All Aboard the Nascopie: Image-Making, Colonial Modernity, and Coastal Memory in the Canadian Eastern Arctic

The history of bowhead whaling and hunt management in the eastern and central Canadian Arctic is reviewed. Subsistence hunting of bowhead whales by Inuit resumed in the 1990s under co-management arrangements that were part of land-claims settlement agreements. Removals by whaling in both Canada and Greenland have been accounted for in IWC Scientific Committee assessments of the Eastern Canada–West Greenland (EC-WG) stock, but Canada, having withdrawn from IWC membership in 1982, has no legal obligation to consider IWC management advice. From 1994-2021 the total reported catch of bowheads in the central and eastern Canadian Arctic was 39 (not including struck-and-lost whales or whales that died from incidental entanglement in fishing gear). Sixteen different communities, most of which had a long history of bowhead whaling prior to the arrival of commercial whalers, took at least one bowhead over that 27-year period. More than half of the recent catches have been by the communities of Igloolik, Sanijarak, Naujaat and Coral Harbour, all in the Foxe Basin–Repulse Bay–northern Hudson Bay region where at least occasional hunting of bowheads by local people had persisted until well into the 1970s. Greenland’s reported landed catches totaled from 2009-2015, with no successful hunts reported since 2015. Well over a third of the whales landed by both countries combined have been mature females, the most valuable class in terms of potential for population increase. Several factors in addition to hunting and entanglement in fishing gear are likely affecting EC-WG bowheads, including increased exposure to killer whale predation (linked to the massive reduction in sea ice) and other changes in ecological conditions driven primarily by climate change (e.g. more industrial activity, more vessel traffic, more noise). Recent analyses suggest the EC-WG stock of bowheads has grown considerably since the end of commercial whaling, with best estimates of current abundance in the range of 6000-7000 individuals. Even though the population appears capable of sustaining present levels of removal and disturbance, it is important for monitoring efforts to continue in both Canada and Greenland, with regular Indigenous participation. Local observations and traditional knowledge can be valuable sources of information on animal health, behaviour and phenology.

Vessel operators in the Canadian Arctic rely on accurate weather, water, ice, and climate (WWIC) information to make safe navigational decisions, particularly where sea ice is present. Despite the necessity of accurate WWIC information, it is currently unknown what services are being accessed by users on vessels in the Canadian Arctic, and to what extent user needs are being met by available WWIC services. User perspectives are crucial for developing meaningful WWIC services, yet there remains a gap between what service providers believe to be useful information and what users need and use for their decision-making. To address this gap, a mixed-methods online survey targeted individuals who use WWIC information while navigating in the Canadian Arctic onboard marine vessels of various sizes and types (e.g., general cargo vessels, pleasure craft, cruise ships). The results show that the needs of most respondents (61%) were met “frequently” by current WWIC services, but 63% said that their voyages would benefit from additional information and better services. Sea ice concentration was the most important WWIC factor identified to support safe navigation, followed by sea ice age/thickness, wind speed, wind direction, and then sea ice drift. The southern route of the Northwest Passage and the Arctic Ocean north of Ellesmere Island were consistently identified as areas where information was regularly inaccurate and where improvements are needed. Some of the recommended improvements for WWIC service delivery included the need for more frequent information updates, improving internet connectivity speed and satellite coverage, and more information offered in low-bandwidth formats. Significance Statement The purpose of this study is to better understand what weather, water, ice, and climate (WWIC) information vessel operators identify as a need to safely travel in the Canadian Arctic. This is important because vessel operators rely on accurate and accessible WWIC information for making safe navigation decisions, yet their needs are not always considered when creating WWIC services. Our results highlight what WWIC services are currently being used in the Canadian Arctic and make recommendations on what improvements are needed to support safe shipping in the region.

