The presentation of bodies in pain has been a major concern in Western art since the time of the Greeks. The Christian tradition is closely entwined with such themes, from the central images of the Passion to the representations of bloody martyrdoms. The remnants of this tradition are evident in contemporary images from Abu Ghraib. In the last forty years, the body in pain has also emerged as a recurring theme in performance art. Recently, authors such as Elaine Scarry, Susan Sontag, and Giorgio Agamben have written about these themes. The scholars in this volume add to the discussion, analyzing representations of pain in art and the media. Their essays are firmly anchored on consideration of the images, not on whatever actual pain the subjects suffered. At issue is representation, before and often apart from events in the world. Part One concerns practices in which the appearance of pain is understood as expressive. Topics discussed include the strange dynamics of faked pain and real pain, contemporary performance art, international photojournalism, surrealism, and Renaissance and Baroque art. Part Two concerns representations that cannot be readily assigned to that genealogy: the Chinese form of execution known as lingchi (popularly the "death of a thousand cuts"), whippings in the Belgian Congo, American lynching photographs, Boer War concentration camp photographs, and recent American capital punishment. These examples do not comprise a single alternate genealogy, but are united by the absence of an intention to represent pain. The book concludes with a roundtable discussion, where the authors discuss the ethical implications of viewing such images.

The presentation of bodies in pain has been a major concern in Western art since the time of the Greeks. The Christian tradition is closely entwined with such themes, from the central images of the Passion to the representations of bloody martyrdoms. The remnants of this tradition are evident in contemporary images from Abu Ghraib. In the last forty years, the body in pain has also emerged as a recurring theme in performance art. Recently, authors such as Elaine Scarry, Susan Sontag, and Giorgio Agamben have written about these themes. The scholars in this volume add to the discussion, analyzing representations of pain in art and the media. Their essays are firmly anchored on consideration of the images, not on whatever actual pain the subjects suffered. At issue is representation, before and often apart from events in the world. Part One concerns practices in which the appearance of pain is understood as expressive. Topics discussed include the strange dynamics of faked pain and real pain, contemporary performance art, international photojournalism, surrealism, and Renaissance and Baroque art. Part Two concerns representations that cannot be readily assigned to that genealogy: the Chinese form of execution known as lingchi (popularly the "death of a thousand cuts"), whippings in the Belgian Congo, American lynching photographs, Boer War concentration camp photographs, and recent American capital punishment. These examples do not comprise a single alternate genealogy, but are united by the absence of an intention to represent pain. The book concludes with a roundtable discussion, where the authors discuss the ethical implications of viewing such images.

Visualizing Sensuous Suffering and Affective Pain in Early Modern Europe and the Spanish Americas is a trans-cultural collection of studies on visual treatments of the phenomena of suffering and pain in early modern culture. Ranging geographically from Italy, Spain, and the Low Countries to Chile, Mexico, and the Philippines and chronologically from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, these studies variously consider pain and suffering as somatic, emotional, and psychological experiences. From examination of bodies shown victimized by brutal public torture to the sublimation of physical suffering conveyed through the incised lines of Counter-Reformation engravings, the authors consider depictions of pain and suffering as conduits to the divine or as guides to social behaviour; indeed, often the two functions overlap.

In the course of its long and tumultuous history the sublime has alternated between spatial and temporal definitions, from its conceptualization in terms of the grandeur and infinity of Nature (spatial), to its postmodern redefinition as an "event" (temporal), from its conceptualization in terms of our failure to "cognitively map" the decentered global network of capital or the rhizomatic structure of the postmetropolis (spatial), to its neurophenomenological redefinition in terms of the new temporality of presence produced by network/real time (temporal). This volume explores the place of the sublime in contemporary culture and the aesthetic, cultural, and political values coded in it. It offers a map of the contemporary sublime in terms of the limits—cinematic, cognitive, neurophysiological, technological, or environmental—of representation.

