Visuality And Identity

A vanguard excursion into sophisticated cultural criticism situated at the intersections of Chinese studies, Asian American studies, diaspora studies & transnational studies, this text argues that the visual has become the primary means of mediating identities under global capitalism.

Shu-mei Shih inaugurates the field of Sinophone studies in this vanguard excursion into sophisticated cultural criticism situated at the intersections of Chinese studies, Asian American studies, diaspora studies, and transnational studies. Arguing that the visual has become the primary means of mediating identities under global capitalism, Shih examines the production and circulation of images across what she terms the "Sinophone Pacific," which comprises Sinitic-language speaking communities such as the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Chinese America. This groundbreaking work argues that the dispersal of the so-called Chinese peoples across the world needs to be reconceptualized in terms of vibrant or vanishing communities of Sinitic-language cultures rather than of ethnicity and nationality.

By focusing on Chinese cultural formations and critical discourses of the last decade of the century, the author dissects the intellectual, economic, and political contradictions of a turbulent era. This wide-ranging, deeply interdisciplinary work demarcates the cultural terrain by examining diverse media: film, television, avant-garde art, and literature, as well as critical theory and intellectual history.

The 'visual' has long played a crucial role in forming experiences, associations, expectations and understandings of heritage. Images convey meaning within a range of practices, including tourism, identity construction, the popularization of the past through a variety of media, and the memorialization of events. However, despite the central role of 'the visual' in these contexts, it has been largely neglected in heritage literature. This edited collection is the first to explore the production, use and consumption of visual imagery as an integral part of heritage. Drawing on case studies from around the world, it provides a multidisciplinary analysis of heritage representations, combining complex understandings of the 'visual' from a wide range of disciplines, including heritage studies, sociology and cultural studies perspectives. In doing so, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the theoretical and methodological tools necessary for understanding visual imagery within its cultural context.

This definitive anthology casts Sinophone studies as the study of Sinitic-language cultures born of colonial and postcolonial influences. Essays by such authors as Rey Chow, Ha Jin, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Ien Ang, Wei-ming Tu, and David Wang address debates concerning the nature of Chineseness while introducing readers to essential readings in Tibetan, Malaysian, Taiwanese, French, Caribbean, and American Sinophone literatures. By placing Sinophone cultures at the crossroads of multiple empires, this anthology richly demonstrates the transformative power of multiculturalism and multilingualism, and by examining the place-based cultural and social practices of Sinitic-language communities in their historical contexts beyond "China proper," it effectively refutes the diasporic framework. It is an invaluable companion for courses in Asian, postcolonial, empire, and ethnic studies, as well as world and comparative literature.

Seeing Differently offers a history and theory of ideas about identity in relation to visual arts discourses and practices in Euro-American culture, from early modern beliefs that art is an expression of an individual, the painted image a "world picture" expressing a comprehensive and coherent point of view, to the rise of identity politics after WWII in the art world and beyond. The book is both a history of these ideas (for example, tracing the dominance of a binary model of self and other from Hegel through classic 1970s identity politics) and a political response to the common claim in art and popular political discourse that we are "beyond" or "post-" identity. In challenging this latter claim, Seeing Differently critically examines how and why we "identify" works of art with an expressive subjectivity, noting the impossibility of claiming we are "post-identity" given the persistence of beliefs in art discourse and broader visual culture about who the subject "is," and offers a new theory of how to think this kind of identification in a more thoughtful and self-reflexive way. Ultimately, Seeing Differently offers a mode of thinking identification as a "queer feminist durational" process that can never be fully resolved but must be accounted for in thinking about art and visual culture. Queer feminist durationality is a mode of relational interpretation that affects both "art" and "interpreter," potentially making us more aware of how we evaluate and give value to art and other kinds of visual culture.

A vanguard excursion into sophisticated cultural criticism situated at the intersections of Chinese studies, Asian American studies, diaspora studies & transnational studies, this text argues that the visual has become the primary means of mediating identities under global capitalism.

Social media and new social facilities have made it necessary to develop new media design processes with different communication strategies in order to promote sustainable communication. Visual communication emphasizes messages that are transmitted through visual materials in order to effectively communicate emotions, thoughts, and concepts using symbols instead of words. Social networks present an ideal environment for utilizing this communication technique. New Media and Visual Communication in Social Networks is a pivotal scholarly publication that examines communication strategies in the context of social media and new digital media platforms and explores the effects of visual communication on social networks, visual identity, television, magazines, newspapers, and more. Highlighting a range of topics such as consumer behavior, visual identity, and digital pollution, this book is essential for researchers, practitioners, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and educators.

Two of the key theoretical shifts over the past two decades of critical work have been the 'visual turn' and the 'material turn'. This book argues that these hitherto distinct fields should be understood as in continual dialogue and co-constitution and focuses on reconceptualising the visual as an embodied, material, and often politically-charged realm. This edited volume elaborates this conceptual argument through a series of contemporary case studies, drawn from the disciplines of Architecture, Sociology, Media Studies, Geography and Cultural Studies. The case studies included are paired around four themes: consumption, translation, practice and ethics. As well as exploring the bringing together of visuality and materiality studies, the contributors raise questions of social identity and social critique, and also focus on the ethics of material visualities.

There has always been an important visual element to the construction and questioning of national identity in post-Independence Mexico, though one that has not always been given its due, outside of the celebrated and much-studied muralists. Ranging from the early nineteenth century to the present – from the vogue for the picturesque, illustrated periodicals and the influential writings of Altamirano to a wealth of twentieth-century graphic artists, filmmakers and photographers – this book re-examines the complex variety of ways in which that visual element has operated. In particular, it looks at the ways in which discourses concerning ethnicity and cultural hybridity have been echoed and transformed in Mexican visual culture, resulting in fields of visual discourse which are eclectic and increasingly self-reflexive.