Book Review| January 01 2022 Review: A Revolution in Movement: Dancers, Painters, and the Image of Modern Mexico, by K. Mitchell Snow K. Mitchell Snow, A Revolution in Movement: Dancers, Painters, and the Image of Modern Mexico. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2020. 346 pages. Hardcover $90.00. Lesley A. Wolff Lesley A. Wolff Texas Tech University, Lubbock Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (2022) 4 (1): 152–154. https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2022.4.1.152 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Lesley A. Wolff; Review: A Revolution in Movement: Dancers, Painters, and the Image of Modern Mexico, by K. Mitchell Snow. Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 1 January 2022; 4 (1): 152–154. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2022.4.1.152 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentLatin American and Latinx Visual Culture Search There is a timeliness to the release of K. Mitchell Snow’s A Revolution in Movement: Dancers, Painters, and the Image of Modern Mexico in September 2020, a moment when the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a standstill. We were suddenly confronted with empty roadways, empty classrooms, and the constant hum of the computer fan running in overdrive to keep us virtually connected through a litany of corporate collaborative platforms: Zoom, Skype, Yammer, Slack, Canvas, Blackboard. At the same time, protestors and activists took to the streets across the hemisphere, from Chile to Mexico to the United States, disrupting the stillness to demand civic, social, and racial justice. Against this backdrop of capitalism and modernity stressed to their very limit and a collective longing for connection, Snow’s book brings the vitality of movement and the promise of collaboration into relief, not only in the context of Mexico, but also as... You do not currently have access to this content.

This review presents summary figures of, and fits growth curves to, data on body lengths (as standard length, SL, whenever possible) of pinnipeds at ages estimated to O.I y. (1) Generalized von Bertalanffy (vB) growth curves are fitted to most data: Lx = L infinity (I - ea(x-x0)b, Lx is length at age x, x0 is the origin of the curve (here chosen a priori as time of initiation of embryonic growth), L infinity is asymptotic length, a (which is negative) determines rate of approach to the asymptote, and b influences the 'shape' of the approach. (2) No single monotonic growth equation suffices for growth in length, which is linear before birth and remains so during early life. The vB equation is only suitable to describe mean lengths of newborns, and animals one or more years old. (3) Also, for males of polygynous species, two functions are needed to account for accelerated growth at puberty. Generally a Gompertz equation is adequate for adult males of these species. (4) The fitted growth equations permit statistical comparisons of sizes and growth rates, as well as of individual variability (as growth-curve residuals), among populations and species. (5) For the following species (including different populations when available), the reliability of data is assessed and parameters of growth curves are presented (with sexes separated where significantly different): walrus, California and Steller sea lions, Antarctic, subantarctic and northern fur seals, Hawaiian monk seal, crabeater, Weddell and Leopard seals, southern and northern elephant seals, bearded, hooded, ringed, Baikal, Caspian, spotted, harbour, harp, ribbon and grey seals. (6) Some novel findings pertain to individual species as follows. Although the Pacific walrus is generally stated to be the larger subspecies, females from Hudson Bay and males from Foxe Basin, in the eastern Canadian Arctic, may be as long as those from the Bering Sea. Although female Weddell seals have been assumed to grow larger than males, there is no significant difference in growth curves fitted to the most complete data. Uniquely among populations examined, the relative variability (absolute growth curve residuals/predicted lengths) of male southern elephant seals is amplified with age. Among ringed seals from Svalbard, the eastern, western and high Canadian Arctic, and the Bering, Chukchi, Okhotsk, Barents and Baltic Seas, asymptotic sizes are larger among those that breed on land-fast ice rather than floes, and size may be more variable in more extreme Arctic environments. The Baikal seal is confirmed as the smallest species of pinniped.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)

Sea ice thickness in the Eastern Canadian Arctic: Hudson Bay Complex & Baffin Bay

The distribution of sea ice meltwater and meteoric water in the eastern Canadian Arctic has been studied by oxygen isotope techniques. The distribution pattern of sea ice meltwater is presented. A comparison of the relative amounts of sea ice meltwater and meteoric water in the surface layer shows that more than 25% of all the samples with sea ice input contained more sea ice input than meteoric input. Sea ice meltwater/meteoric water ratios as high as 4.7 have been observed. The depth of sea ice meltwater penetration varies from 50 m in Baffin Bay to 140 m in Lancaster Sound. Calculated sea ice thicknesses range from 0.5 to 4.5 m with a mean of 1.5 m, in good agreement with ice core data. The significance of sea ice meltwater for chemical, physical, and biological oceanography is briefly discussed. The principles and limitations of using oxygen isotopes to detect brines are discussed in the Baffin Bay setting. The isotopic compositions of possible source waters for Baffin Bay bottom water are examined.

