ABSTRACT This article explores the international journey of the Grand Optical Gallery (1828–1854), operated by Austrian showman Thomas Karl Andorfer, with a particular focus on the unique combination of optical attractions it offered, including cosmoramas, neoramas, dioramas, and a new solar microscope. It investigates the Eurocentric perspective embedded in Andorfer’s exhibitions and the cultural impact of these shows, especially in Brazil, his first overseas destination. Drawing on historical press records, the article traces Andorfer’s itinerary from the early fairs in Italy, where he showcased his Grand Cosmorama, through the Iberian Peninsula and Brazil, culminating on Broadway, where the Grand Optical Gallery was met with acclaim. In Brazil, Eurocentrism became especially pronounced as local audiences began to demand specific iconographic adjustments to the exhibitions. This article argues that, much like panoramas, cosmoramas were entangled with imperialist discourses from their inception, fostering an imperially oriented worldview among spectators. This mindset is starkly illustrated in Brazilian newspapers, where advertisements for cosmorama shows appeared alongside slave sale notices, revealing how such spectacles were embedded in broader colonial economies. By situating cosmoramas within this context, the article analyses how they functioned as cultural commodities that reinforced colonial identities and shaped their viewers’ cultural imagination. Finally, it considers the extent to which the cosmorama, as a global phenomenon, was influenced by and responsive to local cultural contexts.

ABSTRACT This article identifies the importance of clothing in assessing the representation of the princes of India for image making of imperial India. Using both textual and visual British newspapers as a medium that presented the British Empire to the British public, accounts of the clothing worn by rulers formed an important aspect of their overall representation. Newspapers presented a variety of images of clothing to both metropolitan and regional readerships across the country. The 1870s was a significant decade in creating an image of a successful Indian Empire with the rulers of India being an important component in demonstrating this. Accounts depicted their wealth and opulence as an exotic spectacle, such as in the depiction of diamonds and feathers. But it was also important to demonstrate exoticism within the context of imperial indirect rule. Items such as imperial honours, and turbans, demonstrated rulers’ authority and power within this system. Moreover, the rare instances of female rule show how the press presented clothing as both markers of gender difference and respectability. This article will demonstrate that accounts of clothing highlight the nuances of the representation of India that go beyond a stereotyped image, showing that image-making was a controlled process in the promotion of British imperial rule.

ABSTRACT This article will discuss the trade cards (and, to a lesser extent, the poster stamps) that featured visual narratives of Robinson Crusoe and accompanied or were issued with products ranging from meat extract to chocolate. It is a literary-historical examination which focuses on advertising media to glean the impact and interpretability of the novel among young collectors at the beginning of the twentieth century. As such, it will probe the extensive life beyond the text edition of the original work in which readers would have encountered Defoe’s protagonist. The article will examine the subject coverage of some of the early series (which largely consisted of six cards, but also, on occasion, after World War II, extended to far more extensive sets comprising more than 80 cards). Finally, it will consider how the series as a narrative made up of interconnected images and text cues conveyed a particular (reductive) version of Robinson Crusoe that was rooted in German abridgments and redactions of the English work.

ABSTRACT What type of icons can give face to a system that carries the mark of transience and rules with abstraction? Using this question as its point of departure, this article attends to popular representations of capitalism in the works of fin-de-siècle French graphic artists, especially those with radical political affiliations. The rise of speculative capitalism rendered the swollen body of ‘the laissez-faire industrialist’ an insufficient icon to capture the hegemonic financial system by the close of the nineteenth century. The print artists of this study found icons from the historical and mythical pasts as well as extracted modern icons from their daily lives to give recognizable faces to capitalism. Beyond being mere cogs in a mechanics of representation, these icons had to generate affective economies to unite, instruct and agitate their audiences. The biblical golden calf is among the most ubiquitous of these faces. This article brings the visual representations of Capitalism-as-the-modern-golden-calf in dialogue with a selection of nineteenth-century anti-capitalist texts in order to illustrate how the images of popular print culture present a comparable, yet largely overlooked capacity for theoretical interventions. Finally, I constellate these observations with artworks that animated, tamed, or destroyed ‘the Bull of Wall Street’ during the Occupy Movement (2011). The iconographic similarity between the calf and the bull not only bridges centuries and cultures together, but also opens up new pathways to explore historical moments marking the creation, dissolution, and resurfacing of popular icons that constitute a universally recognizable anti-capitalist visual vernacular.

