Visual Tropes Research Articles

Living on a Picture: Approaching Images and Life Stories in Social Media

If images were once conceived either as subordination or oppositions of words, the advent of the Internet has started new relationship dynamics between them. Within this digital scenario, vision and textuality intensely intertwine in the form of captions, posts, hyperlinks or other kind of social media content, daily handled by users. In this context, autobiographical narratives will take on a major role, shaping the way in which the subject conceives, forges and registers his or her identity in relation to the reader/viewer. This article aims to address the question, more present than ever, of how certain autobiographical narratives are disseminated through social networks, and how image and narrative dialogue within this framework. By addressing specific cases found on platforms such as Instagram, we will try to elucidate how these publications point to an ambivalent relationship with visual tropes or narratives associated with certain life experiences, either questioning it or contributing to the creation of a collective narrative. A complex interplay of image and narrative that will affect not only how we share life, but also how we understand it and construct it together with others in a changing world.

A Lantern View from The Ruwenzori Mountain Range

This article explores the role of magic lantern performances in Belgian colonial history, and their impact on broader discussions on science communication and colonial representations. It centers on a lantern lecture that recounted a scientific expedition to the Ruwenzori mountain range in the Belgian Congo in 1932, extensively illustrated with photographic slides. Our analysis focuses on the performative strategies employed by Ganshof Van der Meersch, the lecturer, to frame his scientific discourse on the Ruwenzori mission. Drawing on visual tropes and the narrative structures of an adventurous travel story, he emphasizes the hardships and heroism of the expedition members. While the scientific aspects of the mission are highlighted, the lecture predominantly portrays the scientific process and the heroic endeavors of the members, rather than delving into the region’s fauna and flora. This narrative reinforces Western superiority over the colonized territory and its inhabitants, aligning with imperialist agendas. Enhanced by captivating visuals, the lecture strategically evokes emotional engagement to solicit financial support. By examining these dynamics, the article unveils the underlying mechanisms behind science communication in service of colonial endeavors. In the broader context of colonial studies and the history of science and knowledge, this analysis contributes to understanding of how performance-based science communication was used to advance the colonial agenda.

Emblems Performing Law

The close relationship between the theatre and the courtroom is a commonplace visual trope. In both spaces, discourse becomes spectacle, speech is performative, narrative is subjective, and scenography is essential. Julie Stone Peters’ book Law as Performance articulates the long history of Justice’s theatricality, through a detailed examination of legal verisimilitude. Does this theatricalization, which is often outrageous, lead to a travesty of the judicial ritual? While the very raison d‘être of the judicial institution is to produce images, these images have different roles, uses, and regimes, which the following contribution sets out to address. The subject matter of Law as Performance lies at the crossroads of several different methodological approaches, particularly centering judicial language analysis. This paper will discuss the ways in which visual sources are treated; the oft-quoted adage “justice is not merely to be done but must be seen to be done” leads to the longue durée analysis of the trope of law as theatre.

Carrie Mae Weems’ Intersectional Tropes: Engaging Black Feminism Within Arts Teacher Education

ABSTRACT In this article, we approach the visual tropes in Carrie Mae Weems’ bodies from an intersectional perspective through mobilising critical arts and black feminist studies for art pedagogies. A constant in Weems’ trajectory are the intersectional tropes that emerge in her artworks, which are collapsed with bodies, defying racial, gender, age, and social class stereotypes, stratification, and oppression. Aiming to engage black feminism with pedagogies, we revisit a critical art project that connects different spaces: the exhibition “Carrie Mae Weems: A Great Turn in the Possible”; and, a pre-service art teacher education course - “Childhoods: Inclusive narratives through art” - where narrative is a mode of decolonising pedagogy through contemporary art. First, we will examine the topics and strategies practised by five students’ micro-groups dealing with the critical and dialogical analysis of the intersectional tropes in Weems’ series. Second, we will reconstruct the process that has been conducted to transform and transfer that knowledge into educational spaces and resources designed to perform a feminist, intercultural, and social justice-oriented art education. Finally, the article discusses how critical pedagogy merges with critical arts to train future art educators while experimenting with a black feminist curriculum.

