William Hogarth, Visual Culture and Images of Imprisonment

The development of information technologies, the widespread use of Internet content have led to a situation where the skills of working with visual materials are becoming more popular and make a necessary component of education in the XXI century. The would-be teacher, operating with visual images, must form the younger generation’s skills to evaluate critically, interpret and summarize information, i.e. must have a high level of visual and information culture. This problem is in focus for the preparation of wouldbe mathematics and computer science teachers, because their activities are designed to form students’ information picture of the world, scientifically competently and quickly to convey basic ideas and form fundamental ideas about the world and its laws under conditions of the intensification of the educational process. The nature of the phenomenon of “visual and information culture” is dualistic. It is a synthesis of two phenomena – visual culture and information culture. Analysis of the essence of the concepts “visual culture” and “information culture” allowed revealing the essence of the phenomenon “visual and information culture of would-be mathematics and computer science teachers”. The visual and information culture of would-be mathematics and computer science teachers is the integrative quality of personality, which combines values, aspirations for development in the field of visualization and informatization of education; computer and mathematical, psychological and pedagogical, technological knowledge; ability to perceive, analyze, compare, interpret, produce with the use of information technology, structure, integrate, evaluate visually presented educational material; ability to analyze, predict and reflect on their own professional activities in the visualization of educational material using computer visualization means, which provides professional self-development and self-improvement. So, it should include various components, among which we distinguish the following: professional-motivational, cognitive, operational-activity, and reflexive. The content of each of these components and the mechanism of their formation is developed both individually and in teams. The cognitive component is characterized by developed visual thinking, which we see in the ability to transform various problem situations in the structure of new knowledge, in the creation of cognitive structures in which information is presented by creating models, schemes and more. The operational component is also characterized by a communicative aspect: the ability to transmit educational information by visual means, on the one hand, and the ability to perceive and understand educational information presented visually, on the other. The components are characterized in full and quite widely, which makes it difficult to determine the levels of their formation. This determines the prospects for further exploration, which is to find criteria for determining the levels of formation of visual and information culture of pre-service mathematics and computer science teachers.

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...

Reviewed by: The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Culture ed. by Marguérite Corporaal, Oona Frawley, and Emily Mark-FitzGerald Barbara M. Hoffmann The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Culture, edited by Marguérite Corporaal, Oona Frawley, and Emily Mark-FitzGerald (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018, 296 p., paperback, $39.95) Turning point, calamity, revolution, horror: these are but a few of the terms used to describe An Gorta Mór by the contributors to The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Culture, edited by Marguérite Corporaal, Oona Frawley, and Emily Mark-FitzGerald. These terms—complex and almost contradictory in connotation—speak to the difficulty of representing the Famine, both at the contemporaneous moment and for generations after living with its legacy. With this important contribution to famine studies, Corporaal, Frawley and Mark-FitzGerald offer the first edited collection devoted to an entirely visual and material culture perspective on the Great Famine. The editors have divided the collection into three sections that follow, as Mark-FitzGerald notes in her introduction to the text, a "roughly chronological sequence": Section I, "Witness and Representation: Contemporaneous Depictions of Famine"; Section II, "Negotiating Form: Famine/Post-Famine Modalities and Media"; and Section III, "Legacy: Postmemory and Contemporary [End Page 147] Visual Cultures." The collection's range comes not only from this broad temporal view but also from the diversity of perspectives of the contributors, who hail from universities across Europe and North America as well as from institutions such as Ireland's Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut and the Irish Heritage Trust and National Famine Museum in Strokestown Park, County Roscommon. Likewise, the contributed essays cover an impressive array of visual and material products: paintings and sketches, political cartoons, religious artifacts, textiles, memorials, television shows, graphic novels, and even a film that never was. This variety and diversity, looking to capture a fuller picture of the Famine in history and memory, is enhanced by another focus of the collection, as explained by Mark-FitzGerald: "prioritiz[ing] methodologically close readings of specific engagements with the famine." Rather than presenting broad or universalizing claims about the Famine and its representation, each chapter engages specific examples of visual and material culture, offering nuanced analysis of the product or production itself within its specific historical, cultural, and geographical context. Enhancing this goal, and an invaluable part of this collection, are the thirty-nine brilliant reproductions of the paintings, drawings, and artifacts discussed by the contributors. The four chapters in section one exploring contemporaneous material and visual items all deal with a predominant presumption that the Famine was a moment of aporia in terms of cultural production, not only because, as Niamh O'Sullivan points out in her chapter, "Irish artists tended to avoid the appalling conditions in which the majority lived" but also because that majority's struggle to survive supplanted all leisurely or artistic activities. The contributions in section one suggest that, while representations of the Famine by or depicting the actual suffering of the famine victims may be rare to nonexistent, exploring representations beyond that focus, both within Ireland and abroad, can offer a fuller understanding of the Famine. This suggestion to look beyond seemingly obvious images of the Famine is manifested in the first chapter, O'Sullivan's "The Bond that Knit the Peasant to the Soil: Rural Lore and Superstition in the Work of Daniel Macdonald." Rather than exploring Macdonald's famous 1847 painting An Irish Peasant Family Discovering the Blight of their Store—"renowned as the only known painting representing the blight itself"—O'Sullivan examines representations of superstition in his works from just before and during the Famine. She reveals a continuity in such representations, highlighting not only superstition's role in uniting the Irish peasantry and providing a link between life pre- and post-Famine but also its connection to sedition and proto-nationalism that heightened during the Famine. In the second chapter, "HB's Famine Cartoons: Satirical Art in a Time of [End Page 148] Catastrophe," Peter Gray explores depictions of the Famine in the political cartoons by the London-based middle-class Catholic Irishman John Doyle, known as "H. B.," aimed at a...

