Gender and Germanness

Reviewed by: Empires of Vision: A Reader ed. by Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy Carla Manfredi Empires of Vision: A Reader. Edited by martin jay and sumathi ramaswamy. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014. 688 pp. $119.95 (cloth); $32.95 (paper). Empires of Vision contributes to our understanding of the visual cultures of European imperialism and to their afterlives in postcolonial milieus. Thoughtfully edited by cultural historians Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy, the volume includes twenty-one reprinted essays and is divided into two sections: “The Imperial Optic” and “Postcolonial Looking.” The first section introduces five visual media within a trans-historical and global context that spans roughly five hundred years of imperialism. The second section focuses on the decades following decolonization and explores the different ways in which subaltern artists have responded to or “look[ed] back” (p. 3) at Europe. The selections offer a multitude of historical, regional, cultural, and theoretical perspectives, which will be of interest to an interdisciplinary readership. Although many of the volume’s selections will undoubtedly be familiar to seasoned scholars, they will provide graduate students with a solid grounding for future historical and theoretical research across the fields of imperialism, postcolonialism, visual and cultural studies, and art history. It is impossible to do justice to any book in a brief review let alone to extracts from twenty-one impressive pieces of scholarship. Thus, this review focuses on the editors’ contributions to Empires of Vision, which are bold reminders of what cross-disciplinary study can achieve: a recasting of conventional, written histories and a questioning of entrenched theoretical paradigms. In “The Work of Vision in the Age of European Empires,” Ramaswamy offers a sophisticated and lucid introduction to current critical approaches to colonialism and visual culture. The stakes of Empires of Vision are clearly defined: “The image is a site where new accounts of empire, the (post)colony, and Europe itself emerge and depart from—even challenge—the more familiar narrative line(s) of nonvisual histories” (p. 3). The volume, explains Ramaswamy, responds to and encourages a gradual academic reorientation. Despite the appearance of several recent visual culture anthologies, the study of art remains largely limited to art history; indeed, histories of colonialism and postcolonialism marginalize the integral role of visual culture in the production of colonial violence. Ramaswamy supports her claim with an anecdote about Edward Said, who confessed that “‘just to think about the visual arts generally sends me into a panic’” (p. 5). Panic becomes a productive metaphor for theorizing how images are often “disorderly” and “unpredictable” and sometimes “incoherent”; thus, Empires of [End Page 927] Vision offers alternative histories to those presented in official textual archives (pp. 5–6). If colonial and postcolonial studies have given short shrift to the visual arts, then visual culture studies also need to catch up. In conventional visual culture accounts, the presence of empire is still obscured, resulting in a European framework of visuality (p. 10). To illustrate this argument, Ramaswamy refers to a compelling 1996 “Visual Culture Questionnaire” published in the journal October: No one who responded to this questionnaire was a specialist in visual arts from regions other than Europe or the United States (pp. 10–11). Needless to say, the questionnaire highlights the importance of this collection, which will militate against parochialism (whether disciplinary or otherwise) and encourage interdisciplinary and interregional approaches to visuality and empire. In their introduction to part 1, “The Imperial Optic,” Ramaswamy and Jay trouble Eurocentric approaches to visual culture by underscoring the dynamic interactions between metropolitan technologies and indigenous traditions and practices. Thus, the “mutually constitutive relationship between empire and image-work” engendered new practices of seeing in and outside Europe (p. 25). Part 1 is divided into four sections, which deal with easel painting, mass-printed illustrations, cartography, and photography/film respectively. Anthropologist Deborah Poole’s influential notion of “visual economy” (1997) serves as an underlying concept for this part. The term “visual economy,” rather than “visual culture” is better suited to consider how images circulate within wide social, cultural, geographical, and imperial networks. In other words, individuals do not have to share a common (visual) culture in order to belong to the...