Abstract. A first regional assessment of the impact of shipping emissions on air pollution in the Canadian Arctic and northern regions was conducted in this study. Model simulations were carried out on a limited-area domain (at 15 km horizontal resolution) centred over the Canadian Arctic, using the Environment and Climate Change Canada's on-line air quality forecast model, GEM-MACH (Global Environmental Multi-scale – Modelling Air quality and CHemistry), to investigate the contribution from the marine shipping emissions over the Canadian Arctic waters (at both present and projected future levels) to ambient concentrations of criteria pollutants (O3, PM2.5, NO2, and SO2), atmospheric deposition of sulfur (S) and nitrogen (N), and atmospheric loading and deposition of black carbon (BC) in the Arctic. Several model upgrades were introduced for this study, including the treatment of sea ice in the dry deposition parameterization, chemical lateral boundary conditions, and the inclusion of North American wildfire emissions. The model is shown to have similar skills in predicting ambient O3 and PM2.5 concentrations in the Canadian Arctic and northern regions, as the current operational air quality forecast models in North America and Europe. In particular, the model is able to simulate the observed O3 and PM components well at the Canadian high Arctic site, Alert. The model assessment shows that, at the current (2010) level, Arctic shipping emissions contribute to less than 1 % of ambient O3 concentration over the eastern Canadian Arctic and between 1 and 5 % of ambient PM2.5 concentration over the shipping channels. Arctic shipping emissions make a much greater contributions to the ambient NO2 and SO2 concentrations, at 10 %–50 % and 20 %–100 %, respectively. At the projected 2030 business-as-usual (BAU) level, the impact of Arctic shipping emissions is predicted to increase to up to 5 % in ambient O3 concentration over a broad region of the Canadian Arctic and to 5 %–20 % in ambient PM2.5 concentration over the shipping channels. In contrast, if emission controls such as the ones implemented in the current North American Emission Control Area (NA ECA) are to be put in place over the Canadian Arctic waters, the impact of shipping to ambient criteria pollutants would be significantly reduced. For example, with NA-ECA-like controls, the shipping contributions to the population-weighted concentrations of SO2 and PM2.5 would be brought down to below the current level. The contribution of Canadian Arctic shipping to the atmospheric deposition of sulfur and nitrogen is small at the current level, < 5 %, but is expected to increase to up to 20 % for sulfur and 50 % for nitrogen under the 2030 BAU scenario. At the current level, Canadian Arctic shipping also makes only small contributions to BC column loading and BC deposition, with < 0.1 % on average and up to 2 % locally over the eastern Canadian Arctic for the former, and between 0.1 % and 0.5 % over the shipping channels for the latter. The impacts are again predicted to increase at the projected 2030 BAU level, particularly over the Baffin Island and Baffin Bay area in response to the projected increase in ship traffic there, e.g., up to 15 % on BC column loading and locally exceeding 30 % on BC deposition. Overall, the study indicates that shipping-induced changes in atmospheric composition and deposition are at regional to local scales (particularly in the Arctic). Climate feedbacks are thus likely to act at these scales, so climate impact assessments will require modelling undertaken at much finer resolutions than those used in the existing radiative forcing and climate impact assessments.

