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.
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. Photographys 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 Hatoums Art of
Displacement
13. Mea Culpa: On Residual Culture and the Turn to Ethics
Epilogue Visual Worlds, after 9/11
John R. Hall is Professor of Sociology at the University of California - Davis and Visiting Professor at the School of Social and Political Studies, University of Edinburgh.
Blake Stimson is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of California, Davis.
Lisa Tamiris Becker is Director of the CU Art Museum and the Colorado Collection, Colorado, USA.
