Image Into Identity

The pervading theme of this book is the construction and allocation of identity, especially through images and imagery. The essays analyse how the dominant social discourses and imageries construct identity or assign subject positions in relation to the categories of race, nation, region, gender and language. The volume is designed to inform the study of those categories in cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, literary studies, philosophy and history. Its coverage is geographically global, multidisciplinary, and theoretically eclectic, but also accessible. The authors include both established and rising scholars from historical, literary, media, gender and cultural studies. This innovative collection will appeal to all those who are interested in the mechanisms of constructing and evolving personal and group identities, in past and present.

What do images of the body, which recent poets and filmmakers have given us, tell us about ourselves, about the way we think and about the culture in which we live? In his new book A Body of Vision, R. Bruce Elder situates contemporary poetic and cinematic body images in their cultural context. Elder examines how recent artists have tried to recognize and to convey primordial forms of experiences. He proposes the daring thesis that in their efforts to do so, artists have resorted to gnostic models of consciousness. He argues that the attempt to convey these primordial modes of awareness demands a different conception of artistic meaning from any of those that currently dominate contemporary critical discussion. By reworking theories and speech in highly original ways, Elder formulates this new conception. The works of Brakhage, Artaud, Schneeman, Cohen and others lie naked under Elder’s razor-sharp dissecting knife and he exposes the essence of their work, cutting deeply into the themes and theses from which the works are derived. His remarks on the gaps in contemporary critical practices will likely become the focus of much debate.

Popular interest in body image issues has grown dramatically in recent years, due to an emphasis on individual responsibility and self-determination in contemporary society as well as the seemingly limitless capacities of modern medicine; however body image as a separate field of academic inquiry is still relatively young. The contributors of Body Image and Identity in Contemporary Societies explore the complex social, political and aesthetic interconnections between body image and identity. It is an in-depth study that allows for new perspectives in the analysis of contemporary visual art and literature but also reflects on how these social constructs inform clinical treatment. Sukhanova and Thomashoff bring together contributions from psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychiatrists and scholars in the fields of the social sciences and the humanities to explore representations of the body in literature and the arts across different times and cultures. The chapters analyse the social construction of the 'ideal' body in terms of beauty, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class and disability, from a broadly psychoanalytic perspective, and traces the mechanisms which define the role of the physical appearance in the formation of identity and the assumption of social roles. Body Image and Identity in Contemporary Societies' unique interdisciplinary outlook aims to bridge the current gap between clinical observations and research in semiotic theory. It will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, art therapists, art theorists, academics in the humanities and social sciences, and those interested in an interdisciplinary approach to the issues of body image and identity. Ekaterina Sukhanova is University Director of Academic Program Review at the City University of New York USA. She serves as Scientific Secretary of the Section for Art and Psychiatry and the Section of Art and Psychiatry of the World Psychiatric Association. She is also engaged in interdisciplinary research on cultural constructs of mental health and illness and curates exhibits of art brut as a vehicle for fighting stigma. Hans-Otto Thomashoff was born in Germany and lives in Vienna. He is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, art historian and author of fiction and non-fiction books. He has been curator of several art exhibitions highlighting the connection between the psyche and art as well as president of the section of Art and Psychiatry of the World Psychiatric Association and advisory committee member of the Sigmund Freud Foundation, Vienna.

This volume is presented in four sections based on recent research in the field: the sources of identity, the tie between identity and the social structure, the non-cognitive outcomes - such as emotional - of identity processes, and the idea that individuals have multiple identities. This timely work will be of interest to social psychologists in sociology and psychology, behavioral scientists, and political scientists.

The face of John Wesley (1703–91), the Methodist leader, became one of the most familiar images in the English-speaking and transatlantic worlds through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After the dozen or so painted portraits made during his lifetime came numbers of posthumous portraits and moralising ‘scene paintings’, and hundreds of variations of prints. It was calculated that six million copies were produced of one print alone – an 1827 portrait by John Jackson R.A. as frontispiece for a hymn book. Illustrated by nearly one hundred images, many in colour, with a comprehensive appendix listing known Wesley images, this book offers a much-needed comprehensive and critical survey of one of the most influential religious and public figures of eighteenth-century Britain. Besides chapters on portraits from the life and after, scene paintings and prints, it explores aspects of Wesley’s (and Methodism’s) attitudes to art, and the personality cult which gathered around Wesley as Methodism expanded globally. It will be of interest to art historians as a treatment of an individual sitter and subject, as well as to scholars engaged in Wesley and Methodist studies. It is also significant for the field of material studies, given the spread and use of the image, on artefacts as well as on paper.

In this book, Hertha D. Sweet Wong examines the intersection of writing and visual art in the autobiographical work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American writers and artists who employ a mix of written and visual forms of self-narration. Combining approaches from autobiography studies and visual studies, Wong argues that, in grappling with the breakdown of stable definitions of identity and unmediated representation, these writers-artists experiment with hybrid autobiography in image and text to break free of inherited visual-verbal regimes and revise painful histories. These works provide an interart focus for examining the possibilities of self-representation and self-narration, the boundaries of life writing, and the relationship between image and text. Wong considers eight writers-artists, including comic-book author Art Spiegelman; Faith Ringgold, known for her story quilts; and celebrated Indigenous writer Leslie Marmon Silko. Wong shows how her subjects formulate webs of intersubjectivity shaped by historical trauma, geography, race, and gender as they envision new possibilities of selfhood and fresh modes of self-narration in word and image.

This book addresses the 'autobiographical' literature, visual, and performance art of postcolonial women from Maghreb and Southeast Asia including Leila Sebbar, Assia Djebar, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Karina Eileraas critically examines how contemporary postcolonial artists participate in the violence of representation in order to re-imagine the relationship between image and identity.

An exploration of ways of looking in Renaissance Florence, where works of art were part of a complex process of social exchange Renaissance Florence, of endless fascination for the beauty of its art and architecture, is no less intriguing for its dynamic political, economic, and social life. In this book Patricia Lee Rubin crosses the boundaries of all these areas to arrive at an original and comprehensive view of the place of images in Florentine society. The author asks an array of questions: Why were works of art made? Who were the artists who made them, and who commissioned them? How did they look, and how were they looked at? She demonstrates that the answers to such questions illuminate the contexts in which works of art were created, and how they were valued and viewed. Rubin seeks out the meeting places of meaning in churches, in palaces, in piazzas--places of exchange where identities were taken on and transformed, often with the mediation of images. She concentrates on questions of vision and visuality, on "seeing and being seen." With a blend of exceptional illustrations; close analyses of sacred and secular paintings by artists including Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Filippino Lippi, and Botticelli; and wide-ranging bibliographic essays, the book shines new light on fifteenth-century Florence, a special place that made beauty one of its defining features.