Megha Rajguru

Empires of vision: A reader edited by Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy

This commissioned book review appraises the edited volume Empires of vision: a reader and the contribution it makes to Empire studies and visual culture studies.In spite of this, some chapters are richly illustrated and deploy insightful arguments for those working on visual culture. Particularly interesting are the chapters ‘Posture and health’, ‘Obesity across cultures’ and ‘Seeing pain’. The latter makes connexions between current debates in the neurosciences and historical representations of facial expressions of pain made by Charles Bell, Charles Darwin and Duchenne de Boulogne along the nineteenth century. Departing from the question on whether we can see pain in the face of the other, this chapter interrogates important issues such as the existence of a universal language of pain and the role of sympathy and its shifting meanings. This discussion will help the visual historian to situate these well-known images in their scientific environment, addressing also the key theoretical issues. For its part, ‘Posture and health’ is the longest and most illustrated chapter, with 9 of the 15 images of the book. These include public health posters, seventeenth-century military illustrations, ethnographic photographs, evolutionary sketches, press illustrations and press photography. This variety rightly conveys the entangled cultural and medical meanings of posture. In particular, these images trace the medical and military origins of the straight posture, which has historically served to describe the characteristics of men and even, at the shadow of evolutionism, to define humanity itself. This cultural malleability of the body and its correlation with medical theories is also examined in ‘Obesity across cultures’. This chapter analyses how being fat has become an illness, even a global epidemic, in the United States and China. Gilman shows that this problem has followed different roots in each country due to their particular histories. However, in both cases, obesity reflects institutional and national concerns in reforming the individual and the collective body.

Mimesis across empires: artworks and networks in India, 1765–1860

This commissioned book review for Visual Studies journal examines the important contribution made by author Natasha Eaton to visual culture studies in the Indian colonial context.

Chanting in the gallery: ritual sound and its phenomenology in contemporary art

ABSTRACT Artists Bill Viola, Meredith Monk, Janet Cardiff and Marcus Coates have employed ritualistic singing and chants as tools of critical expression in their practices. What types of experiences do sounds associated with religion and belief systems elicit within the viewers and listeners of the work? Are the causal factors of these experiences implicit in the music or present in the individual listeners? This article draws upon musical phenomenology, neuro-phenomenology, musical time and Heideggers Dasein in order to formulate an understanding of the role of ritual singing in art, and the ways in which art audiences access transcendental experiences.