Popular Visual Media Research Articles

Eco-caste Migrants in Kerala: A Posthumanist Reading of Veyilmarangal

With hundreds of people losing their houses and properties, climate change and its related disasters have changed the face of humanity. This has had a considerable impact on popular visual media such as film as well. From the conventional romanticized portrayal of nature in Malayalam films, a few contemporary Malayalam films have sensitized the ecological issues and the predicaments of its victims. This marks the shift from the idealized portrayal of landscape to the depiction of the fury of nature on human beings. Taking cues from a Posthumanist theoretical perspective, this article considers the Malayalam film Veyilmarangal (2020) directed by Dr. Biju Damodaran to analyse how caste divisions in the society surface during the climate catastrophe. To analyse the nuances of climate change and its posthuman turn, this article takes its insights from the domains of environmental casteism and climate displacement to explain what is used as ‘eco-caste migrants’ in this article. The term signifies the role of caste hierarchy among human and non-human entities during the ecological crisis, especially focusing on the experiences of the Dalits and other caste subalterns. The article also attempts to find parallels between the non-human group and sub-human group hierarchies in society and, thereby, analyse the intersectional casteism from the vantage point of Kerala society through the representation of eco-caste migrants in the film.

The Moral Imagination of the Mahabharata. By Nikhil Govind

The Moral Imagination of the Mahabharata is an important contribution to the study of Indic epics. Since the Mahabharata’s conception, commentaries and performative retellings, vernacular formulations, modern and contemporary dramatizations, cultural histories, philological and religious scholarship, and popular visual media like children’s books, films, and television have explored how and why this epic continues to capture the Indic world’s imagination. Nikhil Govind’s work stands out. He offers a fundamental methodological contribution to a crowded academic table where historians, literary critics, philosophers, and interdisciplinary scholars of pre-modern South Asia have been seated. Today, if you are ready to pay keen attention to how the Mahabharata imagines itself and its moral ethos, you are welcome to the table. The organisation of this book into four neat, seemingly thematic, chapters—dharma, artha, kama, and moksha—is undone as the main thesis develops. Through a detailed analysis of the affect-laden and rarely discussed narrative intricacies of the Mahabharata, Govind argues that neither one of the four themes can be said to over-determine the conceptual schema of the epic. The overarching plot of the Pandava–Kaurava war throws open many ethical questions: What does dharma mean in the face of great violence? Does the martial ethic preclude reflections on peace? What is divinity? And does the divine play a necessary role in human life and social organisation, to name a few? Govind suggests that straight-forwardly didactic answers offered by the many human and divine voices of the Mahabharata are best understood as invitations to conduct ‘a detailed enquiry of the value arrived at through varied narrative situations’ (p. 112) because of what he observes to be the ‘unpredictable worldliness of events, the messy twining of emotion and politics’ (p. 15) throughout the epic. Affect moves, carrying these contingent values, and thereby giving the Mahabharata an inter-relational texture. As the first two chapters demonstrate, concerns of moksha do not always trump those of artha and kama, concerns of artha do not always trump those of moksha and dharma, and most importantly, the rhetoric of destiny complicates any superficial reading of dharma as the sole determining force of human action and its moral legitimacy.

TIPOLOGI KEPRIBADIAN TOKOH PADA FILM GEZZ AND ANN KARYA NADHIFA ALLYA TSANA

Film is a popular visual media that can be watched by various ages according to category. The film presents an interesting story with many building elements. Building elements include many things, one of which is the character's personality typology. Personality typology classifies humans in several ways, namely extroverted and introverted personalities. The research entitled "Tipologi Kepribadian Tokoh Film Gezz and Ann Karya Nadhifa Allya Tsana" raises the typology or depiction of the characters in the film Geez and Ann which is based on the theory of Carl Gustav Jung. The method used is a qualitative method which includes theory that can provide clear views and descriptions. The data collection in this study was assessed using the note-taking method. The results of the study show that there are two personality traits, namely extrovert and introvert. This extrovert personality includes five points, namely: activity, sociability, risk taking, impulsiveness, expressiveness. Furthermore, introverted personality is divided into four points, namely: introverted thoughts, introverted feelings, introverted sensing, and introverted intuition. Keywords: Extrovert, Film, Introvert, Personality Typology.

Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852–1932 by Lyneise E. Williams

Reviewed by: Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852–1932 by Lyneise E. Williams Lena Hill Lyneise E. Williams. Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852–1932. New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019. $130.00 (cloth); $34.95 (paper); $31.45 (eBook). Whoever thought Josephine Baker's banana skirt might represent a sly critique of the commercial inadequacy and declining colonial power of France? In Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852–1932, Lyneise Williams begins her keen analysis of French visual interpretations of Latin American immigrants in Paris by provocatively rereading Baker's iconic fruity attire. Miguel Covarrubias, the Mexican designer of the skirt, had long challenged European claims of artistic superiority. Noting this, Williams traces the conspicuous increase in banana imports to France from the Caribbean from 1897 to 1924—drawing attention to the specific banana varieties that likely comprised Baker's skirt—to suggest Covarrubias's familiarity with banana commerce inspired his decision to drape an African American woman in a skirt that symbolically embodies a failure of French capitalism in the Spanish Americas compared to rising US commercial dominance. In other words, Williams argues that as a Latin American's creative work, Baker's heavily codified banana skirt symbolizes much more than primitive sexual potency. With this disruption of established readings of Baker as the French epitome of primitivist modern Black femininity, Williams provocatively poses the broader question her study probes: what do we miss about French depictions of modern identity when we fail to understand their aggressive regulation of popular interpretations of elite immigrants from Latin America arriving in Paris from 1852 to 1932? Williams recovers what she describes as the Parisian "Latinizing" tendency, or their application of visual strategies that justified their promulgation of the inferiority of the Spanish and Portuguese populations they encountered during the eighty-year period when France pursued control over Latin America. Focusing on three case studies, Williams patiently peels back the layers covering distinct Latin American figures to reveal the complicated projections Parisians developed to define these immigrants as Black outsiders regardless of their phenotypic appearance. With careful historical contextualization, Williams details the Parisian attempt to affix a tripartite marking of European, African, and Indigenous Indian ancestry to the Latin American arrivals they sought to exclude from French society. In building the foundation for her study, Williams returns to critical venues such as the 1855 Exposition Universelle to demonstrate the sometimes subtle but persistent methods Parisians employed to substantiate their disparaging characterization of Latin Americans. For instance, A. Marc's 1885 engraving of Francisco Laso's Habitante de las cordilleras del Perú (Inhabitant of the Peruvian Highlands) reveals how the French artist and critic A. J. Pay intentionally revises Laso's depiction of a figure who appears more distinctly indigenous and African than Laso's original portrayal of the character with a more pre-Colombian appearance. Turning to the stage, Williams examines the play Le Brésilien (The Brazilian) to trace the creation of the character Acapulco, a wealthy Brazilian coffee planter whose appearance and inelegant speech highlight his desperate need for French guidance to assimilate into high society. Photographs from the production show Acapulco with darkened skin and prosthetics that exaggerate his mouth and nose. Williams explains that the stereotype that emerged made a lasting impression on Parisian audiences that evolved into the development of the term "rastaquouère" which was an "over-the-top comically showy depiction of Latin Americans" (37). This derogatory characterization quickly migrated beyond the stage to magazine covers and other popular visual media. With this established stereotype, Williams devotes chapter 2 to a nuanced examination of Chocolat the clown, and in so doing she exposes the intricate blossoming of the seed planted by the rastaquouère. While a cursory consideration of Rafael Padilla's performance as Chocolat might place him in the well-established role of a Black minstrel or primitive, Williams investigates Chocolat's character in stage performances, silent films, and print advertisements to reveal the multifaceted ways Parisian audiences interpreted the clown over the years in different venues. Chocolat rose to fame as part of a pantomime duo with British performer George Footit, and for the most part, his character assumed...

“The Fake is News”: On Popular Visual Media, Fakery and Legitimacy Contestations in Charismatic Christianity in Contemporary Ghana

ABSTRACT Three key questions guide this investigation into specific accusations of fakery related to some Christian religious leaders’ acts in contemporary Ghana. The first question is: what do moving images and other popular visual forms (such as cartoons) contribute to assessments and accusations of fakery? The second question is: what can we learn from a close examination of religious leaders and their actions that citizens consider fake? The last question is: who gets to make public accusations of fakery on Ghanaian religious matters? I argue that the various analyzed cartoons and memes contribute to ongoing public discussions of the religious leaders as fake. I show how some of these religious leaders seem motivated by the need to be recognized as possessing superior supernatural powers which they exchange for material wealth. I draw attention to specific categories of Ghanaians, such as certain politicians with clout, to level accusations that these religious pastors are fakes.