The Külliye as Hypotext: a New Reading of Ottoman Imperial Mosques and Tombs

Abstract This article reflects on Istanbul as a palimpsest city, more specifically, about how architectural typologies, practices, visual tropes and narratives migrate through different contexts in time and space. As a city inherited from the Byzantine Empire, negotiating the intersection of past and present as well as topography and politics has been fundamental to shaping Ottoman Istanbul. The article explores the imperial city through one of its ‘original’ Ottoman structures, the religious and social complex known as külliye, in order to frame its agency, both formal and urbanistic, to reveal not only its extremely rich and imaginative iterations from the conquest of Constantinople to the Tanzimat but also the spatiotemporal relationships between them.

Assembling a global health image: Ethical and pragmatic tensions through the lenses of photographers.

Recently, global health has been confronting its visual culture, historically modulated by colonialism, racism and abusive representation. There have been international calls to promote ethicality of visual practices. However, despite this focus on the history and the institutional use of global health images, little is known about how in practice contemporary images are created in communities, and how consent to be in photographs is obtained. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 29 global health photographers about the ethical and practical challenges they experience in creating global health images, and thematically analysed the findings. The following themes were identified: (1) global health photography is undergoing a marketing transformation and images are being increasingly moderated; (2) photographers routinely negotiate stereotypical and abusive tropes purposefully sought by organisations; (3) local scenes are modified, enhanced and staged to achieve a desired marketing effect; (4) 'empowerment' is becoming an increasingly prominent dehumanising visual trope; (5) consent to be photographed can be jeopardised by power imbalances, illiteracy, fears and trust; (6) organisations sometimes problematically recycle images. This research has identified practical and ethical issues experienced by global health photographers, suggesting that the production cycle of global health images can be easily abused. The detected themes raise questions of responsibility and accountability, and require further transdisciplinary discussion, especially if promoting ethical photojournalism is the goal for 21st century global health.

Drawing the Invisible: A Study of Urban Space, Informal Migration of Construction Workers, and Precarity in Simon Lamouret’s The Alcazar

This article, situated at the intersection of urban studies and comics studies, seeks to interrogate the nature of urban migration and the lives of construction workers in Simon Lamouret’s The Alcazar (2022), a comic based on and in the city of Bangalore. The article begins with a paratextual analysis of the comic, followed by a Lefebvrian analysis of the construction site, to argue that cities like Bangalore are evolving fast “beyond the plan” (Benjamin,2015) to meet the accelerating market pressure, resulting in failed urban planning, infrastructure, and urban crisis. It will further explore what Lamouret’s comic does specifically to intervene in the discourse of neoliberal urbanism and challenge that discourse. The article will also analyze the formal specificities of the comics form and the multiple visual tropes Lamouret employed to “visibilize” the migrant workers and to advance their legitimate rights to urban life in the cityscape.

Unspeakable Things Spoken: Transgenerational Trauma, Fractured Bodies and Visual Tropes in Toni Morrison, Elsa Morante and Elena Ferrante’s Works

ABSTRACT This article proposes to investigate a transnational lineage of female-authored trauma narratives that centre on how overarching power structures affect the lives of women. My line of inquiry traces the legacy of transgenerational and socially transmissible trauma through the maternal protagonists in the works of Toni Morrison (Beloved), Elsa Morante (History: A Novel) and Elena Ferrante (Neapolitan Novels). In a comparative reading underpinned by Rothberg’s notion of the multidirectional negotiation of cultural memory, I identify a series of tropes in the authors’ works that effectively articulate trauma. These include the figures of spectral returns and ghosts, nondiscursive signs and images and other linguistic and structural disarticulations, which all serve to challenge and indeed recodify a dominant master discourse. Ultimately, I show that all three authors’ works powerfully intercept and translate the spectral (hi)stories of diverse settings of violence and trauma whilst engaging in a multidirectional, dynamic and transnational dialogue.

