Rediscovers and examines the lost history of African-American film criticism from the first half of the century.

This book discusses the development of 'dissident' Irish republicanism and considers its impact on politics throughout Ireland since the 1980s. Based on a series of interviews with over ninety radical republican activists from the wide range of groups and currents which make up 'dissident' republicanism, the book provides an up-to-date assessment of the political significance and potential of the groups who continue to oppose the peace process and the Good Friday Agreement. It shows that the 'dissidents' are much more than traditionalist irreconcilables left behind by Gerry Adams' entry into the mainstream. Instead the book suggests that the dynamics and trajectory of 'dissident' republicanism are shaped more by contemporary forces than historical tradition and that by understanding the "dissidents" we can better understand the emerging forms of political challenge in an age of austerity and increasing political instability internationally.

A beautiful and compelling novel, Elif Shafak's The Gaze considers the damage which can be inflicted by our simple desire to look at others "I didn't say anything. I didn't return his smiles. I looked at him in the wide mirror in front of where I was sitting. He grew uncomfortable and avoided my eyes. I hate those who think fat people are stupid.' An obese woman and her lover, a dwarf, are sick of being stared at wherever they go, and so decide to reverse roles. The man goes out wearing make up and the woman draws a moustache on her face. But while the woman wants to hide away from the world, the man meets the stares from passers-by head on, compiling his 'Dictionary of Gazes' to explore the boundaries between appearance and reality. Intertwined with the story of a bizarre freak-show organised in Istanbul in the 1880s, The Gaze considers the damage which can be inflicted by our simple desire to look at others. "Beautifully evoked" - The Times "Original and Compelling" - TLS "Plays with ideas of beauty and ugliness like they're Rubik's cubes" - Helen Oyeyemi "Entertaining and affecting" - Publishers' Weekly Elif Shafak is the acclaimed author of The Bastard of Istanbul and The Forty Rules of Love and is the most widely read female novelist in Turkey. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She is a contributor for The Telegraph, Guardian and the New York Times and her TED talk on the politics of fiction has received 500 000 viewers since July 2010. She is married with two children and divides her time between Istanbul and London.

Art historian Catherine McCormack challenges how culture teaches us to see and value women, their bodies, and their lives. Venus, maiden, wife, mother, monster—women have been bound so long by these restrictive roles, codified by patriarchal culture, that we scarcely see them. Catherine McCormack illuminates the assumptions behind these stereotypes whether writ large or subtly hidden. She ranges through Western art—think Titian, Botticelli, and Millais—and the image-saturated world of fashion photographs, advertisements, and social media, and boldly counters these depictions by turning to the work of women artists like Morisot, Ringgold, Lacy, and Walker, who offer alternative images for exploring women’s identity, sexuality, race, and power in more complex ways.

The end of the eighteenth century saw the start of a new craze in Europe: tiny portraits of single eyes that were exchanged by lovers or family members. Worn as brooches or pendants, these minuscule eyes served the same emotional need as more conventional mementoes, such as lockets containing a coil of a loved one’s hair. The fashion lasted only a few decades, and by the early 1800s eye miniatures had faded into oblivion. Unearthing these portraits in Treasuring the Gaze, Hanneke Grootenboer proposes that the rage for eye miniatures—and their abrupt disappearance—reveals a knot in the unfolding of the history of vision. Drawing on Alois Riegl, Jean-Luc Nancy, Marcia Pointon, Melanie Klein, and others, Grootenboer unravels this knot, discovering previously unseen patterns of looking and strategies for showing. She shows that eye miniatures portray the subject’s gaze rather than his or her eye, making the recipient of the keepsake an exclusive beholder who is perpetually watched. These treasured portraits always return the looks they receive and, as such, they create a reciprocal mode of viewing that Grootenboer calls intimate vision. Recounting stories about eye miniatures—including the role one played in the scandalous affair of Mrs. Fitzherbert and the Prince of Wales, a portrait of the mesmerizing eye of Lord Byron, and the loss and longing incorporated in crying eye miniatures—Grootenboer shows that intimate vision brings the gaze of another deep into the heart of private experience. With a host of fascinating imagery from this eccentric and mostly forgotten yet deeply private keepsake, Treasuring the Gaze provides new insights into the art of miniature painting and the genre of portraiture.

