Visual Culture In Britain

First published in 2006, this volume provides the first in-depth analysis of the place of visual representations within the process of decolonisation during the period 1945 to 1970. The chapters trace the way in which different visual genres – art, film, advertising, photography, news reports and ephemera – represented and contributed to the political and social struggles over Empire and decolonisation during the mid-Twentieth century. The book examines both the direct visual representation of imperial retreat after 1945 as well as the reworkings of imperial and ‘racial’ ideologies within the context of a transformed imperialism. While the book engages with the dominant archive of artists, exhibitions, newsreels and films, it also explores the private images of the family album as well as examining the visual culture of anti-colonial resistance.

1. Staging The Raft of the Medusa - Christine Riding; 2. Uncanny Landscapes in British Film and Television - Peter Hutchings; 3. From Out of the Shadows: Sir Joshua Reynolds' Captain Robert Orme - Mark Hallett; 4. Putting the 'Culture' into Visual Culture: the Legacy and Challenge of Raymond Williams - Jonathan Harris; 5.

Beyond the Frame rewrites the history of Victorian art to explore the relationships between feminism and visual culture in a period of heady excitement and political struggle. Artists were caught up in campaigns for women's enfranchisement, education and paid work, and many were drawn into controversies about sexuality. This richly documented and compelling study considers painting, sculpture, prints, photography, embroidery and comic drawings as well as major styles such as Pre-Raphaelitism, Neo-Classicism and Orientalism. Drawing on critical theory and post-colonial studies to analyse the links between visual media, modernity and imperialism, Deborah Cherry argues that visual culture and feminism were intimately connected to the relations of power.

Concentrating on gender and cultural memory, this study investigates the ways in which masculinities and the web of power relations that they entail worked during the interwar years in order to reconstruct the post-First World War British society. It focuses especially on notions of national identity, class and sexuality and their representations in British visual culture in the aftermath of the Great War.

This edited collection, including contributors from the disciplines of art history, film studies, cultural geography and cultural anthropology, explores ways in which islands in the north of England and Scotland have provided space for a variety of visual-cultural practices and forms of creative expression which have informed our understanding of the world. Simultaneously, the chapters reflect upon the importance of these islands as a space in which, and with which, to contemplate the pressures and the possibilities within contemporary society. This book makes a timely and original contribution to the developing field of island studies, and will be of interest to scholars studying issues of place, community and the peripheries.

An interdisciplinary group of scholars applies the reinterpretive concept of "visual culture" to the English Renaissance. Bringing attention to the visual issues that have appeared persistently, though often marginally, in the newer criticisms of the last decade, the authors write in a diversity of voices on a range of subjects. Common among them, however, is a concern with the visual technologies that underlie the representation of the body, of race, of nation, and of empire. Several essays focus on the construction and representation of the human body—including an examination of anatomy as procedure and visual concept, and a look at early cartographic practice to reveal the correspondences between maps and the female body. In one essay, early Tudor portraits are studied to develop theoretical analogies and historical links between verbal and visual portrayal. In another, connections in Tudor-Stuart drama are drawn between the female body and the textiles made by women. A second group of essays considers issues of colonization, empire, and race. They approach a variety of visual materials, including sixteenth-century representations of the New World that helped formulate a consciousness of subjugation; the Drake Jewel and the myth of the Black Emperor as indices of Elizabethan colonial ideology; and depictions of the Queen of Sheba among other black women "present" in early modern painting. One chapter considers the politics of collecting. The aesthetic and imperial agendas of a Van Dyck portrait are uncovered in another essay, while elsewhere, that same portrait is linked to issues of whiteness and blackness as they are concentrated within the ceremonies and trappings of the Order of the Garter. All of the essays in Early Modern Visual Culture explore the social context in which paintings, statues, textiles, maps, and other artifacts are produced and consumed. They also explore how those artifacts—and the acts of creating, collecting, and admiring them—are themselves mechanisms for fashioning the body and identity, situating the self within a social order, defining the otherness of race, ethnicity, and gender, and establishing relationships of power over others based on exploration, surveillance, and insight.