front cover of Visions of Global America and the Future of Critical Reading
Visions of Global America and the Future of Critical Reading
Daniel T. O’Hara
The Ohio State University Press, 2009
The forces of globalization have transformed literary studies in America, and not for the better. The detailed critical reading of artistic texts has been replaced by newly minted catchphrases describing widely divergent snippets and anecdotes—deemed mere documents—regardless of the critic’s expertise in the appropriate languages and cultures. Visions of Global America and the Future of Critical Reading by Daniel T. O’Hara traces the origin of this global approach to Emerson. But it also demonstrates another, tragic tradition of vision from Henry James that counters the Emersonian global imagination with the hard realities of being human. Building on this tradition, on Lacan’s insights into the Real, and on Badiou’s original theory of truth, O’Hara points to how we can, and should, reground literary study in critical reading.
            In Emerson’s classic essay “Experience” (1844), America appears in and as a symptom of the critic’s self-making that sacrifices the power of love to this visionary project—a literary version of the American self-made man. O’Hara rescues critical reading using James’s late work, especially The Golden Bowl (1904), and builds on this vision with examinations of texts by St. Paul, Emerson, Wallace Stevens, James Purdy, John Cheever, James Baldwin, John Ashbery, and others.
 
 
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Visions of Loveliness
Great Flower Breeders of the Past
Judith M. Taylor
Ohio University Press, 2014

Gardeners of today take for granted the many varieties of geraniums, narcissi, marigolds, roses, and other beloved flowers for their gardens. Few give any thought at all to how this incredible abundance came to be or to the people who spent a good part of their lives creating it. These breeders once had prosperous businesses and were important figures in their communities but are only memories now. They also could be cranky and quirky.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, new and exotic species were arriving in Europe and the United States from all over the world, and these plants often captured the imaginations of the unlikeliest of men, from aristocratic collectors to gruff gardeners who hardly thought of themselves as artists. But whatever their backgrounds, they all shared a quality of mind that led them to ask “What if?” and to use their imagination and skills to answer that question themselves. The newest rose from China was small and light pink, but what if it were larger and came in more colors? Lilac was very nice in its way, but what if its blossoms were double and frilly?

While there are many books about plant collectors and explorers, there are none about plant breeders. Drawing from libraries, archives, and the recollections of family members, horticultural historian Judith M. Taylor traces the lives of prominent cultivators in the context of the scientific discoveries and changing tastes of their times. Visions of Loveliness is international in scope, profiling plant breeders from many countries—for example, China and the former East Germany—whose work may be unknown to the Anglophone reader.

In addition to chronicling the lives of breeders, the author also includes chapters on the history behind the plants by genus, from shrubs and flowering trees to herbaceous plants.

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Visions of Paradise
Images of Eden in the Cinema
Dixon, Wheeler Winston
Rutgers University Press, 2006

Depictions of sex, violence, and crime abound in many of today's movies, sometimes making it seem that the idyllic life has vanished-even from our imaginations. But as shown in this unique book, paradise has not always been lost. For many years, depictions of heaven, earthly paradises, and utopias were common in popular films.

Illustrated throughout with intriguing, rare stills and organized to provide historical context, Visions of Paradise surveys a huge array of films that have offered us glimpses of life free from strife, devoid of pain and privation, and full of harmony. In films such as Moana, White Shadows in the South Seas, The Green Pastures, Heaven Can Wait, The Enchanted Forest, The Bishop's Wife, Carousel, Bikini Beach, and Elvira Madigan, characters and the audience partake in a vision of personal freedom and safety-a zone of privilege and protection that transcends the demands of daily existence.

Many of the films discussed are from the 1960s-perhaps the most edenic decade in contemporary cinema, when everything seemed possible and radical change was taken for granted. As Dixon makes clear, however, these films have not disappeared with the dreams of a generation; they continue to resonate today, offering a tonic to the darker visions that have replaced them.

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Visions of Persia
Mapping the Travels of Adam Olearius
Elio Brancaforte
Harvard University Press, 2003

This work examines the travel account of a German baroque author who journeyed in search of silk from Northern Germany, through Muscovy, to the court of Shah Safi in Isfahan.

Adam Olearius introduced Persian literature, history, and arts to the German-speaking public; his frank appraisal of Persian customs foreshadows the enlightened spirit of the eighteenth century (influencing Montesquieu’s Persian Letters as well as Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan) and prepares the way for German Romanticism’s infatuation with Persian poetry.

Elio Brancaforte focuses on the visual and discursive nexus uniting Olearius’s text with the numerous engravings that supplement the book. The emphasis falls on contextualized readings of Olearius’s decorative frontispieces and his new and improved map of Persia and the Caspian Sea, as expressions of early modern subjectivity.

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VISIONS OF PLACE
CITY, NEIGHBORHOODS, SUBURBS, AND CINCINNATI'S CLIFTON, 1850–2000
ZANE L. MILLER
The Ohio State University Press, 2001

Almost every American city has or had neighborhoods like Clifton, which developed in the mid-nineteenth century as a silk-stocking suburb with a more diverse population than most observers noticed. Incorporated by Cincinnati in the late nineteenth century, Clifton had a reputation as a better-than-average place in which to live, a view that persisted until the end of the twentieth century.

In Visions of Place, Zane L. Miller treats ideas about the nature of cities—including their neighborhoods and their suburbs—as the dynamic factors in Clifton’s experience and examines the changes in Clifton's social, physical, civic, and political structure resulting from these transforming notions. These structural shifts involved a variety of familiar nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban phenomena, including not only the switch from suburban village to city neighborhood and the salience of interracial fears but also the rise of formal city planning and conflicts among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews over the future of Clifton's religious and ethnic ambiance.

Miller concludes with a policy analysis of current and future prospects for neighborhoods like Clifton and the cities and metropolitan areas of which they form a part.

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Visions of Poverty
Welfare Policy and Political Imagination
Robert Asen
Michigan State University Press, 2002
Images of poverty shape the debate surrounding it. In 1996, then President Bill Clinton signed welfare reform legislation repealing the principal federal program providing monetary assistance to poor families, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). With the president's signature this originally non-controversial program became the only title of the 1935 Social Security Act to be repealed. The legislation culminated a retrenchment era in welfare policy beginning in the early 1980s.
     To understand completely the welfare policy debates of the last half of the 20th Century, the various images of poor people that were present must be considered. Visions of Poverty explores these images and the policy debates of the retrenchment era, recounting the ways in which images of the poor appeared in these debates, relaying shifts in images that took place over time, and revealing how images functioned in policy debates to advantage some positions and disadvantage others. Looking to the future, Visions of Poverty demonstrates that any future policy agenda must first come to terms with the vivid, disabling images of the poor that continue to circulate. In debating future reforms, participants-whose ranks should include potential recipients-ought to imagine poor people anew.
     This ground breaking study in policymaking and cultural imagination will be of particular interest to scholars in rhetorical studies, political science, history, and public policy.
 
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Visions of Queer Martyrdom from John Henry Newman to Derek Jarman
Dominic Janes
University of Chicago Press, 2015
With all the heated debates around religion and homosexuality today, it might be hard to see the two as anything but antagonistic. But in this book, Dominic Janes reveals the opposite: Catholic forms of Christianity, he explains, played a key role in the evolution of the culture and visual expression of homosexuality and male same-sex desire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He explores this relationship through the idea of queer martyrdom—closeted queer servitude to Christ—a concept that allowed a certain degree of latitude for the development of same-sex desire.
            Janes finds the beginnings of queer martyrdom in the nineteenth-century Church of England and the controversies over Cardinal John Henry Newman’s sexuality. He then considers how liturgical expression of queer desire in the Victorian Eucharist provided inspiration for artists looking to communicate their own feelings of sexual deviance. After looking at Victorian monasteries as queer families, he analyzes how the Biblical story of David and Jonathan could be used to create forms of same-sex partnerships. Finally, he delves into how artists and writers employed ecclesiastical material culture to further queer self-expression, concluding with studies of Oscar Wilde and Derek Jarman that illustrate both the limitations and ongoing significance of Christianity as an inspiration for expressions of homoerotic desire.
Providing historical context to help us reevaluate the current furor over homosexuality in the Church, this fascinating book brings to light the myriad ways that modern churches and openly gay men and women can learn from the wealth of each other’s cultural and spiritual experience.
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Visions of Savage Paradise
Albert Eckhout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil
Rebecca Brienen
Amsterdam University Press, 2006
Visions of Savage Paradise is the first major book-length study of the Dutch artist Albert Eckhout to be published since 1938. This book, which draws extensively on the author’s doctoral dissertation, examines the fascinating works of art produced by Eckhout while he was court painter in Dutch Brazil to the German count Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen.Johan Maurits, who was colonial governor from 1637-1644 of the Dutch West India Company’s Brazilian colony, supported the study and representation of natural history as part of a program to document the different peoples and natural resources present in the colony. As part of this project, Eckhout created life-size paintings of Amerindians, Africans, and peoples of mixed “racial” background for display in Vrijburg, the governor’s palace. He also made still-life paintings and hundreds of chalk sketches and oil studies on paper of the “savage”peoples, plants, and animals of his new Brazilian home.In this study, the author provides a careful analysis of these works of art, framing them with a discussion of contemporary artistic practices in the Dutch Republic. Nonetheless, the primary focus of this book is the function of these works within their original colonial context. As the author makes clear, the creation, use, and display of the Brazilian paintings and drawings by Albert Eckhout strengthened Johan Maurits’s position as a colonial and cultural leader.This work will not only be of interest to students and scholars of seventeenth-century Dutch art, but it will also be an important resource for those interested in visual anthropology and the history of the WIC.
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Visions of Science
Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age
James A. Secord
University of Chicago Press, 2015
The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed an extraordinary transformation in British political, literary, and intellectual life. There was widespread social unrest, and debates raged regarding education, the lives of the working class, and the new industrial, machine-governed world. At the same time, modern science emerged in Europe in more or less its current form, as new disciplines and revolutionary concepts, including evolution and the vastness of geologic time, began to take shape.        
           
In Visions of Science, James A. Secord offers a new way to capture this unique moment of change. He explores seven key books—among them Charles Babbage’s Reflections on the Decline of Science, Charles Lyell’s Principles ofGeology, Mary Somerville’s Connexion of the Physical Sciences, and Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus—and shows how literature that reflects on the wider meaning of science can be revelatory when granted the kind of close reading usually reserved for fiction and poetry. These books considered the meanings of science and its place in modern life, looking to the future, coordinating and connecting the sciences, and forging knowledge that would be appropriate for the new age. Their aim was often philosophical, but Secord shows it was just as often imaginative, projective, and practical: to suggest not only how to think about the natural world but also to indicate modes of action and potential consequences in an era of unparalleled change.            
           
Visions of Science opens our eyes to how genteel ladies, working men, and the literary elite responded to these remarkable works. It reveals the importance of understanding the physical qualities of books and the key role of printers and publishers, from factories pouring out cheap compendia to fashionable publishing houses in London’s West End. Secord’s vivid account takes us to the heart of an information revolution that was to have profound consequences for the making of the modern world.
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Visions of Sodom
Religion, Homoerotic Desire, and the End of the World in England, c. 1550-1850
H. G. Cocks
University of Chicago Press, 2017
The book of Genesis records the fiery fate of Sodom and Gomorrah—a storm of fire and brimstone was sent from heaven and, for the wickedness of the people, God destroyed the cities “and all the plains, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.” According to many Protestant theologians and commentators, one of the Sodomites’ many crimes was homoerotic excess.