This volume offers a varied and informed series of approaches to questions of mobility—actual, social, virtual, and imaginary—as related to visual culture. Contributors address these questions in light of important contemporary issues such as migration; globalization; trans-nationality and trans-cultural difference; art, space and place; new media; fantasy and identity; and the movement across and the transgression of the proprieties of boundaries and borders. The book invites the reader to read across the collection, noting differences or making connections between media and forms and between audiences, critical traditions and practitioners, with a view to developing a more informed understanding of visual culture and its modalities of mobility and fantasy as encouraged by dominant, emergent, and radical forms of visual practice.

Offering a conceptual framework for teaching the visual arts (K-12 and higher education) from a cultural standpoint, the author discusses visual culture in a democracy.

This book analyses the relationship between comics and cultural memory. By focussing on a range of landmark comics from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the discussion draws attention to the ongoing role of visual culture in framing testimony, particularly in relation to underprivileged subjects such as migrants and refugees, individuals dealing with war and oppressive regimes and individuals living with particular health conditions. The discussion is influenced by literary and cultural debates on the intersections between ethics, testimony, trauma, and human rights, reflected in its three overarching questions: ‘How do comics usually complicate the production of cultural memory in local contents and global mediascapes?’, ‘How do comics engage with, and generate, new forms of testimonial address?’, and ‘How do the comics function as mnemonic structures?’ The author highlights that the power of comics is that they allow both creators and readers to visualise the fracturing power of violence and oppression – at the level of the individual, domestic, communal, national and international – in powerful and creative ways. Comics do not stand outside of literature, cinema, or any of the other arts, but rather enliven the reciprocal relationship between the verbal and the visual language that informs all of these media. As such, the discussion demonstrates how fields such as graphic medicine, graphic justice, and comics journalism contribute to existing theoretical and analytics debates, including critical visual theory, trauma and memory studies, by offering a broad ranging, yet cohesive, analysis of cultural memory and its representation in print and digital comics.

What is pain? Has the experience of pain always been the same? How is pain related to the emotions, to culture, and to pleasure? What happens to us when we feel pain? How does pain work in the body and in the brain? In this Very Short Introduction, Rob Boddice explores the history, culture, and medical science of pain. Charting the shifting meanings of pain across time and place, he focusses on how the experience and treatment of pain have changed. He describes historical hierarchies of pain experience that related pain to social class and race, and the privileging of human states of pain over that of other animals. From the pain concepts of classical antiquity to expressions of pain in contemporary art, and modern medical approaches to the understanding, treatment, and management of pain, Boddice weaves a multifaceted account of this central human experience. Ranging from neuroscientific innovations in experimental medicine to the constructionist arguments of social scientists, pain is shown to resist a timeless definition. Pain is physical and emotional, of body and mind, and is always experienced subjectively and contextually. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

On Not Looking: The Paradox of Contemporary Visual Culture focuses on the image, and our relationship to it, as a site of "not looking." The collection demonstrates that even though we live in an image-saturated culture, many images do not look at what they claim, viewers often do not look at the images, and in other cases, we are encouraged by the context of exhibition not to look at images. Contributors discuss an array of images—photographs, films, videos, press images, digital images, paintings, sculptures, and drawings—from everyday life, museums and galleries, and institutional contexts such as the press and political arena. The themes discussed include: politics of institutional exhibition and perception of images; censored, repressed, and banned images; transformations to practices of not looking as a result of new media interventions; images in history and memory; not looking at images of bodies and cultures on the margins; responses to images of trauma; and embodied vision.

This book offers a cross-disciplinary approach to pain and suffering in the early modern period, based on research in the fields of literary studies, art history, theatre studies, cultural history and the study of emotions. The volume’s two-fold approach to the hurt body, defining ‘hurt’ from the perspectives of both victim and beholder - as well as their combined creation of a gaze - is unique. It establishes a double perspective about the riddle of ‘cruel’ viewing by tracking the shifting cultural meanings of victims’ bodies and confronting them with the values of audiences, religious and popular institutional settings and practices of punishment. It encompasses both the victim’s presence as an image or performed event of pain and the conundrum of the look – the transmitted ‘pain’ experienced by the watching audience.