We Look

In How Do We Look? Fatimah Tobing Rony draws on transnational images of Indonesian women as a way to theorize what she calls visual biopolitics—the ways visual representation determines which lives are made to matter more than others. Rony outlines the mechanisms of visual biopolitics by examining Paul Gauguin’s 1893 portrait of Annah la Javanaise—a trafficked thirteen-year-old girl found wandering the streets of Paris—as well as US ethnographic and documentary films. In each instance, the figure of the Indonesian woman is inextricably tied to discourses of primitivism, savagery, colonialism, exoticism, and genocide. Rony also focuses on acts of resistance to visual biopolitics in film, writing, and photography. These works, such as Rachmi Diyah Larasati’s The Dance that Makes You Vanish, Vincent Monnikendam’s Mother Dao (1995), and the collaborative films of Nia Dinata, challenge the naturalized methods of seeing that justify exploitation, dehumanization, and early death of people of color. By theorizing the mechanisms of visual biopolitics, Rony elucidates both its violence and its vulnerability.

From the bestselling author of The Lost Regiment series comes a factually based narrative of the black military experience in the Civil War. We Look Like Men of War "I was born a slave, as was my father before me, but I shall die a free man...." Thus begins the poignant story of Samuel Washburn, born a slave in 1850. A young master's cruelty leads to an unforeseen confrontation, which forces Sam and his cousin to flee the plantation. They run north to freedom, only to return south to fight for the greater cause. Though still a boy, Sam becomes a regimental drummer with a "colored regiment" and sees action in the Wilderness campaign at Fredericksburg and Petersburg, as well as at the bloody Battle of the Crater in July of 1864. Sam's voice offers a unique and insightful perspective on the carnage of the War Between the States and the toll it took on both young and old, black and white. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The book presents three studies in which eye tracking data were collected at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen in June and July 2013. Overall, the results of those three studies highlight the knowledge gained from the analysis of the very first saccade in a museum context, when people look at paintings and statues. The first study analyzes how viewers orient their first saccade on paintings. This study shows that, in a museum, the first saccade is attracted toward the center of paintings. This attraction toward the paintings’ center is found in all the subjects’ groups that we have studied. Noteworthily, this effect is significantly less pronounced in individuals who never visit museums. It is among amateurs, who often visit museums, that the center attracts the most the first saccade. Among experts, painters or art history teachers, and to a lesser extent among amateurs, the pictorial composition largely determines the orientation of the first saccade. We indeed found that, as soon as the first saccade, experts orient their gaze toward the main subject. This phenomenon seems to be explained by the fact that experts immediately orient their gaze (here measured as the first saccade) toward the paintings’ location conveying the most meaning. It can either be the center, or a peripheral area, depending on whether the paintings’ most meaningful subject is located centrally or peripherally. The second study shows that the center does not attract the first saccade in 5-year-old children. This behavior appears later, in 8- to 10-year-old children. However, noticeably, the 8–10-year-old children orient significantly less frequently their first saccade toward the paintings’ center as adults do, and this is also true when one considers non-expert adult viewers. The results of the third study focus on statues and reveal a very different oculomotor behavior: Indeed, rather than looking at the center, statues’ viewers exhibit a clear tendency to saccade first at the statues’ contours. This stands in contrast with the behavior that we observe with paintings. Our study concludes that statues trigger a specific oculomotor behavior. The latter appears to be mostly driven by the physical presence that stone bodies incarnate. The movement and the climax of this movement, that sculptors manage to convey, thus turn out to attract the gaze in a unique fashion. The book concludes that the first saccade is a powerful indicator of the oculomotor behavior that greatly improves our comprehension of the unique relationship between a viewer and artworks.