Reviewed by: Picturing the Beautiful Game: A History of Soccer in Visual Culture and Art ed. by Daniel Haxall Michał Mazurkiewicz Haxall, Daniel, ed. Picturing the Beautiful Game: A History of Soccer in Visual Culture and Art. New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019. Pp. 296. Acknowledgments, illustrations, tables, terminology and word usage, notes, bibliography, index. $99.00, hb. Numerous artists have drawn inspiration from sports competition, and the amount of scholarship dedicated to the study of sport in art has increased recently. Picturing the Beautiful Game—focusing on soccer—continues this research, covering a wide range of topics. The editor, Daniel Haxall, has gathered a cast of authors specializing in disciplines such as sport and art history, sociology, and media studies. Different perspectives enrich the volume, which thus offers a multifaced history of the world's most popular game. The book is divided into six major parts, each consisting of two chapters. First, the editor offers a useful introduction that presents soccer as "the most common avenue for uniting art and sport" (2) and defines the aim of the monograph: "this collections of essays considers the way soccer has been promoted, commemorated, and contested in visual arts" (2). Next, Haxall analyzes soccer as the subject for academic study, discusses exhibitions and art museums of soccer, and briefly describes the contributions to follow. In Part I, "Soccer and Mass Media," Alexander Leese offers insights into English late nineteenth-century soccer and draws attention to Victorian illustrated newspapers, focusing on three artists whose works demonstrate "how the game was played, watched, and officiated" (20). Luke Healey explores contemporary web-based GIF, which "provides an especially pertinent example of the visual culture of football in the early twenty-first century" (47). "Soccer and Memory," Part II, "considers soccer in the context of memory, ranging from nostalgia to commemoration" (10). Mike O'Mahony discusses the "Football and the Fine Arts" exhibition against the background of postwar British culture. He concentrates on artworks depicting crowds and the stadium atmosphere. The chapter provides—among others—an eye-opening study of painters such as Gerald Cains. Christopher Stride, Ffion E. Thomas, and Nick Catley analyze the desire to commemorate athletes, emphasizing statues of sportspeople. They present a detailed list of sculptures of this type and devote the core of the paper to three statues erected in honor of legendary manager Brian Clough. The next part, "Soccer and Modernism," examines modern and postmodern depictions of athletes. Przemysław Strożek describes early twentieth-century Italian and Russian avant-gardes, showing "how images of footballers operated as signifiers of modernity and artistic transformation from the 1910s to 1930s" (98). Chris McAuliffe looks into soccer and spectacle in contemporary art and sheds light on how the authors view society through soccer (an interesting international perspective). The fourth part, "Soccer and Gender," explores women in the world of soccer. Jennifer Doyle chronicles a history of women's exclusion in representations of soccer and critically analyzes feminist sport art. Carrie Dunn deftly explores the visual consumption of athletes in the media, offering a sociological study [End Page 175] of British female fans. She notes the high level of their media consumption but also that "they have to negotiate their identities, as fans and as women, in an institutionally sexist sport and an institutionally sexist fandom, reinforced by the media they consume" (165). In Part V, "Soccer and Global Politics," the analysis first zooms into African art. Daniel Haxall presents selected Ghanaian artists, for whom "soccer serves as a powerful metaphor, allowing [them] to engage immigration, global capitalism, fan behavior, and other issues bound within the politics of Ghana's most popular sport" (171). Also, such issues as spirituality and ritualism in sport are touched on here. Christopher Collier deals with three-sided soccer, sketching "a preliminary history of the game, tentatively exploring connections to the wider thought of its mercurial inventor—a man once labeled 'the greatest painter of the 1950s' [Asger Jorn]—and the group of which he was once a member, the Situationist International" (191). The first paper of Part VI ("Soccer and Commercialization'), by Jean Williams, analyzes World Cup posters and, to be more precise, "argues that the posters...