ESR Endangered Species Research Contact the journal Facebook Twitter RSS Mailing List Subscribe to our mailing list via Mailchimp HomeLatest VolumeAbout the JournalEditorsSpecials ESR 17:1-16 (2012) - DOI: https://doi.org/10.3354/esr00403 Theme Section: Beyond marine mammal habitat modeling: applications for ecology and conservation Definition of critical summer and fall habitat for bowhead whales in the eastern Canadian Arctic Benjamin Wheeler1,*, Marianne Gilbert2, Stephen Rowe3 1Hemmera, 1380 Burrard St., Suite 250, Vancouver, British Columbia V6Z 2H3, Canada 2Stantec, 4370 Dominion St., 5th floor, Burnaby, British Columbia V5G 4L7, Canada 3Integrated Informatics Inc., 268 Duckworth Street, St. John’s, Newfoundland A1C 5W1, Canada *Email: wheelerbena@gmail.com ABSTRACT: Bowhead whale Balaena mysticetus critical habitat was identified as a key information gap by the Eastern Arctic Bowhead Whale Recovery Team. To fill this gap, data on eastern Canadian Arctic (ECA) bowhead whales and their habitat were collected and analyzed. We selected governmental, private, and historical whaling bowhead location datasets which differed in temporal and spatial extent, sample size, and quality. Sufficient data were available only for the ‘reduced-ice’ period (June to October) and pooled by month. Data for 6 ecogeographical variables (EGVs) were integrated into a geographical information system (GIS): sea surface temperature, chlorophyll, ice, depth, slope, and distance to shore. A monthly ecological niche factor analysis was performed for each whale and EGV dataset to determine habitat suitability in the ECA. Eleven habitat suitability models were produced, and a composite map of predicted high suitability habitat, for all 5 months, was developed. Twenty-one areas within the ECA were identified as highly suitable habitat and ranked according to analytical confidence. Six critical habitats were identified and are supported by recent scientific evidence and Inuit knowledge. Recently, the population estimate, conservation status, and management of the Eastern Canada−West Greenland bowhead population have changed dramatically (bowhead whales of this population also inhabit the ECA). In parallel, evidence of ecological change from climate warming has increased and associated loss of sea ice is anticipated to increase interactions between bowheads and anthropogenic activity. As envisioned by the recovery team, this study provides resource managers with a timely tool for population recovery, conservation, and protection. KEY WORDS: Eastern Canadian Arctic · Bowhead whale · Critical habitat · Ecological niche modeling · Ecological niche factor analysis · Habitat suitability · Species recovery · Management · Climate change Full text in pdf format NextCite this article as: Wheeler B, Gilbert M, Rowe S (2012) Definition of critical summer and fall habitat for bowhead whales in the eastern Canadian Arctic. Endang Species Res 17:1-16. https://doi.org/10.3354/esr00403 Export citation RSS - Facebook - Tweet - linkedIn Cited by Published in ESR Vol. 17, No. 1. Online publication date: April 12, 2012 Print ISSN: 1863-5407; Online ISSN: 1613-4796 Copyright © 2012 Inter-Research.

IntroductionThis study examines 20 years of killer whale (Orcinus orca) sightings (2002–2023) in the eastern Canadian Arctic, drawing from a comprehensive sighting database spanning 1850–2023. Despite inherent biases favoring data collection near communities and coastal areas, spatiotemporal analyses reveal significant shifts in killer whale distribution linked to changing sea ice conditions.MethodsWe developed a clustering metric representing the mean distance to the five nearest sightings and included it in a linear model to investigate spatial trends. We investigated temporal trends by modeling the effects of multiple covariates on the ordinal date of killer whale sightings.ResultsSpatial analysis showed that killer whales are progressively moving away from historically high-use areas and that sighting locations are becoming more dispersed over time. A significant year × sea ice interaction in the temporal analyses indicates observations occur earlier during their arrival period at lower sea ice concentrations over time, suggesting that declining sea ice concentration contributes to earlier arrival. Conversely, for departure periods, killer whales are observed farther south later in the year, likely linked to earlier freeze-up at higher latitudes, and are overall observed later into the year over time. This trend has led to a near doubling of their average presence from 26 days in 2002 to 48 days in 2023 (27 July to 13 September) reflecting an extended open-water season.DiscussionThese findings underscore the prolonged seasonal use of Arctic regions by killer whales, driven by diminishing sea ice and expanding open-water habitat. Such shifts highlight potential implications for Arctic marine ecosystems as killer whales increasingly overlap with endemic species.

