Sensing Medieval Violence: Two Literary Case Studies Klement, Leah; Saltzman, Benjamin A.
Global intellectual history (Abingdon, England),
07/2023, Letnik:
ahead-of-print, Številka:
ahead-of-print
Journal Article
Modern discourses surrounding the aesthetic representation of violence and the ethics of witnessing have often focused on visual perception. Yet, the intrusive and percussive nature of sound's ...transmission has linked it intimately with the perception of violence in both medieval and modern representations. This article presents two case studies from medieval literature in which issues of sensation consistently mediate aesthetic and ethical dimensions of the violence that the texts contain. This emphasis on sensation foregrounds the role of the body in observing and witnessing representations of violence.
Through a discussion of drone warfare, and in particular the massacre of 23 people in the Uruzgan province in Afghanistan in 2010, I argue that drone warfare is both embodied and embodying. Drawing ...from posthuman feminist theorists such as Donna Haraway and N Katherine Hayles, I understand the turn toward data and machine intelligence not as an other-than-human process of decisionmaking that deprives humans of sovereignty, but as a form of embodiment that reworks and undermines essentialist notions of culture and nature, biology and technology. Through the intermediation of algorithmic, visual, and affective modes of embodiment, drone warfare reproduces gendered and racialized bodies that enable a necropolitics of massacre. Finally, the category of gender demonstrates a flaw in the supposed perfectibility of the algorithm in removing issues of identity or prejudice from security practices, as well as the perceptions of drone assemblages as comprising sublime technologies of perfect analysis and vision. Gender as both a mode of embodiment and a category of analysis is not removed by algorithmic war, but rather is put into the service of the violence it enables.
Uruguay is a country whose national identity has been created in the image of European modernity. The search for a national imaginary has exalted symbolic attributes of rectitude and (European) ...homogeneity. A crisis of national identity and the global fracture of modernity broke this model. As part of this process, beach tourism emerged based on the ideal of a paradise which promotes the use of native palms as an important element of the physical and symbolic landscape. This paper analyses the relations between postcolonialism, tourism, modernity, identity and palm trees in Uruguay. It argues that the growing trend of beach tourism is part of a process that articulates tropical and traditional arguments, promoting undulated, local features over rectilinear, global ones.
•Tourism has played an important role in the Uruguayan postcolonial identity.•Straightness and undulation are the aesthetic criteria that are behind postmodern tensions.•Tensions between exotic and native palms are key in the postcolonial image of tourist destination.•Global tourism models adopted for post-colonial purposes are expressed locally in neocolonial tensions.
The
has a number of distinctly visual components. However, how, and to what ends, imagery functions in this text is less clear. Taking a single narrative episode at the beginning of the text as its ...main focus this paper offers an examination of the pivotal metaphor of the
(
. In attempting to show the importance of visuality to the rhetoric of the text the following approach is offered: exploration of the conceptual domains of the elements of the composition to provide approximated access to cultural context; visual reconstruction of the narrative sequence; analysis of the visual articulation of meaning and interpretation of the strategic use of visual rhetoric.
This article considers the 15M archive as a site of meaning, knowledge, experience and activism where photography plays a crucial role. Especially in its digital incarnation, such a cause-based ...collection becomes a retrievable myriad of images that opens the movement to a new set of questions regarding its meaning and aftereffects. For 15M was also an image-producing event, and the constellation of snapshots it generated significantly contributed to what we can consider the visuality of the Spanish crisis. The origins and nature of the photographic images that compose that 15M digital archive - the ones taken in its iconic Madrid square, in particular - also shed light on the importance of a picture-taking practice that documents and, in fact, helps to configure 15M as emerging event.