This book is proposed as a contribution to postcolonial critiques of the colonial and postcolonial exotic. It investigates the exotic as a representation of colonial cultural difference in colonial discourse, culture and history, and its oppositional rewritings in postcolonial thought and literature. Its analyses of the exotic include classical Arabo-Islamic ethnographic texts, Marco Polo's and Mandeville's travel accounts, Shakespeare's The Tempest, Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes, and a variety of colonial and postcolonial texts. Its Deconstructive approach to the exotic breaks new grounds of analysis beyond the Saidian problematic of «Orientalism», Homi Bhabha's intervention on the exotic, Hegel's Master/Slave dialectic, Michel Foucault's archaeology of Western cultural history, and Sartre's theorization of the «gaze» and its underlying Phenomenological subject. The scope of critical discussions of the exotic in this book includes - apart from Western cultural history - postmodern and postcolonial critiques of the colonial Other and exotic, and anthropological and philosophical discussions of the exotic. While tracing the divided inscription of the exotic as a colonial subject with reference to Shakespeare's The Tempest, the author throws into question l'Exote and the exotic Other as problematic subject positions for reading and rewriting the exotic in cultural history, and the double binds of counter-Exoticist discourses.

In 1975 Laura Mulvey published her seminal essay on the male gaze, ushering in a new era in understanding the politics and theory of looking at the female body. Since then, feminist thinking has expanded upon and revised Mulvey's theory and much of the Western world has seen a resurgence in feminist activism as well as the rise of neoliberalism and shifts in digital culture and (self-)representation. For the first time, this book addresses what it means to look at the fashioned female body in this radical new landscape. In chapters exploring the fashioned body within contexts such as queerness, veiling, blackness, pregnancy, fatness, and criminality, Revisiting the Gaze addresses intersectional debates in feminism and re-evaluates the concept of the gaze in light of recent social and political changes. With an interdisciplinary approach, bridging fashion and fine art, this book opens the door to discussions about the male gaze and the fashioned body.

Although we routinely take our vision to be veridical representations of reality, in actuality we choose (albeit unwittingly) or construct what we see. By movements of the eyes, the direction of our gaze, we create meaning. The author offers a reformulation of perception and its neural underpinnings, focusing on the active nature of perception. In his investigation of active perception and its brain mechanisms, he offers the gaze as the principal paradigm for perception. He discusses the dynamic and constrained nature of perception; the complex information processing at the level of the retina; the active nature of vision; the intensive nature of representations; the gaze of others as visual stimulus; and the intentionality of vision and consciousness.

A revelatory account of the brain's capacity for change When neuroscientist Susan Barry was fifty years old, she experienced the sense of immersion in a three dimensional world for the first time. Skyscrapers on street corners appeared to loom out toward her like the bows of giant ships. Tree branches projected upward and outward, enclosing and commanding palpable volumes of space. Leaves created intricate mosaics in 3D. Barry had been cross-eyed and stereoblind since early infancy. After half a century of perceiving her surroundings as flat and compressed, on that day she saw the city of Manhattan in stereo depth for first time in her life. As a neuroscientist, she understood just how extraordinary this transformation was, not only for herself but for the scientific understanding of the human brain. Scientists have long believed that the brain is malleable only during a "critical period" in early childhood. According to this theory, Barry's brain had organized itself when she was a baby to avoid double vision - and there was no way to rewire it as an adult. But Barry found an optometrist who prescribed a little-known program of vision therapy; after intensive training, Barry was ultimately able to accomplish what other scientists and even she herself had once considered impossible. Dubbed "Stereo Sue" by renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks, Susan Barry tells her own remarkable journey and celebrates the joyous pleasure of our senses.