The subject of this thesis is a perception that the visual arts is declining in value in Australian culture. The rationale for this perception is drawn in the immediate sense from repeated debate in favour of abolition of the Australia Council (the premier source of grant funding to artistic producers). The method selected to investigate this perception is a comparison of rational and social epistemologies for curriculum, based respectively on the work of Arthur Efland and Theodor Adorno. By making this comparison, the thesis argues that the perceived shrinkage in the value and status of visual art is based on a fundamental conflict between the meanings of “art” and “culture”. The context of the debate is in fact perceptions of curriculum and their function vis-à-vis “cultural production” and is taken here to signal a change in the way Australia regards and values artistic activity. <br> <br> The thesis argues that culture needs to be defined appropriate to the Australian experience of “cultural production”. A lack of appropriate definition has resulted in terms like “creativity” becoming so broad in meaning that they are losing theoretical impact. I am inquiring as to what this loss of meaningfulness indicates about art education: some of the questions I ask in order to conduct the inquiry address whether the switch from visual art to visual culture signals a decline in the value of artistic culture; or does it owe itself to changing conditions between art education and artistic employment or commerce? <br> <br> The study examines visual art in particular as it might fall within the realm of Australian cultural production, providing one instance of artistic employment (i.e., in the visual arts). The focus of the study will be on addressing the stand-off between visual arts and visual culture in the field of curriculum studies: my method entails the application of Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory so as to place visual art and visual culture within a framework by which both rational and social epistemologies of art education can be used to define change in the realm of cultural production. <br> <br> Such change will include a re-evaluation of the role of visual art within higher education. At Monash University in Melbourne, the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture has progressively eroded the value of different studio practices by shutting down programs in disciplines that cannot attract sufficient enrolments. The institution appears to displace artistic practice, and to favour visual culture as a more reliable, rational form of investment, leading to more secure forms of employment, and offering less risk in terms of the returns to public education and the economy more generally. <br> <br> Visual culture, or visual culture studies, purports to be a postmodern approach to the study of art and replaces fine art and visual art studies, which represent a more rational epistemology within the field of art education. Visual culture studies aims to work with the current corporate and technocratic reality rather than deny its existence. It permits interdisciplinarity and the removal of a metanarrative about the artist as hero, offering in its place a semblance of plurality, multiplicity, indeterminacy and fragmentation. <br> <br> Visual culture embraces forms of symbolic analysis to construct meaning or rather, to analyse artworks (Lankshear, 1997); addresses digital and social media more readily, and turns to visual literacy to justify the artfulness of artworks (de Duve, 1994; Brown, 2003). This process may suggest a value-free art is being practised: it erodes the significance of traditional aesthetic skills, making aesthetic judgment less essential to the creation of an artwork. <br> <br> One implication of this change is to free fine art in general from its supposedly elitist origins, and to enable the art world to encompass both “high” and “low” art forms with equal value. This new value, which is implicitly more value-free than the high art it seeks to overturn, destabilizes art to the point that it has so few boundaries its continued existence (in its traditional form) becomes questionable.

Nationalism as a force in shaping and understanding historical events, long recognised by historians, has emerged as a rich field of historiological study. Awareness of nationalism has spilled into cultural studies, where the role and history of museums has been investigated in the light of nationalistic influences. Favoured images of a nation’s history, culture and people may impact on collecting and curatorial decisions. Library historians have been slower to recognise the impact of nationalism on library collections, although national and state libraries are prone to nationalistic influences. As they purport to collect the documentary heritage of a nation and its people, they engag with questions of national identity, history and geography. This paper maps some of the intersections between nationalism and libraries by considering how changing concepts of nationhood and Australian identity have influenced the formation and development of the National Library of Australia.

