Moche murals of northern Peru represent one of the great, yet still largely unknown, artistic traditions of the ancient Americas. Created in an era without written scripts, these murals are key to understandings of Moche history, society, and culture. In this first comprehensive study on the subject, Lisa Trever develops an interdisciplinary methodology of “archaeo art history” to examine how ancient histories of art can be written without texts, boldly inverting the typical relationship of art to archaeology. Trever argues that early coastal artistic traditions cannot be reduced uncritically to interpretations based in much later Inca histories of the Andean highlands. Instead, the author seeks the origins of Moche mural art, and its emphasis on figuration, in the deep past of the Pacific coast of South America. Image Encounters shows how formal transformations in Moche mural art, before and after the seventh century, were part of broader changes to the work that images were made to perform at Huacas de Moche, El Brujo, Pañamarca, and elsewhere in an increasingly complex social and political world. In doing so, this book reveals alternative evidentiary foundations for histories of art and visual experience.

"Reality does not comply with our narrations of it. And that is most certainly the case with the narrations produced in academia. An anthropologist in Bahia, Brazil, fears to become possessed by the spirits he had come to study; falls madly in love withan 'informant'; finds himself baffled by the sayings of a clairvoyant; and has to come to grips with the murder of one of his best friends. Unsettling events that do not belong to the orderly world of scientific research, yet leave their imprint on the way the anthropologist comes to understand the world. REflecting on his long research experience with the spirit possession cult Candomblâe, the author shows, in a probing manner, how definitions of reality always require the exclusion of certain perceptions, experiences and insights. And yet, this 'rest-of-what-is' turns out to be an inexhaustible source of amazement, seduction and renewal." --P [4] of cover.

A detailed study of the ekphrasis of photography in poetry since the 19th century. Unlike other critical studies of ekphrasis, Miller's study concentrates solely on the lyrical ekphrasis of photographs, setting out to define how the photographic image provides a unique form of poetic ekphrasis.

Clinical Encounters in Sexuality makes an intervention into the fields of clinical psychoanalysis and sexuality studies, in an effort to think about a range of issues relating to sexuality from a clinical psychoanalytic perspective. The editors have chosen queer theory as an interlocutor for the clinical contributors, because it is at the forefront of theoretical considerations of sexuality, as well as being both reliant upon and suspicious of psychoanalysis as a clinical practice and discourse. The book brings together a number of psychoanalytic schools of thought and clinical approaches, which are sometimes at odds with one another and thus tend not to engage in dialogue about divisive theoretical concepts and matters of clinical technique. The volume also stages, for the first time, a sustained clinical psychoanalytic engagement with queer theory. The central questions we present to readers to think about are: What are the discourses of sexuality underpinning psychoanalysis, and how do they impact on clinical practice? In what ways does sexuality get played out for, and between, the psychoanalytic practitioner and the patient? How do social, cultural and historical attitudes towards sexuality impact on the transference and countertransference, consciously and unconsciously? Why is sexuality so prone to reification? TABLE OF CONTENTS // Introduction: Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory, by Noreen Giffney SECTION 1: QUEER THEORIES / Chapter 1 [Identity]: Precarious Sexualities: Queer Challenges to Psychoanalytic and Social Identity Categorisation, by Alice Kuzniar - Chapter 2 [Desire]: Are We Missing Something? Queer Desire, by Lara Farina - Chapter 3 [Pleasure]: Jouissance: The Gash of Bliss, by Kathryn Bond Stockton - Chapter 4 [Perversion]: Perversion and the Problem of Fluidity and Fixity, by Lisa Downing - Chapter 5 [Ethics]: Out of Line, On Hold: D.W. Winnicott's Queer Sensibilities, by Michael D. Snediker - Chapter 6 [Discourse]: Discourse and the History of Sexuality, by Will Stockton SECTION 2: PSYCHOANALYTIC RESPONSES / Chapter 7: On Not Thinking Straight: Comments on a Conceptual Marriage, by R.D. Hinshelwood - Chapter 8: Queer as a New Shelter from Castration, by Abe Geldhof and Paul Verhaeghe - Chapter 9: The Redress of Psychoanalysis, by Ann Murphy - Chapter 10: Queer Directions from Lacan, by Ian Parker - Chapter 11: Queer Theory Meets Jung, by Claudette Kulkarni - Chapter 12: Queer Troubles for Psychoanalysis, by Carol Owens - Chapter 13: Clinique, by Aranye Fradenburg - Chapter 14: From Tragic Fall to Programmatic Blueprint: 'Behold this is Oedipus ...' by Olga Cox Cameron - Chapter 15: Enigmatic Sexuality, by Katrine Zeuthen and Judy Gammelgaard - Chapter 16: The Transforming Nexus: Psychoanalysis, Social Theory and Queer Childhood, by Ken Corbett - Chapter 17: Clinical Encounters: The Queer New Times, by Rob Weatherill - Chapter 18: Undoing Psychoanalysis: Towards a Clinical and Conceptual Metistopia, by Dany Nobus - Chapter 19: 'You make me feel like a natural woman': Thoughts on a Case of Transsexual Identity Formation and Queer Theory, by Ami Kaplan - Chapter 20: Sexual Difference: From Symptom to Sinthome, by Patricia Gherovici SECTION 3: RESPONSES TO PSYCHOANALYTIC PRACTICES ENCOUNTERING QUEER THEORIES / Chapter 21: A Plague on Both Your Houses, by Stephen Frosh - Chapter 22: Something Amiss, by Jacqueline Rose - Chapter 23: Taking Shelter from Queer, by Tim Dean - Chapter 24: Courageous Drawings of Vigilant Ambiguities, by Noreen O'Connor - Chapter 25: Understanding Homophobia, by Mark J. Blechner - Chapter 26: Transgender and Psychoanalysis, by Susan Stryker - Chapter 27: The Psychoanalysis that Dare Not Speak Its Name, Ona Nierenberg ABOUT THE COVER / On the Not-Meanings of Karla Black's There Can Be No Arguments, by Medb Ruane AFTERWORD, by Eve Watson

