Visual Representation

When mass media is examined in respect to critical theories, it can be said that media is under the control of men and thus it promotes patriarchal thought. According to critical theories like Frankfurt School and Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, which mainly advocate that media’s power is unlimited, an individual is tended to consider every single item that he sees on media is true and thus he internalizes by acquiescing. Individuals who are against the mainstream understanding, are represented restrictedly and who are on the behalf of mainstream understanding, are represented in accordance to some stereotypes and frames which promote mainstream understanding. In this respect, “The Representation of Social Identities in Turkish Television Series in Regard to Popular Culture” article, aims to examine the representation of social identities whether the characters represent the dominant ideology or not. Content analysis ise used to prepare this article. Sample size of it is restricted with 5 television serials which broke the ratings records within the period of 2011-2012. These serials are Arka Sokaklar, Oyle Bir Gecer Zaman Ki, Fatmagul’un Sucu Ne?, Adini Feriha Koydum and Kuzey Guney. Although Muhtesem Yuzyil was in the top five list, it was not examined since the period of that series was not suit with the parameters of article. The characters represented in the sample serials are examined according to their personalities and behavioural patterns. In this respect personality types, positive and negative behavioural patterns and crime rates are determined. In the next phase of the article the same characters are examined in in regard to religious, sexual, ideological, ethnic/national, denominational, professional identities and gender.

In the twentieth century, the “death of the author” was proclaimed by literary critics. Since then, there has been a shift in focus from text to reader. This reorientation called forth changing critical paradigms, taking us from modernism to postmodernism and beyond...

The examination of social status in conditions of transnationalism is an important and fruitful topic since many of the social relations in which migrants find themselves involved in are paralleling or intersecting the social hierarchies and identities of both the destination and origin societies, ethnic communities and transnational social fields. It offers researchers good opportunity to examine the links between distribution of resources, expressions of power and dominance, representations of social identity, imaginaries of society etc. Proceeding from these assumptions, the article examines the dynamics of ways and mechanisms through which social status and prestige are gained, maintained and demonstrated among the Albanians from the Republic of Macedonia in conditions of transnational migrations continuing for decades. Three different domains are considered: the family regarding the inter-personal relationships; the community membership focusing on criteria of gaining and maintenance of reputation and prestige; and the Albanian community’s status claims and positioning in the Macedonian society in the context of Albanian-Macedonian relationships. The study is based on ethnographic research in several Albanian villages located in the regions of Skopje, Tetovo and Struga.

In this paper I propose to demonstrate how the anthropological view can highlight the effects of the relationship between ethnic nationalism and global processes. Showing the results of an ethnographical research conducted in 2015, I focus on the representation of social identity in the contemporary Basque Country. I emphasize the central role played by the new technologies for the identification of the Basque communities’ boundaries. The creation of „the eighth province“ (or province of the diaspora) shows how, in this context, Internet could transform the “imagined community” into a virtual reality. The ethnographical view proves to be useful to understand how local practices and discourses can interact with global phenomena: particularly significant is the spreading of archaeogenetic investigations in Euskal Herria, in order to verify the hypothesis of a reproductive isolation of Basque people. Moreover, a big part of local population is using genetic tests proposed online by DNA consulting agencies. It is important to identify how these genetic narratives are absorbed and reused by local populations and if they can reshape the past of a mnemonic community, influencing the representation of its future.