In Visions of Sodom, H. G. Cocks examines the many different ways in which the story of Sodom’s destruction provided a template for understanding homoerotic desire and behaviour in Britain between the Reformation and the nineteenth century. Sodom was not only a marker of sexual sins, but also the epitome of false—usually Catholic—religion, an exemplar of the iniquitous city, a foreshadowing of the world’s fiery end, an epitome of divine and earthly punishment, and an actual place that could be searched for and discovered. Visions of Sodom investigates each of these ways of reading Sodom’s annihilation in the three hundred years after the Reformation. The centrality of scripture to Protestant faith meant that Sodom’s demise provided a powerful origin myth of homoerotic desire and sexual excess, one that persisted across centuries, and retains an apocalyptic echo in the religious fundamentalism of our own time.
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The Visions of Sor María de Agreda
Writing Knowledge and Power
Clark Colahan
University of Arizona Press, 1994
Sor María de Agreda (1602-65) was a Spanish nun and visionary who is best known as the author of the widely read biography of the Virgin Mary, The Mystical City of God, and as the missionary who "bilocated" to the American Southwest, reportedly appearing to Indians there without ever leaving Spain. Her role as advisor to King Philip IV contributed further to her legend.

Clark Colahan now offers the first major study of Sor María's writings, including translations of two previously unpublished works: Face of the Earth and Map of the Spheres and the first half of her Report to Father Manero, in which she reflects on her bilocation.
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Visions of Sound
Musical Instruments of First Nation Communities in Northeastern America
Beverley Diamond, M. Sam Cronk, and Franziska von Rosen
University of Chicago Press, 1995
The most comprehensive study ever undertaken of the musical instruments of native people in Northeastern North America, Visions of Sound focuses on interpretations by elders and consultants from Iroquois, Wabanati, Innuat, and Anishnabek communities. Beverley Diamond, M. Sam Cronk, and Franziska von Rosen present these instruments in a theoretically innovative setting organized around such abstract themes as complementarity, twinness, and relationship. As sources of metaphor—in both sound and image—instruments are interpreted within a framework that regards meaning as "emergent" and that challenges a number of previous ethnographic descriptions. Finally, the association between sound and "motion"—an association that illuminates the unity of music and dance and the life cycles of individual musical instruments—is explored.

Featuring over two hundred photographs of instruments, dialogues among the coauthors, numerous interviews with individual music makers, and an appended catalogue of over seven hundred instrument descriptions, this is an important book for all ethnomusicologists and students of Native American culture as well as general readers interested in Native American mythology and religious life.
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Visions of the Black Belt
A Cultural Survey of the Heart of Alabama
Robin McDonald and Valerie Pope Burnes
University of Alabama Press, 2015
In Visions of the Black Belt, Robin McDonald and Valerie Pope Burnes offer a richly illustrated tour of the Black Belt, the fertile arc that represents the cultural efflorescence of Alabama’s heartland. Like knowledgeable friends, McDonald and Burnes guide readers through the Black Belt’s towns and architecture and introduce the region’s great panoply of citizens, farmers, craftspeople, cooks, writers, and musicians.
 
A constellation of Black Belt towns arose during Alabama’s territorial decades, communities like Selma, Camden, Eutaw, Tuskegee, Greenville, and many more. Visions of the Black Belt recounts their stories and others, such as Demopolis’s founding by exiles from Napoleon’s France. As an escarpment of clouds scuds across an indigo sky, the ruins of Alabama’s lost capital of Cahaba reveal the secrets of its lost squares. Also on this picturesque tour are the Black Belt’s homes, from artless cabins wreathed in fern to ozymandian manses wrapped by stately columns, such as Kirkwood and Reverie.
 
Among the emblematic houses of worship lovingly photographed in Visions of the Black Belt is Prairieville’s St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, noted for its “carpenter gothic” style. Also reflecting the region’s history of faith are poignant graveyards such as Greenville’s Pioneer Cemetery with its homespun memorials of seashell-and-concrete and the elegant marbles clad in ebon lichen of Selma's Live Oak Cemetery.
 
In photos and text, McDonald and Burnes bring to life the layers of history that shaped the Black Belt’s tastes, sounds, and colors. Their gastronomic discoveries include the picant crawfish of the Faunsdale Bar & Grill and GainesRidge Dining Club’s famed Black Bottom pie. They bring the sounds of the Black Belt to life by presenting a wide range of musicians and musical events, from bona fide blues and soul masters to Eutaw’s Black Belt Roots Festival.
 
Including two maps and more than 370 full-color photographs, Visions of the Black Belt offers a timeless message of faith, determination, and the rich simplicity of living in harmony with the rhythms of the land and nature.

Published in Cooperation with the Black Belt Treasures Cultural Arts Center, Camden, Alabama
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Visions of the East
Orientalism in Film
Bernstein, Matthew
Rutgers University Press, 1997

The Sheik. Pépé le Moko. Casablanca. Aladdin. Some of the most popular and frequently discussed titles in movie history are imbued with orientalism, the politically-charged way in which western artists have represented gender, race, and ethnicity in the cultures of North Africa and Asia. This is the first anthology to address and highlight orientalism in film from pre-cinema fascinations with Egyptian culture through the "Whole New World" of Aladdin. Eleven illuminating and well-illustrated essays utilize the insights of interdisciplinary cultural studies, psychoanalysis, feminism, and genre criticism. Other films discussed includeThe Letter, Caesar and Cleopatra, Lawrence of Arabia, Indochine, and several films of France's cinéma colonial.

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Visions of the Emerald City
Modernity, Tradition, and the Formation of Porfirian Oaxaca, Mexico
Mark Overmyer-Velázquez
Duke University Press, 2006
Visions of the Emerald City is an absorbing historical analysis of how Mexicans living in Oaxaca City experienced “modernity” during the lengthy “Order and Progress” dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911). Renowned as the Emerald City (for its many buildings made of green cantera stone), Oaxaca City was not only the economic, political, and cultural capital of the state of Oaxaca but also a vital commercial hub for all of southern Mexico. As such, it was a showcase for many of Díaz’s modernizing and state-building projects. Drawing on in-depth research in archives in Oaxaca, Mexico City, and the United States, Mark Overmyer-Velázquez describes how Oaxacans, both elites and commoners, crafted and manipulated practices of tradition and modernity to define themselves and their city as integral parts of a modern Mexico.

Incorporating a nuanced understanding of visual culture into his analysis, Overmyer-Velázquez shows how ideas of modernity figured in Oaxacans’ ideologies of class, race, gender, sexuality, and religion and how they were expressed in Oaxaca City’s streets, plazas, buildings, newspapers, and public rituals. He pays particular attention to the roles of national and regional elites, the Catholic church, and popular groups—such as Oaxaca City’s madams and prostitutes—in shaping the discourses and practices of modernity. At the same time, he illuminates the dynamic interplay between these groups. Ultimately, this well-illustrated history provides insight into provincial life in pre-Revolutionary Mexico and challenges any easy distinctions between the center and the periphery or modernity and tradition.

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Visions of the End in Medieval Spain
Catalogue of Illustrated Beatus Commentaries on the Apocalypse and Study of the Geneva Beatus
John Williams
Amsterdam University Press, 2016
This is the first study to bring together all twenty-nine extant copies of the medieval Commentary on the Apocalypse, which was originally written by Spanish monk Beatus of Liébana. John Williams, a renowned expert on the Commentary, shares a lifetime of study and offers new insights on these strikingly illustrated manuscripts. As he shows, the Commentary responded to differing monastic needs within the shifting context of the Middle Ages. Of special interest is a discussion of the recently discovered Geneva copy: one of only three commentaries to be written outside of the Iberian Peninsula, this manuscript shows both close affinities to the Spanish model and fascinating deviations from it in terms of its script and style of illustrations.
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Visions of the Holy
Studies in Biblical Theology and Literature
Marvin A. Sweeney
SBL Press, 2023

Visions of the Holy is a collection of essays by Marvin A. Sweeney on the study of biblical and postbiblical theology and literature. The volume includes previously published and unpublished essays related to the developing field of Jewish biblical theology; historical, comparative, and reception-critical studies; and the reading of texts from the Pentateuch, Former Prophets, Latter Prophets, and Ketuvim. Additional essays examine Asian biblical theology, the understanding of Shabbat, intertextuality in Exodus–Numbers, Samuel, Isaiah, and the Twelve in intertextual perspective, and the democratization of messianism in modern Jewish thought. The volume is an excellent resource for scholars, students, and clergy interested in theological readings of the Hebrew Bible.

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Visions of the Past
The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History
Robert A. Rosenstone
Harvard University Press, 1998

Can filmed history measure up to written history? What happens to history when it is recorded in images, rather than words? Can images convey ideas and information that lie beyond words? Taking on these timely questions, Robert Rosenstone pioneers a new direction in the relationship between history and film. Rosenstone moves beyond traditional approaches, which examine the history of film as art and industry, or view films as texts reflecting their specific cultural contexts. This essay collection makes a radical venture into the investigation of a new concern: how a visual medium, subject to the conventions of drama and fiction, might be used as a serious vehicle for thinking about our relationship with the past.

Rosenstone looks at history films in a way that forces us to reconceptualize what we mean by "history." He explores the innovative strategies of films made in Africa, Latin America, Germany, and other parts of the world. He journeys into the history of film in a wide range of cultures, and expertly traces the contours of the postmodern historical film. In essays on specific films, including Reds, JFK, and Sans Soleil, he considers such issues as the relationship between fact and film and the documentary as visionary truth.

Theorists have for some time been calling our attention to the epistemological and literary limitations of traditional history. The first sustained defense of film as a way of thinking historically, this book takes us beyond those limitations.

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Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850-1950
Mark Hampton
University of Illinois Press, 2004
Historians recognize the cultural centrality of the newspaper press in Britain, yet very little has been published regarding competing historical understandings of the press and its proper role in British society.

In Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850-1950, Mark Hampton argues that qualities expected of the contemporary British press--lively writing, speed, impartiality, depth, and the ability to topple corrupt governments by informing readers--are not obvious attributes of journalism but derive from more than a century of debate. He analyzes the various historical conceptions of the British press that helped to create its modern role, and demonstrates that these conceptions were intimately involved in the emergence of mass democracy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Hampton surveys a diversity of sources--Parliamentary speeches and commissions, books, pamphlets, periodicals and select private correspondence--in order to identify how governmental elites, the educated public, professional journalists, and industry moguls characterized the political and cultural function of the press. The resulting blend of cultural history and media sociology demonstrates how once optimistic visions of the press have given way to more pessimistic contemporary views about the power of the mass media.

With clarity and panache, this book shows that many competing conceptions continued to influence twentieth-century understandings of the press but did not remain satisfactory in new political, cultural, and media environments. Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850-1950 provides a rich tapestry against which to understand the contemporary realities of journalism, democracy, and mass media.

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Visions of the Sociological Tradition
Donald N. Levine
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Don Levine moves from the origins of systematic knowledge in ancient Greece to the present day to present an account that is at once a history of the social science enterprise and an introduction to the cornerstone works of Western social thought.

"Visions" has three meanings, each of which corresponds to a part of the book. In Part 1, Levine presents the ways previous sociologists have rendered accounts of their discipline, as a series of narratives—or "life stories"—that build upon each other, generation to generation, a succession of efforts to envisage a coherent past for the sake of a purposive present.

In Part 2, the heart of the book, Levine offers his own narrative, reconnecting centuries of voices into a richly textured dialogue among the varied strands of the sociological tradition: Hellenic, British, French, German, Marxian, Italian, and American. Here, in a tour de force of clarity and conciseness, he tracks the formation of the sociological imagination through a series of conversations across generations. From classic philosophy to pragmatism, Aristotle to W. I. Thomas, Levine maps the web of visionary statements—confrontations and oppositions—from which social science has grown.

At the same time, this is much more than an expert synthesis of social theory. Throughout each stage, Levine demonstrates social knowledge has grown in response to three recurring questions: How shall we live? What makes humans moral creatures? How do we understand the world? He anchors the creation of social knowledge to ethical foundations, and shows for the first time how differences in those foundations disposed the shapers of modern social science—among them, Marshall and Spencer, Comte and Durkheim, Simmel and Weber, Marx and Mosca, Dewey and Park—to proceed in vastly different ways.

