Representations

Representations

Two for These Times

The uprisings in recent weeks against police brutality and institutionalized racism in the United States has brought the long wound of slavery into greater relief for everyone, whether we’re out in the streets or listening to newscasts. In recognition of this moment’s fury and demand for justice, we offer two special issues from our archives that address the issue of slavery head-on. Their engagements with questions of reparation, identity, dispossession, and the archive remain brilliantly, if painfully, pertinent today. All content in these issues is free through the end of 2020.

Special Issue (Representations 92):
Redress 
Edited by Saidiya Hartman and Stephen Best

STEPHEN BEST and SAIDIYA HARTMAN
Fugitive Justice

HERMAN L. BENNETT
‘‘Sons of Adam’’: Text, Context, and the Early Modern African Subject

COLIN J. DAYAN
Legal Terrors

ROBERT WESTLEY
The Accursed Share: Genealogy, Temporality, and the Problem of Value in Black Reparations Discourse

BRYAN WAGNER
Disarmed and Dangerous: The Strange Career of Bras-Coupe´

DAVID LLOYD
The Indigent Sublime: Specters of Irish Hunger


Special Issue (Representations 113):
New World Slavery and the Matter of the Visual
Edited by Huey Copeland, Krista Thompson, and Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby

HUEY COPELAND and KRISTA THOMPSON
Perpetual Returns: New World Slavery and the Matter of the Visual

DARCY GRIMALDO GRIGSBY
Negative-Positive Truths

KRISTA THOMPSON
The Evidence of Things Not Photographed: Slavery and Historical Memory in the British West Indies

ARTISTS’ PORTFOLIOS
Hank Willis Thomas, Fred Wilson, Christopher Cozier

HUEY COPELAND
Runaway Subjects

MARCUS WOOD
The Museu do Negro in Rio and the Cult of Anastácia as a New Model for the Memory of Slavery

COMMENTARY
STEPHEN BEST
Neither Lost nor Found: Slavery and the Visual Archive

 

New Issue, Representations 150

NOW AVAILABLE

Representations 150, Spring 2020

In recognition of the impact of Covid-19 on campus instruction and the rise of unplanned distance learning, UC Press is pleased to make Representations and all of its online journals content free to all through June 2020. 

ABBY HOLEKAMP
Who Are Vera and Tatiana? The Female Russian Nihilist
in the Fin de Siècle Imagination

MARK TAYLOR
The Lower Criticism

ANNA SHECHTMAN
The Medium Concept

HELEN DEUTSCH
“True Wit Is Nature”: Wimsatt, Pope, and the Power of Style

ELLEN LOCKHART
Lupus tonalis


Upcoming in Representations 151: Kathryn Crim on Jen Bervin’s Silk Poems, Ian Duncan on Darwin’s aesthetic science, Danielle Simon on Italian television, Paulina Hartono on the sound of Chinese Communist radio, and Todd Olson on zoological osteology and art-historical method in early twentieth-century France. Available in August.

New Issue, Representations 149

NOW AVAILABLE

Representations 149, Winter 2020

ALINE GUILLERMET
Vera Molnar’s Computer Paintings

KENT PUCKETT
RAND Narratology

RYAN HEALEY, EWAN JONES,
PAUL NULTY, GABRIEL RECCHIA,
JOHN REGAN, and PETER de BOLLA
The Uses of Genre:
Is There an “Adam Smith Question”?

ANDREW J. COUNTER
Wilde, Zola, Dreyfus, Christ:
Fin de Siècle Passions


PLUS: AN UNTIMELY REVIEW

WHITNEY DAVIS
Triple Cross:
Binarisms and Binds in Epistemology of the Closet


Upcoming in Representations 150: Ellen Lockhart on the sound of wolves, Anna Shechtman on the medium concept, Abby Holekamp on female Russian nihilists, Helen Deutsch on Wimsatt and Pope, and Mark Taylor on “the lower criticism.” Available in May.

New Issue, Representations 148

NOW AVAILABLE

Representations 148, Fall 2019


 

  • Field Notes

      • Upcoming in Representations 149: ALINE GUILLERMET on Vera Molnar’s computer paintings; ANDREW COUNTER on Wilde, Zola, and Dreyfus; KENT PUCKETT on the RAND Corporation ; PETER DE BOLLA, RYAN HEALEY, EWAN JONES, PAUL NULTY, GABRIEL RECCHIA, and JOHN REGAN on the uses of genre; and an Untimely Review of Epistemology of the Closet by Whitney Davis. (Coming in February.)