My project is part of my larger, ongoing research interest on the representation of social identities in American cinema. My poster/paper will focus on the use of color theory to clearly characterize members of rival ethnic gangs in the 1961 film adaptation of West Side Story. Originally a 1957 Broadway musical loosely based on William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story captured audiences with its groundbreaking innovation in choreography and music, while earning praise from critics for delving into contemporary issues like immigration and gang-related violence. It won an astonishing ten Academy Awards, including the Academy Awards for Best Costume Design and Best Art Direction, and still holds the record for the most Academy Awards won by a movie musical.While much of the existing research on West Side Story focuses on references of vying cultures made explicitly through song and dance, my research instead focuses on the non-verbal representations of these cultures that are expressed through color in the film. By studying the film’s iconic art direction and investigating audiences’ subsequent perceptions of characters and settings, I argue that the colors featured in the costume designs and set designs are used to denote a culturally-charged power structure within the Jets and the Sharks. Based on close examination of these various designs, the film’s overall color palette, and published scholarship, I conclude that West Side Story's non-verbal references are uniquely dangerous to its explicit references, as they subliminally promote harmful stereotypes and suggest that gang violence brings life to an otherwise drab city. Studying the connection between color theory and culture ultimately illuminates the historical roots of society's perceptions of colors and their seemingly inherent associations to certain traits.

Hindi, Hinglish: Head to Head

The article continues the study about the place of cultural anthropology of the city in the national system of the humanities. It proposes a definition of the object of science and describes the foreshortenings of contemporary studies of urban culture. The author thinks that the cultural anthropology of a city should study of the cultural specifics of a particular city in all its diversity. He insists that attempts to develop a more specific definition of the central object of urban anthropology, regardless of one aspect or another, are deliberately helpless. The plurality and heterogeneity of cultural units will always hinder the ultimate completeness of definitions. The ratio of this vision of the object with the aspects developed to date is presented in the form of the opposition “general / particular”. Particular aspects are built up in relation to internal and external cultural anthropology. Internal cultural anthropology is addressed to the study of cultural units and their types, processes, developmental features, and external – to the connection of culture with the external circumstances of its existence (social structure, linguistic expression, architectural embodiment, historical conditioning, etc.). The inner culture anthropology of the city has been developed so far only in two directions – descriptive and semiotic. The descriptive direction involves the study of various (directly perceived and thought-artistic) manifestations of culture. It originated at the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries in the works of I.M. Grevs and N.P. Antsiferov, the founders of Petersburg studies. The semiotic direction is associated with the analysis of sign systems that contain cultural information. Its foundations were laid in the works of representatives of the Moscow-Tartu school – first of all, Yu.M. Lotman and V.N. Toporov. The history of the descriptive and semiotic direction of urban anthropology is closely related to literary criticism. The first steps in the study of urban culture were laid on the material of literary creativity and thus built connections between reality and a particular artistic concept – expressing and / or forming a unique image of space. At the present time, when studies on the specificity of the city are clearly divided between two independent areas – the study of literary text and the study of culture, the genetic ties of urban anthropology and literary criticism manifest themselves in the presence of terminological homonymy in the zone of central concepts. The external cultural anthropology of the city demonstrates how anthropological problems are linked with other sciences. To a greater extent, this pairing can be seen with literary criticism, art history, as well as a combination of architectural and construction, architectural and artistic sciences, brand marketing and tourism marketing. To a lesser extent, the cultural anthropology of the city is associated with linguistics, psychology, history, mass communications and philosophy.

In this paper, I want to begin to contemplate the possibility that the concept of culture could one day be thought outside modern Western thought, via a reading of Martin Heidegger's 'Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer'. As we shall see, for Heidegger, the dominant position here is representationalism. And so a large part of what I want to do here is to begin to shake the concept of culture from these dominant representationalist moorings.