Concentrations of mercury in tissues of beluga whales ( Delphinapterus leucas) from several communities in the Canadian Arctic from 1981 to 2002

Killer whales (Orcinus orca) are major predators that may reshape marine ecosystems via top-down forcing. Climate change models predict major reductions in sea ice with the subsequent expectation for readjustments of species' distribution and abundance. Here, we measure changes in killer whale distribution in the Hudson Bay region with decreasing sea ice as an example of global readjustments occurring with climate change. We summarize records of killer whales in Hudson Bay, Hudson Strait, and Foxe Basin in the eastern Canadian Arctic and relate them to an historical sea ice data set while accounting for spatial and temporal autocorrelation in the data. We find evidence for "choke points," where sea ice inhibits killer whale movement, thereby creating restrictions to their Arctic distribution. We hypothesize that a threshold exists in seasonal sea ice concentration within these choke points that results in pulses in advancements in distribution of an ice-avoiding predator. Hudson Strait appears to have been a significant sea ice choke point that opened up .approximately 50 years ago allowing for an initial punctuated appearance of killer whales followed by a gradual advancing distribution within the entire Hudson Bay region. Killer whale sightings have increased exponentially and are now reported in the Hudson Bay region every summer. We predict that other choke points will soon open up with continued sea ice melt producing punctuated predator-prey trophic cascades across the Arctic.

Ecology of North American Arctic continental shelf benthos: a review

Reviewed by: Picturing the Beautiful Game: A History of Soccer in Visual Culture and Art ed. by Daniel Haxall Michał Mazurkiewicz Haxall, Daniel, ed. Picturing the Beautiful Game: A History of Soccer in Visual Culture and Art. New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019. Pp. 296. Acknowledgments, illustrations, tables, terminology and word usage, notes, bibliography, index. $99.00, hb. Numerous artists have drawn inspiration from sports competition, and the amount of scholarship dedicated to the study of sport in art has increased recently. Picturing the Beautiful Game—focusing on soccer—continues this research, covering a wide range of topics. The editor, Daniel Haxall, has gathered a cast of authors specializing in disciplines such as sport and art history, sociology, and media studies. Different perspectives enrich the volume, which thus offers a multifaced history of the world's most popular game. The book is divided into six major parts, each consisting of two chapters. First, the editor offers a useful introduction that presents soccer as "the most common avenue for uniting art and sport" (2) and defines the aim of the monograph: "this collections of essays considers the way soccer has been promoted, commemorated, and contested in visual arts" (2). Next, Haxall analyzes soccer as the subject for academic study, discusses exhibitions and art museums of soccer, and briefly describes the contributions to follow. In Part I, "Soccer and Mass Media," Alexander Leese offers insights into English late nineteenth-century soccer and draws attention to Victorian illustrated newspapers, focusing on three artists whose works demonstrate "how the game was played, watched, and officiated" (20). Luke Healey explores contemporary web-based GIF, which "provides an especially pertinent example of the visual culture of football in the early twenty-first century" (47). "Soccer and Memory," Part II, "considers soccer in the context of memory, ranging from nostalgia to commemoration" (10). Mike O'Mahony discusses the "Football and the Fine Arts" exhibition against the background of postwar British culture. He concentrates on artworks depicting crowds and the stadium atmosphere. The chapter provides—among others—an eye-opening study of painters such as Gerald Cains. Christopher Stride, Ffion E. Thomas, and Nick Catley analyze the desire to commemorate athletes, emphasizing statues of sportspeople. They present a detailed list of sculptures of this type and devote the core of the paper to three statues erected in honor of legendary manager Brian Clough. The next part, "Soccer and Modernism," examines modern and postmodern depictions of athletes. Przemysław Strożek describes early twentieth-century Italian and Russian avant-gardes, showing "how images of footballers operated as signifiers of modernity and artistic transformation from the 1910s to 1930s" (98). Chris McAuliffe looks into soccer and spectacle in contemporary art and sheds light on how the authors view society through soccer (an interesting international perspective). The fourth part, "Soccer and Gender," explores women in the world of soccer. Jennifer Doyle chronicles a history of women's exclusion in representations of soccer and critically analyzes feminist sport art. Carrie Dunn deftly explores the visual consumption of athletes in the media, offering a sociological study [End Page 175] of British female fans. She notes the high level of their media consumption but also that "they have to negotiate their identities, as fans and as women, in an institutionally sexist sport and an institutionally sexist fandom, reinforced by the media they consume" (165). In Part V, "Soccer and Global Politics," the analysis first zooms into African art. Daniel Haxall presents selected Ghanaian artists, for whom "soccer serves as a powerful metaphor, allowing [them] to engage immigration, global capitalism, fan behavior, and other issues bound within the politics of Ghana's most popular sport" (171). Also, such issues as spirituality and ritualism in sport are touched on here. Christopher Collier deals with three-sided soccer, sketching "a preliminary history of the game, tentatively exploring connections to the wider thought of its mercurial inventor—a man once labeled 'the greatest painter of the 1950s' [Asger Jorn]—and the group of which he was once a member, the Situationist International" (191). The first paper of Part VI ("Soccer and Commercialization'), by Jean Williams, analyzes World Cup posters and, to be more precise, "argues that the posters...