In Part 3, Levine offers a vision of the contemporary scene, setting the crisis of fragmentation in social sciences against the fragmentation of experience and community. By reconstructing the history of social thought as a series of fundamentally moral engagements with common themes, he suggests new uses for sociology's intellectual resources: not only as insight about the nature of modernity, but also as a model of mutually respectful communication in an increasingly fractious world.
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The Visions of Tondal
From the Library of Margaret of York
Thomas Kren
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 1990

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Visions of Vienna
Narrating the City in 1920s and 1930s Cinema
Alexandra Seibel
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
Vienna, with its stunning architecture and unforgettable streetscape, has long provided a backdrop for filmmakers. Visions of Vienna offers a close look at how directors such as Erich von Stroheim, Ernst Lubitsch, and Max Ophüls made use of the city, and how the nostalgic glorification of the Habsburg era can be seen as directly tied to crucial issues of modernity. Films set in Vienna, Alexandra Seibel shows, persistently articulate the experience of displacement due to emigration, changing gender relations and anti-feminism, class distinction, and anti-Semitism, themes that run counter to the ongoing mystification of Vienna as the incarnation of "waltz dreams" and schmaltz.
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Visions of Violence
German Avant-Gardes After Fascism
Richard Langston
Northwestern University Press, 2007
Nazi Germany’s book burnings, its campaign against “degenerate art,” and its persecution of experimental artists pushed the avant garde to the brink of extinction.  How the avant-garde came back, finding a new purpose in the wake of the war, is the subject of Visions of Violence. 

An extreme faction of aesthetic modernity intent on bulldozing contemporary life, the avant-garde has regularly employed visions of violence in their push for societal and cultural renewal. But in the shadow of unparalleled war and genocide, such aesthetic violence lost its force. This book explores the reconfiguration of the avant-garde in response to the violent transformation of European reality. Citing the emergence of independent avant-garde practitioners in the place of the previous collective, Richard Langston considers six individual exemplars of Germany’s post-fascist avant-garde—works that span the last six decades: painter, writer, and filmmaker Peter Weiss’s appropriation of French surrealism in the fifties; writer Dieter Wellershoff’s coterie of “new realists”; artist Wolf Vostell’s mediation and conflation of the experiences of the Auschwitz trials and the Vietnam War; poet and novelist Dieter Brinkmann’s collages from the seventies; the multimedia displacements of Alexander Kluge; and the performative engagements of dramatists Christoph Schlingensief and Rene Pollesch.

Taking stock of the evolution of Germany’s post-fascist avant-gardes, Langston’s book shows how the movement from Weiss to Pollesch exhibits the problems that both modernity and postmodernity pose for an aesthetic engagement of Germany’s violent past.
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Visions of War
World War II in Popular Literature and Culture
M. Paul Holsinger
University of Wisconsin Press, 1992
For Americans World War II was “a good war,” a war that was worth fighting. Even as the conflict was underway, a myriad of both fictional and nonfictional books began to appear examining one or another of  the raging battles. These essays  examine some of the best literature and popular culture of World War II. Many of the studies focus on women, several are about children, and all concern themselves with the ways that the war changed lives. While many of the contributors concern themselves with the United States, there are essays about Great Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Poland, Russia, and Japan.
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Visit Me in California
Stories
Cooley Windsor
Northwestern University Press, 2008

Deftly moving between the comic and the tragic, the sacred and the profane, this collection of short stories is populated by modern children, ancient poets, dying men, and your basic, mundane Greek gods. Windsor turns familiar stories from the Bible and from myth inside out, exploring the feelings of minor characters and looking at events from imaginative perspectives. His prose is rich with detail and emotion and he touches on themes of art and artifice, success and failure, family and its sacrifices, and expectations met or missed.

In “The Last Israelite in the Red Sea,” a follower of Moses who dallies during their Exodus finds it more difficult to walk across the bottom of the temporarily displaced Red Sea without shoes. “Four of the Times My Sister Cried” follows a young narrator as his family rehearses for his mother’s death and then, as they must, lives without her. The wry “The Art of War” has characters from Homer to a courtesan talking shop about the battle of Troy from their perspectives. Set as a series of short pieces, “The Fleshly School of Poetry” tells of lessons learned and lessons taught. With its explorations of expectations, “Meet the Author” gives readers intimate portraits of various plans or coping mechanisms people put up when death draws close. “The End of the World” approaches the Rapture with a humorously practical spin: wouldn’t the angels need a plan to ensure that it goes smoothly? “In Parting” explores some of the troubles with family, especially when a sister’s child turns out to be a marionette. The geographically explicit “Three Mediums in San Francisco” touches on frustrated and imagined eroticism. The collection ends with “The Hilton Epiphany,” a fitting closer in which divinity comes to an unlikely person in an unlikely place.

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A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories
Glenway Wescott; Edited and with an introduction by Jerry Rosco; Foreword by Wendy Moffat
University of Wisconsin Press, 2013
Just as E. M. Forster's novel of gay love, Maurice, remained unpublished throughout his lifetime, Glenway Wescott's long story "A Visit to Priapus" was also destined to be a posthumous work, buried from 1938 until this century in Wescott's massive archive of manuscripts, journals, notebooks, and letters.
            The autobiographical story is about a literary man, frustrated in love, who puts aside his pride and makes a date with a young artist in Maine. Lavishly rendered in Wescott's elegant prose, the tale is explicit where it needs to be, but—as is typical of Wescott—it is filled with descriptive beauty and introspective lessons about sex and sexuality, love and creativity.
            Previously published in anthology form in the United Kingdom, "A Visit to Priapus" is presented for the first time in book form in America, containing previously uncollected stories, including three never before published. The result is a candid portrayal of the gifted but enigmatic writer who was famous in youth and remained a perceptive and compassionate voice throughout his long life. Drawn together from midcentury literary journals and magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as from Wescott's papers, the stories were inspired by his life, from childhood to old age, from Wisconsin farm country to New York, London, Germany, and Paris.

Finalist, Gay General Fiction, Lambda Literary Awards
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A Visitable Past
Views of Venice by American Artists, 1860-1915
Margaretta M. Lovell
University of Chicago Press, 1988
In this ambitious and imaginative study, Margaretta M. Lovell analyzes the large body of accomplished, sometimes startling, often brilliant work of American artists drawn to Venice's ragged splendor in the last century. Including major works by such diverse and talented painters as James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, and Maurice Prendergast, these richly varied paintings portray sleepy canals, architectural monuments, and scenes of picturesque everyday life while they also reveal surprising aspects of American culture.
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Visitation
The Conjure Work of Black Feminist Avant-Garde Cinema
Jennifer DeClue
Duke University Press, 2022
In Visitation, Jennifer DeClue shows how Black feminist avant-garde filmmakers draw from historical archives in order to visualize and reckon with violence suffered by Black women in the United States. DeClue argues that these filmmakers—including Kara Walker, Kara Lynch, Tourmaline, and Ja’Tovia Gary—create spaces of mourning and reckoning rather than voyeurism and pornotropy. Through their use of editing, performance, and cinematic experimentation, these filmmakers intervene in the production of Blackness and activate new ways of seeing Black women and telling their stories. Theorizing these films as a form of conjure work, DeClue shows how these filmmakers raise the specters of Black women from the past and invite them to reveal history from their point of view. In so doing, Black feminist avant-garde filmmakers channel spirits that haunt archives and create cinematic arenas for witnessing Black women battling for survival during pivotal and exceedingly violent moments in US history.

Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient
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Visiting Dr. Williams
Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of William Carlos Williams
Sheila Coghill
University of Iowa Press, 2011
Loved for his decidedly American voice, for his painterly rendering of modern urban settings, and for his ability to re-imagine a living language shaped by the philosophy of “no ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) left an indelible mark on modern poetry. As each successive generation of poets discovers the “new” that lives within his work, his durability and expansiveness make him an influential poet for the twenty-first century as well. The one hundred and two poems by one hundred and two poets collected in Visiting Dr. Williams demonstrate the range of his influence in ways that permanently echo and amplify the transcendent music of his language.
 
Contributors include: Robert Creeley, David Wojahn, Maxine Kumin, James Laughlin, A. R. Ammons, Wendell Berry, Heid Erdrich, Frank O’Hara, Lyn Lifshin, Denise Levertov, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, and a host of others.

 

 
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Visiting Emily
Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Emily Dickinson
Sheila Coghill
University of Iowa Press, 2000

This unique anthology gathers work by eighty poets inspired by Emily Dickinson. Beginning with Hart Crane's 1927 poem “To Emily Dickinson” and moving forward through the century to such luminary figures as Archibald MacLeish, John Berryman, Yvor Winters, Adrienne Rich, Richard Eberhart, Richard Wilbur, Maxine Kumin, Amy Clampitt, William Stafford, and Galway Kinnell, Visiting Emily offers both a celebration of and an homage to one of the world's great poets.

If there was ever any doubt about Dickinson's influence on modern and contemporary poets, this remarkable collection surely puts it to rest. Gathered here are poems reflecting a wide range of voices, styles, and forms—poems written in traditional and experimental forms; poems whose tones are meditative, reflective, reverent and irreverent, satirical, whimsical, improvisational, and serious. Many of the poets draw from Dickinson's biography, while others imagine events from her life. Some poets borrow lines from Dickinson's poems or letters as triggers for their inspiration. Though most of the poems connect directly to Dickinson's life or work, for others the connection is more oblique.

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Visiting Frost
Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Robert Frost
Sheila Coghill
University of Iowa Press, 2005
Like Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, Robert Frost looms large in the American literary landscape, straddling the 19th and 20th centuries like a poetic colossus: whosoever desires passage must, at some point, contend with the monolithic presence of Robert Frost. As they did in Visiting Emily and Visiting Walt, in Visiting Frost, Sheila Coghill and Thom Tammaro once again capture the conversations between contemporary poets and a legend whose voice endures. In his introduction to the collection, Frost biographer Jay Parini likens the poet to a “great power station, one who stands off by himself in the big woods, continuously generating electricity that future poets can tap into for the price of a volume of his poems.” A four-time Pulitzer Prize winner whose work is principally associated with the landscape and life in New England, Frost (1874-1963) was a traditional, psychologically complex, often dark and intense poet. In Visiting Frost, one hundred homage-paying poets--some who knew Frost, most only acquainted through his work--celebrate and reflect that intensity, in effect tapping into his electrical current. By reacting to specific Frost poems, by reinventing others, and by remembering aspects of Frost or by quarreling with him, the contributors speak on behalf of us whose lives have been brightened by the memorization and recitation of such poems as “The Road Not Taken” or “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” As the poets pay tribute to Frost's place in American poetry and history, they suggest--more than forty years after his death--just how alive and vital he remains in our collective memory.
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Visiting Henry
Sara Journey
Michigan Publishing Services, 2022

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Visiting Picasso
Jim Barnes
University of Illinois Press, 2006
Jim Barnes’s familiarity with the European poetic traditions has been deepened through long periods spent in France, Germany, and Italy, and through his translations of European poetry. In Visiting Picasso he repays Europe for its gifts to him in a series of poems that evoke the lush poetic history that ties European culture together, sometimes darkly.  A heightened sense of place and purpose infuses the poems of Visiting Picasso with meaning drawn from actual landscapes, events, and observations.
 
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Visiting Wallace
Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Wallace Stevens
Dennis Barone
University of Iowa Press, 2009
The poetry of Wallace Stevens has inspired generations of poets of every school. Here, for the first time, is assembled an astonishing variety of poems, by a full range of poets, inspired by Stevens’s life and work. In its own way, each poem exhibits the torque and feel of his poetry, yet each also is deeply personal and conveys how meaningful Stevens was and remains for poets and poetry.

