Chapter 4 uses the figure of the mirror as a way into questions of mimesis, by which I mean sensuous, contact-based imitative practice, rather than “realistic” representation. This chapter theorizes what I call “mirror games,” which are embodied mimetic performances that find Bechdel experimenting with the space between self and other, subject and object. These games are about negotiating what it means to be her own person, a person who comes out of the body of her mother but who lays claim to a separate self. Is there a mode of mimetic reproduction that is enabling rather than annihilating? I investigate Bechdel’s corporeal, sensuous relationship to mimesis at three sites: photography, diaries, and symbolic play. At each site, Bechdel negotiates her similarity to, and her difference from, whatever it is she is copying: her mother’s face, her father’s photo album, a parent’s handwriting. The line is touch, caress; the line is also an edge that marks distinction, dividing this and that, me and you. Through these procedures, Bechdel develops a relational self that passes through alterity, as through the looking glass.

Chapter Two sets the scene, providing the context of regional networks within which global circulations of law were elaborated. The chapter shows how Malay elite figures such as Abu Bakar navigated regional and familial networks to make space for themselves in imperial and colonial hierarchies. Abu Bakar’s story encapsulates the ambition, sense of self-invention and possibility that accompanied Malay elite exploration of the world in the nineteenth century, explorations made both possible and needful by colonial and imperial encounter. These explorations also gave rise to a welter of new and pressing anxieties around recognition, authority and legitimacy, and representation. Tensions proliferated, between belonging and innovation, authority and representation, recognition and invention. Where textual archives often served to efface or resolve these tensions, visual material often captured them, in all their creativity, anxiety, and alterations. Chapter Two places these archives in conversation, in order to explore the critical utility of elite biography as a problematic for global Islamic history, against an imperial backdrop.

This chapter examines William Burroughs’ extensive and experimental visual art practice, which spanned over four decades and included paintings, collages, photography, and sculpture – most notably his “shotgun paintings.” Often created privately and with utilitarian, even esoteric, intent, Burroughs’ art parallels his literary work in its disruption of conventional forms. The chapter traces the evolution of his practice, from early ink drawings and photo experiments to later works shaped by magic, science, and collaboration with an impressive range of artists. It situates Burroughs within key artistic movements and scenes – from Dada in Paris and Pop Art in New York to outsider art in Kansas – while highlighting the limited critical attention his visual work has received. Despite numerous late-life and posthumous exhibitions, Burroughs remains an underexplored figure in contemporary art history. This study calls for deeper scholarly engagement with his unique and enigmatic body of work, which continues to resist categorization and invites new interpretations.

Visual popular culture flourished in the nineteenth century. Museums began democratizing to include wider audiences, even to the extent that some hosted exotic objects, live people, and animals. These sensationalist or “dime” museums were best represented by P. T. Barnum’s American Museum (1841–1865) and its dioramas and panoramas, objects, illusions and stunts, and animal and human performances. Popularization of visual culture also occurred in the commercial growth of book and magazine illustrations as well as in wall art print reproductions, all of which admitted the fine arts into middle-class parlors. Photographs and daguerreotypes, especially portraiture and landscapes, became fashionable. Outside the home, an increasingly urbanized environment admitted new visual elements in a landscape of sensory overload. Broadsides, billboards, and wall posters all contributed to democratizing spectatorship, and visual spectatorship itself became an essential component of urban living. New visual culture reshaped both who could see and who was seen.

Allen Ginsberg’s fastidiousness about retroactively dating three decades of his own photographs in the 1980s is a significant part of a historiographical project. Ginsberg strives to document his role in the creation of a movement that enables viewers to perceive self-portraits and individual portraits of other key Beat figures such as Kerouac as communal objects. Ginsberg’s inscriptions couple the author’s penchant for mythmaking with his interest in narrating events that are made significant through their incorporation into a composition that suggests a heightened meaning for each individual image. Collecting the ninety-one portraits in Allen Ginsberg: Photographs, placing them in a roughly chronological order, and providing information about each image through captions that feature the date of composition, the place in which the image was taken, and how each subject contributed to the Beat movement or to subsequent countercultural movements such as hippie and punk that Ginsberg regards as part of the Beat legacy, the poet displays his interest in what Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory regards as the creation of “collective memory.”