1. Introduction 2. Historiographic layers of visual science cultures 3. Formation of visual science cultures 4. Pioneers of visual science cultures 5. Transfer of visual techniques 6. Support by illustrators and image technicians 7. One image rarely comes alone 8. Practical training in visual skills 9. Mastery of pattern recognition 10. Visual thinking in scientic and technological practice 11. Recurrent color taxonomies 12. Aesthetic fascination as a visual culture's binding glue 13. Issues of visual perception 14. Visuality through and through

The essay presents a model of “queer family romance” (adapted from Freud's concept of family romance) in historical practices of collecting visual culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Though queer collections of visual culture and queer family romance are independent variables, the essay addresses their intersection. The first part briefly outlines how queer collections, regardless of the stylistic and iconographic affiliations of particular objects, are constituted in “family resemblances” among objects that tend, overall, to inflect the entire array in terms of nonstandard sexualities and erotic attractions. The second part considers how Freud handled the question of family romance in his most notable treatment of a famous historical artist, Leonardo da Vinci, and suggests that a concept of queer family romance, though overlooked by Freud, might extend and improve the Freudian account of Leonardo's sexual subjectivity (as well as his subjectivity as an artist) and go some way toward explaining why Leonardo's art played a paradigmatic role in later collections of queer visual culture and why Leonardo occupied a major place in later family romances of artistic subjectivity. The third section considers an example of the intersection of queer family romance and the collection of visual culture, namely, the collection of paintings, objets d'art, and other items of visual and material culture gathered and exhibited by William Beckford at Fonthill Abbey from about 1795 to about 1820. The essay concludes by suggesting that queer family romance in collecting visual and material culture constitutes a possible matrix of queer bonding that might supplement, or even provide an alternative to, the social relations of juridical kin or real biological family; because queer families constituted extrabiologically (i.e., in activities of generating cultural forms) can function psychically and socially as family in the fullest sense, they deserve more attention in contemporary debates about the legal-political status—even the very identity—of nontraditional family structures.