Whether whimsical or serious, solemn or light, the poems in Dennis Barone and James Finnegan’s Visiting Wallace are sure to inspire delight and thought. Alan Filreis’s brilliant foreword asks us to consider whether there is another modern poet who means as much to contemporary verse as Stevens: “seventy-six poems giving us seventy-six distinct Stevenses to follow and succeed.”
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Visiting Walt
Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Walt Whitman
Sheila Coghill
University of Iowa Press, 2003

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The Visitor
André Palmeiro and the Jesuits in Asia
Liam Matthew Brockey
Harvard University Press, 2014

In an age when few people ventured beyond their place of birth, André Palmeiro left Portugal on a journey to the far side of the world. Bearing the title “Father Visitor,” he was entrusted with the daunting task of inspecting Jesuit missions spanning from Mozambique to Japan. A global history in the guise of a biography, The Visitor tells the story of a theologian whose extraordinary travels bore witness to the fruitful contact—and violent collision—of East and West in the early modern era.

In India, Palmeiro was thrust into a controversy over the missionary tactics of Roberto Nobili, who insisted on dressing the part of an indigenous ascetic. Palmeiro walked across Southern India to inspect Nobili’s mission, recording fascinating observations along the way. As the highest-ranking Jesuit in India, he also coordinated missions to the Mughal Emperors and the Ethiopian Christians, as well as the first European explorations of the East African interior and the highlands of Tibet.

Orders from Rome sent Palmeiro farther afield in 1626, to Macau, where he oversaw Jesuit affairs in East Asia. He played a crucial role in creating missions in Vietnam and seized the opportunity to visit the Chinese mission, trekking thousands of miles to Beijing as one of China’s first Western tourists. When the Tokugawa Shogunate brutally cracked down on Christians in Japan—where neither he nor any Westerner had power to intervene—Palmeiro died from anxiety over the possibility that the last Jesuits still alive would apostatize under torture.

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A Visitor's Guide to the University of Nevada, Reno Arboretum
James W. Hulse
University of Nevada Press, 2018

A Nevada State Arboretum, the University of Nevada, Reno campus is home to more than 3,000 trees representing more than 200 species and varieties. This attractive guidebook introduces readers to the university’s beautiful campus and its botanical treasures. Richly illustrated with both contemporary color and archival photos, this book captures the charm of the campus in all four seasons and shows how the grounds of the university have evolved over the years. Featuring 19 distinct tours around campus, a comprehensive map, and family-friendly interactive “tree hunts,” this guide showcases the campus' ecological diversity and interesting tree species and will appeal to first-time visitors as well as longtime residents.

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Visits with the Amish
Impressions of the Plain Life
Linda Egenes
University of Iowa Press, 2000
Who are the “plain people,” the men and women who till their fields with horse and plow, travel by horse and buggy, live without electricity and telephones, and practice “help thy neighbor” in daily life? Linda Egenes visited with her Old Order Amish neighbors in southeast Iowa for thirteen years before writing this informative and companionable introduction to their lifeways.

Drawn to their slower pace of life and their resistance to the lures of a consumer society, Egenes found a warm welcome among the Amish, and in return she has given us an equally warm perspective on Amish family life as she experienced it. The Amish value harmony in family life above all, and Egenes found an abundance of harmony as she savored homemade ice cream in a kitchen where the refrigerator ran on kerosene, learned to milk a two-bucket cow, helped cook dinner for nine in a summer kitchen, spent the day in a one-room schoolhouse, and sang “The Hymn of Praise” in its original German at Sunday service.

Whether quilting at a weekly sewing circle above the Stringtown Grocery, playing Dutch Blitz and Dare Base with schoolchildren, learning the intricacies of harness making, or mulching strawberries in a huge garden, Egenes was treated with the kindness, respect, and dignity that exemplify the strong community ties of the Amish. Her engaging account of her visits with the Amish, beautifully illustrated with woodcuts by Caldecott Medal winner Mary Azarian, reveals the serene and peaceful ways of a plain people whose lives are anything but plain.
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Visser 't Hooft, 1900-1985
Living for the Unity of the Church
Jurjen Zeilstra
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
God's diplomat, the pope of the ecumenical movement, but also an acerbic theologian and a difficult person: this is how journalists characterised Willem Adolf Visser 't Hooft (1900-1985). He was one of the best-known Dutch theologians outside the Netherlands and he left his mark on the world church. Even at an early age he made profound efforts in support of international ecumenical youth and student organisations (Dutch Student Christian Movement, YMCA and World Student Christian Federation). He led the World Council of Churches during its formative stages (from 1938), and after its formal establishment in 1948 became its first general secretary, serving until 1966. To Visser 't Hooft, the unity of the church was both an article of faith and of a pragmatic organisation of church influence in a disunited world.
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Visual Alterity
Seeing Difference in Cinema
Randall Halle
University of Illinois Press, 2021
Reconsidering the dynamics of perception

Using cinema to explore the visual aspects of alterity, Randall Halle analyzes how we become cognizant of each other and how we perceive and judge another person in a visual field. Halle draws on insights from philosophy and recent developments in cognitive and neuroscience to argue that there is no pure "natural" sight. We always see in a particular way, from a particular vantage point, and through a specific apparatus, and Halle shows how human beings have used cinema to experiment with the apparatus of seeing for over a century. Visual alterity goes beyond seeing difference to being conscious of how one sees difference. Investigating the process allows us to move from mere perception to apperception, or conscious perception.

Innovative and insightful, Visual Alterity merges film theory with philosophy and cutting-edge science to propose new ways of perceiving and knowing.

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Visual Archives of Sex
Heike Bauer, Melina Pappademos, Katie Sutton, and Jennifer Tucker, special issue editors
Duke University Press, 2021
Contributors to this special issue study the visual histories of sex by examining symbols, images, film, and other visual forms ranging from medieval religious icons to twenty-first-century selfies. They argue that engaging BIPOC, antiracist, queer, and feminist perspectives of the past is vital to understanding the complex historical relationships between sex and visual culture and how these relationships continue to shape sexual lives, bodies, myths, and desires. Essay topics include trans visual archives in Francoist Spain, a visual archive of British escort and nightclub hostess Ruth Ellis, pornography and queer pleasure in East Germany, swimsuit advertisements and “bikini blondes” in the age of the atom bomb, and teaching the history of sexuality with images. This issue also contains a roundtable on curating exhibitions devoted to sex and to queer and trans experience; conversations with historians, artists, and curators who study visual culture and the history of sexuality; and an exploration of the photographic archives of Carol Leigh, a.k.a. Scarlot Harlot.

Contributors. Heike Bauer, Roland Betancourt, Alexis L. Boylan, Topher Campbell, João Florêncio, Kyle Frackman, Javier Fernández Galeano, Sarah Jones, Carol Leigh, Conor McGrady, Ben Miller, Derek Conrad Murray, Lynda Nead, Melina Pappademos, Ashkan Sepahvand, David Serlin, Meg Slater, Katie Sutton, Annette F. Timm, Jennifer Tucker, Jeanne Vaccaro, Sunny Xiang
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Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary China
Urbanized Interface
Edited by Minna Valjakka and Meiqin Wang
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
This edited volume provides a multifaceted investigation of the dynamic interrelations between visual arts and urbanization in contemporary Mainland China with a focus on unseen representations and urban interventions brought about by the transformations of the urban space and the various problems associated with it. Through a wide range of illuminating case studies, the authors demonstrate how innovative artistic and creative practices initiated by various stakeholders not only raise critical awareness on socio-political issues of Chinese urbanization but also actively reshape the urban living spaces. The formation of new collaborations, agencies, aesthetics and cultural production sites facilitate diverse forms of cultural activism as they challenge the dominant ways of interpreting social changes and encourage civic participation in the production of alternative meanings in and of the city. Their significance lies in their potential to question current values and power structures as well as to foster new subjectivities for disparate individuals and social groups.
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Visual Culture of Post-Industrial Europe
Frances Guerin
Amsterdam University Press

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Visual Cultures
Edited by James Elkins
Intellect Books, 2010

Visual Cultures is the first study of the place of visuality and literacy in specific nations around the world, featuring authoritative, insightful essays on the value accorded to the visual and the verbal in Japan, Poland, China, Russia, Ireland, and Slovenia.

Focusing on the national instead of the global, distinguished art critic James Elkins offers a critique of general histories of visuality, such as those of Martin Jay or Jean Baudrillard, as well as a critique of local histories of visuality, as in Third Text and other postcolonial studies. The content is not only analytic, but also historical, tracing changes in the significance of visual and verbal literacy in each nation. Visual Cultures also explores questions of national identity and the many issues Elkins raises suggest a wealth of promising avenues for future research.

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Visual Cultures of Japanese Imperialism, Volume 8
Gennifer Weisenfeld, ed.
Duke University Press
Under pressure of cultural colonization from the West and expanding an imperialist force and cultural colonizer within Asia, Japan occupied a unique space on the international landscape in the years from the beginning of the Meiji Period to the Pacific War. This special issue of positions examines the integral role that visual culture played both in representing and constituting this imperial reality.
The articles, contributed by scholars in the fields of art history, cultural history, and Japanese literature, address the interactions between Japan, the West, and the rest of Asia. Costumes, architecture, tourism propaganda, pottery, and a host of other sources provide the raw materials for Visual Cultures of Japanese Imperialism, and the incisive essays built from these sources will change readers’ understanding of the visual culture(s) of imperialism.

Contributors. Kim Brandt, Leo Ching, Carol Ann Christ, Christine Guth, Jordan Sand, Gennifer Weisenfeld, Cherie Wendelken

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Visual Disobedience
Art and Decoloniality in Central America
Kency Cornejo
Duke University Press, 2024
In Visual Disobedience, Kency Cornejo traces the emergence of new artistic strategies for Indigenous, feminist, and anticarceral resistance in the wake of torture, disappearance, killings, and US-funded civil wars in Central America. Cornejo reveals a direct line from US intervention to current forms of racial, economic, and gender injustice in the isthmus, connecting this to the criminalization and incarceration of migrants at the US-Mexico border today. Drawing on interviews with Central American artists and curators, she theorizes a form of “visual disobedience” in which art operates in opposition to nation-states, colonialism, and visual coloniality. She counters historical erasure by examining over eighty artworks and highlighting forty artists across the region. Cornejo also rejects the normalized image of the suffering Central American individual by repositioning artists as creative agents of their own realities. With this a comprehensive exploration of contemporary Central American art, Cornejo highlights the role of visual disobedience as a strategy of decolonial aesthetics to expose and combat coloniality, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, empire, and other systems of oppression.
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The Visual Elements Landscapes
John A. Jakle
University of Massachusetts Press, 1987
An examination of how visual and aesthetic dimensions amplify the functional interpretation of cultural landscape.
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The Visual Elements—Design
A Handbook for Communicating Science and Engineering
Felice C. Frankel
University of Chicago Press, 2024
With insights and examples from designers at publications from Nature to the New York Times, an essential guide to creating figures and presentations.
 
In this short handbook, award-winning science communicator Felice C. Frankel offers a quick guide for scientists and engineers who want to share—and better understand—their research by designing compelling graphics for journal submissions, grant applications, presentations, and posters. Like all the books in the Visual Elements series, this handbook is also a training tool for researchers. Distilling her celebrated books and courses to the essentials, Frankel shows scientists and engineers, from students to primary investigators, the importance of thinking visually. This crucial volume in the Visual Elements series offers a wealth of engaging design examples. Case studies and advice from designers at prestigious publications and researchers’ own before-and-after examples show how even the smallest changes—to color, type, composition, and layering—can greatly improve communication. Ideal for researchers who want a foothold for presenting and preparing their work for everything from conferences to publications, the book explains the steps for creating a concise and communicative graphic to highlight the most important aspects of research—and to clarify researchers’ own thinking. The resulting book is an essential element of any scientist’s, engineer’s, or designer’s library.
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The Visual Elements—Photography
A Handbook for Communicating Science and Engineering
Felice C. Frankel
University of Chicago Press, 2023
For novice or pro, primary investigator or postdoc, the essentials for photographing science and technology for journals, grant applications, and public understanding.
 