Caregiver, are you overwhelmed? Do you secretly (or not so secretly) have bouts of despair, bitterness, and even hopelessness? As a caregiver, you run the risk of disappearing. Your time goes overwhelmingly to the needs of your loved one. Relationships get strained, and challenges and anxieties are difficult to articulate. It’s easier to just keep your head down and do what must be done. What’s more, you probably didn’t sign up for this role or train for it. And yet here you are, reliving the trauma that got you here, providing support you didn’t know you had in you to give, struggling with fatigue, making critical, life-altering decisions, and yearning for the community you had that has changed or disappeared. As a caregiver, do you ever wonder: Where did everybody go? Why can’t I do a better job? Am I a complete failure? How can I keep up this level of care without exhausting myself? Rich in stories, threaded with humor, and unflinchingly real, We’re Stronger than We Look is a safe place for you to process the life you’ve been given, to accept that it’s okay not to have it all together, and to be inspired about your caregiving role—even while recognizing the need to take care of yourself as well.

The More We Look, the Deeper It Gets: Transforming the Curriculum through Art provides inspiration and practical guidance for teaching with works of art in order to deepen engagement and improve student learning. The book introduces the Pyramid of Inquiry, a flexible framework that teachers of all subject areas can use to support connections between students’ lives, academic curriculum, and works of art from across time and place. Based on three years of research with New York City K-12 public school students and educators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the book highlights best practices for teaching with works of art and shares exemplars from diverse classrooms. Readers will gain valuable insights, strategies and resources for leveraging the power of art to reach all learners.

This shocking, boisterous novel was a runaway bestseller and award winner in Japan: “Pressingly real . . . In these pages, you will find the lives of all of us” (Japan Times). Searingly honest and sexually explicit, So We Look to the Sky is a novel told in five linked stories that begin with an affair between a student and a woman ten years his senior, who picks him up for cosplay sex in a comics market. Their scandalous liaison, which the woman's husband makes public by posting secretly taped video online, frames all of the stories, but each explores a different aspect of the life passages and hardships ordinary people face. A teenager experimenting with sex and then, perhaps, experiencing love and loss; a young, anime-obsessed wife bullied by her mother-in-law to produce the child she and her husband cannot conceive; a high school girl, spurned by the student, realizing that being cute and fertile is all others expect of her; the student's best friend, who lives in the projects and is left alone to support and care for his voracious, senile grandmother; and the student's mother, a divorced single parent and midwife, who guides women bringing new life into this world and must rescue her son, crushed by the twin blows of public humiliation and loss, from giving up on his own. Narrating each story in the distinctive voice of its protagonist, Misumi Kubo weaves themes including sex, love, the female body, gossip, and the bullying that leaves young people feeling burdened and helpless into a profoundly original novel that lingers in the mind for its affirmation of the raw, unquellable force of life.

From prehistoric Mexico to modern Istanbul, Mary Beard looks beyond the familiar canon of Western imagery to explore the history of art, religion, and humanity. Conceived as a gorgeously illustrated accompaniment to “How Do We Look” and “The Eye of Faith,” the famed Civilisations shows on PBS, renowned classicist Mary Beard has created this elegant volume on how we have looked at art. Focusing in Part I on the Olmec heads of early Mesoamerica, the colossal statues of the pharaoh Amenhotep III, and the nudes of classical Greece, Beard explores the power, hierarchy, and gender politics of the art of the ancient world, and explains how it came to define the so-called civilized world. In Part II, Beard chronicles some of the most breathtaking religious imagery ever made—whether at Angkor Wat, Ravenna, Venice, or in the art of Jewish and Islamic calligraphers— to show how all religions, ancient and modern, have faced irreconcilable problems in trying to picture the divine. With this classic volume, Beard redefines the Western-and male-centric legacies of Ernst Gombrich and Kenneth Clark.

Drawing on examples from art, media, fashion, history and memoir, cultural critic Rosemarie Garland-Thomson tackles a basic human interaction which has remained curiously unexplored, the human stare. In the first book of its kind, Garland-Thomson defines staring, explores the factors that motivate it, and considers the targets and the effects of the stare. While borrowing from psychology and biology to help explain why the impulse to stare is so powerful, she also enlarges and complicates these formulations with examples from the realm of imaginative culture. Featuring over forty illustrations, Staring captures the stimulating combination of symbolic, material and emotional factors that make staring so irresistible while endeavoring to shift the usual response to staring, shame, into an engaged self-consideration. Elegant and provocative, this unique study advances new ways of thinking about visuality and the body that will appeal to readers who are interested in the overlap between the humanities and human behaviors.