New Issue, Representations 147

NOW AVAILABLE

Number 147, Summer 2019

BOYD BROGAN
His Belly, Her Seed:Gender and Medicine in Early Modern Demonic Possession

DELIA CASADEI
Sound Evidence, 1969: Recording a Milanese Riot

BERNARD DIONYSIUS GEOGHEGAN
An Ecology of Operations: Vigilance, Radar, and the Birth of the Computer Screen

CLAUDIO LOMNITZ
The Ethos and Telos of Michoacán’s Knights Templar

COREY BYRNES
Chinese Landscapes of Desolation

Upcoming in Representations 148: PARAMA ROY on John Lockwood Kipling and comparative vegetarianism, VICTORIA KAHN on art, Judaism, and the critique of fascism in Ernst Cassirer, MATTHEW HUNTER on the aphorism and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, STEPHANIE O’ROURKE on deep time in Caspar David Friedrich, ANTOINE LENTACKER on medical prescriptions and “graphic performativity” in France, and a Field Note by BRIANNE COHEN on “slow protest” art in Cambodia. (Coming in November.)

New Special Issue: THE SOCIAL LIFE OF PAIN

NOW AVAILABLE!

Number 146, Spring 2019

Special Issue: The Social Life of Pain
Edited by Rachel Ablow

“The essays collected here counter [the] fantasy of pain as a knowable sensation that lies within that is then represented, or misrepresented, in language. Instead, they consider pain as always already enmeshed in social life, and representation as the means through which we can engage this imbrication. In so doing, they demonstrate the importance of bringing together two approaches to the problem of pain that have often been kept distinct. The first is the anthropological insight that pain behavior constitutes a mode of social engagement and, hence, that suffering is necessarily bound up with shifting, often unpredictable, cultural, familial, and interpersonal dynamics. The second involves a historical and literary-critical account of representation’s complex and productive relations to both experience and culture.” –from the editor’s introduction

RACHEL ABLOW
The Social Life of Pain

DARIUS REJALI
Is There Truth in Pain?

NANCY SCHEPER-HUGHES
A Finger in the Wound: On Pain, Scars, and Suffering

MITCHELL MERBACK
Pain and Memory in the Formation of Early Modern Habitus

SHIGEHISA KURIYAMA
‘‘No Pain, No Gain’’ and the History of Presence

RACHEL ABLOW
An Interview with ELAINE SCARRY

New Special Issue, Representations 145

NOW AVAILABLE!

Number 145, Winter 2019 (available free for a limited time from UC Press)

Special Issue
Visual History: The Past in Pictures

“If, as this issue suggests, visual histories rupture the metronomic pace of history, they also allow time to simultaneously compress and expand, to make some things more proximate and others more distant. In fascinating, unexpected, and at times unpredictable ways, images time-travel and take us with them. They also take up our time, the minutes and hours of looking and seeing. And they have their own kind of time, because the experience of seeing history is phenomenologically different from that of reading it in words.” —from the editors’ introduction

The volume, edited by Daniela Bleichmar and Vanessa R. Schwartz, defines the category of “visual history” and introduces its operations in essays dealing with the impact of visual narratives on and within their historical contexts. It proposes that visual histories can be seen not simply as guides to the times, but as  guides to time itself.

DANIELA BLEICHMAR and VANESSA R. SCHWARTZ
Visual History: The Past in Pictures

RANDALL MEISSEN
Francisco Pacheco’s Book of True Portraits: Humanism, Art, and the Practice of “Visual History”

EVONNE LEVY
Eyewitnessed Historia and the Renaissance Media Revolution: Visual Histories of The Council of Trent

SUSAN L. SIEGFRIED
Visualizing History in Eighteenth-Century France

ALLAN DOYLE
The Medium Is the Messagerie

BILLIE MELMAN
Ur: Empire, Modernity, and the Visualization of Antiquity Between the Two World Wars

AARON RICH
The Accent of Truth: The Hollywood Research Bible and the Republic of Images

Upcoming in Representations 146: The Social Life of Pain: a special issue edited by Rachel Ablow, who provides an introduction, including essays by Darius Rejali on truth and torture, Nancy Scheper-Hughes on social representations of pain and the kidney trade, Mitchell Merback on pain and memory in the formation of early modern habitus, Shigehisa Kuriyama on the historical and metaphysical roots of the idea of “good” pain, and an interview with Elaine Scarry. Coming in June.

Sneak Peak: Visual History Special Issue

Coming in March! (watch this space)

Representations 145
SPECIAL ISSUE
Visual History: The Past in Pictures
edited by Daniela Bleichmar and Vanessa R. Schwartz

 

 

 

 

 

The following is adapted from the introduction to the issue by its editors, Daniela Bleichmar and Vanessa R. Schwartz:

Visual histories—pictorial accounts of the past—are as old as art, but they have been little recognized as constituting their own genre.