Award-winning photographer Felice C. Frankel, whose work has graced the covers of Science, Nature,and Scientific American, among other publications, offers a quick guide for scientists and engineers who want to communicate—and better understand—their research by creating compelling photographs. Like all the books in the Visual Elements series, this short guide uses engaging examples to train researchers to learn visual communication. Distilling her celebrated books and courses to the essentials, Frankel shows scientists and engineers the importance of thinking visually. When she creates stunning images of scientific phenomena, she is not only interested in helping researchers to convey understanding to others in their research community or to gain media attention, but also in making these experts themselves “look longer” to understand more fully. Ideal for researchers who want a foothold for presenting and preparing their work for conferences, journal publications, and funding agencies, the book explains four tools that all readers can use—a phone, a camera, a scanner, and a microscope—and then offers important advice on composition and image manipulation ethics. The Visual Elements—Photography is an essential element in any scientist’s, engineer’s, or photographer’s library.
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Visual Encounters in the Study of Rural Childhoods
Mandrona, April R.
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Visual Encounters in the Study of Rural Childhoods brings together visual studies and childhood studies to explore images of childhood in the study of rurality and rural life. The volume highlights how the voices of children themselves remain central to investigations of rural childhoods. Contributions look at representations and experiences of rural childhoods from both the Global North and Global South (including U.S., Canada, Haiti, India, Sweden, Slovenia, South Africa, Russia, Timor-Leste, and Colombia) and consider visuals ranging from picture books to cell phone video to television. 
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Visual Futures
Exploring the Past, Present, and Divergent Possibilities of Visual Practice
Edited by Tracey Bowen and Brett Caraway
Intellect Books, 2021
A collection of thoughtful and incisive examinations of how we interact and engage with the visual elements of our environments. 

In our everyday lives, we navigate a vast sea of visual imagery. Yet we rarely consider systematically how or why we derive meaning from this sea of the visual. Nor do we typically contemplate the effect it has on our motivations and actions as individuals and collectives. Visual Futures provides a new lens through which to analyze and challenge established perspectives, norms, and practices surrounding the visual. 

This edited collection ruminates on how visuality and the visual provoke a new kind of cultural exchange and explores the relationships, intersections, and collisions between visuality and visual practices and one (or a combination) of the following: embodiment, spatial literacy, emerging languages, historical reflection, educative practices, civic development, and social development. 
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A Visual Guide to Classical Art Theory for Drawing and Painting Students
Mantle, Eric
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2009

Eric Mantle presents the basics of classical theory in a clear and concise manner for all beginning drawing and painting students. His book features diagrams that illustrate every concept. Students will see the complexities of color theory and understand how to create the illusion of volume and depth on a 2-dimensional surface. “As an art student,” Professor Mantle recalls, “I was frequently frustrated by instructional books that gave lengthy verbal descriptions of visual concepts and then showed small and/or unclear diagrams of those concepts. As an art teacher, I found that my students would gain a clearer understanding of a visual concept if my verbal explanation was combined with a diagram of that concept.”

A Visual Guide to Classical Art Theory is great for both traditional and non-traditional media. Each page, theory and diagram represents a different tool for the artist to use. Through their use, the artist will find an infinite number of solutions. Artists also may use the book to create a trompe-l’oeil effect in graffiti art or the illusion of volume and depth on the computer. A Visual Guide to Art Theory is presented in a unique, non-verbal format that clearly illustrates the effect of perspective on color, light and shade.

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The Visual Is Political
Feminist Photography and Countercultural Activity in 1970s Britain
Na'ama Klorman-Eraqi
Rutgers University Press, 2019
The Visual is Political examines the growth of feminist photography as it unfolded in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s. This period in Britain was marked by instability following the collapse of the welfare state, massive unemployment, race riots, and workers’ strikes. However, this was also a time in which various forms of social activism emerged or solidified, including the Women’s Movement, whose members increasingly turned to photography as a tool for their political activism. Rather than focusing on the aesthetic quality of the images produced, Klorman-Eraqi looks at the application of feminist theory, photojournalism, advertising, photo montage, punk subculture and aesthetics, and politicized street activity to emphasize the statement and challenge that the photographic language of these works posed. She shows both the utilitarian uses of photography in activism, but also how these same photographers went on to be accepted (or co-opted) into the mainstream art spaces little by little, sometimes with great controversy. The Visual is Political highlights the relevance and impact of an earlier contentious, creative, and politicized moment of feminism and photography as art and activism.
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The Visual Life of Romantic Theater, 1780-1830
Edited by Diane Piccitto and Terry F. Robinson
University of Michigan Press, 2023
The Visual Life of Romantic Theater examines the dynamism and vibrancy of stage spectacle and its impact in an era of momentous social upheaval and aesthetic change. Situating theatrical production as key to understanding visuality ca. 1780-1830, this book places the stage front and center in Romantic scholarship by re-envisioning traditional approaches to artistic and social creation in the period. How, it asks, did dramaturgy and stagecraft influence aesthetic and sociopolitical concerns? How does a focus on visuality expand our understanding of the historical experience of theatergoing? In what ways did stage performance converge with visual culture beyond the theater? How did extratheatrical genres engage with theatrical sight and spectacle? Finally, how does a focus on dramatic vision change the way we conceive of Romanticism itself? The volume’s essays by emerging and established scholars provide exciting and suggestive answers to these questions, along with a more capacious conception of Romantic theater as a locus of visual culture that reached well beyond playhouse walls.
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Visual Literacy for Libraries
A Practical, Standards-Based Guide
Nicole E. Brown
American Library Association, 2016

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The Visual Memory of Protest
Ann Rigney
Amsterdam University Press
Social movements are not only remembered in personal experience, but also through cultural carriers that shape how later movements see themselves and are seen by others. The present collection zooms in on the role of photography in this memory-activism nexus. How do iconographic conventions shape images of protest? Why do some images keep movements in the public eye, while others are quickly forgotten? What role do images play in linking different protests, movements, and generations of activists? Have the affordances of digital media made it easier for activists to use images in their memory politics, or has the digital production and massive online exchange of images made it harder to identify and remember a movement via a single powerful image? Bringing together experts in visual culture, cultural memory, social movements, and digital humanities, this collection presents new empirical, theoretical, and methodological insights into the visual memory of protest.
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Visual Occupations
Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone
Gil Z. Hochberg
Duke University Press, 2015
In Visual Occupations Gil Z. Hochberg shows how the Israeli Occupation of Palestine is driven by the unequal access to visual rights, or the right to control what can be seen, how, and from which position. Israel maintains this unequal balance by erasing the history and denying the existence of Palestinians, and by carefully concealing its own militarization. Israeli surveillance of Palestinians, combined with the militarized gaze of Israeli soldiers at places like roadside checkpoints, also serve as tools of dominance. Hochberg analyzes various works by Palestinian and Israeli artists, among them Elia Suleiman, Rula Halawani, Sharif Waked, Ari Folman, and Larry Abramson, whose films, art, and photography challenge the inequity of visual rights by altering, queering, and manipulating dominant modes of representing the conflict. These artists' creation of new ways of seeing—such as the refusal of Palestinian filmmakers and photographers to show Palestinian suffering or the Israeli artists' exposure of state manipulated Israeli blindness —offers a crucial gateway, Hochberg suggests, for overcoming and undoing Israel's militarized dominance and political oppression of Palestinians.
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Visual Pedagogy
Media Cultures in and beyond the Classroom
Brian Goldfarb
Duke University Press, 2002
In classrooms, museums, health clinics and beyond, the educational uses of visual media have proliferated over the past fifty years. Film, video, television, and digital media have been integral to the development of new pedagogical theories and practices, globalization processes, and identity and community formation. Yet, Brian Goldfarb argues, the educational roles of visual technologies have not been fully understood or appreciated. He contends that in order to understand the intersections of new media and learning, we need to recognize the sweeping scope of the technologically infused visual pedagogy—both in and outside the classroom. From Samoa to the United States mainland to Africa and Brazil, from museums to city streets, Visual Pedagogy explores the educational applications of visual media in different institutional settings during the past half century.

Looking beyond the popular media texts and mainstream classroom technologies that are the objects of most analyses of media and education, Goldfarb encourages readers to see a range of media subcultures as pedagogical tools. The projects he analyzes include media produced by AIDS/HIV advocacy groups and social services agencies for classroom use in the 1990s; documentary and fictional cinemas of West Africa used by the French government and then by those resisting it; museum exhibitions; and TV Anhembi, a municipally sponsored collaboration between the television industry and community-based videographers in São Paolo, Brazil.

Combining media studies, pedagogical theory, and art history, and including an appendix of visual media resources and ideas about the most productive ways to utilize visual technologies for educational purposes, Visual Pedagogy will be useful to educators, administrators, and activists.

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Visual Research Methods in Architecture
Edited by Igea Troiani and Suzanne Ewing
Intellect Books, 2020
This book offers a distinctive approach to the use of visual methodologies for qualitative architectural research. It presents a diverse selection of ways for the architect or architectural researcher to use their gaze as part of their research practice for the purpose of visual literacy. Its contributors explore and use, “critical visualizations,” which employ observation and socio-cultural critique through visual creations—texts, drawings, diagrams, paintings, visual texts, photography, film, and their hybrid forms—to research architecture, landscape design, and interior architecture. The visual methods intersect with those used in ethnography, anthropology, visual culture, and media studies. In presenting a range of interdisciplinary approaches, Visual Research Methods in Architecture opens up territory for new forms of visual architectural scholarship.
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Visual Syntax of Race
Arab-Jews in Zionist Visual Culture
Noa Hazan
University of Michigan Press, 2022

Analyzing the visual syntax and display rhetoric applied in newspaper photos, national historical albums, and museum exhibitions, Noa Hazan shows that although racial thought was and still is verbally suppressed in Israel, it is vividly present in its nonverbal official and public visual sphere. The racist perspective of newspaper editors, book publishers, photographers, and museum curators were morally justified in its time by such patronizing ideals as realistic news coverage or the salvation of Jewish heritage assets. Although their perspectives played a dominant role in establishing a visual syntax of race in Israel, they were not seen as racially discriminating at the time. The racist motifs and actions are revealed here by colligating multiple cases into a coherent narrative in retrospect. 

This book points to a direct influence of the anti-Semitic discourse in Europe toward Mizrahim in Israel, highlighting the shared visual stereotypes used in both Europe and the fledgling state of Israel. Engraved in their body, these cultural traits were depicted and understood as racial-biological qualities and were visually manipulated to silo Ashkenazim and Mizrahim in Israel as distinct racial types. 

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Visual Time
The Image in History
Keith Moxey
Duke University Press, 2013
Visual Time offers a rare consideration of the idea of time in art history. Non-Western art histories currently have an unprecedented prominence in the discipline. To what extent are their artistic narratives commensurate with those told about Western art? Does time run at the same speed in all places? Keith Moxey argues that the discipline of art history has been too attached to interpreting works of art based on a teleological categorization—demonstrating how each work influences the next as part of a linear sequence—which he sees as tied to Western notions of modernity. In contrast, he emphasizes how the experience of viewing art creates its own aesthetic time, where the viewer is entranced by the work itself rather than what it represents about the historical moment when it was created. Moxey discusses the art, and writing about the art, of modern and contemporary artists, such as Gerard Sekoto, Thomas Demand, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Cindy Sherman, as well as the sixteenth-century figures Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald, and Hans Holbein. In the process, he addresses the phenomenological turn in the study of the image, its application to the understanding of particular artists, the ways verisimilitude eludes time in both the past and the present, and the role of time in nationalist accounts of the past.
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The Visual Turn
Classical Film Theory and Art History
Dalle Vacche, Angela
Rutgers University Press, 2002
A collection of cutting-edge articles that demonstrate an implicit dialogue between art historians and film specialists.

The Visual Turn is a cutting-edge dialogue between art historians and film theorists from the silent period to the aftermath of World War II. Its aim is to broaden the horizons of film studies, while making students of art history more comfortable when they approach the key texts of classical film theory.