The Jewish Quarterly Review, XCII, Nos. 3-4 (January-April, 2002) 633-634 Ritchie Robertson. The "Jewish Question" in German Literature, 17491939 : Emancipation and Its Discontent. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. ? + 534. In his new study, Ritchie Robertson provides an in-depth survey from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's The Jews (1749) to Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism (1939) of what he calls the Jewish presence in German literature. Through an analysis of scores of literary texts that thematize aspects of Jewish identity in some of the darlings of German-Jewish literature in addition to lesser-known works, Robertson discusses GermanJewish literary productivity as well as the depiction of Jews and Judaism in German and Austrian literature. The first chapters, "Enlightenment" and "Liberalism," follow a chronological path from Lessing and Mendelssohn to Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig with admirable breadth, whereas the subsequent chapters "AntiSemitism ," "Assimilation," and "Dissimilation," bring a more thematic focus to the study. Robertson mindfully avoids a teleological reading of German history that progresses from a prolonged fight over emancipation and antisemitic discourses to the Holocaust, such as Paul Lawrence Rose and Daniel Goldhagen would have constructed. Instead, he rightly emphasizes that antisemitism in Germany was much more discontinuous than has often been assumed (pp. 151-232). This insight, however, takes surprising forms at times. For example, Robertson reverses the ¡mage of the tolerant Gotthold Ephraim Lessing by postulating the existence of an exclusionary subtext at the heart of Nathan the Wise, while not only is Johann Gottfried Herder left untainted but Johann David Michaelis is turned from a foe into a more benign figure (p. 30). Robertson follows this engaging reading of the Enlightenment by describing a trajectory from assimilation to dissimilation. In contrast to previous scholars like Shulamit Volkov and others, Robertson suggests that the First World War inaugurated a new period in German-Jewish history (p. 378) that reflected the intensifying exclusionary antisemitic discourses of the time. The dating of this turning point may be unconvincing, and, furthermore, to postulate such a radical change in the first place also is problematic insofar as this approach reduces roughly a hundred years of modern German-Jewish creativity to questions of assimilation. The self-assertion of Jews and Judaism in the writings of Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Abraham Geiger or Heinrich Graetz is overshadowed by a discussion of the assimilatory program of German-Jewry during this era. Equally problematic is the way in which Robertson applies himself to the task of delineating how Jews may have internalized anti-Jewish prejudices, 634THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW which he discusses under the heading of "Self-Hatred" (pp. 286-345). The concept of self-hatred is too reductive to adequately address the complicated range of negation, remodeling, and irony that is characteristic of many German-Jewish writers from Heine to Karl Krauss and Elias Canetti. While by and large Robertson is a careful reader of the literary text, as a cultural study his attempt at contributing to the elucidation of GermanJewish identity formation is not very impressive. Robertson's assertion that "culture is not fixed; it is continually reinvented, as we know from the plethora of books with 'Invention' or 'Inventing' in their titles" (p. 5) hardly provides sufficient ground to address this question. Occasionally, he seems to imply that simply analyzing German-Jewish literature would provide him with an understanding of German-Jewish culture. The absence of works like those of Itta Shedletzky and Hans Otto Horch, who have described in detail the contours of Jewish literary criticism, however, makes it obvious that Robertson is not very interested in describing the place of GermanJewish literature within the realm of German-Jewish culture. Nevertheless, as a study of representations of Jewish identities, Robertson 's work offers a weil-versed survey and provides, despite his disclaimer, a comprehensive view of the topic that leaves only the field of postwar German-Jewish literature untouched. A conclusion would have helped to bring the overall development of the Jewish presence during this period into clearer perspective. University of SouthamptonNils Roemer ...

What does it mean to insist on the visual as a form of psychic and political violence? And how are women specifically targeted by symbolic violence during periods of war and colonization? Between Image and Identity highlights postcolonial feminist efforts to transform violence into aesthetic and political strategies of resistance. This book explores the 'autobiographical' literature, visual, and performance art of postcolonial women from Maghreb and Southeast Asia including Leila Sebbar, Assia Djebar, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Karina Eileraas critically examines how contemporary these artists actively participate in the violence of representation in order to re-imagine the relationship between image and identity. By exploring the creative potentials of fantasy, alienation, and misrecognition in their work, these artists rewrite postcolonial history and re-vision the relationships between sexual politics, symbolic violence, and national memory. Between Image and Identity is a compelling and innovative book that will appeal to those interested in postcolonial and feminist studies, autobiography, visual culture, war and trauma studies.