Bollywood, Popular Visual Media, and Sexism in India: A Critical Glance Back

Sexism is a sociocultural and psychological construct existing since ages. The popular media, as a mode of influencing public mindset and opinion, is also inflicted by it. The current discussion centers around the gender role stereotyping and sexism portrayed in the mainstream Indian movies, television, and advertisements and its evolution over the years. We also highlight the possible reasons behind the continued sexism in the media, and the bidirectional influence of popular media on the society and vice versa. We conclude that the portrayal is changing with increased awareness despite the challenges present, and a continuous attempt at promoting gender equality at all levels will help shape the sociocultural beliefs and public perceptions in the long run.

A preferred reality: Film portrayals of robots and AI in popular science fiction

The increasing frequency and depth of human interaction with robots and artificial intelligence (AI) prompts this research study into how media-framed portrayals of technology in popular visual media might construct social reality. Cinema serves as an important and influential form of media, and portrayals of technology in film media can influence public perceptions, specifically confirming or creating perceptions of artificial or robotic intelligence. Previous research identifies frequent portrayals of robots and AI as deceptive, aggressive monsters in films like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and James Cameron’s The Terminator. However, as the distance between fantastic technology collapses into a new social reality where humans, AI and robots exist together, film portrayals reflect a more nuanced view and changing expectations for human-robot, human-AI interactions. The study applies framing theory and a content analysis methodology to examine filmmakers’ choices to determine robot and AI character types frequenting popular cinema. Seventeen popular films yielded 592 scenes to analyse. Findings from this quantitative content analysis revealed patterns portraying robots and AI more often as friendly, helpful companions of humans, rather than menacing or harmful to humans. Therefore, the researchers conclude that modern films primarily depict cohesive and complimentary interactions between humans and living technology, reflecting on heavy technology use and dependency. Furthermore, individuals who create these films may be illustrating scenes of a preferred reality, where AI and robots are meant to be our helpers, rather than threatening replacements in both society and industry.

Editorial: Art and Politics Section

This issue of Mutual Images Journal presents, in this special section, a collection of essays centred around the theme of “Japanese Arts and Politics”. The articles within this section focus on the relations between Japanese art and political themes. This section of the journal is, in part, the output of a workshop and research project designed by Eriko Tomizawa-Kay—a lecturer at the University of East Anglia (UEA)—and titled Reflective Transitions of Politics in the Arts: Examining the Atomisation of Japanese Socio-political Milieus through Art. The workshop was held at UEA, in Norwich, on 24 August 2017, bringing together scholars to investigate how Japanese arts have been shaped by political forces in the “neoliberal” world order, as an analytical dimension to study and comment on the process of atomisation of society as it can be perceived in the arts. The workshop’s papers presented empirical examples of internalised art productions and art currents in Japan, in juxtaposition to, or contrast with, art expressing national or regional politics. The contributors focused on the presence of political notions and messages in Japanese fine arts, popular visual media, visual entertainment forms, and visual arts at large, and on the possible intersections among “western” arts and artistic representations of political themes concerning the Japanese context. As a collaborative endeavour that expands interdisciplinary research contributing to a growing literature, this project attempts to break new ground in [...]

Of Cornopleezeepi and Party Poopers: A Brief History of Physicians in Comics.

The representations of physicians and medical practice found in comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels throughout the past century reflect broader representational trends in popular visual media. Drawing on examples including Winsor McCay's Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, the superhero comics character Stephen Strange/Doctor Strange, and contemporary graphic medicine, this article outlines the shifting models for depicting physicians and medical ethics in comics. It concludes that contemporary representations are often more realistic and nuanced, although gender and racial diversity along with diversity in medical specializations remains problematic.

A Vernacular of Surveillance: Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus Perform White Authenticity

This article looks at popular visual media in the context of the larger surveillance society in which it occurs. Bringing into conversation scholarship in feminist media studies, surveillance, performance, and critical race studies, the article offers another way to explore race in popular media and consider the implications of surveillance. The work examines how principles from contexts of surveillance carry over into contexts not under surveillance. The article explores the vernacularization—the process of making things mundane, everyday, unremarkable—of ideas about authenticity and performing, and the implications when it comes to race issues, which are animated in contexts of surveillance, but exceed these and are apparent in contexts not under surveillance. Through a critical examination of Taylor Swift’s video “Shake it off,” and Miley Cyrus’s video “We Can’t Stop,” the author argues self-reflexivity marks their performing behavior as distinct from their authentic self, reassuring audiences there is an authentic (white) self under the performance. This authentic self is presented as stable, a core identity most naturally enacted by white bodies, brought into relief by performing otherness.

