Visual Culture

Spectral Places, Subjectivities and Politics

By Juliana Martínez

María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, eds. The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. Bloomsbury, 2013. 569 pp.

With an all-star Table of Contents that includes Giorgio Agamben, Arjun Appadurai, Ulrich Baer, Jacques Derrida, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, among others, The Spectralities Reader compiles the founding texts of what the editors call the “spectral turn,” as well as the more salient critiques that have fuelled one of the more productive debates in the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts over the last twenty-five years.
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Popular Media and the Rhetoric of Colorblindness

By Shui-yin Sharon Yam

Catherine Squires. The Post-Racial Mystique: Media and Race in the 21st Century. New York University Press: 2014. 243 pp. 

Written in a time when public deliberation is suffused with conflicting discourses and representations of race, Catherine Squires’s The Post-Racial Mystique: Media and Race in the 21st Century deftly interrogates how the increased popularity of the post-racial narrative of “colorblindness” intersects with the material conditions of systematic racism.
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Framed

By Johanna Skibsrud

Catherine Zuromskis. Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images. MIT Press, 2013. 264 pp.

Like its subject, Catherine Zuromskis’s Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images straddles the realms of public and private, high and low art. She considers the “snapshot” within an American, middle-class context: those who bought the first Brownie cameras and, over the course of the latter half of the twentieth century, took the requisite photos.
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Housing Whiteness

By Lisa Uddin

Dianne Harris. Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America. University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 392 pp.

Last year marked a milestone in my life as a multiracial immigrant to the United States who has thus far warded off steep downward mobility. The purchase of a modest ranch-style house located on the corner lot of a quiet, leafy street was arguably the most explicit investment in whiteness our family had ever made.
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Trauma and the Limits of Counter-Memory

By Kelli Moore

Dora Apel. War Culture and the Contest of Images. Rutgers University Press, 2012. 273 pp.

War Culture and the Contest of Images comes in the wake of the Bush administration’s corporatized media production, chiefly represented by Colin Powell’s testimony before the U.N. Security Council on the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the current extension of policies and practices of the Obama administration that continue to drive underground public knowledge and debate about secret detention camps.
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Glorious and Brave: An American’s Take on Canadian Art

By Mary Elizabeth Luka

Denise Markonish, Ed. Oh Canada: Contemporary Art from North North America. The MIT Press, 2012. 400 pp.

From the first images and words of the Oh, Canada catalogue, it is evident that Denise Markonish is a curator in love with the thousands of artistic works, the 800 artists, and the dozens of critics, commentators and curators she has discovered, considered, and pulled together in a relatively idiosyncratic manner from a country abutting her own.
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The Culture of Urbanization in (Post)Socialist China

By Joshua Neves

Yomi Braester. Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract. Duke University Press, 2010. 405 pp.

Robin Visser. Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China. Duke University Press, 2010. 362 pp.

Yomi Braester’s Painting the City Red and Robin Visser’s Cities Surround the Countryside offer complementary engagements with urban transformation in P.R. China—though Braester also has a single chapter on Taipei.[1] Each takes as their focus the cultural restructuring that has shaped and been shaped by (post)socialist urbanization and the shifting designs on the city.
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Subject of Desire/Subject of Drive: The Emergence of Žižekian Media Studies

By Matthew Flisfeder

Jodi Dean. Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive. Polity, 2010. 140 pp.

Paul A. Taylor. Žižek and the Media. Polity, 2011. 192 pp.

Fabio Vighi. Sexual Difference in European Cinema: The Curse of Enjoyment. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 256 pp.

Those familiar with Slavoj Žižek will know that a great deal of his work is bound up with later theories of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. While Lacan has long been an influential figure in media and cultural theory, the three books reviewed here demonstrate an emerging field of Žižekian media studies that is distinct from the earlier Lacanian media studies.
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Broaching the Subject of War: Toward an Ethics of Vulnerability

By Jeffrey Barbeau

Rosalyn Deutsche. Hiroshima After Iraq: Three Studies in Art and War. Columbia University Press, 2010. 88 pp.

Rosalyn Deutsche’s Hiroshima After Iraq: Three Studies in Art and War is a slim volume at eighty-eight pages, but it represents a timely meditation on the often tense relationship between political resistance and contemporary visual culture.
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The Art of Seeing Without Being Seen

By Susan Cahill

Sandra S. Phillips, ed. Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870. San Francisco and New Haven: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Yale University Press, 2010. 256 pp.

The widespread viewing of previously unseen activities and spaces has become commonplace in a moment characterized by cell phone cameras, youtube videos, reality television and programmes such as Google Earth. The need to uncover and see has gained increased social importance through the elevated use of CCTVs, UAVs and airport body scanners—surveillance technologies that are legitimized as innocuous, yet essential to ensuring global security.
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From Virtuality to Actuality: The Power, Wealth and Ambivalence of Video Games

By Lisa Dusenberry

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter’s Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games deftly merges a critique of Empire and its practices with the social and historical context of video games and the gaming industry.
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The Citizenry of Photography

By John M. Woolsey

Ariella Azoulay. The Civil Contract of Photography. Zone Books, 2008.

Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography is, among other things, a political theory of photography that investigates and radically rethinks prevalent conceptualizations of citizenship. As a “political theory,” Azoulay’s argument poses a direct challenge to both modernist and postmodernist approaches to “photographs of horror” that depict injured populations.
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