L’esperienza di «Arabeschi». Con un’intervista a Stefania Rimini e Maria Rizzarelli

Visual culture studies is a contemporary, emerging interdisciplinary field of inquiry that employs a variety of approaches to analyze and interpret visual images. Visual culture studies does not designate a discipline so much as what John Walker and Sarah Chaplin call “a hybrid, an inter‐ or multi‐disciplinary enterprise formed as a consequence of a convergence of, or borrowing from, a variety of disciplines and methodologies” (1997: 1). Visual culture studies borrows from many disciplines in the arts and humanities, such as art history, cultural studies, media studies, literary criticism, feminism, queer studies, postcolonial theory, anthropology, and sociology. As a result of these borrowings or convergences, visual culture studies offers us a variety of interpretive ways of engaging with our past and present visual cultures – including semiotics, Marxism, feminism, historiography, social history, psychoanalysis, queer theory, deconstruction, postcolonial studies, ethnography, and museology. From these interpretive strategies, visual culture studies enables a wider range of analyses. It sustains investigations that are concerned with the production, circulation, and consumption of images; the changing nature of subjectivity; the ways in which we visualize or reflect upon or represent the world to ourselves; what Irit Rogoff (1998) has called “viewing apparatuses,” which include our ways of seeing and practices of looking, knowing, and doing, and even sometimes our misunderstandings and unsettling curiosity in imagining the as yet unthought.

The paper analyses the relationship between religious practices, belief and the media based on the medial layering of communication. The arguments are situated within the fields of studies in visual culture and cultural studies, reflecting on the role of art as a specific medium in the Western religious tradition. Vera Frenkel’s video This Is Your Messiah Speaking (1990) is reviewed as a critical inquiry into religious practices and the media structures of communication.

The following annotated bibliography includes selected works published from 1994 to 1999 in topics related to queer black studies. It is organized in four sections: journal articles, critical anthologies, book-length studies, and books and anthologies with single chapters relevant to queer black studies. Due to the increasingly interdisciplinary breadth of the field, the bibliography does not exhaust the scholarly work that has been completed within black gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender studies over the last five years. Rather, in accordance with Callaloo's attention to African-American Arts and Letters, the bibliographical texts are drawn primarily from literary criticism, cultural studies, and the study of visual culture, as well as limited entries from sociological studies.

The article continues the study about the place of cultural anthropology of the city in the national system of the humanities. It proposes a definition of the object of science and describes the foreshortenings of contemporary studies of urban culture. The author thinks that the cultural anthropology of a city should study of the cultural specifics of a particular city in all its diversity. He insists that attempts to develop a more specific definition of the central object of urban anthropology, regardless of one aspect or another, are deliberately helpless. The plurality and heterogeneity of cultural units will always hinder the ultimate completeness of definitions. The ratio of this vision of the object with the aspects developed to date is presented in the form of the opposition “general / particular”. Particular aspects are built up in relation to internal and external cultural anthropology. Internal cultural anthropology is addressed to the study of cultural units and their types, processes, developmental features, and external – to the connection of culture with the external circumstances of its existence (social structure, linguistic expression, architectural embodiment, historical conditioning, etc.). The inner culture anthropology of the city has been developed so far only in two directions – descriptive and semiotic. The descriptive direction involves the study of various (directly perceived and thought-artistic) manifestations of culture. It originated at the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries in the works of I.M. Grevs and N.P. Antsiferov, the founders of Petersburg studies. The semiotic direction is associated with the analysis of sign systems that contain cultural information. Its foundations were laid in the works of representatives of the Moscow-Tartu school – first of all, Yu.M. Lotman and V.N. Toporov. The history of the descriptive and semiotic direction of urban anthropology is closely related to literary criticism. The first steps in the study of urban culture were laid on the material of literary creativity and thus built connections between reality and a particular artistic concept – expressing and / or forming a unique image of space. At the present time, when studies on the specificity of the city are clearly divided between two independent areas – the study of literary text and the study of culture, the genetic ties of urban anthropology and literary criticism manifest themselves in the presence of terminological homonymy in the zone of central concepts. The external cultural anthropology of the city demonstrates how anthropological problems are linked with other sciences. To a greater extent, this pairing can be seen with literary criticism, art history, as well as a combination of architectural and construction, architectural and artistic sciences, brand marketing and tourism marketing. To a lesser extent, the cultural anthropology of the city is associated with linguistics, psychology, history, mass communications and philosophy.

This introduction examines some of the theoretical problems which have delayed the cooperation between visual culture studies and contemporary religious studies.

ABSTRACTThis essay draws on critical disability studies and blindness studies to rethink our commonsense understanding of vision and unsettle the normative sensory subject that is lodged in visual culture studies. Through a disability studies critique of visual culture studies and a juxtaposition of blind studies alongside the canonical images of the “male gaze” and the “white gaze” this paper argues that (visual) difference does not exist in the world waiting to be seen, but that difference is produced in visual power relations. This essay proposes that the possibilities of visual culture are determined by structures of seeing, rather than physiology or optics, arguing that as long as visual culture and social justice studies are lodged within a Cartesian conception of the subject, they falter in conceptualizing the social construction of perception and difference, for they have not destabilized the “distribution of the sensible” (Rancière) of their own epistemic tradition. Race, gender, and disability are apprehended here not primarily as identity categories, but as possibilities of the body that develop(ed) in tandem in complex socio-historical formations.

