Visual Cultures - Transatlantic Perspectives

Edited by Volker Depkat and Meike Zwingenberger.

On both sides of the Atlantic, visual culture studies currently is one of the fastest growing and most innovative fields in academia, attracting a great variety of questions, approaches and disciplines. Indebted to an understanding of visual culture as the means by which cultures visually construct the social field, the articles in this volume address how concepts of legitimacy and authority, race and ethnicity, history and space were visualized over the centuries in Europe and the United States. Contributors cover the creation of political iconographies, contested visual narratives of racial and ethnic difference, images of gender and sexuality, the role of photographs in journalism, and, finally, the importance of visual representations in the construction of historical memory. A broad selection of visual media, ranging from paintings, prints and photographs to experimental cinema and the internet, is analyzed to unearth the visual dimensions of the political and the social in Europe and the United States since the eighteenth century. - Contents: Martin Jay: Scopic Regimes of Modernity Revisited. - Mark Thistlethwaite: The Face of the Nation. George Washington's Image and American Identity. - Sarah J. Purcell: Seeing Martyrdom. Elmer Ellsworth, James Jackson, and Revolutionary Martyrdom at the Onset of the U.S. Civil War. - Wolfram Pyta: Visualizing Democratic Legitimacy and Authority. The Case of the Weimar Republic. - Shawn Michelle Smith: Augustus Washington and the Civil Contract of Photography. - Astrid Böger: Envisioning Race and Ethnicity. Spectacles of Otherness at the Early American World's Fairs. - Michael P. Conzen: Cartography as Conquest. Visualizing the American West through Maps in the Era of National Expansion. - Ingrid Gessner: War, Visual Politics and Cultural Memory. Revisiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. - Julia Lossau: Geography, the Visual, and Public Art. Exploring the New Gorbals Landscape. - Michael Griffin: Images from Nowhere. Visuality and News in 21st Century Media. - Caja Thimm: The Visuals of Online Politics. Barack Obama's Web Campaign. - Robin Blaetz: Home Movies. Thoughts on Framing the Domestic Sphere in Experimental Cinema. VIII,263 Seiten mit 44 Farb- und 35 s/w-Abb., gebunden (Publications of the Bavarian American Society; Vol. 14/Universitätsverlag Winter 2012)