“Smashing Images in Your Face”: Mobile Perception and Urban Media in James Rosenquist’s Pop

James Rosenquist’s paintings of the early 1960s have been interpreted as a Pop synthesis of media imagery and the formal and aesthetic logic of mid-century American abstract art. These composites of image fragments also confront the mechanisms and operations of the mobilized gaze at a time of intense anxiety over the negative psychological effects of popular visual media. The products, bodies, and vehicles vying for space in his works reference everyday collisions between images generated by consumer culture and the congested urban spaces where they circulated most heavily. Rosenquist’s work is unique within Pop art in its systematic evocation of the sensory experiences of urban vision, characterized by shifts in movement, scale, and time of exposure to produce moments of erratic, distracted looking, as well as a sustained, immersive gaze. By considering the artist’s statements on city life and his career as a Times Square billboard painter, as well as contemporaneous theories and descriptions of modern visuality, this article interprets Rosenquist’s project as primarily an exploration of the destabilizing visual effects of urban life and the modern image. It frames his work as equally relevant to abstraction in the everyday as to modernist aesthetics.

Perancangan Komik Digital Interaktif "New Ethnicia" : Eksplorasi Visual Storytelling Cerita Rakyat Indonesia

Indonesian folkloree in comic form is still difficult to compete with foreign-made comics both in quality and quantity. Moreover, with Indonesia’s teens as target market who tend to like comics from abroad, Indonesia’s folkloree and content in comic may be neglected. In order to prevent those conditions, it required an alternative solution to packaging folkloree through popular visual media among teens such as mobile device. Interactive digital comics in mobile devices may support the presentation of Indonesian folkloree, as long as it designed with the appropriate interactive storytelling and media strategy. This is an action research that delivering solution in form of adigital comic prototype. Through selected aspects of visual storytelling and interactivity theory, data will be analyzed to produce the digital comic formulation from Indonesia folkloree which will work as the foundation of designing interactive digital comics on mobile devices. As the result, the Indonesia’s folkloree can be delivered through a formulation of combined interactive storytelling and media strategy.

Visualizing the Past: The Power of the Image in Franz Kugler and Adolph Menzel's Illustrated History Book Geschichte Friedrichs des Großen (1842)

Current scholars often neglect the formative role of popular visual media for the formation of nineteenth-century German academic historicism and exclusively focus on its textual and narrative design. This article aims to change this perspective by exploring the representational power of images in the genre of illustrated history books, specifically in the work on Prussian history by the art historian Franz Kugler and the painter Adolph Menzel, Geschichte Friedrichs des Großen (1842). Menzel's use of wood engraving created a revolutionary text and image relationship, because his illustrations could be printed directly into the text. Menzel and Kugler's medial hybrids reconfigure historical representation by referencing visual perception modes exhibited in panoramas, photography, and landscape paintings. Their work represents the era of Frederick II beyond a narrative paradigm and highlights visual-spatial conceptions of the past that are not commonly associated with German academic historicism.

Bring on the books for everybody: how literary culture became popular culture

Bring on the Books for Everybody is an engaging assessment of the robust popular culture that has developed in the United States during the past two decades. Jim Collins describes how a once solitary and print-based has become an exuberantly social activity, enjoyed as much on the screen as on the page. Fueled by Oprah's Book Club, Miramax film adaptations, superstore bookshops, and new technologies such as the Kindle digital reader, fiction has been transformed into best-selling, high-concept entertainment. Collins highlights the infrastructural and cultural changes that have given rise to a flourishing reading public at a time when the future of the book has been called into question. Book reading, he claims, has not become obsolete; it has become integrated into popular visual media. Collins explores how digital technologies and the convergence of literary, visual, and consumer cultures have changed what counts as a literary experience in phenomena ranging from lush film adaptations such as The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love to the customer communities at Amazon. Central to Collins's analysis and, he argues, to contemporary culture, is the notion that refined taste is now easily acquired; it is just a matter of knowing where to access it and whose advice to trust. Using recent novels, he shows that the redefined landscape has affected not just how books are being read, but also what sort of novels are being written for these passionate readers. Collins connects bestsellers from The Jane Austen Book Club and Literacy and Longing in L.A. to Saturday and The Line of Beauty, highlighting their depictions of fictional worlds filled with avid readers and their equations of reading with cultivated consumer taste.