Introduction 1. A History of the Japan Discourse in China from its Beginnings to 1928 2. The Study of Japan in Republican China: An Overview 3. Explaining Japan --And China-- Through Japanese History 4. Mirroring the 'Other': The Study of National Character and Culture of the Japanese 5. Deconstructing Japanism to Construct and Chinese Identity 6. Language and Form in the Japan Studies: A Discursive Analysis Conclusion Glossary Bibliography Vita

This book addresses the important question of what appears as luxury in contemporary visual culture. The author introduces the reader to the concept of visual culture to clarify the transformation of the private and public spheres of luxury in contemporary advanced cultures. • Luxury in contemporary visual culture is contextualized by linking its precise sphere – abundance – to those of fashion and art, photography, cinema, television, and social media that configure the structures of contemporary visual culture. • The visual representations of contemporary culture are considered as luxury-branded visual representations and the idea of visual culture as the portrayal of luxurious photographic, cinematic, and televisual selves. • Examinations of the roles of contemporary fashion and art in visual culture are employed as conduits to later analyses of visual consumers, luxury-branded and other visual representations produced by twentieth-century and contemporary fashion photographers and filmmakers, television, and social media producers in everyday life. • The ways in which luxury is utilized and operates in twentieth-century and contemporary cinema and television are investigated through the luxury lifestyles, lavish choices, luxurious values, and occasionally wayward inclinations sustaining the new voluptuousness and behaviors. • The new role of the luster of the digital luxury fashion house is addressed before the conclusion. Luxury and Visual Culture presents a thoughtful, yet user-friendly explanation of how luxury is undergoing numerous shifts in visual culture. It is vital reading for all scholars and students in critical luxury studies and visual culture, fashion theory, contemporary art, photography, cinema, television, and social media studies.

The Elusive Netherlands: the Question of National Identity in the early Modern Low Countries on the Eve of the RevoltThe idea of the Burgundian-Habsburg Netherlands having any sort of national identity is usually met with understandable scepticism. The constitutional obstacles to the construction of such an identity were formidable, not least the piecemeal formation of the Burgundian dynastic state, whose prince owed homage to the kings of France and to the Holy Roman Emperor for their territories, and some of whose subjects could still seek justice in ‘foreign’ courts . Not surprisingly the early modern Low Countries baffled foreigners, but even those thoroughly familiar with the region did not know whether it belonged to ‘Gallia’ and ‘Germania’, and in particular how the Habsburg Netherlands related to an entity as vague as ‘Nider teutschelant’. The rich yet problematic nomenclature for the Low Countries testifies to these difficulties, which were aggravated by the protean configuration of the Habsburg state and by uncertain relationship between ‘Dutch’ and ‘Teutsch zung’. The state-building activities of Charles V certainly did not resolve the political and cultural confusion, but by 1555 these had helped to foster a stronger consciousness of the Low Countries as a distinctive political community, especially in the ‘core’ provinces. On the eve of the Revolt this found expression, ironically, in the emerging opposition to the presence of Spanish soldiers and to the central government’s religious policy.

The present research investigates the experiences of pre-service visual arts teachers in the planning and application phase of a course focusing on visual culture in the special teaching methods course. This course in Turkey provides information about how and with what type of methodologies arts-related topics should be taught in visual arts education. During the first semester, the course was conducted theoretically, and in the second semester the researcher focused on the application of these theories. In this research, visual culture is discussed as one of the special teaching methods of visual arts education. A total of five visual arts pre-service teachers were selected as participants using criterion sampling. The research used practitioner inquiry as a method and conducted during the 2017–2018 spring and 2018–2019 fall semesters, lasting 8 weeks in total. During the application process, the pre-service teachers taught their samples of course plans on visual culture that they created during their pre-service practice to the primary and secondary school students in 2 weeks of classes. The research data were obtained through semi-structured interviews, document review, and reflective notes and analyzed with descriptive methods. As a result of this research, the visual arts pre-service teachers saw the students gain a critical perspective, become more aware of issues in their daily lives, express themselves in a better way, and improve their inquiring skills with the application of a visual culture course plan. With the visual culture course plan, the pre-service teachers also gained several professional experiences and skills.