In the Western tradition, visual histories have since early modernity played an important role in geographic and economic expansion, imperialism, and capitalism and in the global circulation of information through reproducible media, from the printing press to photography, film, and digital media. As such, the rise and spread of visual history has an important legacy for contemporary culture. We see the news more than we read it; historical fictions and documentaries play on screens small and large to enormous audiences; new museums dedicated to national and world heritage exhibit the past and visualize historical narratives primarily through combinations of objects and images. The essays in this special issue of Representations, taken together, also delineate a centuries-long trajectory of visual history; one that has been variously embraced, ignored, and challenged by different audiences. There is little doubt that the contemporary digital-image revolution makes us now, more than ever, both able to see the long life of visual history and curious about its workings.

In proposing and exploring the notion of visual history, we aim to contribute to the study of images in the broadest sense, addressing all pictures and formats across categories such as fine art, popular or folk art, and nonart. Central to our approach is the belief that images not only reflect or provide access to a period’s views but also actively participate in creating those views in the first place. As the essays in the volume suggest, the history of images has an impact on the making of other images, which itself constitutes a valuable record of people’s past actions in the world. Additionally, the essays we present here investigate how images shape meaningful change rather than embodying, containing, or reflecting changes that happen elsewhere. Visual history is thus particularly important because it suggests that images have shaped how people lived in earlier times as much as they can be used in the present to address other issues that concern students of the past, among them evidence and truth claims, the organization and presentation of knowledge and information, and temporality and the experience of spatial and temporal distance.

If, as we suggest, visual histories rupture the metronomic pace of history, they also allow time to simultaneously compress and expand, to make some things more proximate and others more distant. In fascinating, unexpected, and at times unpredictable ways, images time-travel and take us with them. They also take up our time, the minutes and hours of looking and seeing. And they have their own kind of time, because the experience of seeing history is phenomenologically different from that of reading it in words.

Table of Contents

DANIELA BLEICHMAR and VANESSA R. SCHWARTZ
Visual History: The Past in Pictures

RANDALL MEISSEN
Francisco Pacheco’s Book of True Portraits: Humanism, Art, and the Practice of “Visual History”

EVONNE LEVY
Eyewitnessed Historia and the Renaissance Media Revolution: Visual Histories of The Council of Trent

SUSAN L. SIEGFRIED
Visualizing History in Eighteenth-Century France

ALLEN DOYLE
The Medium Is the Messagerie

BILLIE MELMAN
Ur: Empire, Modernity, and the Visualization of Antiquity Between the Two World Wars

AARON RICH
The Accent of Truth: The Hollywood Research Bible and the Republic of Images

New Issue, Representations 144

NOW AVAILABLE

Number 144, Fall 2018

WHITNEY DAVIS 
“Reading-In”: Franz Boas’s Theory of the Beholder’s Share

ROGER MATHEW GRANT 
Music Lessons on Affect and Its Objects

EWAN JONES
Thermodynamic Rhythm: The Poetics of Waste

JULIÁN JIMÉNEZ HEFFERNAN 
The Stamp of Rarity: Ancestrality and Extinction in Daniel Deronda

KATHRYN L. BRACKNEY 
Remembering “Planet Auschwitz” During the Cold War

Plus:

FIELD NOTES 
Robert H. Sharf: What Do Nanquan and Schrödinger Have Against Cats?

Upcoming in Representations 145, a special issue, Visual History: The Past in Pictures, edited by Daniela Bleichmar and Vanessa R. Schwartz: Billie Melman on the archaeological site of Ur between the two world wars, Randall Meissen on Francisco Pacheco’s Book of True Portraits, Evonne Levy on eyewitness accounts and the Renaissance media revolution, Allan Doyle on Géricault and the production of visual history, and Aaron Rich on role of the Hollywood “research bible” in creating cinematic recreations of the past. With an introduction by the editors. (Coming in February.)

New Issue, Representations 143

NOW AVAILABLE

Number 143, Summer 2018

JULIE STONE PETERS
Staging the Last Judgment in the Trial of Charles I

BETTINA VARWIG
Heartfelt Musicking: The Physiology of a Bach Cantata

TRISHA URMI BANERJEE
Austen Equilibrium

ANDREW M. SHANKEN
Unit: A Semantic and Architectural History

NOURI GANA
Afteraffect: Arabic Literature and Affective Politics

Upcoming in Representations 144: Whitney Davis on Franz Boas’s theory of “the beholder’s share,” Roger Grant on the musical origins of affect theory, Ewan Jones on Swinburne and the poetics of waste, Kate Brackney on “Planet Auschwitz,” Julián Heffernan on ancestrality and extinction in Daniel Deronda, and a Field Note from Robert Sharf on the famous cats of physics and Buddhism. (Coming in November.)