What Does Rape Look Like?

Abstract From the late Middle Ages into the Renaissance, a handful of narratives about sexual assault dominated Western Europe. In the seventeen novellas of Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron (1559) that feature assault or attempted assault, these different narratives coexist. To date, scholarship has not extensively explored the relationship between the novellas of the Heptaméron and the first two sets of engravings to accompany them—those of Dutch artist Romeyn de Hooghe, in 1698, and those of S. Freudenberger and A. Dunker, in 1780–1781. This article addresses that gap, and, by means of a comparative reading, considers different narratives about sexual assault in the novellas and frame of the Heptaméron alongside these first two sets of visual engravings. It argues that the engravings more closely follow other visual tropes of rape than they do the text. In so doing, these first images of the Heptaméron favor more canonical representations of sexual assault that either heroicize, eroticize, or blame the subject of rape. What is lost is the polyvalence of the text; in particular, moments that document the responses and reactions of the women in the novellas and the opinions they put forth in the frame.

The Significance of Colour Symbolisms in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (1979)

The paper seeks to critically explore Angela Carter’s use of colour symbolisms in her short story “The Bloody Chamber” (1979). By focussing on the recurrent invocation of three major colours, namely red, black and white, the paper studies how chromatic coding becomes a potent rhetorical device through which the psychological and physical implications of gendered violence are negotiated in Carter’s story. Paying close attention to the protagonist’s interaction with an aesthetically stimulating narrative world, steeped in visceral colours, the paper attempts at problematizing the politics of victimisation and female agency that underlies the entire narrative. Carter’s deployment of colour symbolisms has a quasi-theatrical dimension that tends to visualise the subversive implications of the text. Keeping that in mind, the paper seeks to crack the chromatic codes at multiple levels; for instance, red is studied in context to patriarchal violation of female bodies, as an embodiment of female desire and a manifestation of female bonding. Black is read through the lens of motherhood where it becomes a visual trope that deconstructs the prototype of an ideal mother and individualises her as a redemptive and rebellious figure. Finally, by paying attention to Carter’s use of the colour white, the paper seeks to trace its dual purpose in perpetuating invisibilization of female desire and charging the act of seeing with an agential import.

Chatterton's Precious Things

If Thomas Chatterton had been born to Generation Alpha, my children’s generation, he would have been one of those obnoxiously attention-hungry, fashionable, razor-sharp social-media influencers. Self-promotion drove Chatterton. Precocious and sensitive, he used whatever literary and visual tropes seemed most popular to his inexperienced, but culturally acute eyes. His poetics was gorgeously fashionable and fraudulent, an inchoate grab at whatever professional relationships or commercial opportunities were likely to enhance his literary and pecuniary standing, and his success. More than anything, he wished to demonstrate his skills as a professional gentleman of letters, to those he perceived as his coterie circle of peers, patrons and publishers.
 The material experiment that Chatterton is best known for still is the Rowley manuscripts, and their often-repeated story of antiquarian fraudulence and forgery. But when I began researching Chatterton’s poetry and other textual forms, I discovered that his interest in the material was not only some kind of ill-informed, adolescent, historical conmanship; instead, it was a broad-based, ambitious and purposeful attempt to harness the power of material things for his own professional advantage. That said, in this paper I do use the Rowley manuscripts as a case study, because they are the most well-developed and frankly entertaining of Chatterton’s precious things.

