Visual Worlds

Summary

As many observers have noted, the world is becoming increasingly visually mediated, with the rise of computers and the internet being central factors in the emergence of new tools and conventions. Exploring the social structure of visuality, this volume contains a collection of essays by internationally renowned artists and scholars from a variety of fields (including art history, literary theory and criticism, cultural studies, film and television studies, intellectual history and sociology). It was conceived to address a bold query: how is our experience and understanding of vision and visual form changing under pressure from the various social, economic and cultural factors that are linked under the term 'globalization'.

The essays overlap in their considerations of the tensions between cultures and worlds, political life, everyday social experience, and war. The resulting conversation that develops between the chapters touches on points from many visual worlds, and provides a unique opportunity for considering the changing character of visual experience today.

This book will attract readers from a wide range of academic disciplines and will especially be valuable as a textbook for graduate and undergraduate courses in visual culture and cultural studies.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Visual Cultures and Visual Worlds Part 1: Cultures  Political Culture 1. Uncle Sam Needs a Wife: Citizenship and Denegation 2. Televisual Popular Politics: Diana and Democracy 3. Manufacturing Dissent: Challenges for Activism and Alternative Voices in the Post 9/11 World Visual Culture 4. Art at the Intersection of Social Fields 5. Heart of Darkness: A Journey into the Dark Matter of the Art World 6. Primetime Art as Seen on Melrose Place Part 2: Worlds  Social Worlds 7. Electronic Habitus Agit-Prop in an Imaginary World 8. Los Angeles as Visual World: Media, Seeing and the City 9. Photography’s Decline into Modernism: In praise of ‘Bad’ Photographs 10. Between the Net and the Deep Blue Sea (Rethinking the Traffic in Photographs) Warring Worlds 11. Witness to Surrender 12. Under Siege: Mona Hatoum’s Art of Displacement 13. Mea Culpa: On Residual Culture and the Turn to Ethics Epilogue Visual Worlds, after 9/11