soap to shirts to coffee. The racialization of black figures, first associated with the American minstrel shows that toured Germany, found ever greater purchase in German advertising up to and after 1905, when Germany waged war against the Herero in Southwest Africa. The new reach of advertising not only expanded the domestic audience for German colonialism, but transformed colonialism’s political and cultural meaning as well, by infusing it with a simplified racial cast. The visual realm shaped the worldview of the colonial rulers, illuminated the importance of commodities, and in the process, drew a path to German modernity. The powerful vision of racial difference at the core of this modernity would have profound consequences for the future.




De-Illustrating the History of the British Empire


Book Description

De-Illustrating the History of the British Empire aims to offer a timely and inclusive contribution to the evolving cross-disciplinary scholarship that connects visual studies with British imperial historiography. The key purpose of this book is to introduce scholars and students of British imperial and Commonwealth history to a clearly presented and diversely themed evaluation of several "visual manuscripts" – images of all genres depicting particular events, personalities, social and cultural contexts – that document the development of some of the British imperial and post-colonial visual literacies history. The concept of "visual manuscripts" alongside theories of visual anthropology and memory studies are addressed across the entire volume thus allowing the readers to approach with greater ease the discourse on imperial iconography and historiography.




The Signifying Body


Book Description

How do we live ethically? What role do sex and race play in living or being ethically? Can ethics lead to ontology? Can literature play a role in ethical being? Drawing extensively on the work of Luce Irigaray, Frantz Fanon, and Martin Heidegger, Penelope Ingram argues that ethical questions must be understood in light of ontological ones. It is only when sexual and racial difference are viewed at an ontological level that ethics is truly possible. Central to the connection between ontology and ethics is the role of language. Ingram revisits the relationship between representation and matter in order to advance a theory of material signification. She examines a number of twentieth-century film and literary texts, including Neil Jordan's The Crying Game, J. M. Coetzee's Foe, Toni Morrison's Paradise, and Don DeLillo's The Body Artist, to demonstrate that material signification, rather than representation, is crucial to our experience of living authentically and achieving an ethical relation with the Other. By attending closely to Heidegger's, Irigaray's, and Fanon's positions on language, this original work argues that the literary text is indispensable to a "revealing" of the relationship between ontology and ethics, and through it, the reader can experience a state of "authentic Being ethically."




Challenging Euro-America's Politics of Identity


Book Description

In this fascinating book, Jorge Luis Andrade Fernandes critically examines the impact of colonialism and postcolonial migration on the politics and identity of Euro-American imperial powers. It considers how ‘outsiders’ are part of the construction of the ‘native’ identity of the nation-state, and also how they challenge its essential coherence when they ‘return’ to the centre in our increasingly globalized world. Engaging in a theoretically-motivated discussion of a range of sources (film, fiction, political theory and state policy); the volume traces the nomadic movement of bodies across national frontiers, helping us to question any natural link between nation-states and identities, and between places and peoples. This is not merely a theoretical problem, as Fernandes relates it to the very current crisis of nativistic / multicultural identity in the West. He examines how politics takes shape in transnational social and cultural encounters, and how this new politics is not just about containing aliens, but also contains fruitful possibilities for different modes of being. Challenging Euro-America's Politics of Identity will be of interest to advanced students and scholars in politics, geography, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, African and African-American studies, comparative literature, American studies, and Ethnic studies.




Sovereign Lives


Book Description

For International Relations scholars, discussions of globalization inevitably turn to questions of sovereignty. How much control does a country have over its borders, people and economy? Where does that authority come from? Sovereign Lives explores these changes through reading of humanitarian intervention, human rights discourses, securitization, refugees, the fragmentation of identities and the practices of development.




Visual Persuasion


Book Description

The pictures in television commercials, magazine advertisements and other forms of advertising often convey meanings that cannot be expressed as well, or at all, through words or music. Visual Persuasion is an exploration of the uniquely visual aspects of advertising. Because of the implicit nature of visual argumentation and the relative lack of social accountability which images enjoy in comparison with words, pictures can be used to make advertising claims that would be unacceptable if spelled out verbally. From this starting point, Paul Messaris analyzes a variety of commercial, political and social issue advertisements. He also discusses the role of images in cross-cultural advertising.




The Play World


Book Description

The Play World chronicles the history and evolution of the concept of play as a universal part of childhood. Examining texts and toys coming out of Europe between 1631 and 1914, Patricia Anne Simpson argues that German material, literary, and pedagogical cultures were central to the construction of the modern ideas and realities of play and childhood in the transatlantic world. With attention to the details of toy manufacturing and marketing, Simpson considers prescriptive texts about how children should play, treat their possessions, and experience adventure in the scientific exploration of distant geographies. She illuminates the role of toys—among them a mechanical guillotine, yo-yos, hybridized dolls, and circus figures—as agents of history. Using an interdisciplinary approach that draws from postcolonial, childhood, and migration studies, she makes the case that these texts and toys transfer the world of play into a space in which model childhoods are imagined and enacted as German. With chapters on the Protestant play ethic, enlightened parenting, Goethe as an advocate of play, colonial fantasies, children’s almanacs, ethnographic play, and an empire of toys, Simpson’s argument follows a compelling path toward understanding the reproduction of religious, gendered, ethnic, racial, national, and imperial identities, emanating from German-speaking Europe, that collectively construct a global imaginary. This foundational and deeply original study connects German-speaking communities across the Atlantic as they collectively engender the epistemology of the play world. It will be of particular interest to German studies scholars whose research crosses the Atlantic.