Through pairings of articles, The Visual Turn demonstrates that an implicit dialogue between art historians and film specialists has enriched both fields for decades. By combining original essays, reprints, and translations from French and Italian, The Visual Turn makes this little-known dialogue between two disciplines speak about such rich issues as: iconophobia, iconophilia, and iconoclasm; haptic and optical images; cognitivism and aesthetics; visual form, history, and technology.

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Visualising Facebook
A Comparative Perspective
Daniel Miller and Jolynna Sinanan
University College London, 2017
Since the growth of social media, human communication has become much more visual. This book presents a scholarly analysis of the images people post on a regular basis to Facebook. By including hundreds of examples, readers can see for themselves the differences between postings from a village north of London, and those from a small town in Trinidad. Why do women respond so differently to becoming a mother in England from the way they do in Trinidad? How are values such as carnival and suburbia expressed visually? Based on an examination of over 20,000 images, the authors argue that phenomena such as selfies and memes must be analysed in their local context. The book aims to highlight the importance of visual images today in patrolling and controlling the moral values of populations, and explores the changing role of photography from that of recording and representation, to that of communication, where an image not only documents an experience but also enhances it, making the moment itself more exciting.
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Visualities 2
More Perspectives on Contemporary American Indian Film and Art
Denise K. Cummings
Michigan State University Press, 2019
Echoing and expanding the aims of the first volume, Visualities: Perspectives on Contemporary American Indian Film and Art, this second volume contains illuminating global Indigenous visualities concerning First Nations, Aboriginal Australian, Maori, and Sami peoples. This insightful collection of essays explores how identity is created and communicated through Indigenous film-, video-, and art-making; what role these practices play in contemporary cultural revitalization; and how indigenous creators revisit media pasts and resignify dominant discourses through their work. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Visualities Two draws on American Indian studies, film studies, art history, cultural studies, visual culture studies, women’s studies, and postcolonial studies. Among the artists and media makers examined are Tasha Hubbard, Rachel Perkins, and Ehren “Bear Witness” Thomas, as well as contemporary Inuit artists and Indigenous agents of cultural production working to reimagine digital and social platforms. Films analyzed include The Exiles, Winter in the Blood, The Spirit of Annie Mae, Radiance, One Night the Moon, Bran Nue Dae, Ngati, Shimásání, and Sami Blood
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Visualities
Perspectives on Contemporary American Indian Film and Art
Denise K. Cummings
Michigan State University Press, 2011
In recent years, works by American Indian artists and filmmakers such as Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, Edgar Heap of Birds, Sherman Alexie, Shelley Niro, and Chris Eyre have illustrated the importance of visual culture as a means to mediate identity in contemporary Native America. This insightful collection of essays explores how identity is created and communicated through Native film-, video-, and art-making; what role these practices play in contemporary cultural revitalization; and how indigenous creators revisit media pasts and resignify dominant discourses through their work. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Visualities: Perspectives on Contemporary American Indian Film and Art draws on American Indian Studies, American Studies, Film Studies, Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies, and Postcolonial Studies. Among the artists examined are Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, Eric Gansworth, Melanie Printup Hope, Jolene Rickard, and George Longfish. Films analyzed include Imprint, It Starts with a Whisper, Mohawk Girls, Skins, The Business of Fancydancing, and a selection of Native Latin films.
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Visualizing American Empire
Orientalism and Imperialism in the Philippines
David Brody
University of Chicago Press, 2010

In 1899 an American could open a newspaper and find outrageous images, such as an American soldier being injected with leprosy by Filipino insurgents. These kinds of hyperbolic accounts, David Brody argues in this illuminating book, were just one element of the visual and material culture that played an integral role in debates about empire in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.

Visualizing American Empire
explores the ways visual imagery and design shaped the political and cultural landscape. Drawing on a myriad of sources—including photographs, tattoos, the decorative arts, the popular press, maps, parades, and material from world’s fairs and urban planners—Brody offers a distinctive perspective on American imperialism. Exploring the period leading up to the Spanish-American War, as well as beyond it, Brody argues that the way Americans visualized the Orient greatly influenced the fantasies of colonial domestication that would play out in the Philippines. Throughout, Brody insightfully examines visual culture’s integral role in the machinery that runs the colonial engine. The result is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the United States, art, design, or empire.

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Visualizing Anthropology
Experimenting with Image-Based Ethnography
Edited by Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz
Intellect Books, 1995
Questions of vision and knowledge are central to debates about the world in which we live. Developing new analytical approaches toward ways of seeing is a key challenge facing those working across a wide range of disciplines. How can visuality be understood on its own terms rather than by means of established textual frameworks? Visualizing Anthropology takes up this challenge. Bringing together a range of perspectives anchored in practice, the book maps experiments in the forms and techniques of visual enquiry.

The origins of this collection lie in visual anthropology. Although the field has greatly expanded and diversified, many of the key debates continue to be focused around the textual concerns of the mainstream discipline. In seeking to establish a more genuinely visual anthropology, the editors have sought to forge links with other kinds of image-based projects. Ethnography is the shared space of practice. Understood not as a specialized method but as cultural critique, the book explores new collaborative possibilities linked to image-based work.
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Visualizing Black Lives
Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media
Reighan Gillam
University of Illinois Press, 2022
A new generation of Afro-Brazilian media producers have emerged to challenge a mainstream that frequently excludes them. Reighan Gillam delves into the dynamic alternative media landscape developed by Afro-Brazilians in the twenty-first century. With works that confront racism and focus on Black characters, these artists and the visual media they create identify, challenge, or break with entrenched racist practices, ideologies, and structures. Gillam looks at a cross-section of media to show the ways Afro-Brazilians assert control over various means of representation in order to present a complex Black humanity. These images--so at odds with the mainstream--contribute to an anti-racist visual politics fighting to change how Brazilian media depicts Black people while highlighting the importance of media in the movement for Black inclusion.

An eye-opening union of analysis and fieldwork, Visualizing Black Lives examines the alternative and activist Black media and the people creating it in today's Brazil.

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Visualizing Community
Art, Material Culture, and Settlement in Byzantine Cappadocia
Robert G. Ousterhout
Harvard University Press

Cappadocia, a picturesque volcanic region of central Anatolia, preserves the best evidence of daily life in the Byzantine Empire and yet remains remarkably understudied, better known to tourists than to scholars. The area preserves an abundance of physical remains: at least a thousand rock-cut churches or chapels, of which more than one-third retain significant elements of their painted decoration, as well as monasteries, houses, entire towns and villages, underground refuges, agricultural installations, storage facilities, hydrological interventions, and countless other examples of non-ecclesiastical architecture. In dramatic contrast to its dearth of textual evidence, Cappadocia is unrivaled in the Byzantine world for its material culture.

Based upon the close analysis of material and visual residues, Visualizing Community offers a critical reassessment of the story and historiography of Byzantine Cappadocia, with chapters devoted to its architecture and painting, as well as to its secular and spiritual landscapes. In the absence of a written record, it may never be possible to write a traditional history of the region, but, as Robert Ousterhout shows, it is possible to visualize the kinds of communities that once formed the living landscape of Cappadocia.

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Visualizing Disease
The Art and History of Pathological Illustrations
Domenico Bertoloni Meli
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Visual anatomy books have been a staple of medical practice and study since the mid-sixteenth century. But the visual representation of diseased states followed a very different pattern from anatomy, one we are only now beginning to investigate and understand. With Visualizing Disease, Domenico Bertoloni Meli explores key questions in this domain, opening a new field of inquiry based on the analysis of a rich body of arresting and intellectually challenging images reproduced here both in black and white and in color.
 
Starting in the Renaissance, Bertoloni Meli delves into the wide range of figures involved in the early study and representation of disease, including not just men of medicine, like anatomists, physicians, surgeons, and pathologists, but also draftsmen and engravers. Pathological preparations proved difficult to preserve and represent, and as Bertoloni Meli takes us through a number of different cases from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century, we gain a new understanding of how knowledge of disease, interactions among medical men and artists, and changes in the technologies of preservation and representation of specimens interacted to slowly bring illustration into the medical world.
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Visualizing Empire
Africa, Europe, and the Politics of Representation
Rebecca Peabody
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2021

An exploration of how an official French visual culture normalized France’s colonial project and exposed citizens and subjects to racialized ideas of life in the empire.

By the end of World War I, having fortified its colonial holdings in the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, the Indian Ocean, and Asia, France had expanded its dominion to the four corners of the earth. This volume examines how an official French visual culture normalized the country’s colonial project and exposed citizens and subjects alike to racialized ideas of life in the empire. Essays analyze aspects of colonialism through investigations into the art, popular literature, material culture, film, and exhibitions that represented, celebrated, or were created for France’s colonies across the seas.
 
These studies draw from the rich documents and media—photographs, albums, postcards, maps, posters, advertisements, and children’s games—related to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century French empire that are held in the Getty Research Institute’s Association Connaissance de l’histoire de l’Afrique contemporaine (ACHAC) collections. ACHAC is a consortium of scholars and researchers devoted to exploring and promoting discussions of race, iconography, and the colonial and postcolonial periods of Africa and Europe.

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Visualizing Fascism
The Twentieth-Century Rise of the Global Right
Julia Adeney Thomas and Geoff Eley, editors
Duke University Press, 2020
Visualizing Fascism argues that fascism was not merely a domestic menace in a few European nations, but arose as a genuinely global phenomenon in the early twentieth century. Contributors use visual materials to explore fascism's populist appeal in settings around the world, including China, Japan, South Africa, Slovakia, and Spain. This visual strategy allows readers to see the transnational rise of the right as it fed off the agitated energies of modernity and mobilized shared political and aesthetic tropes. This volume also considers the postwar aftermath as antifascist art forms were depoliticized and repurposed in the West. More commonly, analyses of fascism focus on Italy and Germany alone and on institutions like fascist parties, but that approach truncates our understanding of the way fascism was indebted to colonialism and internationalism with all their attendant grievances and aspirations. Using photography, graphic arts, architecture, monuments, and film—rather than written documents alone—produces a portable concept of fascism, useful for grappling with the upsurge of the global right a century ago—and today.

Contributors. Nadya Bair, Paul D. Barclay, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Maggie Clinton, Geoff Eley, Lutz Koepnick, Ethan Mark, Bertrand Metton, Lorena Rizzo, Julia Adeney Thomas, Claire Zimmerman
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Visualizing Genocide
Indigenous Interventions in Art, Archives, and Museums
Edited by Yve Chavez and Nancy Marie Mithlo; Foreword by Charlene Villaseñor Black
University of Arizona Press, 2022
Visualizing Genocide examines how creative arts and memory institutions selectively commemorate or often outright ignore stark histories of colonialism. The essays confront outdated narratives and institutional methods by investigating contemporary artistic and scholarly interventions documenting settler colonialisms including land theft, incarceration, intergenerational trauma, and genocide. Interdisciplinary approaches, including oral histories, exhibition practices, artistic critiques, archival investigations, and public arts, are among the many decolonizing methods incorporated in contemporary curatorial practices.

Rather than dwelling simply in celebratory appraisals of Indigenous survival, this unprecedented volume tracks how massacres, disease, removals, abrogated treaties, religious intolerance, theft of land, and relocation are conceived by contemporary academics and artists. Contributors address indigeneity in the United States, Norway, Canada, Australia, and the Caribbean in scholarly essays, poems, and artist narratives. Missions, cemeteries, archives, exhibitions, photography, printmaking, painting, installations, performance, music, and museums are documented by fourteen authors from a variety of disciplines and illustrated with forty-three original artworks.

The authors offer honest critique, but in so doing they give hopeful and concrete strategies for the future. This powerful collection of voices employs Indigenous epistemologies and decolonial strategies, providing essential perspectives on art and visual culture.

Contributors
T. Christopher Aplin
Emily Arthur
Marwin Begaye
Charlene Villaseñor Black
Yve Chavez
Iris Colburn
Ellen Fernandez-Sacco
Stephen Gilchrist
John Hitchcock
Michelle J. Lanteri
Jérémie McGowan
Nancy Marie Mithlo
Anne May Olli
Emily Voelker
Richard Ray Whitman
 
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Visualizing Portuguese Power
The Political Use of Images in Portugal and its Overseas Empire (16th-18th Century)
Edited by Urte Krass
Diaphanes, 2015
Images play a key role in political communication and the ways we come to understand the power structures that shape society. Nowhere is this more evident than in the process of empire building, in which visual language has long been a highly effective means of overpowering another culture with one’s own values and beliefs.
           