Cartooning from the right: Israel’s Religious Zionist cartoonists and the judicial overhaul

ABSTRACT Political cartoons are valuable cultural artifacts which not only capture moments in time but also offer the illustrator’s insight into those moments. This essay examines how three of Israel’s Religious Zionist cartoonists have illustrated the first three months of the 2023 nationwide protests and the judicial overhaul that sparked them. Shay Charka, Or Reichert, and Reut Bortz all self-identify as members of the Religious Zionist community but their cartoons show diverse reactions to the protests and proposed legislation. Examining their works provides insight into how the cartoonists themselves are navigating significant changes in their own society and also what messages are being conveyed to the Religious-Zionist readership. What emerges from this analysis are thematic overlaps in which the artists draw upon common visual tropes and themes but offer distinct readings of the judicial overhaul and the protests that ensued. The value of analyzing the three cartoonists’ work in this way is that it provides insight into the messages that are disseminated to the wider Religious Zionist community given their role as figures who shape and construct Religious Zionist ideology and mentality.

Climate change communication in India: A study on climate change imageries on Instagram

The rising accessibility of mobile phones and the proliferation of social media have revolutionized the way climate change has been communicated. Yet, the inherent invisibility and temporal complexities of climate change pose challenges when trying to communicate it on visual media platforms. This study employs visual content analysis to investigate how environmental non-government organizations (NGOs) in India address these limitations on their Instagram pages. Four environmental NGOs based in India were selected, and their thirty most recent Instagram posts related to climate change were analyzed based on imagery type, subject, context and themes. The findings revealed that these NGOs employed a diverse range of climate change imageries, often accompanied by overlaying texts, to traverse the lack of standardized visual tropes. Moreover, it is noted that a significant majority of analyzed Instagram imageries following the visual principles advocated by Climate Outreach emerged from one single NGO account, suggesting potential variations in the visual communication strategies among different NGOs.

The aesthetics of impasse and the affective rhythms of survival: Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank as cinema of precarity

ABSTRACT This article reads Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (2009) through Lauren Berlant’s conceptualisation of impasse and the affective rhythms of survival, which Berlant develops in their reflections on the cinema of precarity. This framework, I contend, has the potential to open up new avenues of inquiry within the study of Arnold’s work, usually discussed in relation to either British (social) realist cinema or the phenomenological representations of female experience. Situating Fish Tank within the broader framework of the cinema of precarity helps articulate a position from which to problematise the overemphasis on movement in critical writings on the film – which, as I will discuss, is also predominant in both affect theory and film phenomenology. I argue that with its simultaneous focus on movement and impasse, realised through framing and composition of the shot, camera movement, and repetition of visual tropes that convey confinement, Fish Tank is able to capture and aesthetically re-enact the impact of neoliberalism, while simultaneously paying attention to class and gendered styles of bodily adjustment to crisis ordinariness. I conclude that Berlant’s critical apparatus illuminates the formal and affective complexity of Fish Tank in new ways, and creates space to address larger questions of affect, aesthetics, and the profilmic body.

Travelling Through Memory: Transgender Road Narratives in Contemporary Italian Documentaries

ABSTRACT The narrative of the journey has become a dominant visual trope in the representation of transgender identities. This article examines three Italian documentaries that engage with the trans road narrative, beyond the metaphor of gender transition: C’è un soffio di vita soltanto (2021), Una nobile rivoluzione (2014), and Porpora (2021). By focusing on the use of cinematic transitions as moments of dis-connection that simultaneously elicit processes of transformation and memorialization, the article explores how Italian trans documentaries have redeployed travel narratives as occasions for pinpointing individual stories and mending collective history. In these films, the visual motif of the journey dissolves the binary between moving and staying in place, to become a fitting metaphor for a shared memory that, like any identity and like cinematic images, is enduring precisely because it is in motion.