Visual Culture and Latin American Studies Andrea Noble (bio) The Visual Turn Amid the "posts" and "turns" of contemporary critical debate, visual culture is booming in the Euro-American academy. There is a palpable feeling in the humanities classroom that sight is currently the favored sense in this regional academic arena. Its objects and methods of study, over the past ten years or so, have been transformed beyond recognition. Traditional disciplines such as English, or indeed my own discipline of Modern Languages—once squarely literary—have recently widened their purview. And now the novel, poetry, and drama vie for attention alongside a wealth of visual artifacts and practices such as film, TV, photography, painting, performance, digital and virtual imaging, etc. In turn, changes in the objects of study have necessitated shifts in the critical tools and modes of analysis required for approaching them. The emergence of the field of study known as visual culture has been posited as a symptom of, and as a response to, the image-based contemporary cultural landscape that, it is claimed, we now inhabit, and which in turn inhabits us. In the age of the world picture—to cite an essay by Heidegger [End Page 219] (1977) that is often positioned as a pre-text in a growing theoretical corpus—the 1990 s witnessed an explosion into print of anthologies, readers, and introductions whose express aim has been to stake out the shifting visual terrains of contemporary culture. In this busy marketplace, the major academic publishers have issued an array of remarkably similar titles that jostle for our attention: Routledge's The Visual Culture Reader (1998), not to be confused with Sage's Visual Culture: The Reader (1999); or Oxford's Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (2001), as distinct from another Routledge title, An Introduction to Visual Culture (1999); or, most recently and simply, Polity's Visual Culture (2003). That this list is by no means exhaustive indicates that visual culture is out there and, for better or worse, resolutely with us at the beginning of the twenty-first century. To be sure, the rise of visual culture is a relatively new, progressive, and potentially exciting endeavor. Visual culture, as an object of study, not only provides an opportunity to reflect on contemporary image cultures that are purported to be increasingly part of everyday human experience. As a critical practice that comes in the wake of, and builds upon, the methodologies of cultural studies and queer, postcolonial, and feminist theory, among other radical interventions into the humanities, the newness of visual culture also promises to shed light on the pressing political concerns of the day from a different perspective. Nevertheless, the existence of volumes such as those listed above signal that visual culture is already beginning to establish certain orthodoxies. In this essay, therefore, my intention, in part, is to take stock of the visual-culture phenomenon or movement (as object of study and mode of analysis) as it has emerged so far.1 This is because, as an academic movement on the ascendant, in some of its guises, visual culture displays a tendency to proclaim itself as innovative and progressive, almost utopian—claims that, on further scrutiny, may in fact prove problematic. Visual culture, as proposed by some of its practitioners, promises to liberate us from the limitations of narrative and textuality, and to enable us to account for visuality, if not necessarily in visual terms, then at least on the visual's terms.2 Visual culture also purports to transcend the conventional confines of disciplinarity, and depending on whose account you read, is an "inter-," "trans-," or even "post-" disciplinary mode of inquiry. Most pressingly [End Page 220] in the context of the current discussion, however, visual culture has come of age as globalization is calling into question established national boundaries and the allegiances that they foster. Images now circulate transnationally in ways that were barely imaginable a mere 20 years ago. Emerging in tandem with such developments, visual culture concerns itself to some considerable degree with the issues that arise when images travel. Indeed, as W. J. T. Mitchell (1994) states in a seminal essay: "the need for a...

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.

