ABSTRACT This article identifies the importance of clothing in assessing the representation of the princes of India for image making of imperial India. Using both textual and visual British newspapers as a medium that presented the British Empire to the British public, accounts of the clothing worn by rulers formed an important aspect of their overall representation. Newspapers presented a variety of images of clothing to both metropolitan and regional readerships across the country. The 1870s was a significant decade in creating an image of a successful Indian Empire with the rulers of India being an important component in demonstrating this. Accounts depicted their wealth and opulence as an exotic spectacle, such as in the depiction of diamonds and feathers. But it was also important to demonstrate exoticism within the context of imperial indirect rule. Items such as imperial honours, and turbans, demonstrated rulers’ authority and power within this system. Moreover, the rare instances of female rule show how the press presented clothing as both markers of gender difference and respectability. This article will demonstrate that accounts of clothing highlight the nuances of the representation of India that go beyond a stereotyped image, showing that image-making was a controlled process in the promotion of British imperial rule.

ABSTRACT In this paper, I argue that the ‘eye-training’ stereoviews of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are full of playful transgressions against the medical regime of ocular discipline in which they were embedded. These views were intended for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes within a project to medicalize and normalize spatial seeing. Read within that framing, they exemplify the influential claims of Jonathan Crary about stereoscopy’s role in the standardization and mechanization of vision, rendering it rational and efficient within an increasingly global system of industrial mass production. But evident within the design of these views is a more complex story. Many of them, visually and conceptually, are direct descendants of early nineteenth-century stereoviews used in rational recreation. These were intended to stimulate critical thinking about how perception and optical deceptions worked and return agency and social power to the observer. Others embody some of the tropes of modernist art of the early twentieth century – mixed-media collage, spatial fragmentation and re-composition, plus a reflexive, ‘meta-pictorial’ logic. Rather than a dull notion of conformity to a standardized spatial regime, these views invite the idea that space is a somewhat arbitrary construction, open to the often witty and creative agency of artist and viewer. They offer a kind of effectivity within modernity that is best understood in class terms.

ABSTRACT Due to Sultan Abdülhamid II’s authoritarian regime and his alleged suspicion of modern technologies, Turkish film historians have often viewed the Hamidian era as an obstacle to the development of cinema in Turkey. However, this article aims to move beyond the simplistic characterizations of Abdülhamid’s reign as mere despotism and paranoia, especially concerning cinema. It explores government regulations, censorship, and prohibitions to gain a deeper understanding of how the Hamidian regime perceived, regulated, and influenced the development of cinema in the Ottoman Empire. By analyzing the motivations and measures taken by the Hamidian regime, this article demonstrates that the regime not only attempted to control cinema’s perceived negative impacts on public safety, morality, and state policies but also used cinema for political, economic, and cultural purposes. It argues that while the Hamidian regime was aware of cinema’s potential risks, it also recognized that, under strict control, cinema could offer significant benefits.

ABSTRACT The Tudor Cinema was situated in Leicester’s West End, a thriving working-class district less than a mile from the city centre. It was built in 1914 with 975 seats, expanded to 1,250 in the 1920s. The Tudor faced competition from newly opening super cinemas in and around the city centre during the 1920s and 1930s, but like most neighbourhood cinemas in Britain during this time, its audience was both local and loyal. The cinema’s ledgers have already been the subject of some considerable study. This article uses a digital, computational analysis to further enrich understanding of the economic realities of the cinema as a business, as well as the cinemagoing habits of its audience during the transition to sound. It takes the Tudor as a case study whose financial records provide an important and revealing window into audience behaviour and programming during the final years of silent cinema and the first years of sound. It also argues that concomitant factors – such as the shifts in rental arrangements and Entertainments Tax – were as impactful, and in some cases more so, than the arrival of sound on the fortunes of cinemas like the Tudor during the period.

ABSTRACT This article investigates Black moviegoing in the United States during the silent film era. In existing scholarship, African American moviegoers tend to be discussed with reference to race movies – that is, independent films featuring all-Black casts. However, even during their heyday, race movies were in limited supply and could not compete directly with the dominant, vertically integrated Hollywood film studios. Thus, using data gathered from film programmes of Harlem’s Black cinemas in the 1920s – reconstructed primarily through Black newspapers New York Age and New York Amsterdam News – the article discusses the popularity of Hollywood films among Black spectators. If Black viewers were not embedded in the newly institutionalised white fan culture – consuming screen narratives that representationally marginalised them – then what were the parameters of their engagement? Drawing on fan magazines, social surveys, and established literature on African Americans as consumers of mainstream culture, this piece interrogates the pleasures of cinema as articulated by Black viewers.