Reviewed by: Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer" Magdalena J. Zaborowska Stockton, Kathryn Bond. Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer.” Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 271 pp. $79.95 cloth; $22.95 paperback. Kathryn Bond Stockton’s book is a welcome contribution to studies of race and sexuality in literature and visual culture and especially to the field whose cutting-edge name echoes in its subtitle – black queer studies. The defining collection of essays that sealed that field’s name comes from Duke University Press too; and, like Stockton’s book, its cover features a nude black male body. While both the essays in Black Queer Studies (eds. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson [2005]) and Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame assume the crisscrossing and intertwining of discourses on race and sexuality, the latter takes full advantage of its monograph length to focus intensely on the tropes, rhetoric, and often paradoxical imaginaries of abjection, shame, and humiliation. Stockton’s book argues forcefully that there are no “purely black” or “queer” forms of debasement, only “blended forms of shame” (23). This well researched and provocatively designed study deploys a rich toolkit of literary and psychoanalytic theory, critical race and cultural studies, and semiotics and queer theory. [End Page 379] Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame explores “low” spaces of human interaction, or the meeting places for socially debased and degraded individuals and groups–black and queer people, or those marked by AIDS–in novels, film, photography, and popular culture venues like TV shows and news media. Stockton also shows that shame can be a thing of beauty in instances where abjection fosters self-scrutiny and uplift, where its certain manifestations are linked to desire and attraction, or where they enable production of knowledge and create possibilities for aesthetic expression, including “dark camp” (See, Conclusion). Her analyses of diverse, often purposefully divergent cultural texts privilege conceptual, thematic, and tropological synchronicities over chronology. Such an approach allows for “a circuitry of switchpoints” (4–5), a design that Stockton calls a “composite form” (23), one that helps to spark “point[s] of connection” between her two key signs–“black” and “queer” (5). The switchpoints help to organize the chapters around the moments of intense crossings of these key signs in relation to non-normative bodies whose diverse representations and productions Stockton studies throughout her book. The introduction sets up the emergence of popular representations of “DL” or Down Low culture as the first of these switchpoints and argues for “probing the value of debasement as a central social action” (2). The richness of Stockton’s primary and secondary sources is both inspiring and challenging. To manage it, she loops back and forth through historic contexts to demonstrate how shame forces us to examine the complex workings of abjection and debasement that underlie mainstream American culture’s violent attractions to bodies of color and non-normative sexualities. This is also true, she shows, in the work of theorists, from Freud, Barthes, and Fanon to Lacan, Bataille, and Sontag, as well as in diverse American and European literary and visual representations. In chapter one, which links Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), Leslie Feingold’s Stone Butch Blues (1993), and Jean Genet’s Querelle (1947), Stockton explores “cloth wounds” or the workings and implication of sartorial shame on queer bodies, assuming that, like skin, “clothing raises the question of a surface to which shame attaches” (39). Moving from epidermal surfaces into the body, as it were, and across the bodies’ economic and social attachments to other bodies and communal settings, Chapter Two continues the examination of unexpected critical conversations. Proposing a specific “debasement” of “critical theories” (79), it demonstrates the limits of Freudian thought for reading Toni Morrison’s vision of black masculinity and femininity in Sula (1974). In a bold move that goes against some readings of Morrison’s text as seemingly homophobic, Stockton argues that this writer’s possibly riskiest engagement with anality undergirds Sula’s focus on homosocial bonds between lower-class black women. The following chapters link the pain and yearning inherent in racialized and gendered homoerotic desire as they move between the material and the metaphorical...

How the intentions of the draftsman shape perception of a drawing

Visual culture is an area of study focused on practices of looking and the role of visual representations in the arts, popular and alternative media cultures, institutional and professional contexts, and everyday life. Art history, film and media studies, → cultural studies, sociology, and anthropology are some of the fields in which visual culture study is conducted. Forms of → visual representation studied include → museum display, fine art, film and → Television, old and new media, computer and → video games, digital culture, medical images such as X‐rays and sonograms, and advertising (→ Art as Communication; Painting; Cinema; Film as Popular Culture; Television, Visual Characteristics of; Video; Digital Imagery; Advertisement, Visual Characteristics of).

