Visual cultures – transatlantic perspectives

On both sides of the Atlantic, visual culture studies currently is one of the fastest growing and most innovative fields in academia, attracting a great variety of questions, approaches and disciplines. Indebted to an understanding of visual culture as the means by which cultures visually construct the social field, the articles in this volume address how concepts of legitimacy and authority, race and ethnicity, history and space were visualized over the centuries in Europe and the United States. Contributors cover the creation of political iconographies, contested visual narratives of racial and ethnic difference, images of gender and sexuality, the role of photographs in journalism, and, finally, the importance of visual representations in the construction of historical memory. A broad selection of visual media, ranging from paintings, prints and photographs to experimental cinema and the internet, is analyzed to unearth the visual dimensions of the political and the social in Europe and the United States since the eighteenth century.