In many countries, legacies of war, colonialism, genocide and oppression return again and again to dominate contemporary culture, politics and society. This anthology explores how these pasts also inspire creative means by which the past is remembered and challenged. It brings to the foreground the rich visual and creative responses that issue among artists, and how these carry suggestions for effective ways that such pasts are confronted, disturbed and transformed. Contributors to this volume are keen to register the important idea that any meaningful encounter with the past has to be felt at the personal level, no matter how difficult to recall and painful to represent, however contested or fraught with risk and freighted with emotion. Recollecting stories of this kind is complex and sensitive, and this book recommends how it can benefit from the joint efforts of artists, curators and academics. Based on a major project of international collaboration supported by the European Science Foundation, the volume brings together professional art practices, art history and visual culture studies, social anthropology, literary studies, history, museology and cultural policy studies. From diverse contexts are gathered voices, histories and images relating to ‘disturbing pasts’ in South Africa, Germany, Namibia, the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Poland, Norway, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Australia. The results reveal a courageous and carefully examined global picture, with a variety of new approaches to confronting dominant historical narratives and shaping alternative interpretations.

This article analyzes parallels and discontinuities between performance studies and visual culture studies, arguing that a comparison between the two newer fields provides a way of foregrounding the stakes faced in their shared consolidation. It considers the ways that the turn from art history to visual culture studies parallels a turn from theater studies to performance studies. However, it also shows places where the parallels break down, especially when we consider how the threat of theatricality has inflected a longer tradition of visual art criticism. Positioning performance as a ‘mixed media’ form in both its traditional and contemporary guises, it considers how the conventions of visual and theatrical criticism vary in their terms, histories and formal vocabularies. It argues that we could do a better job of attending to these legacies, both in the perceptual analyses that we employ and in the relevant object histories that we deploy as scholars within and between disciplines in the humanities.

Literature, Culture & CritiqueNotes on the First Callaloo Retreat, March 5–8, 2008 Charles Henry Rowell I founded Callaloo in 1976 as a publishing outlet for Black South creative writers and literary critics whose voices were marginalized to the extent that they had been all but silenced. Once I was able to establish the journal as a visible and viable African Diaspora quarterly by the mid-1980s, I then began deliberately working toward transforming Callaloo into a forum in which creative writers and literary and cultural critics in the African Diaspora could converse—if not to engage each other directly, then at least to read each other’s work, in spite of the tendency of current centers of power within English departments, which seem to encourage the contrary. I have always thought the growing divide between the creative and critical worlds to be superficial and nonproductive at best and collectively paranoid at worst. It is obvious to me that the majority of faculty members of English departments continue to valorize the work of academics (archival, critical, and theoretical) at the expense of that of their creative writing colleagues. Academics have far too long viewed living, not-yet-canonized creative writers as Others—a group of artists that academics, with their institution-sanctioned power, tend to marginalize and construct as mere exotics. Thinking of creative writers in this way, academics have made them an annex to English departments. That is, critical theoretical work is ranked very high in value but the work of the contemporary poet or novelist, for example, is seldom read or even given a tepid applause until the time comes for hearings on tenure or rank change. I have always viewed these circumstances as serious problems, and as a result I have tried to address them in the pages of Callaloo—that is, as they pertain to African Diaspora literatures, and African Diaspora literary and cultural studies. Since the 1980s, I have edited Callaloo with the intention of pulling the creative and critical together: by publishing, for example, poems beside theoretical and critical articles on problems in literature and culture or by printing prose fiction next to essays on the life of a playwright or a visual artist. I wanted the one to see/read what the other is doing. I have thought, in other words, that I could at least get the literary critic to study what some creative writers are producing, and I thought I might engage the creative writer to peruse with interest some of the rigorous texts literary and cultural critics are creating. My efforts to bring the critic face to face with the creative writer—that is, on the page—is stage one of what I am calling a conversation between two subjects: the critical and the creative, the academic and the artistic. My efforts in stage one have not generated the effects that I had hoped they would. In fact, the two groups continue to grow apart. Why? I did not see both sides of the problems—not with the clarity and precision that poet and literary critic Michael S. Collins showed when I discussed the subject with him. In an email summing up his side of our conversation, he wrote: What I was trying to say about critics and creative writers is this: In recent decades, literary theory under the influence of French theorists [End Page 552] such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault has incorporated and elaborated upon a specialized vocabulary that non-initiates sometimes find impenetrable. At the same time, many within the academic critical community find the productions of literary theory to be more profound and more exciting than creative works. Creative writers, on the other hand, sometimes view literary criticism as parasitic at best, badly-written and pretentious at worst. There are often, in other words, built-in misunderstandings between the communities. It is especially telling that academic literary criticism is not even considered for things like the National Book Critics’ Circle award for criticism. The world that rewards creative writers, and that creative writers have to pay attention to, views academic literary criticism as, for the most part, irrelevant. Complicating things further is the fact that...