Named after the gender-neutral Swedish pronoun, Hen is a queer puppet show, created and performed by the French artist Johanny Bert. In this performance, the body of the puppet, made of wood, foam ...and, fabric, is used like a “jigsaw” - assembling different pieces together in order to create and reveal a form, an image, a meaning. It becomes the material for a new vision of how we conceive and construct the body, as it deconstructs essentializing, binary, heteronormative identities, envisioning greater possibilities and pluralities of bodies. Through the vision of non-human object in the space of a theatre, Johanny Bert unveils and rethinks the relationship sexuality and society maintain together by showing sexuality as a theatrical utopia where new forms of bodies and desires can be revealed. Guided by an interdisciplinary approach combining both Gender Studies and Visual Studies, this article talks about how the plasticity of the puppetting object can affect the perception of our own bodies. How and where does the show Hen manifest utopia for the human body and sexuality? Johanny Bert puts the concept of anthropomorphism as the threshold for questioning human sexuality into the theatre and challenges the ways we define and circumscribe bodies and desires, inviting new perspectives for sexual and corporeal paradigms, too.
Contemporary organizations increasingly rely on images, logos, videos, building materials, graphic and product design, and a range of other material and visual artifacts to compete, communicate, form ...identity and organize their activities. This Special Issue focuses on materiality and visuality in the course of objectifying and reacting to novel ideas, and, more broadly, contributes to organizational theory by articulating the emergent contours of a material and visual turn in the study of organizations. In this Introduction, we provide an overview of research on materiality and visuality. Drawing on the articles in the special issue, we further explore the affordances and limits of the material and visual dimensions of organizing in relation to novelty. We conclude by pointing out theoretical avenues for advancing multimodal research, and discuss some of the ethical, pragmatic and identity-related challenges that a material and visual turn could pose for organizational research.
Drawing from a subset of data from a multi-year connective ethnographic study with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth, this article explores the scriptural counter-economy ...of composing new media narratives across online/offline contexts. Combining theoretical constructs from “multi-” literacy studies alongside visual and textual analysis, this article describes the influences of Web 2.0 technologies and photo-based composing tools on contemporary configurations of LGBTQ youth identity making. Giving visuality a place of primacy, this article focuses on two larger thematic findings: snapping selfies as sedimentary identity texts and curating lifestreams as operationalizing community. Focusing on how youth use these material, embodied, and visual texts to reinforce, challenge, combat, and/or resist identities of difference, this article considers how the so-called visual vernaculars and material texts of youth lifestreaming offer alternative conceptions to contemporary new media writing and storying of the self.
This paper addresses the migration theme as an embodied experience performed by myself in two installation pieces, which serve as examples to explore the notions of displacement and territory in ...phenomenology and semiotic of culture points of view. A mode of performed narrative within moving images attempts to imagine other existences, through cognition and body studies. Presence and politics in ageless aesthetic forms amplify a performativity experience in body and image, related to Greek Hellenic sites and Brazilian countryside landscapes. How do the visual arts act as both a reenactment of a continuous present through affected sites and a dramaturgy of the moving image, through a migrant body in continuous creation of belonging in unknown lands and seas?
Abstract
Since the ancient rhetoricians, humans have awarded imagery, the visual, and the vivid an extraordinary effect on emotions and memory. Such assumptions have led to iconophobia, iconoclasm, ...and myths about the special power of images. The issue of the power of pictures, however, is more complicated. As all other kinds of rhetorical utterances, the visual can be both powerful and powerless depending on the circumstances. For many pictures, the rhetorical power lies not mainly in their political deliberation, but instead in their nature as demonstrative or epideictic rhetoric: a rhetoric that does not primarily advocate immediate change, but tries to increase adherence to existing view-points, attitudes and values. Even though visual rhetoric may perform a powerful address to those who are already convinced, it does not necessarily hold much power over adversaries and sceptics. This article argues that when teaching visuality and the power of imagery, educators ought to help young pupils – and the citizenry in general – not only to decode visual communication, but also to interpret and evaluate it. The first requires knowledge about rules of visual literacy, the second requires not only critical thinking, but also situational and cultural knowledge, as well as sound judgment.
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