Elena Ferrante as World Literature by Stiliana Milkova

Reviewed by: Elena Ferrante as World Literature by Stiliana Milkova Carlotta Moro Elena Ferrante as World Literature. By Stiliana Milkova. (Literatures as World Literature) New York: Bloomsbury Academic. 2021. x+214 pp. £90. ISBN 978–1–5013–5752–7. Published in the wake of a global onset of Ferrante fever, Stiliana Milkova's Elena Ferrante as World Literature is the first comprehensive English-language monograph on the acclaimed Italian author. The volume provides an original and accessible analysis of Ferrante's corpus of writings, encompassing both fiction and non-fiction, and rigorously drawing on an impressive multidisciplinary array of interpretative tools that range from classical mythology, to Freudian psychoanalysis, to feminist theory. Addressing the crucial role of translators in Ferrante's international rise, the introductory chapter argues that her powerful impact on the world literary scene stems from her creation of a universal feminine imaginary that resists the mechanisms of violence and gender inequality that characterize our age. Following this, the neologisms frantumaglia and smarginatura are proposed as the lexical, psychic, and spatial parameters of Ferrante's theory of feminine experience. Unfurling the semantic layers of these terms, Milkova observes that frantumaglia and smarginatura are used to excavate and describe the turmoil that [End Page 264] afflicts Ferrante's protagonists, who fall into an abyss of suffering as a result of male violence yet always resurface as creative entities. The opening paragraph of Elena Ferrante as World Literature presents the monograph as the fruit of the intellectual exchange that Milkova had with her mother. In a similar way, Ferrante's writing on maternal identity is also understood as an ongoing dialogue with a genealogy of literary foremothers that includes Sibilla Aleramo, Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg, and Alba de Céspedes, among others. The sweeping chapter on 'Binding and Unbinding the Maternal Body and Voice' identifies the visceral bond between mothers and daughters as the overriding concern of Ferrante's literature. Milkova concludes that by giving life to dysfunctional and devious mothers Ferrante challenges a pervasive cultural paradigm in which creativity has been vanquished by self-sacrificing child-rearing. The chapter entitled 'Outside the Frame: The Aesthetics of Female Creativity and Authorship' brilliantly surveys the signature visual trope of the contained female figure which recurs in Ferrante's universe, where women appear framed by mirrors, as mutilated bodies on a cropped canvas, or in commodified and eroticized paintings and photographs. Imprisoned by an androcentric artistic and literary tradition, Ferrante's narrators struggle to break free from aesthetics that objectify them. With innovative references to feminist art theory and the works of women artists, Milkova illustrates how Ferrante's heroines appropriate the patriarchal iconography of dismemberment in order to wield creative power and to lay the foundations for a feminist artistic legacy. The chapter 'Mapping Urban Feminine Topographies' meticulously examines cityscapes and gendered spatial hierarchies in Ferrante's narratives. The hostile urban settings of Turin and Naples are configured as masculinist spaces: as in the myth of Theseus and Ariadne, Naples is envisioned as a labyrinth designed to punish female desire, while Turin is inscribed with monuments that celebrate male political, military, and cultural dominance. Tracing the journeys undertaken by Delia, Olga, Elena, and Lila across these settings, the chapter suggests that their perambulations remap the patriarchal cartography that erased them, creating new feminine localities that fit their subjectivities. The Epilogue, a short analysis of The Lying Life of Adults, charts the development of defining motifs in Ferrante's thought, such as Naples as the topography of the self, the significance of female genealogy, and the reflection of the female body in the mirror. As she masterfully weaves together a repertoire of tropes and preoccupations that span Ferrante's entire writing career across different genres and media, Milkova deftly untangles common thematic threads, draws out analogies, unveils shared patterns, and displays how Ferrante's feminine imaginary has matured over the course of thirty years. Although she convincingly advocates for the inclusion of Ferrante in the canon of world literature, Milkova never loses sight of the author's Italian roots. Indeed, particularly cogent is the extensive consideration of the profound influence exerted by Italian women writers, artists, and philosophers on Ferrante...