With Visualizing Portuguese Power, Urte Krass and a group of contributors examine the visual arts within the Portuguese empire between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. With a focus on the political appropriation of Portuguese-Christian art within the colonies, the book looks at how these and other objects could be staged to generate new layers of meaning. Beyond religious images, the book shows that the appropriation of the visual arts to reinforce important political concepts also took place in the outside the religious sphere, including adaptations of local artistic customs to reinforce Portuguese power.
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Visualizing Posthuman Conservation in the Age of the Anthropocene
Amy D. Propen
The Ohio State University Press, 2018
How do we understand the lives of nonhuman animals and our relationship with and responsibilities to them? What are the artifacts or things that help configure such perceived responsibility? And what does it mean to practice conservation in the Anthropocene? Amy D. Propen seeks to answer these questions in Visualizing Posthuman Conservation in the Age of the Anthropocene, which brings a visual-material rhetorical approach into conversation with material feminisms and environmental humanities to describe how technologies, environments, bodies, and matter work together to shape and reshape how we coexist with our nonhuman kin.

Through case studies in which visual technologies and science play a prominent role in arguments to protect threatened marine species—from photographs showing the impact of ocean plastics on vulnerable sea birds, to debates about seismic testing and its impact on marine species, to maps created from GPS tracking projects—Propen advances a notion of posthuman environmental conservation that decenters the human enough to consider ideas about the material world from the vantage point of the nonhuman animal. In so bringing together work in environmental humanities, animal studies, human geography, and visual-material rhetoric, Propen further shows how interdisciplinary ways of knowing can further shape and illuminate our various lived and embodied experiences.
 
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Visualizing Secularism and Religion
Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, India
Alev Cinar, Srirupa Roy and Maha Yahya, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2012

Over the past two decades secular polities across the globe have witnessed an increasing turn to religion-based political movements, such as the rise of political Islam and Hindu nationalism, which have been fueling new and alternative notions of nationhood and national ideologies. The rise of such movements has initiated widespread debates over the meaning, efficacy, and normative worth of secularism. Visualizing Secularism and Religion examines the constitutive role of religion in the formation of secular-national public spheres in the Middle East and South Asia, arguing that in order to establish secularism as the dominant national ideology of countries such as Turkey, Lebanon, and India, the discourses, practices, and institutions of secular nation-building include rather than exclude religion as a presence within the public sphere. The contributors examine three fields---urban space and architecture, media, and public rituals such as parades, processions, and commemorative festivals---with a view to exploring how the relation between secularism, religion, and nationalism is displayed and performed. This approach demands a reconceptualization of secularism as an array of contextually specific practices, ideologies, subjectivities, and "performances" rather than as simply an abstract legal bundle of rights and policies.

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Visualizing Taste
How Business Changed the Look of What You Eat
Ai Hisano
Harvard University Press, 2019

Ai Hisano exposes how corporations, the American government, and consumers shaped the colors of what we eat and even the colors of what we consider “natural,” “fresh,” and “wholesome.”

The yellow of margarine, the red of meat, the bright orange of “natural” oranges—we live in the modern world of the senses created by business. Ai Hisano reveals how the food industry capitalized on color, and how the creation of a new visual vocabulary has shaped what we think of the food we eat. Constructing standards for the colors of food and the meanings we associate with them—wholesome, fresh, uniform—has been a business practice since the late nineteenth century, though one invisible to consumers. Under the growing influences of corporate profit and consumer expectations, firms have sought to control our sensory experiences ever since.

Visualizing Taste explores how our perceptions of what food should look like have changed over the course of more than a century. By examining the development of color-controlling technology, government regulation, and consumer expectations, Hisano demonstrates that scientists, farmers, food processors, dye manufacturers, government officials, and intermediate suppliers have created a version of “natural” that is, in fact, highly engineered. Retailers and marketers have used scientific data about color to stimulate and influence consumers’—and especially female consumers’—sensory desires, triggering our appetites and cravings. Grasping this pivotal transformation in how we see, and how we consume, is critical to understanding the business of food.

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Visualizing the Revolution
Politics and Pictorial Arts in Late Eighteenth-Century France
Hubertus Kohle and Rolf Reichardt
Reaktion Books, 2008

The French Revolution was marked by a wealth of imagery and visual symbolism that inspired the masses to fight for freedom. Visualizing the Revolution surveys the rich and multifaceted visual culture of the French Revolution, exploring its creation and how it conveyed the new revolutionary sensibilities of the era.

            Unlike most studies on art of the French Revolution, Visualizing the Revolution embraces a wide range of artistic genres—including prints, architecture, painting, and sculpture—and also draws upon archival documents to investigate the period’s aesthetic concerns. The authors break new ground in methodology and interpretative practice as they tease out the web of connections between these various historical artifacts and argue for the central place of the arts in the transmission of ideas and the political manipulation of the populace. The book translates the provocatively new visual language revealed in these artworks and writings and shows how its emphasis on metaphor, allegory, and symbolism transformed French mass visual culture.  An innovative and lushly illustrated study, Visualizing the Revolution is a worthy new contribution to scholarship on the French Revolution and the history of French art.

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Visualizing the Sacred
Cosmic Visions, Regionalism, and the Art of the Mississippian World
Edited by George E. Lankford, F. Kent Reilly III, and James F. Garber
University of Texas Press, 2011

The prehistoric native peoples of the Mississippi River Valley and other areas of the Eastern Woodlands of the United States shared a complex set of symbols and motifs that constituted one of the greatest artistic traditions of the pre-Columbian Americas. Traditionally known as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, these artifacts of copper, shell, stone, clay, and wood were the subject of the groundbreaking 2007 book Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms: Interpretations of Mississippian Iconography, which presented a major reconstruction of the rituals, cosmology, ideology, and political structures of the Mississippian peoples.

Visualizing the Sacred advances the study of Mississippian iconography by delving into the regional variations within what is now known as the Mississippian Iconographic Interaction Sphere (MIIS). Bringing archaeological, ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and iconographic perspectives to the analysis of Mississippian art, contributors from several disciplines discuss variations in symbols and motifs among major sites and regions across a wide span of time and also consider what visual symbols reveal about elite status in diverse political environments. These findings represent the first formal identification of style regions within the Mississippian Iconographic Interaction Sphere and call for a new understanding of the MIIS as a network of localized, yet interrelated religious systems that experienced both continuity and change over time.

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Visualizing the Street
New Practices of Documenting, Navigating and Imagining the City
Edited by Pedram Dibazar and Judith Naeff
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
From user-generated images of streets to professional architectural renderings, and from digital maps and drone footages to representations of invisible digital ecologies, this collection of essays analyses the emergent practices of visualizing the street. Today, advancements in digital technologies of the image have given rise to the production and dissemination of imagery of streets and urban realities in multiple forms. The ubiquitous presence of digital visualizations has in turn created new forms of urban practice and modes of spatial encounter. Everyone who carries a smartphone not only plays an increasingly significant role in the production, editing and circulation of images of the street, but also relies on those images to experience urban worlds and to navigate in them. Such entangled forms of image-making and image-sharing have constructed new imaginaries of the street and have had a significant impact on theways in which contemporary and future streets are understood, imagined, documented, navigated, mediated and visualized.Visualizing the Street investigates the social and cultural significance of these new developments at the intersection of visual culture and urban space. The interdisciplinary essays provide new concepts, theories and research methods that combine close analyses of street images and imaginaries with the study of the practices of their production and circulation. The book covers a wide range of visible and invisible geographies — From Hong Kong’s streets to Rio’s favelas, from Sydney’s suburbs to London’s street markets, and from Damascus’ war-torn streets to Istanbul’s sidewalks — and engages with multiple ways in which visualizations of the street function to document street protests and urban change, to build imaginaries of urban communities and alternate worlds, and to help navigate streetscapes.
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Visualizing the Text
From Manuscript Culture to the Age of Caricature
Lauren Beck
University of Delaware Press, 2017
This volume presents in-depth and contextualized analyses of a wealth of visual materials. These documents provide viewers with a mesmerizing and informative glimpse into how the early modern world was interpreted by image-makers and presented to viewers during a period that spans from manuscript culture to the age of caricature. The premise of this collection responds to a fundamental question: how are early modern texts, objects, and systems of knowledge imaged and consumed through bimodal, hybrid, or intermedial products that rely on both words and pictures to convey meaning? The twelve contributors to this collection go beyond traditional lines of inquiry into word-and-image interaction to deconstruct visual dynamics and politics—to show how images were shaped, manipulated, displayed, and distributed to represent the material world, to propagate official and commercial messages, to support religious practice and ideology, or to embody relations of power. These chapters are anchored in various theoretical and disciplinary points of departure, such as the history of collections and collecting, literary theory and criticism, the histories of science, art history and visual culture, word-and-image studies, as well as print culture and book illustration. Authors draw upon a wide range of visual material hitherto insufficiently explored and placed in context, in some cases hidden in museums and archives, or previously assessed only from a disciplinary standpoint that favored either the image or the text but not both in relation to each other. They include manuscript illuminations representing compilers and collections, frontispieces and other accompanying plates published in catalogues and museographies, astronomical diagrams, mixed pictographic-alphabetic accounting documents, Spanish baroque paintings, illustrative frontispieces or series inspired by or designed for single novels or anthologies, anatomical drawings featured in encyclopedic publications, visual patterns of volcanic formations, engravings representing the New World that accompany non-fictional travelogues, commonplace books that interlace text and images, and graphic satire. Geographically, the collection covers imperial centers (Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Spain), as well as their colonial periphery (New France; Mexico; Central America; South America, in particular Brazil; parts of Africa; and the island of Ceylon). Emblematic and thought-provoking, these images are only fragments of the multifaceted and comprehensive visual mosaic created during the early modern period, but their consideration has far reaching implications.
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Vita Nova
Dante Alighieri, translated by Andrew Frisardi
Northwestern University Press, 2012

Receipient, 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship

Dante’s Vita Nova (circa 1292–1295) depicts the joys and sorrows, the discoveries and conflicts of Dante’s early love for Beatrice—who would achieve later and even greater fame in Commedia—starting with his first sighting of her and culminating in his prevision of Beatrice among the beatified in heaven. Award-winning translator and poet Andrew Frisardi channels the vigor and nuance of Dante’s first masterpiece for a modern audience.

The “little book,” as Dante calls it, consists of thirty-one lyric po­ems—mostly sonnets—embedded in a prose narrative, which both re­counts an apparently autobiographical set of events also evoked in the poems and offers analysis of the poems’ construction in the medieval critical tradition of divisio textus, or division of the text. Dante selected poetry he had written before age twenty-eight or so and wrote the prose to shape it into a story. The poems anthologize Dante’s growth as a poet, from the influence of his earliest mentors to the stylistic and thematic breakthroughs of his poetic coming-of-age.

The interplay of poetry and prose in Vita Nova, along with the fur­ther distinction in the latter between autobiography and critical divisioni, presents a particular challenge for any translator. Frisardi faithfully voices the complex meter and rhyme schemes of the poetry while capturing the tone of each of the prose styles. His introduction and in-depth annotations provide additional context for the twenty-first-century reader.

 
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Vita Nuova
A Novel
Bohumil Hrabal
Northwestern University Press, 2010

Vita Nuova is the second in a trilogy of memoirs written from the perspective of Bohumil Hrabal’s wife, Elis.ka, about their life in Prague from the 1950s to the 1970s, when Communist repression of artists was at its peak.