In ‘Notes on Writing a Novel’, Elizabeth Bowen addresses the visual angle an author may choose to adopt as a problem in writerly technique: ‘Where is the camera-eye to be located?’ As she was a self-described ‘visual writer’, it follows that an exploration of her visuality offers a useful lens to perceive her work. Talk of lenses leads to thoughts of eyes, glasses, and photography, all of which feature prominently in her fiction. Bowen’s visuality also manifests itself across technical, aesthetic, and thematic levels, through linguistic choice, and in the rendering of perception. Through a selection of novels and short stories, this essay considers Bowen’s visuality under two lens-based categories – the human ‘roving eye’ and the photograph, index of the mechanical ‘camera eye’ – in an effort to apprehend, at least in part, her literary focus, and how she registers, records, and frames impressions and experiences.

An account of the making of the Wooster Group’s Rumstick Road, an autobiographical inquiry into the circumstances and legacy of the suicide of Spalding Gray’s mother. (The production, in rehearsal in the fall and winter of 1976, held an open rehearsal in December before opening the following spring.) The chapter considers the Wooster Group’s approach to acting (distinct from the style of its predecessor, the Performance Group), the visual art sources for the production’s imagery and structure, the use of recording technology, the role of the spectator, and the nature of privacy.

A survey of drama and performance in the period 1975-1980, with emphasis on the innovative plays and experimental productions that appeared in New York in 1976, along with consideration of surrounding developments in visual art, literature, film, and music, and attention to the politics of these transitional years.

A reading of the best-known experimental work of 1976, Einstein on the Beach, that traces the sources of its imagery in mass media, popular culture, and art history, and that studies how the kinetics and contingency of live performance complicate the classical decorum associated with Robert Wilson’s theater. The chapter also discusses the performance styles of Lucinda Childs and Sheryl Sutton, the relationship of the opera to mathematics, the value of error and the handmade, and the persistence of emotion despite the production’s apparent coolness.

An examination of Meredith Monk’s 1976 opera Quarry in the context of her other works of music theater and film, as well as selected music compositions from the full span of her career. The analysis reads the opera alongside scholarship on the "post-memory" generation (characterized by its distance from the Holocaust), as well as on photography, monuments and "counter-monuments," and other memorial art.

Chapter 3 reads two maritime fictions against the cartographic and photographic records of US War Department’s Bureau of Insular Affairs. I argue that the camera’s unpredictable mode of development heightened colonial anxieties about the assimilation of the Philippines into the United States. For a literary counterpoint to the Bureau’s colonizing project, I read back and forth between the island-hopping narratives of Ernest Hemingway and Ramon Muzones, a Hiligaynon language novelist from the Visayas. Their shipboard fictions set adrift the repressive and racializing logics of US military technics. But the novelists move in different directions. Disillusioned, the late Hemingway gets lost at sea, uninterested in a return to national homeland. Muzones complies a pre-Hispanic nautical map, a regional Visayan space within the newly independent Philippine republic.

While a three-dimensional statue may be photographed from any angle, some views are more pervasive than others, and a published photograph of an Attic grave relief not in a frontal view can hardly be found at all. Relief sculpture seems to ask for a frontal view, while sculpture in the round presents itself to the viewer wherever s/he stands. Since the late nineteenth century, however, there have also been attempts to limit the range of “possible” views onto freestanding sculpture by defining for each statue a principal view, or Hauptansicht. Such attempts thereby turn sculpture into relief. The conceptualization of sculpture as relief can be traced back both to sculptor Adolf Hildebrand’s Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (1893) and to the rise of photography in the academic study of sculpture. The practice of subjecting sculpture to a particular view, however, stretches even further back, at least to neoclassicism. Indeed, the privileging of one view is a compositional strategy in ancient sculpture itself. Yet in contrast to the photographic experience of a statue strictly limited to its “correct” view, the “bad” views, or nonprincipal views, still played a crucial role in the ancient aesthetic experience of sculpture.