Crusading-as-entertainment is not new. The fictionalisation of the crusades, Susan Edgington remarks, began even before the capture of Jerusalem in 1099; the medieval Chanson de geste, tales of chivalry and even the chronicles themselves, all sought to entertain audiences while informing them, recording past events and inspiring their emulation. The crusades, then, have always been (in the broadest sense) fictive events – alongside military, political and theological ones. Increasingly, the technologies of entertainment production and consumption have commodified the crusades for a broad audience; beginning with troubadour songs and epic poems and expanding their reach through the production of books and pamphlets, all the way to the twentieth century’s invention of the cinema and the twenty-first-century explosion of digital culture. They have produced, as Jerome de Groot has termed the boom in historical culture more generally, ‘historiocopia’: an almost endless abundance of historical material in (especially Western) popular culture.

The mystery’s radical social politics, Chapter 2 argues, lies less in its melodramatic attempts to spur social action than in its attention to the trope of the misleading clue. The urban Mysteries purport to offer readers a “social kaleidoscope,” the name of a magical x-ray apparatus the demon Asmodeus gives the narrator in George Thompson’s Revelations of Asmodeus (1849) so that he can see “all things in two aspects – as they seem, and as they really are.” However, the mystery’s relish in disguise and delight in turning clues of social identity on their heads make its “social kaleidoscope” work like an actual kaleidoscope, utterly shaking up confidence in visible identity. The mystery showcases a kind of kaleidoscopic seeing that fragments and collapses divisions between people, fostering recognition of human commonality and new forms of social trust. The Mysteries’ interest in social marginality as a potential source of social power aligns them with radical, transatlantic political movements such as socialism, republicanism, abolition, and early feminism. These elements also importantly shape the literary detective, who incubates in the Mysteries as an often-marginal figure who gains power by exploiting indeterminacy and by masterfully reading and manipulating signs

The mid-century transatlantic explosion of city-mysteries modernized the mystery genre into a form that encapsulates a popular politics focused on the powers but also the difficulties of perception. Urban Mysteries narratives illuminate popular understandings of the century’s growing cult of science, the fluid and transformable nature of modern identity, and the complex relationship between visual and social conundrums. The genre’s dependence on the misleading clue complicates ideas about heroism and criminality, producing indirect challenges to traditional social hierarchies. Emerging at a time of increasingly visible social inequity and increasingly possible social mobility, the Mysteries describe for their readers less a modern world that might be saved by chivalric, scientifically-minded heroes than a world in which virtue and vice are rendered uncertain and morality is relative and contingent. As they generated suspense out of their rapidly urbanizing culture, the Mysteries engaged and mystified scientific process; proclaimed and problematized moral certainty; encouraged and stultified social action. In short, the mid-century mystery’s visual paradoxes produced a politics responsive to a modernizing world that was itself envisioned as a kind of paradoxopolis

In the early 1840s, Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (1842-3) relocated fictional mystery from a medieval-gothic imaginary to a modern urban landscape, and sparked a widespread international craze for stories involving the secrets, iniquities, and inequities of the modern city. I trace the evolution of mystery as a designation for fiction and argue that considering the modern mystery widely, starting with its penny press origins, reveals an extraordinarily diverse and socially radical genre. Expanding and historicizing the genre in this way reveals the limits of the dominant critical view of mystery as an inherently conservative genre. Rather than functioning as a tool of social discipline, the modern mystery teaches readers to distrust immediate perceptions and to scrutinize assumptions. I introduce the terms visual fetishism, kaleidoscopic vision, and kaleidoscopic reading to help describe how the modern mystery engages readers in plots that depend on misleading clues, the thrill of visual instability, and the unexpected pleasures of spectatorial discomfort, and argue that the mystery’s paradoxical attitudes towards visual powers and problems cultivate a form of empathetic vision that works to challenge the very social hierarchies the genre has often been understood to uphold.

This chapter examines 1940s African American poetry, nonfiction, and drama that share tropes of being outside time to explore attitudes on visual and historical representation, national sovereignty, and civil rights. Contextualizing this work between 1920s New Negro literature and 1960s Black Arts Movement literature, it charts changing African American perspectives on the uses of history, the symbolism of apocalypse, and the ever-elusive promises of democracy. The 1940s texts are Melvin Tolson’s Rendezvous with America, Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage,” Langston Hughes’ The Sun Do Move and “Jim Crow’s Last Stand,” Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices, and Roi Ottley’s New World A–Coming. These authors expand global 1940s conversations about colonialism, democracy, and sovereignty to include domestic civil rights in the US, seeking capacious literary and visual means to capture an interconnectedness with Western European artifacts, contrasting both 1920s and 1960s African American texts, which tend more toward spotlighting African American achievement.

The popularization of psychoanalysis following World War II provided African American writers such as Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ann Petry with a new paradigm for exploring the effects of racial prejudice and discrimination on Black identity and consciousness. The new field of social psychiatry helped these writers expand their frame to encompass the broader environment of American racism and examine how segregation was not just about the control of Black bodies but about the psychological control of Black minds. Their nonfiction writings and experimentation with the documentary mode of the photo-essay illuminate how visual culture could be adapted to reveal Black lives under the pressure of racial discrimination and increasing cold war surveillance. All four fought to find and improvise safe spaces, both physical and psychological, for African Americans during a decade in which the national security state overshadowed and conflicted with civil rights goals.

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.

