University of Heidelberg

B4 Transcultural Visuality

Transcultural Visuality Learning Group

Coordination: Sumathi Ramaswamy, Barbara Mittler, Christiane Brosius

Abstract

Transcultural visual studies are emerging as a new challenging field within art history, globalisation and media studies. The term can be traced back to the interest attached to debates around ‘pictorial turn’ (W. J. T. Mitchell 1994) as well as ‘intervisuality’ (e.g. Mirzoeff 2001) or ‘interocularity’ (Mirzoeff 2000) as well as the role of media in migration and globalisation contexts. The role of images in the context of diverse cultural processes and historical phenomena is acknowledged yet, at the same time, still a marginal field within the Humanities.

The flow of images across geographical, cultural and disciplinary borders has become a centre-stage focus of attention, for instance, in the case of the Mohammad cartoon debate. Assuming that the flows are by no means symmetrical but driven by varying forces, motivations and discourses, the aim is to address this transgressing mobility of images as a key challenge by tying it to current theoretical debates as well as concrete case studies deriving from the Cluster’s agenda and the group-members' own research.

The agenda of this learning group evolves around a systematic follow-up of questions related to the role of visuality and visual culture in the context of transcultural flows and asymmetries between Asia and Europe and within Asia. A core group of ten scholars from Heidelberg and abroad engage in key arenas of transcultural visual culture in terms of theory and methods within their research fields: "archiving practices" (2009); "icon: affect and spectacle" (2010); "colour: transculturality's sensoriums" (2011).

Themes are linked to key themes of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Asia and Europe in a Global Context – Shifting Asymmetries in Cultural Flows’, especially within RA B.

The Transcultural Visuality Learning Group will explore questions of visual flows and asymmetries in such a way that will enable its members to both enrich their own research and engagement with visual culture and histories and to stimulate ongoing discussions among members of the group and the Cluster as well as a larger interested audience from the fields of art history, history, anthropology and area studies. The group seeks to intensively engage with and immerse in scholarship relevant to the Cluster in matters relating to the growing new interdisciplinary field of transcultural visual studies.