The handbook embraces the extraordinary range of disciplines which now engage in the study of the visual - film and photography, television, fashion, visual arts, digital media, geography, philosophy, architecture, material culture, sociology, cultural studies and art history. Throughout, the Handbook is responsive to the cross-disciplinary nature of many of the key questions raised in visual culture around digitization, globalization, cyberculture, surveillance, spectacle, and the role of art. It guides readers new to the area, as well as experienced researchers, into the topics, issues and questions that have emerged in the study of visual culture since the start of the new millennium, conveying the boldness, excitement and vitality of the subject.

National identities in the British Isles have been a neglected subject of study for a long time, though interest has been growing recently. Why the neglect, and why the new interest? This article proposes that much of the puzzle has to do with the peculiar, and dominating, position of England historically within the United Kingdom. This has led to a relative indifference to questions of national identity on the part of the English, and, by a defensive reaction, a corresponding increase, over time, with such questions on the part of the Scots, Welsh and Irish. The English developed a largely ‘non‐national’ conception of themselves, preoccupied as they were with the management of the United Kingdom and the British Empire; the ‘Celtic’ nations followed a more familiar pattern of developing national consciousness, as shown elsewhere in Europe. With the loss of the British Empire, large‐scale immigration, the call of Europe, and renewed nationalist movements that threaten the ‘break‐up’ of Britain, it is the English who find themselves most acutely faced with questions of national identity. Hence the new interest in national identity, especially among the English but also generally throughout the United Kingdom as other groups seek to imagine alternative futures for themselves.

This book brings together a group of leading experts on the political history of Germany and the medieval Empire from the Carolingian period to the end of the Middle Ages. Its purpose is to introduce and analyze key concepts in the study of medieval political culture. The representation of power by means of texts, buildings and images is a theme which has long interested historians. However, recent debates and methodological insights have fundamentally altered the way this subject is perceived, opening it up to perspectives unnoticed by its pioneers in the middle of the twentieth century. By taking account of these debates and insights, this volume explores a series of fundamental questions. How was power defined in a medieval context? How was it claimed, legitimized and disputed? What were the moral parameters against which its exercise was judged? How did different spheres of political power interact? What roles were played by texts, images and rituals in the maintenance of, and challenges to, the political order? The contributors bring varied and original approaches to these and other questions, illuminating the complex power relationships which determined the changing political history of medieval Germany.

This book brings together a group of leading experts on the political history of Germany and the medieval Empire from the Carolingian period to the end of the Middle Ages. Its purpose is to introduce and analyze key concepts in the study of medieval political culture. The representation of power by means of texts, buildings and images is a theme which has long interested historians. However, recent debates and methodological insights have fundamentally altered the way this subject is perceived, opening it up to perspectives unnoticed by its pioneers in the middle of the twentieth century. By taking account of these debates and insights, this volume explores a series of fundamental questions. How was power defined in a medieval context? How was it claimed, legitimized and disputed? What were the moral parameters against which its exercise was judged? How did different spheres of political power interact? What roles were played by texts, images and rituals in the maintenance of, and challenges to, the political order? The contributors bring varied and original approaches to these and other questions, illuminating the complex power relationships which determined the changing political history of medieval Germany.

The overwhelming focus on textual or dharma studies in Buddhism, to the relative neglect of artistic production, has led to a bias in understanding the close and intricate relationships between Buddhist art (usually comprising sculptures, mural paintings, architectural facades and ornamental elements, illuminated paintings, cloth banners, and drawings in manuscripts), rituals, and the written word. The constant dialogue between material, visual, and ritual cultures should be approached in tandem. Visual culture is a significant part of Buddhism and must be treated as part of the same social, historical, and geographical contexts as texts and practices. Buddhist visual culture, including art media, graphic aids, and physical objects or monuments associated with Buddhist practices, does not merely serve to illustrate sacred texts, legends, and doctrines. In addition, the textual tradition does not always have to explain or justify the presence—or absence—of a material object such as a Buddha icon or a Buddhist painting. While visual culture studies have become increasingly important in various academic fields over the years, a critical and complete overview of the precise relationship between art, ritual, and text in the study of south and southeast Asian Buddhism has yet to be written.