Encounters with Godard takes the reader on a personal voyage into the sensory pleasures and polyphonic rhythms of Jean-Luc Godard's multimedia work since the late 1970s, from his feature films and video essays to his published writings, art books, and media performances. Godard, suggests James S. Williams, lays ethical claim to the cinematic, defined in the broadest terms as relationality and artistic resistance. An introductory chapter on the extended history of La Chinoise (1967), a film explicitly of montage, is followed by seven different types of critical encounters with Godard, encompassing the fields of art and photography, music and literature, and foregrounding themes of gender and sexuality, race and violence, mystery and emotion. The Godard who emerges here is a restless and radical experimenter who establishes new cinematic thresholds through new technology and expands the creative potential and free exchange of the archives. Williams examines works including Nouvelle vague (1990), Film socialisme (2010), Hélas pour moi (1993), and the magnum opus Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98). Wide-ranging and accessible, Encounters with Godard marks a major intervention in the study of film aesthetics and ethics while forging a vital dialogue with literature, history and politics, art and art history, music and musicology, philosophy, and aesthetics.

How do images circulating in Pacific cultures and exchanged between them and their many visitors transform meanings for all involved? This fascinating collection explores how through mimesis, wayfarers and locales alike borrow images from one another to expand their cultural repertoire of meanings or borrow images from their own past to validate their identities.

Vittorio Morfino draws out the implications of the dynamic Spinoza-Machiavelli encounter by focusing on the concepts of causality, temporality and politics. This allows him to think through the relationship between ontology and politics, leading to an understanding of history as a complex and plural interweaving of different rhythms.

Digital Encounters is a cross media study of digital moving images in animation, cinema, games, and installation art.In a world increasingly marked by proliferating technologies, the way we encounter and understand these story-worlds, game spaces and art works reveals aspects of the ways in which we organize and decode the vast amount of visual mat

“The Enchanting Encounter with the East” belongs to cross-cultural studies and focuses on the attempts of European literati to get acquainted with the bizarre realm of the Far East during the Late Middle Ages. It turns out that western intellectuals lured by the marvels and myths of the Far East did a lot of spadework before taking a route that led to unfamiliar oriental realms. On this thorny path, many Eurocentric medieval fantasies had been debunked. The book shows how global connections had surfaced centuries before industrialization. The book falls into the genre of non-fiction history and centers on the recognition of lands and cultures of India, China, and the Mongols by the Latin medieval society. The storyline is based on the original online research and presents authentic arguments based on the author’s engagement with the sources. The readers might enjoy as well as profit from this comprehensive reference that does not require deep background knowledge. The content is provided in clear language and is supplemented with a bibliography and illustrations that will enrich the entire work.