Staging the Imagined City: Aretino in Rome and London

AbstractThis article explores the theme of ‘cityscapes’, and Aretino as a writer of the urban experience, by focussing on the city as an unknowable and anonymous space, especially to social outsiders. It will first examine how Aretino portrays Rome in his early comedy Cortigiana (1525) as a confusing and socially stratified space when experienced from its peripheries. A key factor in achieving this is in his mapping of the imagined spaces of the city (the ‘locus’) onto the theatrical stage‐space (the ‘platea’) so that the stage represents the street and the back‐stage represents a hidden world from which both Cortigiana's main characters and indeed the audience are locked out. Those desired spaces of the city are often coded in sexual terms, and so the second half of this article will explore the way in which i modi (the ephemeral erotic images which would shape Aretino's posthumous reputation as a pornographer) would become a visual trope used by seventeenth‐century English writers to conjure up the unseen and imagined interiors of London's suburban brothels and aristocratic boudoirs.

‘Artistic Text’ in the Artworks of V.E.Makovsky: Rhetorical Figures and Visual Tropes

The article is devoted to the study of visual semantics in the artworks of the famous artist Vladimir Makovsky (1846–1920). This painter entered the history of Russian art as an outstanding master of “small genre”, the author of a short, fascinating story in painting. It is no coincidence that the contemporaries compared the characters in V. Makovsky’s paintings with the heroes of N. Gogol’s, I. Turgenev’s, A. Ostrovsky’s, L. Tolstoy’s, M. Gorky’s, A. Chekhov’s works. The author makes an attempt of interdisciplinary research, analyzing the “Artistic text” in V.Makovsky’s paintings in the aspect of philological problems, using the appropriate methodology and terminology, as well as touching upon the issues of psychological perception and comprehension of his works of art. The article draws parallels between the rhetorical figures (antithesis, comparison, metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole) and the visual tropes in V.Makovsky’s paintings and, using specific examples, examines the role of the psychological landscape, quotation, artistic detail, mirror, observer’s position, the techniques of “story in a story” (“picture in a picture”) in painting. Language — a cultural code — performs two formally opposite functions: on the one hand, it preserves and reproduces traditions, and on the other, it provides dynamics through creative innovation. Verbal language affects the viewer gradually in time, with a clear sequence of language elements, visual language affects the viewer one-step and complex. It is argued that in V. Makovsky’s artworks there is an intense penetration of techniques and image-associative references associated with literary tradition. The means of artistic expression in literature and in visual arts reflect the action of general mental operators associated with creation and transformation activities.

Falling Stories: Cinematic Naturalism and Disability in Frank Norris’ and Stephen Crane's City Sketches

Falling Stories: Cinematic Naturalism and Disability in Frank Norris’ and Stephen Crane's City Sketches

Defining a sphere of influence: Karel Landman's centenary monument

Located on a cleared koppie called "Kolrand" in the Eastern Cape, the Karel Landman Monument (KLM) was designed by Gerhard Moerdijk. Its foundation was laid on 16 December 1938, and the monument itself was unveiled a year later. But rather than being a straightforward outgrowth of the celebrations that surrounded the Centenary of the Great Trek, it is revealed that the KLM was mired in controversy about Karel Landman's standing as a "Voortrekker" and the monument's legitimacy. It is argued also that, despite seeming unusual, it deploys visual tropes that can be discerned in other monuments that emanated from the Centenary Trek. Furthermore, it is proposed that its visual language is tied into Afrikaner imaginaries that held sway in the late 1930s. In its inclusion of a globe and its treatment of the trek motif within it, the KLM is underpinned by a conception of South Africa's place in the world that is at odds with a British imperialist vision of the Cape and Egypt as civilising points at either end of a dark hinterland. It would seem instead to be tied into conceptions of the heartland of Africa as an abode in which the white Afrikaner enjoys a God-given predominance and may perhaps even be linked to conceptions of Monomotapa which were an influence on Moerdijk.