Western art has long sought to find a perfect method of representing the body. At the same time as we have lost faith in the certainty of the modernist project, the perfect, straight, white body of modernism is now seen as fiction. But what sort of body will take its place? This work explores body images in visual culture, from revolutionary France to contemporary New York. It engages with artists' use of different kinds of body images in painting, sculpture, photography and film, and shows the centrality of the body in the work of artists from da Vinci to Manet, from Paul Strand to Kiki...

Western art has long sought to find a perfect method of representing the body. At the same time as we have lost faith in the certainty of the modernist project, the perfect, straight, white body of modernism is now seen as fiction. But what sort of body will take its place? This work explores body images in visual culture, from revolutionary France to contemporary New York. It engages with artists' use of different kinds of body images in painting, sculpture, photography and film, and shows the centrality of the body in the work of artists from da Vinci to Manet, from Paul Strand to Kiki...

This is the first book to examine the connections between diaspora - the movement, whether forced or voluntary, of a nation or group of people from one homeland to another - and its representations in visual culture. Two foundational articles by Stuart Hall and the painter R.B. Kitaj provide points of departure for an exploration of the meanings of diaspora for cultural identity and artistic practice.

A distinguished group of contributors, who include Alan Sinfield, Irit Rogoff, and Eunice Lipton, address the rich complexity of diasporic cultures and art, but with a focus on the...

This text marks the importance of diaspora as a means of understanding the new modes of postnational identity. In examining the visual culture of the classic African and Jewish diasporas, contributors address different aspects of the multiple viewpoints inherent in diasporic cultures. Two introductory essays by Stuart Hall and the painter R.B. Kitaj highlight the intersections of diaspora and cultural identity. The subsequent essays examine individual instances of diaspora as diverse as homosexuality in the Dreyfus Affair, the Caribbean-Jewish Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, Yoruba...

Groundbreaking and compelling, Watching Babylon examines the experience of watching the war against Iraq on television, on the internet, in the cinema and in print media.

Mirzoeff shows how the endless stream of images flowing from the Gulf has necessitated a new form of visual thinking, one which recognises that the war has turned images themselves into weapons. Drawing connections between the history and legend of ancient Babylon, the metaphorical Babylon of Western modernity, and everyday life in the modern suburb of Babylon, New York, Mirzoeff explores ancient concerns...

This groundbreaking book examines the experience of watching the war against Iraq on television, on the Internet, in print media and in cinema. Looking at the endless stream of images from Iraq requires a new form of visual thinking that highlights the intersection of local and global while recognizing the way in which the war turned images themselves into weapons. Making striking connections between the history and legend of ancient Babylon, the Babylon that is Western modernity and everyday life in the modern suburb of Babylon, New York, Nicholas Mirzoeff explores that part of the ancient...

The Visual Culture Reader does justice to this exciting interdisciplinary field, bringing together key writings as well as specially commissioned articles by authors including Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway and Kobena Mercer. In total, 47 essays cover photography, painting, sculpture, fashion, advertising, television, cinema and digital culture. The reader, now in a completely revised new edition, comprises articles grouped into thematic sections, each prefaced by an introduction by the editor, and including suggestions for further reading.

In The Right to Look, Nicholas Mirzoeff develops a comparative decolonial framework for visual culture studies, the field that he helped to create and shape. Casting modernity as an ongoing contest between visuality and countervisuality, or the right to look, he explains how visuality sutures authority to power and renders the association natural. An early-nineteenth-century concept, meaning the visualization of history, visuality has been central to the legitimization of Western hegemony. Mirzoeff identifies three complexes of visuality plantation slavery, imperialism, and the...