During my early introduction to architecture I found that I was motivated not only by matters pertaining to what architecture is, but also, to what it can do. Thus, the questions motivating this work derive from my education in architecture which, at their most rudimentary level, entail a deep fascination with the nature of space, and thus the problem of time. And, subsequently, a practical desire to understand the conditions that constituted experience, and thus perception, sensation and mind. My interest also developed from a general disposition towards others and world founded in principles of human equality and rights with respect to both freedom and responsibility. During my years practicing architecture, these questions as they were brought through the perspective of design continued to inspire me. At the same time, my interest in investigating these questions through theoretical and philosophical research persisted until my aspiration to engage in critical thought outpaced my desire to practice. Hence, a turn in career to work as an academic in the discipline of architecture and the area of architecture theory. This research may be perceived by some as situated outside the realm of architecture. However, this is not the case. My approach to architecture theory is not one that begins with a study of the object, or, for some, one might say the subject of architecture. That is, if the object is understood as the manifestation in thought, process or form of the building or built environment (real or conceived) itself; and if the subject is understood as the thought or idea emanating from the mind of the architect (as author). While there is much architecture theory advanced from this perspective lining my own bookshelves and utilized in my work as an educator. The concerns that have always called me towards thinking about architecture as the imagined and constructed world in which we live are those that query the very nature of concepts, notions, ideologies and intellectual constructions and beliefs upon which culture and society – architecture as both a cultural product and a social actor – are formed. This goes, as well, to the considerations that motivate my concern for people, not users or inhabitants as such, but as ontologically situated beings in the world. Accordingly, my work primarily deals with the content, history and effects of architecture as it relates to theories of space, time, the body, and cognition. Employing and developing theories and methods from disciplines including philosophy, cultural studies, literary theory, political, social and economic theory, cognitive psychology, and the neurosciences in the broadest sense. Admittedly, the nature of theoretical discourse has shown itself to be problematic over the past fifty-plus years; it has also proven to be transformative. Critical thinkers in the late 1960s developed a sustained critique of their philosophical predecessors – primarily in regard to Marx on one hand and Heidegger on the other – with a critique of social history and a displacement of metaphysics resulting in a repositioning of social and cultural discourse. Of course, the debate unfolded against the philosophical and aesthetic background of not only Marx and Heidegger, but also Nietzsche, Hegel and Freud on one hand, and Manet, Cézanne, Baudelaire and Mallarmé, Wagner and Debussy on the other. In architecture, the debate extended to Ruskin and Wölfflin, and to Wright and Corbusier, amongst others. This period, in itself, refers to an unprecedented artistic, scientific, economic, and technological mutation. Prevalent underpinnings remain identifiable, for instance an attack on the absolute nature of knowledge, which has brought about a fundamental rethinking of both the nature of consciousness, as well as a critique of science. As Foucault suggested, one of the great problems that arose in the 1950s was that of the political status of science and the ideological functions that it could serve. Another rebuke can be seen as the challenge to the primacy of truth as an adequation of subject to thing. This culminated in a radical critique of subjectivity resulting, some years later, in the so-called post-humanist-subject. In order to be rid of the subject itself, Foucault, in ‘Truth and Power’ (1977) argued that it was necessary to dispense with the essentialist subject both at the extremes and in-between the enlightenment’s humanist subject and its ideals of knowledge as self-constituting; as well as phenomenology’s fabrication of the subject as evolving through and embodying the course of history. Reflecting on this history, that post-war moment of theory, one cannot help but be struck by the complexity and the ambiguity of the adventure; qualities most evident in the fact that new spaces and new means of writing and drawing, of thinking and making emerged. Ideas that modified our understanding of both communication and the image, of both space and time. Discourses, when combined with a reflexivity within certain architectures and certain texts, rendered them somehow indefinitely open. In the 1960s, literary theory transformed thought on both sides of the Atlantic. For instance, Roland Barthes’s de-sanctioning of the biography-centric author, or the removal of authority from the author turned scriptor in ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967), or Julia Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality with ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’ (1969). These works impacted our thinking on linguistic phenomena and the origin (or non-originality) of textual content and further, on the invention of new forms of writing and affective relations. Such theories informed and redirected thinking in architecture, for instance, Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas’s work ‘Semiotics and Architecture: Ideological Consumption or Theoretical Work’ was published in the first issue of Oppositions, an architectural journal produced between 1973 and 1984 by the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York. With this, the influence of the French intellectual climate as well as the Italian discourse on semiotics was brought to the centre of Anglo-American discourse in architecture theory. The intellectual trajectory along which this history is traced and the terrain on which it now takes place will be recognisable to anyone familiar with the work of such thinkers as Henri Bergson, Louis Althusser, Gabriel Tarde, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and, of course, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, and Maurizio Lazzarato. The importance of the radically original works that emerged in the seventies and eighties cannot be overestimated, for instance: Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and his lectures at the Collège de France, The Birth of Biopolitics, and Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia volumes Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. These works, translated into English shortly after their original publication, were being read throughout many disciplines outside of philosophy including schools of architecture, and their influence can only be said to have increased. I share the above brief history so as to situate my work for those less familiar with the work of theory – whether architecture or otherwise – as this, too, is the intellectual trajectory and exploration along which my own work, as well as many of my contemporaries, travels. In my own work, the influence of the nineteenth/ twentieth-century French vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson – the great thinker of time and, as Walter Benjamin suggested, a seminal source to consult in considering the problem of experience – has quite profoundly informed my thinking and shaped its outcomes. Both with respect to time and space as well as body and brain, his influence is reflected in the title of this volume. That said, this is not a collection of chapters on Bergson’s philosophy. It is a collection on critical concepts I believe to be of importance for contemporary critique, delivered through topics that are relevant – at times directly and at others indirectly – to our current moment. This is a work of great commitment and it has sustained itself over time. It is my hope the reader finds some value in this as well.

