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In Latin America, where even today writing has remained a restricted form of expression, the task of generating consent and imposing the emergent nation-state as the exclusive form of the political, was largely conferred to the image. Furthermore, at the moment of its historical demise, the new, 'postmodern' forms of sovereignty appear to rely even more heavily on visual discourses of power. However, a critique of the iconography of the modern state-form has been missing. This volume is the first concerted attempt by cultural, historical and visual scholars to address the political dimension of visual culture in Latin America, in a comparative perspective spanning various regions and historical stages. The case studies are divided into four sections, analysing the formation of a public sphere, the visual politics of avant-garde art, the impact of mass society on political iconography, and the consolidation and crisis of territory as a key icon of the state. Jens Andermann is a Lecturer in Latin American Studies at Birkbeck College, London, and co-editor of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. Among his publications are Mapas de poder: una arqueología literaria del espacio argentino (Rosario, 2000) and articles for major journals in Argentina, Brazil, Europe and the US. William Rowe is Anniversary Professor of Poetics at Birkbeck College, London. His book Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America (London, 1991) has been translated into several languages. His most recent works, apart from translations of a wide range of Latin American poetry, are Poets of Contemporary Latin America: History and the Inner Life (Oxford, 2000) and Ensayos vallejianos (Berkeley and Lima, 2006).
From the American Revolution to the present, the United States has enjoyed a rich and persuasive visual culture. These images have constructed, sustained, and disseminated social values and identities, but this unwieldy, sometimes untidy form of cultural expression has received less systematic attention than other modes of depicting American life. Recently, scholars in the humanities have developed a new critical approach to reading images and the cultural work they perform. This practice, American cultural iconography, is generating sophisticated analyses of how images organize our public life. The contributions to this volume exhibit the extraordinary scope and interpretive power of this interdisciplinary study while illuminating the dark corners of the nation's psyche. Drawing on such varied texts and visual media as daguerreotypes, political cartoons, tourist posters, and religious artifacts, these essays explore how pictures and words combine to teach us who we are and who we are not. They examine mimesis in elegant portraits of black Freemasons, industrial-age representations of national parks, and postwar photographs of atomic destruction. They consider how visual culture has described and disclosed the politics of racialized sexuality, whether subconsciously affirming it in the shadows of film noir or deliberately contesting it through the interethnic incest of John Sayles's Lone Star. Students of literature, film, and history will find that these essays extend the frontier of American studies. The contributors are Maurice Wallace, Dennis Berthold, Alan Trachtenberg, Shirley Samuels, Jenny Franchot, Cecelia Tichi, Eric Lott, Bryan C. Taylor, and José E. Limón.
In an era before affordable travel, National Geographic not only served as the first glimpse of countless other worlds for its readers, but it helped them confront sweeping historical change. There was a time when its cover, with the unmistakable yellow frame, seemed to be on every coffee table, in every waiting room. In American Iconographic, Stephanie L. Hawkins traces National Geographic’s rise to cultural prominence, from its first publication of nude photographs in 1896 to the 1950s, when the magazine’s trademark visual and textual motifs found their way into cartoon caricature, popular novels, and film trading on the "romance" of the magazine’s distinctive visual fare. National Geographic transformed local color into global culture through its production and circulation of readily identifiable cultural icons. The adventurer-photographer, the exotic woman of color, and the intrepid explorer were part of the magazine’s "institutional aesthetic," a visual and textual repertoire that drew upon popular nineteenth-century literary and cultural traditions. This aesthetic encouraged readers to identify themselves as members not only in an elite society but, paradoxically, as both Americans and global citizens. More than a window on the world, National Geographic presented a window on American cultural attitudes and drew forth a variety of complex responses to social and historical changes brought about by immigration, the Great Depression, and world war. Drawing on the National Geographic Society’s archive of readers’ letters and its founders’ correspondence, Hawkins reveals how the magazine’s participation in the "culture industry" was not so straightforward as scholars have assumed. Letters from the magazine’s earliest readers offer an important intervention in this narrative of passive spectatorship, revealing how readers resisted and revised National Geographic’s authority. Its photographs and articles celebrated American self-reliance and imperialist expansion abroad, but its readers were highly aware of these representational strategies, and alert to inconsistencies between the magazine’s editorial vision and its photographs and text. Hawkins also illustrates how the magazine actually encouraged readers to question Western values and identify with those beyond the nation’s borders. Chapters devoted to the magazine’s practice of photographing its photographers on assignment and to its genre of husband-wife adventurers reveal a more enlightened National Geographic invested in a cosmopolitan vision of a global human family. A fascinating narrative of how a cultural institution can influence and embody public attitudes, this book is the definitive account of an iconic magazine’s unique place in the American imagination.
" Topical theme: the volume connects the study of cultural icons to pressing questions on the role of icons and the iconic in present day society. " Innovative and compelling comparative approach that offers a new synthesis of the study of cultural icons so far by focusing both on the construction processes and the dynamics of cultural icons. " The volume brings together scholars from art history, film studies, literature and cultural history in a joint reflection on the study of cultural icons and their role in shaping cultural memory.
What does the study of iconography entail for scholars active today? How does it intersect with the broad array of methodological and theoretical approaches now at the disposal of art historians? Should we still dare to use the term "iconography" to describe such work? The seven essays collected here argue that we should. Their authors set out to evaluate the continuing relevance of iconographic studies to current art-historical scholarship by exploring the fluidity of iconography itself over broad spans of time, place, and culture. These wide-ranging case studies take a diversity of approaches as they track the transformation of medieval images and their meanings along their respective paths, exploring how medieval iconographies remained stable or changed; how images were reconceived in response to new contexts, ideas, or viewerships; and how modern thinking about medieval images--including the application or rejection of traditional methodologies--has shaped our understanding of what they signify. These essays demonstrate that iconographic work still holds a critical place within the rapidly evolving discipline of art history as well as within the many other disciplines that increasingly prioritize the study of images. This inaugural volume in the series Signa: Papers of the Index of Medieval Art at Princeton University demonstrates the importance of keeping matters of image and meaning--regardless of whether we use the word "iconography"--at the center of modern inquiry into medieval visual literature. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are Kirk Ambrose, Charles Barber, Catherine Fernandez, Elina Gertsman, Jacqueline E. Jung, Dale Kinney, and D. Fairchild Ruggles.
This book, first published in 1988, draws together fourteen scholars from diverse disciplines to explicate the status of landscape as a cultural image.