From Visual Culture to Design Culture The past ten years of academia have seen the establishment of Visual Culture, Material Culture and, most recently, Design Culture as scholarly disciplines. Visual Culture partly has emerged from art history through its incorporation of cultural studies. Material Culture’s provenance is in a mixture of anthropology, museum studies, and design history. The term “design culture” has been used more sporadically, and not just in academia. It also has been employed in journalism and the design industry itself. But if design culture is to be consolidated as an academic discipline, what relationship would it have to these other categories and, indeed, to design practice itself? Given the foci of Visual Culture in images, and that of Material Culture in things, they should, theoretically, provide a scholastic springboard for Design Culture. Visual Culture is now firmly established as an academic discipline in universities across Europe and the Americas. It sports two refereed journals,1 at least five student introductory texts,2 and three substantial readers.3 Undergraduate and postgraduate courses have been established. While differing in their approaches, Visual Culture authors generally include design alongside fine art, photography, film, TV, and advertising within their scope.4 Visual Culture, therefore, challenges and widens the field of investigation previously occupied by Art History. This project was instigated in the 1970s within the then-called “New Art History.” Proponents turned away from traditional interests in formal analysis, provenance, and patronage to embrace a more anthropological attitude to the visual in society. Henceforth, all visual forms are admissible into the academic canon—a notion spurred on by the rise of Cultural Studies, Popular Culture Studies, Media Studies and, indeed, Design History. As the academic discipline of Visual Culture emerged through the 1990s, its central concern was the investigation of the relationship between the viewer and the viewed. Nonetheless, despite this apparent openness, this article contends that the methods of Visual Culture have limited use for developing an understanding of the cultural role of contemporary design in society. Victor Margolin previously has suggested the need for doctoral-level studies of design and culture.5 In essence, 1 The Journal of Visual Culture (Sage, founded 2002) and Visual Culture in Britain (Ashgate, founded 2000). 2 For example, see Malcolm Barnard, Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); Richard Howells, Visual Culture: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2001); Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999): Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Visual Culture: An Introduction, John Walker and Sarah Chaplin, eds. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997). 3 For example, see Visual Culture: The Reader, Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, eds. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001); Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Visual Culture Reader (New York: Routledge, 1998); and The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, Amelia Jones, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2003). 4 Malcolm Barnard, Art, Design, and Visual Culture: An Introduction (London: Macmillan, 1998) includes some short references to design. 5 See Victor Margolin, “Design History and Design Studies” in The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

<p>A problem facing art historians and scholars of visual and material culture studies is the white patriarchy that undergirds most visual culture produced in the western world, at least until recent times: whether paintings, book illustration, sculpture, advertising, or the environments that nourish and house these creations, both the producer and the intended viewer for the most part came from one demographic category. Building upon the concept of affordance, this essay questions object-human interactions to propose methodological approaches to visual culture that privilege the inclusion of otherwise siloed or marginalized people (women and people of colour, but also non-western people). By centering on the object represented in or through an image, this essay explores ways of detecting marginalized presence so to foment a more inclusive visual culture while formulating new types of questions that can be asked of our visualized world.</p>

Ideologies of imperialism, othering, and difference do not exist in a vacuum nor do they end after the formal construction and maintenance of empires. Instead, imperialism infiltrates domestic culture and the day-to-day lives of even those citizens most isolated from policy- and decision-makers. From the household to the church and chapel, scholars of the British Empire have analyzed imperial influence at home as one of the many sites where empire was re- imagined and rearticulated. Moreover, popular visual culture serves as an important vehicle for the cultivation and transmission of dominating ideologies. Analyzing visual culture properly is an ethical exercise because visual culture not only depicts but also guides and changes both popular culture and dominant ideologies. My dissertation focuses on the intersections of imperialism and animal imagery in London's visual and popular culture during the interwar era. Analyzing exotic animal imagery in propaganda posters produced by the Empire Marketing Board, poster advertisements for the London Underground, popular and political cartoons, and the Official Guides to the Regent's Park Zoo, I argue that the design and display of these visual objects was profoundly influenced by British imperialism and served to reinforce and normalize this ideology at home. In the process, I reveal some of the ways in which humans represent non-humans-and other humans as non-humans-and explore the disconnect between the imagined and experienced geographies of empire. Accordingly, I demonstrate the ethical considerations of a popularized and mass- produced imperialism in the metropole, the strategies and consequences of representing animals in a human way, or humans in an animal way, and the immediate and lasting effects of this taken for granted result of imperial ideologies infiltrating and transforming visual and material culture at home.