ESR Endangered Species Research Contact the journal Facebook Twitter RSS Mailing List Subscribe to our mailing list via Mailchimp HomeLatest VolumeAbout the JournalEditorsSpecials ESR 15:167-177 (2011) - DOI: https://doi.org/10.3354/esr00373 Bowhead whale Balaena mysticetus diving and movement patterns in the eastern Canadian Arctic: implications for foraging ecology Corinne Pomerleau1,2,*, Toby A. Patterson3, Sebastian Luque4, Véronique Lesage1, Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen5, Larry L. Dueck4, Steven H. Ferguson4 1Fisheries & Oceans Canada, Institute of Ocean Sciences, Sidney, British Columbia V8L 4B2, Canada 2Université du Québec à Rimouski, Rimouski, Quebec G5L 3A1, Canada 3 CSIRO Wealth from Oceans Research Flagship, Hobart, Tasmania 3169, Australia 4Department of Biological Sciences, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2N2, Canada 5Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, Greenland 3900, Denmark 6Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Freshwater Institute, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2N2, Canada *Email: corinne.pomerleau@dfo-mpo.gc.ca ABSTRACT: The bowhead whale Balaena mysticetus is the only mysticete species endemic to the Arctic. The Eastern Arctic-West Greenland (EA-WG) population is considered of special concern in Canada as these whales remain at risk of becoming threatened or endangered due to their slow rate of growth and low fecundity, and ongoing environmental changes in the Arctic. In this context, we used satellite-linked time-depth recorders (SDR-T16) to investigate their movements and dive behaviour and identify plausible summer feeding areas in the Canadian Arctic. Seven individuals from the northern Foxe Basin (FB) (n = 4 in July 2003) and Cumberland Sound (CS) (n = 3 in July 2006) were tracked by satellite for 17 to 293 d. Movement patterns from 4 whales were analyzed using a hidden Markov model (HMM) to inform the probability of whales being in one of 2 behavioural modes: transient or resident. Comparing dive characteristics during transient and resident periods, we observed that the Gulf of Boothia (GB) with moderate ice coverage (54−62%) was used as a summer foraging area by all 4 whales even though they came from different regions. All animals transited rapidly through Fury and Hecla Strait, an area of heavy ice coverage (80−98%). Whales spent most of their time at shallow depths (8−16 m) regardless of time of day when in resident mode, likely feeding on near-surface aggregations of zooplankton. Considering the apparent importance of the GB as a feeding area for this population, every effort should be made to maintain the integrity of this ecosystem. KEY WORDS: Bowhead whale · Balaena mysticetus · Movement · Diving behaviour · Hidden Markov model · Foraging habitat · Sea ice Full text in pdf format PreviousCite this article as: Pomerleau C, Patterson TA, Luque S, Lesage V, Heide-Jørgensen MP, Dueck LL, Ferguson SH (2011) Bowhead whale Balaena mysticetus diving and movement patterns in the eastern Canadian Arctic: implications for foraging ecology. Endang Species Res 15:167-177. https://doi.org/10.3354/esr00373 Export citation RSS - Facebook - Tweet - linkedIn Cited by Published in ESR Vol. 15, No. 2. Online publication date: November 10, 2011 Print ISSN: 1863-5407; Online ISSN: 1613-4796 Copyright © 2011 Inter-Research.