Sociocultural knowledge and visual re(‐)presentations of Black masculinity and community: reading The Wire for critical multicultural teacher education

In this article we consider the implications of using popular visual media as a pedagogic tool for helping teachers acquire critical sociocultural knowledge to work more effectively with students of color, particularly Black males. Drawing from a textual analysis (McKee 2001, 2003; Rose 2001) conducted in the critical visual studies tradition (Barthes 1977; Hall 1993, 1997) and longstanding discourses on Blackness, Black masculinity and critical visual studies, we explore how the critically acclaimed HBO series, The Wire, positions Black males in the local and larger social milieu. While offering a more complex rendering of the Black male, The Wire simultaneously presents a myopic representation of the Black man and his place in the larger Black community. This inquiry highlights the pedagogic limitations of using The Wire, or any other visual media that reinscribes deficit‐oriented knowledge that critical multicultural teacher education seeks to challenge about Blackness and Black people.

The Spectropolitics of Romantic Infidelism: Cruikshank, Paine, and The Age of Reason

The aim of this article is to take a fresh look at Romanticism’s arch ‘infidel’, Thomas Paine. My approach is to place his key work The Age of Reason (1795) in the context of what Derrida in Spectres of Marx calls ‘spectropolitics’. Derrida coins this term to describe the way in which ‘effectivity phantamolizes itself,’ and I want to use Derrida’s insight to explore the specifically visual dimension of Paine’s ‘phantomal’ image. I will show that there are three components to the spectropolitical transformation of Paine: his demonization in the 1790s as the diabolical seducer of the common reader; his ‘resuscitation’ in the post-war period by Richard Carlile and other ‘apostles’; and the ironic conjunction between this contested ‘apotheosis’ of Paine and his Deistical debunking of Christian revelation as vulgar spectacle. I focus my discussion around George Cruikshank’s print The Age of Reason (1819) in order to show that caricature was a major spectropolitical force in the Romantic period and the apposite cultural medium for negatively ‘phantamolizing’ Paine, though this tactic always ran the risk of further enhancing his ‘cult’ status in radical martyrology. The larger critical aim of the article is to open up a new area in Romantic studies: to redefine Romanticism in terms of ‘spectropolitics’ gives popular visual media such as caricature a primary rather than secondary critical function, and it allows us to rethink and revalue the ‘phantasmagoric’ transformation of Romantic politics and culture.

Persistent Popular Images of Pastoralists

Pastoralists have long been recurrent figures in visual images and other representations of Africa and Africans. Whether seen in positive or negative terms, pastoralists have provided means for thinking about and imaging cultural difference and identity, with considerable continuity in representational forms and themes. As popular visual media proliferated and changed over the past two centuries--from postcards, trade cards, and live shows to Hollywood films and video games--African pastoralists have continued to appear in each new form, often replicating the types and stereotypes of Euroamerican understandings even as they register new and varied circumstances. The proliferation and reverberation of similar images through diverse visual media is one way these images have come to seem "natural" and to develop such remarkable persistence [Kratz 2002]. Using cases drawn from eastern and southern Africa, this collection of articles considers the multifaceted processes of representation involved in imaging African pastoralists. It invites attention to how such representations are produced in diverse visual media and through interconnections among visual and verbal media, examining the range of actors, interactions, and mediations involved in crafting representations of African pastoralists at different times and in different places.

The Revolt against Realism: The Attraction of Fiction for Young Writers

In this article I explore the implicit boundaries on topic choice established by early proponents of writing process pedagogy and trace these boundaries to a widespread cultural concern about the disappearance of a pretechnological form of childhood. This orientation has resulted in a reluctance to examine (and in some cases even to allow) children to write nonrealistic fiction modeled after the popular visual media (cartoons, movies, television). The study reports on interviews with 77 third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade students from 4 classes in which they explain the attraction of nonrealistic fiction. Drawing on the work of Dyson and Pratt, I urge a dialogic view of writing that acknowledges the positive contribution that children's media affiliations can make to writing development.