The development of new sexualities and gender identities has become a crucial issue in the field of literary and cultural studies in the first years of the twenty-first century. The roles of gender and sexual identities in the struggle for equality have become a major concern in both fields. The legacy of this process has its origins in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century. The Victorian preoccupation about the female body and sexual promiscuity was focused on the regulation of deviant elements in society and the control of venereal disease; homosexuals, lesbians, and prostitutes' identities were considered out of the norm and against the moral values of the time. The relationship between sexuality and gender identity has attracted wide-ranging discussion amongst feminist theorists during the last few decades. The methodologies of cultural studies and, in particular, of post-structuralism and post-colonialism, urges us to read and interpret different cultures and different texts in ways that enhance personal and collective views of identity which are culturally grounded. These readings question the postmodernist concept of identity by looking into more progressive views of identity and difference addressing post-positivist interpretations of key identity markers such as sex, gender, race, and agency. As a consequence, an individual's identity is recognized as culturally constructed and the result of power relations. Identities on the Move: Contemporary Representations of New Sexualities and Gender Identities offers creative insights on pressing issues and engages in productive dialogue. Identities on the Move to addresses the topic of new sexualities and gender identities and their representation in post-colonial and contemporary Anglophone literary, historical, and cultural productions from a trans-national, trans-cultural, and anti-essentialist perspective. The authors include the views and concerns of people of color, of women in the diaspora, in our evermore multiethnic and multicultural societies, and their representation in the media, films, popular culture, subcultures, and the arts.

Focusing on “Science in Action,” published in 1987, this chapter discusses the key concepts of Bruno Latour’s anthropology of science, e.g. “technoscience,” “inscription device,” “immutable mobiles,” and “centres of calculation.” It points out connections between Latour’s interest in scientific imagery and similar interests in media studies and the history of art. At the same time, it draws attention to important role played in this context by the criticism of linguistics in authors such as Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

This book uncovers how British writers and artists engaged with archaeological discourse—its artefacts, landscapes, bodies, and methods—uncovering the materials of the past to envision radical possibilities for the present and future. The project traces how a range of canonical and less familiar figures turned to archaeology to shape major late-Victorian and modern discussions: informing debates over shifting gender roles; facilitating the development of queer iconography and the recovery of silenced or neglected histories; inspiring artefactual forgery and transforming modern conceptions of authenticity; and helping writers and artists historicise the traumas of the First World War. Ultimately unearthing archaeology at the centre of these major discourses through which writers and artists conceived of modernity, this book simultaneously positions literary and artistic engagements with the archaeological imagination as forms of archaeological knowledge in themselves, providing a valuable study for scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with a range of interdisciplinary interests in literature, art history, and cultural studies.