Hrabal’s inimitable humor, which in Elis.ka’s ruminations ranges from bawdy slapstick to cutting irony, is all the more penetrating for being directed at himself. Vita Nuova showcases Hrabal’s legendary bohemian intellectual life, particularly his relationship with Vladimír Boudník. Hrabal creates a shrewd, lively portrait of Eastern European intellectual life in the mid-twentieth century.

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Vita Sexualis
Karl Ulrichs and the Origins of Sexual Science
Ralph M. Leck
University of Illinois Press, 2020
Karl Ulrichs's studies of sexual diversity galvanized the burgeoning field of sexual science in the nineteenth century. But in the years since, his groundbreaking activism for the emancipation of homosexuality has overshadowed his scholarly achievements.Ralph M. Leck returns Ulrichs to his place as the inventor of the science of sexual heterogeneity. Leck's analysis situates sexual science in thematic contexts that include political history, aesthetics, amatory studies, and the language of science. Although he was the greatest nineteenth-century scholar of sexual heterogeneity, Ulrichs retained certain traditional conjectures about gender. Leck recognizes these subtleties and employs the analytical concepts of modernist vita sexualis and traditional psychopathia sexualis to articulate philosophical and cultural differences among sexologists.Original and audacious, Vita Sexualis uses a bedrock figure's scientific and political innovations to open new insights into the history of sexual science, legal systems, and Western amatory codes.
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The Vital Art of D.H. Lawrence
Vision and Expression
Jack Stewart
Southern Illinois University Press, 1999

D. H. Lawrence, asserts Jack Stewart, expresses a painter’s vision in words, supplementing visual images with verbal rhythms. With the help of twenty-three illustrations, Stewart examines Lawrence’s painterly vision in The White Peacock, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, Kangaroo, and The Plumed Serpent. He concludes by synthesizing the themes that pervade this interarts study: vision and expression, art and ontology.  

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Vital Conflicts in Medical Ethics
A Virtue Approach to Craniotomy and Tubal Pregnancies
Martin Rhonheimer
Catholic University of America Press, 2009
Vital Conflicts in Medical Ethics by renowned Swiss philosopher Martin Rhonheimer considers some of the most difficult and disputed questions in Catholic moral theology
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The Vital Dead
Making Meaning, Identity, and Community through Cemeteries
Alison Bell
University of Tennessee Press, 2022

What can a cemetery tell us about the social and cultural dynamics of a place and time? Anthropologist Alison Bell suggests that cemeteries participate in the grassroots cultural work of crafting social connections, even as they test the transcendental durability of the deceased person and provide a measure of a culture’s values. In The Vital Dead, Bell applies this framework to the communities of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and the cemeteries that have both claimed them and, paradoxically, sustained them.

Bell surveys objects left on graves, images and epitaphs on grave markers, and other artifacts of material culture to suggest a landscape of symbols maintaining relationships across the threshold of death. She explores cemetery practice and its transformation over time and largely presents her interpretations as a struggle against alienation. Rich in evocative examples both contemporary and historical, Bell’s analysis stems from fieldwork interviews, archival sources, and recent anthropological theory. The book’s chapters range across cemetery types, focusing on African American burials, the grave sites of institutionalized individuals, and modern community memorials. Ultimately, The Vital Dead is an account of how lives, both famous and forgotten, become transformed and energized through the communities and things they leave behind to produce profound and unexpected narratives of mortality. Bell’s deft storytelling coupled with skill for scholarly analysis make for a fascinating and emotionally moving read.

Groundbreaking in its approach, The Vital Dead makes important contributions to cemetery and material culture studies, as well as the fields of anthropology, archaeology, history, geography, and folklore.

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Vital Decomposition
Soil Practitioners and Life Politics
Kristina M. Lyons
Duke University Press, 2020
In Colombia, decades of social and armed conflict and the US-led war on drugs have created a seemingly untenable situation for scientists and rural communities as they attempt to care for forests and grow non-illicit crops. In Vital Decomposition Kristina M. Lyons presents an ethnography of human-soil relations. She follows state soil scientists and peasants across labs, greenhouses, forests, and farms and attends to the struggles and collaborations between farmers, agrarian movements, state officials, and scientists over the meanings of peace, productivity, rural development, and sustainability in Colombia. In particular, Lyons examines the practices and philosophies of rural farmers who value the decomposing layers of leaves, which make the soils that sustain life in the Amazon, and shows how the study and stewardship of the soil point to alternative frameworks for living and dying. In outlining the life-making processes that compose and decompose into soil, Lyons theorizes how life can thrive in the face of the violence, criminalization, and poisoning produced by militarized, growth-oriented development.
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Vital Enemies
Slavery, Predation, and the Amerindian Political Economy of Life
By Fernando Santos-Granero
University of Texas Press, 2009

Analyzing slavery and other forms of servitude in six non-state indigenous societies of tropical America at the time of European contact, Vital Enemies offers a fascinating new approach to the study of slavery based on the notion of "political economy of life." Fernando Santos-Granero draws on the earliest available historical sources to provide novel information on Amerindian regimes of servitude, sociologies of submission, and ideologies of capture.

Estimating that captive slaves represented up to 20 percent of the total population and up to 40 percent when combined with other forms of servitude, Santos-Granero argues that native forms of servitude fulfill the modern understandings of slavery, though Amerindian contexts provide crucial distinctions with slavery as it developed in the American South. The Amerindian understanding of life forces as being finite, scarce, unequally distributed, and in constant circulation yields a concept of all living beings as competing for vital energy. The capture of human beings is an extreme manifestation of this understanding, but it marks an important element in the ways Amerindian "captive slavery" was misconstrued by European conquistadors.

Illuminating a cultural facet that has been widely overlooked or miscast for centuries, Vital Enemies makes possible new dialogues regarding hierarchies in the field of native studies, as well as a provocative re-framing of pre- and post-contact America.

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A Vital Force
Women in American Homeopathy
Kirschmann, Anne Taylor
Rutgers University Press, 2003

Homeopathy, as a medical system, presented a significant institutional and economic challenge to conventional medicine in the nineteenth century. Although contemporary critics portrayed homeopathic physicians as part of a sect whose treatment of disease was beyond the pale of acceptable medical practice, homeopathy was in many ways similar to established medicine. Anne Taylor Kirschmann explores the strategic choices and consequences for women practitioners. Not only were female homeopaths respected within their communities, they also enjoyed considerable professional advantages not available to women within regular medicine.

A Vital Force: Women in American Homeopathy offers a new interpretation of women’s roles in modern medicine. Kirschmann strengthens and clarifies the history of homeopathic women physicians and creates a framework of comparison to “regular,” or orthodox, physicians. Women medical practitioners chose homeopathy in dramatic numbers from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, although the reasons for this preference varied over time. Linked to social reform movements in the nineteenth century, anti-modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth, and countercultural ideals of the 1960s and 1970s, women's advocacy of homeopathy has been intertwined with broad social and cultural issues in American society.

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A Vital Frontier
Water Insurgencies in Europe
Andrea Muehlebach
Duke University Press, 2023
In A Vital Frontier Andrea Muehlebach examines the work of activists across Europe as they organize to preserve water as a commons and public good in the face of privatization. Traversing social, political, legal, and hydrological terrains, Muehlebach situates water as a political fault line at the frontiers of financialization, showing how the seemingly relentless expansion of capital into public utilities is being challenged by an equally relentless and often successful insurgence of political organizing. Drawing on ethnographic research, Muehlebach presents water protests as a vital politics that comprises popular referenda, barricades in the streets, huge demonstrations, the burning of utility bills, and legal disputes over transparency and contracts. As Muehlebach documents, Europe’s water activists articulate their own values of democracy and just price, raising far-reaching political questions about private versus common property and financing, liberal democracy, sovereignty, legality, and collective infrastructural responsibility in the face of financialization and commodification. Muehlebach shows that water-rights activists can successfully resist financial markets by exposing the commodification of water as the theft of life itself.
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The Vital Lie
Reality and Illusion in Modern Drama
Anthony S. Abbott
University of Alabama Press, 1988

 The Vital Lie is the first book to examine the reality-illusion conflict in modern drama from Ibsen to present-day playwrights. The book questions why vital lies, lies necessary for life itself, are such an obsessive concern for playwrights of the last hundred years. Using the work of fifteen playwrights, Abbott seeks to discover if modern playwrights treat illusions as helpful or necessary to life, or as signals of sicknesses from which human beings need to be cured. What happens to characters when they are forced to face the truth about themselves and their worlds without the protection of their illusions? The author develops a three-part historical analysis of the use of the reality-illusion theme, from its origins as a metaphysical search to its current elaborations as a theatrical game.

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Vital Minimum
Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France
Dana Simmons
University of Chicago Press, 2015
What constitutes a need? Who gets to decide what people do or do not need? In modern France, scientists, both amateur and professional, were engaged in defining and measuring human needs. These scientists did not trust in a providential economy to distribute the fruits of labor and uphold the social order. Rather, they believed that social organization should be actively directed according to scientific principles. They grounded their study of human needs on quantifiable foundations: agricultural and physiological experiments, demographic studies, and statistics.

The result was the concept of the "vital minimum"--the living wage, a measure of physical and social needs. In this book, Dana Simmons traces the history of this concept, revealing the intersections between technologies of measurement, such as calorimeters and social surveys, and technologies of wages and welfare, such as minimum wages, poor aid, and welfare programs. In looking at how we define and measure need, Vital Minimum raises profound questions about the authority of nature and the nature of inequality.
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front cover of The Vital Realities for 2020 and Beyond
The Vital Realities for 2020 and Beyond
Writings on Water Wars, Nuclear Devastation, Endless War, Economic Revolution, and Surveillance Versus Freedom
Roger Armbrust
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2019
This collection of writings by journalist Roger Armbrust focuses on national and international public policy concerns. Armbrust is particularly concerned with water resource policy, both nationally and internationally, the increasing likelihood of nuclear war, given the proliferation of nuclear powers and the destruction of nuclear treaties. Armbrust is concerned that the USA seems to be at war somewhere nearly always, a condition that enhances the power of the military-industrial complex in this country and abroad. Economic instability exacerbated by mounting public and private debt is another of his recurring themes. The continuum of government-and corporate efforts to stifle sustainable economic progress of poorer peoples leads to social instability worldwide.
 
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Vital Signs 1998
The Environmental Trends That Are Shaping Our Future
The Worldwatch Institute
Island Press, 1998
The new Vital Signs 1998 gives you more than 100 charts, graphs and tables that show you the worldwide trends that are changing our lives, for better and for worse. It includes the latest data on critical global trends, presented in simple but compelling graphics, along with concise, thoughtful analysis.
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Vital Signs 1999
The Environmental Trends That Are Shaping Our Future
The Worldwatch Institute
Island Press, 2015
The global trends documented in Vital Signs 1999—from a decline in nuclear power generating capacity to the proliferation of genetically modified crops—will play a large part in determining the quality of our lives and our children's lives in the next decade.
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Vital Signs 2000
The Environmental Trends That Are Shaping Our Future
The Worldwatch Institute
Island Press, 2015
The global trends documented in Vital Signs 2000—from the rapid rise in the sales of energy-efficient compact fluorescent lamps to the worldwide overpumping of growndwater—will play a large role in determining the quality of our lives and our children's lives in the next decade.
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Vital Signs 2001
The Trends That Are Shaping Our Future
The Worldwatch Institute
Island Press, 2015
The global trends documented in Vital Signs 2001—from the rapid increase in the use of wind power to the continued warming of the planet—will play a large role in determining the quality of our lives and our children's lives in this new century.
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front cover of Vital Signs 2002
Vital Signs 2002
The Trends That Are Shaping Our Future
The Worldwatch Institute
Island Press, 2015
The 2002 edition features more than 50 key indicators of long-term trends—from the growth of fish farms and bicycle production to the increase in solar cell and Internet use.
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front cover of Vital Signs 2003
Vital Signs 2003
The Trends That Are Shaping Our Future
The Worldwatch Institute
Island Press, 2015
With Vital Signs 2003, you’ll have the cogent analysis you need to prepare for tomorrow’s challenges.
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