Reviewed by: Empires of Vision: A Reader ed. by Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy Carla Manfredi Empires of Vision: A Reader. Edited by martin jay and sumathi ramaswamy. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014. 688 pp. $119.95 (cloth); $32.95 (paper). Empires of Vision contributes to our understanding of the visual cultures of European imperialism and to their afterlives in postcolonial milieus. Thoughtfully edited by cultural historians Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy, the volume includes twenty-one reprinted essays and is divided into two sections: “The Imperial Optic” and “Postcolonial Looking.” The first section introduces five visual media within a trans-historical and global context that spans roughly five hundred years of imperialism. The second section focuses on the decades following decolonization and explores the different ways in which subaltern artists have responded to or “look[ed] back” (p. 3) at Europe. The selections offer a multitude of historical, regional, cultural, and theoretical perspectives, which will be of interest to an interdisciplinary readership. Although many of the volume’s selections will undoubtedly be familiar to seasoned scholars, they will provide graduate students with a solid grounding for future historical and theoretical research across the fields of imperialism, postcolonialism, visual and cultural studies, and art history. It is impossible to do justice to any book in a brief review let alone to extracts from twenty-one impressive pieces of scholarship. Thus, this review focuses on the editors’ contributions to Empires of Vision, which are bold reminders of what cross-disciplinary study can achieve: a recasting of conventional, written histories and a questioning of entrenched theoretical paradigms. In “The Work of Vision in the Age of European Empires,” Ramaswamy offers a sophisticated and lucid introduction to current critical approaches to colonialism and visual culture. The stakes of Empires of Vision are clearly defined: “The image is a site where new accounts of empire, the (post)colony, and Europe itself emerge and depart from—even challenge—the more familiar narrative line(s) of nonvisual histories” (p. 3). The volume, explains Ramaswamy, responds to and encourages a gradual academic reorientation. Despite the appearance of several recent visual culture anthologies, the study of art remains largely limited to art history; indeed, histories of colonialism and postcolonialism marginalize the integral role of visual culture in the production of colonial violence. Ramaswamy supports her claim with an anecdote about Edward Said, who confessed that “‘just to think about the visual arts generally sends me into a panic’” (p. 5). Panic becomes a productive metaphor for theorizing how images are often “disorderly” and “unpredictable” and sometimes “incoherent”; thus, Empires of [End Page 927] Vision offers alternative histories to those presented in official textual archives (pp. 5–6). If colonial and postcolonial studies have given short shrift to the visual arts, then visual culture studies also need to catch up. In conventional visual culture accounts, the presence of empire is still obscured, resulting in a European framework of visuality (p. 10). To illustrate this argument, Ramaswamy refers to a compelling 1996 “Visual Culture Questionnaire” published in the journal October: No one who responded to this questionnaire was a specialist in visual arts from regions other than Europe or the United States (pp. 10–11). Needless to say, the questionnaire highlights the importance of this collection, which will militate against parochialism (whether disciplinary or otherwise) and encourage interdisciplinary and interregional approaches to visuality and empire. In their introduction to part 1, “The Imperial Optic,” Ramaswamy and Jay trouble Eurocentric approaches to visual culture by underscoring the dynamic interactions between metropolitan technologies and indigenous traditions and practices. Thus, the “mutually constitutive relationship between empire and image-work” engendered new practices of seeing in and outside Europe (p. 25). Part 1 is divided into four sections, which deal with easel painting, mass-printed illustrations, cartography, and photography/film respectively. Anthropologist Deborah Poole’s influential notion of “visual economy” (1997) serves as an underlying concept for this part. The term “visual economy,” rather than “visual culture” is better suited to consider how images circulate within wide social, cultural, geographical, and imperial networks. In other words, individuals do not have to share a common (visual) culture in order to belong to the...