This book is a critical interdisciplinary approach to the study of contemporary visual culture and image studies, exploring ideas about space and place and ultimately contributing to the debates about being human in the digital age. The upward and downward pull seem in a constant contest for humanity’s attention. Both forces are powerful in the effects and affects they invoke. When tracing this iconological history, Amanda du Preez starts in the early nineteenth century, moving into the twentieth century and then spanning the whole century up to contemporary twenty-first century screen culture and space travels. Du Preez parses the intersecting pathways between Heaven and Earth, up and down, flying and falling through the concept of being “spaced out”. The idea of being “spaced out” is applied as a metaphor to trace the visual history of sublime encounters that displace Earth, gravity, locality, belonging, home, real life, and embodiment. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, media and cultural studies, phenomenology, digital culture, mobility studies, and urban studies.

This chapter considers what Visual Culture Studies can offer to the study of comics. It begins with a brief overview of the emergence of Visual Culture Studies and its relationship to Art History, before focusing on how a broad framing of the object of study and the interdisciplinary methodologies used by Visual Culture Studies makes it a useful critical framework for the study of comics. The second half of the chapter engages with Lynda Barry’s explorations of the nature of the image in her works What It Is and Syllabus. Barry’s work is seen as a theory of the image in its own right, rather than an object to be analysed by theories of visual culture or an illustration of an existing theory. Instead, her contemplation of the image is situated within an interest in the presence of the image within Visual Culture Studies, and it is juxtaposed with Hans Belting’s An Anthropology of Images as one example of what a Visual Culture Studies approach to the study of comics might yield.KeywordsVisual Culture Studies and comicsArt History and Visual Culture StudiesInterdisciplinarityImageLynda BarryHans Belting

It is now quite normal to join company with Dryden's contemporaries and immediate successors and to view him as England's greatest translator of the classical Roman poets (and a range of other material). New work on Dryden's translations, and their literary contexts, pre-texts and determinants, has substantially modified the image of Dryden as a religious or satirical writer or the negotiator of such contemporary events as the Popish Plot. Scholars have, to be sure, continued to detect topical resonances in Dryden's poetry, increasingly within a variety of ostensibly non-political works: as Howard Erskine-Hill has written, 'The pervasiveness of Jacobite and Williamite allusion in Dryden's Aeneis may be readily traced.'1 But Dryden scholars have also rediscovered the literary context of their primary texts: the social and the political (the 'manners', in contemporary terminology) has transformed into the mental and emotional world of the poet, and we now view Dryden in company with his sources in a collaborative partnership, or spiritual communion, of poetic souls. Interest in the relationship between Dryden's literary critical writing and its historical antecedents, the subject of the present discussion, has lagged behind this important shift. Part of the problem may be that to use the term 'literary criticism' of any of Dryden's writing is inevitably to make certain assumptions about what criticism is.2 In recent years commentators have attempted to collapse criticism into 'cultural studies', or to redefine it as 'theory',3 and it is sometimes described as a hybrid mode or 'bastard discourse' within the debates of philosophical writing. Dryden himself defined it in his 'Author's Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic Licence' simply as 'a standard of judging well' (Essays, I, 197). But to admit into the category of criticism Dryden's collected essays, dialogues, prefaces, and epistles dedicatory in prose, or to include the many occasions on which he is explicitly alluding to, translating, adapting, and implicitly judging, placing, appreciating, or otherwise interpreting other poets, or copying and re-stating other critics, would be to invoke an inescapably controversial definition of the critical process.4 To this core problem of what actually counts as criticism in Dryden, we must then add the difficulties of thinking historically about

Most scholarly work on national literatures seems to take for granted the existence of its object of inquiry, and seldom addresses the segmentation of modern culture according to national and/or linguistic boundaries. During the last twenty years, however, the history and politics of Hispanism has been the focus of an intense debate among scholars. This need to rethink the disciplinary boundaries — and even the name — of the study of Spanish or Hispanic culture(s) can be understood as a response to two developments: the general shift from 'literary criticism' to 'cultural studies', and a more specific remapping of the cultural geography of the Spanish-speaking world. If the first is the result of a paradigmatic change in the Humanities at large, the second is closely linked to the emergence of areas that had remained until then marginal to the core of Hispanic studies: the literatures of Latin America after the boom of the 1970s, the culture of Latinos in the United States in the wake of multiculturalism, and of 'peripheral' cultures in post-Franco Spain. This essay examines how these developments and debates have fostered a rethinking and in fact a reconfiguration of the institutional life of American Hispanism. It calls for a transformation of the field of so-called 'Peninsular Literature' (traditionally centred on the production in the Spanish, i.e. Castilian, language) into a wider field where the interliterary relations and internal complexity of multilingual culture in the Iberian Peninsula become major objects of analysis and research.

<i>Cultural Capital</i>: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

Wrestling with Angels