American culture in the twenty-first century is conceptually fraught with problems: new communications and media technologies make the visual imagery of American culture instantaneously accessible globally; the consumption of American goods and imagery is frequently a metonym for wealth, status, and power; and yet, just as often, American culture is seen as a polluting and contaminating force that threatens the integrity and viability of other cultures (see Figure 1). Even American scholars have flattened and oversimplified the idea of American culture as something fixed and stable. But American cultural identity is neither singular nor unitary; rather it is a constantly mutating social construct and the result of multiple of transcultural connections, transactions, negotiations, and exchanges. And its borders are permeable and porous; its mutating identity is elastic and slippery. This article considers the problems presented by a singular unitary construct of American visual culture specifically in today's world of exponentially expanding production and consumption of digitally produced visual images, of transactual global visual communications and transcultural identities. It argues for a reframing of the intellectual platforms of American (visual) culture studies in light of the fact that the primary sites of American transcultural transactions are increasingly visual. Moreover, the article explores how the history of American art and visual culture has already reframed its scholarly discourse to embrace a more relativist and complex conceptualization of American visual culture as a network of imbricated transcultural transactions. Finally, it proposes a new scholarly and pedagogical platform upon which future American (visual) culture studies might be built. Reframing American Visual Culture for the Twenty-First Century Many scholars argue today that the idea of a fixed or unitary consideration of culture(s) needs rethinking owing to the global transactions facilitated by communications technologies in the twenty-first century. Nicholas Mirzoeff, for example, argues that culture is less a fixed entity than a hybrid of networks in which the process of cultural exchange is perpetually (re)negotiated among cultures. Mirzoeff approvingly cites Fernando Ortiz who claimed that in any transaction among cultures, weak or strong, the cultures are changed and that accordingly all culture is (41). Additionally, the change is constant: transculture is a perpetual process of deculturation and reculturation of both the weak and strong (41). Thus, meaning in culture is a result of constant ongoing (re)negotiation of cultural identity as cultures reimagine and regenerate themselves. Cultures continually possess, alter and assimilate aspects of other cultures into their own. Mirzoeff thus concludes that all transculture is plural because transculture has no beginning or end and is always in transformation (43). Within this conceptual framework cultural meaning is located less in a search for a singular authenticity in culture than in transactions among (trans)cultures. Cultural meaning (transcultural narrative) cannot be comprehended either from a singular authoritative viewpoint or as a static entity; it can only be comprehended as moving and mutating, and it can only be observed in fragments from a transverse or oblique perspective and with an implicated eye. Within today's hybrid, global, visual communications networks, the construction of visual cultural identity is not monolithic. Rather, it is a constantly morphing multiplicity of transcultural transactions. Just as mechanical technology fundamentally transformed communication in the nineteenth century, digital technology is proving to be equally transformative in the twenty-first century. Digitally produced visual images have become America's most pervasive and widely consumed good. Those with access to digital technologies increasingly read, think, and communicate visually. …