ABSTRACT The Crimean War (1853–1856) was one of the first military conflicts to be documented by the media in quasi-‘real time’. Thanks to the electric telegraph, war reports reached audiences at a breakneck speed, while war journalism and photography promised more ‘accurate’ accounts. Competing to profit from this conflict, popular theatres promised the most up-to-date, spectacular war-themed pieces. This article focuses on equestrian theatricalizations of the Crimean War in Paris and London. Yet rather than examine their spectacular visual dimensions, I explore their musical accompaniments. Their scores served to create continuity with older wars and reassurance by integrating familiar ‘old tunes’ thus counterbalancing the anxieties that came with misinformation or ‘objective’ but emotionally distant reports. The inclusion of time-honoured national anthems and well-known songs helped map past encounters with war, such as the Napoleonic conflicts, onto the present. Music thus became crucial to the ‘making of modern wartime’, a development predicated on collapsing the temporal and geographic boundaries between wartime experiences. Moreover, the propagandistic messages embedded within this music and its associated performance practices forged a more orderly and respectable image of military conflicts. Examining these ‘old tunes’ demonstrates that the ears were just as important as the eyes for propagating contemporary ideologies of militarism. Hence, this article advocates for a solid audio-visual examination of the emergent war-as-mass-entertainment culture in re-imaginations of the Crimean War in London and Paris.

ABSTRACT The South African War (1899–1902) was an intensively mediatized confrontation in which the familiar instruments of news and propaganda were joined by a new form of mass media: film. Aided by the rapid technological advancement and a leisure industry of variety and magic lantern shows, contemporary audiences in Britain, South Africa, and elsewhere viewed the war in new and dramatic ways. However, while this explosion in representation is thought of as primarily visual, these experiences were synthesized within larger soundscapes comprising not only ‘soundtracks’ of both music and sound effects, but (re)mediations of war into popular musico-dramatic performances and concerts designed to have spectacular trans-media effects. This essay traces the sonic representation of the South African War through accounts of film, film sound, and music hall song in Britain and its empire during the period from 1899 to 1902, looking at how the combined use of media created particular effects on audiences half-way across the world. I argue that these practices of hearing war-as-entertainment position the South African War as a key transitional moment in nineteenth- and twentieth-century media. This does not only contribute to the histories of media and of staged performance, but also asks how audiovisual representations of the South African War have shaped the imaging and imagining of war today?

ABSTRACT In the early cinema of Méliès, he artificially trans-planted, reproduced, and regenerated bodies through experiments with film techniques. Through his play with the possibilities of a new medium, Méliès could be said to generate a new humanity that transcends the existing one. This article analyzes how his films can be understood as expressions of transhumanism avant la lettre – before Julien Huxley coined the term in 1957. I define transhumanism as an attempt to transform and adapt human bodies in different environments, with or without technology. His five early films, including The Four Troublesome Heads (1898), The Vanishing Lady (1896), Dislocation Extraordinary (1901), The Man with the Rubber Head (1902), and Prolific Magic Egg (1903), demonstrate how Méliès began to experiment and play with human and nonhuman bodies, thereby presenting the audience the malleability and adaptability of bodies. I argue that his treatment of bodies as subjects of transformation enables the blurring between different genders, races, species, and identities. Instead of focusing on what is presented on screen, this article concentrates on how the bodies continue to transform and adapt in the films of Méliès, which focuses more on its transforming process itself. From the perspective of transhumanism, the identity is not a fixed notion. Human beings consistently modify themselves to survive in different situations, and Méliès’s films illustrate it in an entertaining manner.

ABSTRACT In 1756, a perspective paper theatre depicted the Lisbon earthquake, showing terrified people and collapsing monuments, churches and houses. Then, in 1848, the London Cyclorama depicted various moments of the disaster, including the tidal wave that submerged the city. Finally, in 2022, the Quake Museum opened in Lisbon. Here, visitors can learn about the science of earthquakes, walk through 18^(th)-century Lisbon and experience earthquake simulators. All of these representations attempt to give people the impression of ‘being there’, immersing them in the catastrophe as if they had experienced it first-hand. In this paper, I will discuss: 1. The extent to which immersivity has been a key feature in the narration of the Lisbon earthquake over time. 2. The different techniques employed to immerse the spectator in the catastrophe, from 18^(th)-century literary technology to the mixed reality of the Quake Museum. 3. The relationship between these techniques and the circulation and visualisation of scientific knowledge, particularly in relation to the emergence of geological sciences and the development of debates around risk, natural disasters and prevention.