Reviewed by: Islamic Modernities In Southeast Asia: Exploring Indonesian Popular and Visual Culture by Leonie Schmidt Jennifer Goodlander ISLAMIC MODERNITIES IN SOUTHEAST ASIA: EXPLORING INDONESIAN POPULAR AND VISUAL CULTURE. By Leonie Schmidt. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. 218 pp. Hardcover, $131.00; Paperback, $41.95. "To be Muslim, is to be modern" is the constant refrain of Leonie Schmidt's wide-reaching work on Indonesia, Islam, and popular culture. Her book is one of several giving attention to Islam and culture in Indonesia. Despite being the world's most populous Muslim country Indonesia is often left out of studies on Islamic culture, which tend to focus on the Arab world. In contrast, Schmidt's field research was carried out in the city of Yogyakarta, a bustling university town that is also popular with tourists; in addition many of her case studies are national or international in scope. The book examines various kinds of media and spaces, including rock music, fashion blogs, self-help books, shopping malls, and art. Within these various foci, there emerges several cohesive arguments and Schmidt is adept at drawing useful comparisons among the chapters. The book is not specifically about performance or theatre—but offers numerous intersections with wider concerns of performance studies and the role of Islam in mediatized identities in Southeast Asia that complement the field of theatre. [End Page 531] The introduction offers a historical overview of how Islam functions in Indonesian society and the relationship of global Islam to modernity, and how after the New Order period (1966–1998) people actively sought means to express diverse identities after a period of tight censorship. Schmidt contends her research is especially important because contemporary Indonesia is "simultaneously modernizing and Islamizing" and "popular and visual culture present perfect tools to publically fantasize and experiment with Islamic modernities" (p. 3). Thus her focus is not singularly on the object of study, whether it be a shopping mall, fashion blog, or rock song, but also in how Indonesians are consuming and using visual and popular cultures to construct modern Muslim identities. She establishes that she does not consider all culture produced by Muslims in a Muslim culture to be "Islamic", rather only those that bernafaaskan Islam, or "breath Islam". Most of her case studies encompass a relationship to "Islamic Culture" in some way, even though not all are Islamic culture per say. In order to analyze popular culture and its role in society, Schmidt outlines specific overlapping cultural spheres for her work: (1) leisure sphere (shopping malls); (2) media sphere (music, books, film, social media); and (3) creative sphere (visual and performance art). This is an effective way of conceptualizing these cases because it offers opportunities for cross-chapter comparisons and development of themes that greatly enrich the book's overall argument. Chapter Two "Urban Islamic Spectacles: Transforming the Space of the Shopping Mall during Ramadan" introduces an important theme that carries through several chapters in the book—the relationships between consumerism and religious piety. This chapter focuses on shopping malls in order to analyze the relationship between time and space in constructing meaning through intentional displays of Islamic goods, references to religion in advertisement, and people's engagement of the malls during Ramadan. The analysis of how expressions of Ramadan have shifted from private practice to public spectacle aligns with a larger shift of religious expression in Indonesia, and Schmidt offers valuable insight in analyzing specific moments or interactions. The chapter attempts to consider three large luxury malls together with Mal Malioboro, which is essentially an indoor market primarily for visitors to the city, but this lack of specificity makes it difficult to understand the relationships she is trying to draw between her theoretical framework and her evidence. The sixth chapter on Islamic fashion blogs draws similar conclusions, but also suffers from a lack of clear focus on a manageable number of examples. The next three chapters deal with rock music, self-help books, and film respectively. In each Schmidt provides excellent general [End Page 532] cultural and historical background for understanding the genre and its relationship to Indonesian society before giving focused analysis on a limited number of case studies. These three chapters provide the most...

This chapter focuses on the contemporary broadening of art and design curriculum to include all forms of visual and material arts, including historical and contemporary fine arts, popular arts, and designed objects, and the concept of visual literacy with regard to curriculum. The chapter has three sections. The first section describes the realm and forms of visual and material culture, referred to here as visual culture. The second section provides a synopsis of curriculum issues and debates related to visual culture approaches to art and design education. Visual culture curricula take many forms internationally, several examples of which are mentioned here, and involve an underlying criticality as well as an emphasis on production and analysis. Learning in and through visual culture requires increasing levels of visual literacy, which is discussed in the third section of the chapter.

The overwhelming focus on textual or dharma studies in Buddhism, to the relative neglect of artistic production, has led to a bias in understanding the close and intricate relationships between Buddhist art (usually comprising sculptures, mural paintings, architectural facades and ornamental elements, illuminated paintings, cloth banners, and drawings in manuscripts), rituals, and the written word. The constant dialogue between material, visual, and ritual cultures should be approached in tandem. Visual culture is a significant part of Buddhism and must be treated as part of the same social, historical, and geographical contexts as texts and practices. Buddhist visual culture, including art media, graphic aids, and physical objects or monuments associated with Buddhist practices, does not merely serve to illustrate sacred texts, legends, and doctrines. In addition, the textual tradition does not always have to explain or justify the presence—or absence—of a material object such as a Buddha icon or a Buddhist painting. While visual culture studies have become increasingly important in various academic fields over the years, a critical and complete overview of the precise relationship between art, ritual, and text in the study of south and southeast Asian Buddhism has yet to be written.

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