Ignatius Sancho is the subject of a fabulous 1768 portrait by Thomas Gainsborough now in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. He has also been associated with images by Hogarth, and copies of his business card for his Westminster shop, sometimes attributed to Hogarth, are held in the V&A and the British Museum. This chapter explores Sancho’s relationship to eighteenth-century London’s visual culture not only through images by Gainsborough and Hogarth, but also through Sancho’s own rhetorical style, and the networks and relationships with artist correspondents that emerge through his letters, arguing that Sancho emerges as an agent as well as a subject in eighteenth-century British visual culture.

The Introduction outlines the intermedial method of this book, which brings together Milton with nineteenth-century writers and artists who engage with each other’s work at the same time as reading Milton directly. It provides an overview of Milton’s place in the visual and material culture of the long nineteenth century. This includes the literary galleries of the late eighteenth century, the development of proto-cinematic technologies and stage spectacles, illustration on canvas and the page, and interventions in books such as extra-illustration and marginalia. The Introduction also addresses the various metaphors drawn from Milton’s writing that scholars have used to explain his influence, comparing him to a ghost, a troll, a father, even God. It then proposes the epic simile as a useful model for the way Milton is understood in this book: just as Milton’s similes describing Satan suggest, a powerful figure can be like many disparate things at the same time.

Chapter 1 starts with a discussion of the relevance of images to the displine of psychology, then it proceeds to a definition of some of the key terms of the book: public images, visual culture, visual/language distinctions, and the researcher’s viewing position.

This introduction presents the historical and social context of Argentina in the nineteenth century, as it relates to the local Afro-descendant population. It explains the building-nation conceived by the dominant groups toward the end of the century. The project sought to create a national imaginary founded on the notion of a culturally and racially homogeneous country of white European descent. This project necessarily entailed the disappearance of the population of African (and Indigenous) descent as part of the nation. The strategies used to achieve this project (census, cultural appropriation, official history) are mentioned. In this sense, it is proposed that the construction and recurrent use of visual stereotypes throughout the nineteenth century (concentrated in specific iconographic nuclei) was one of the strategies used in the process of invisibilization of the descendants of enslaved Africans in Argentina. It also explains the state of the art on the subject, the theoretical framework, and the methodology used in the research.

Using the case of the exhibition Véxoa: Nós Sabemos, the first Indigenous-only arts exhibition at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2020–2021), we explore the deconstruction of the coloniality of a visual culture based on stereotypes of Indigenous peoples; self-representation as a strategy to combat the invisibilisation of Indigenous authorship in Brazil; and Indigenous arts as affective interventions that amplify the struggle for Indigenous rights. We show how contemporary Indigenous arts in Brazil are unsettling categories persistently associated with native aesthetics, and enacting anti-racism by challenging the dominant culture’s appropriation and exploitation of Indigenous cultures. In Véxoa, objects perceived as artifacts or crafts by hegemonic visual cultures are recontextualised as works of art, empowering Indigenous artists in symbolic, political and economic terms. Indigenous artists can disrupt the power dynamics that perpetuate racism, demonstrating that, in order to confront colonial and extractive practices that have historically marginalised Indigenous peoples, it is important for museums to establish collaborative relationships with Indigenous artists and community members in the curatorial process.

The development of urbanism in Europe, beginning in the high Middle Ages, gave rise to many and diverse ways of representing cities. In the beginning these representations show cities as compact units, and as places characterised by a particular social order grounded in the history of salvation. New ways of conceiving cities were explored along with the humanist interest in urbanism, perspective, and historical knowledge. From around 1500, representations experimented with how cities could be displayed as differentiated architectural spaces with an individual sense of self. At the same time the technology of printing helped a market for images of towns and cities to develop. Measuring, but also aesthetic models and the needs of the administration became increasingly important. Scholars, artists and later engineers and photographers contributed to a broad range of images and maps that display cities from manifold angles.

The chapter begins with a survey of literature on nineteenth-century colonial exhibitions and world’s fairs as a cultural practice and the complicity of academic disciplines such as anthropology and ethnology in promoting violent forms of pedagogy. It provides a brief overview of the ‘nasty’ Indian nautch, a racially charged practice framed simultaneously by colonial desire and abhorrence, which moved between the Empire’s exhibitions and theatres as disturbances. It then examines one particular colonial exhibition, the failed Liberty of London’s 1885 exhibition, and specifically analyses the work of nautch dancers whose moving bodies both engaged and disrupted the scopophilia framing live human exhibits. The chapter then listens to the dissenting voices of Liberty’s performers and delves into the legal proceedings they set in motion against their producers. In the final section, the chapter examines how re-imagining the Liberty’s nautch experience by embodying archival silences and slippages might be a usefully anarchic ‘corpo-active’ method that animates the memories of subaltern dancers forgotten by both British and Indian nationalist history.

This chapter examines the fictions of nautch dancers painted by local artists (patuas) in nineteenth-century Kalighat paintings from Bengal. Part I, ‘Bazaar Art, Bazaari Women’, highlights key features and techniques of Kalighat paintings in representing the female/courtesan figure (or Bibi). Part II, ‘Patuas and Performance’, discusses the intimacy between visual and performance worlds in Kalighat paintings, noticing how patuas borrowed gestures and bodies from Bengal’s performance forms such as jatra and khemta. Through contemporary social satires and reviews produced by caste-privileged, Bengali male authors, the chapter tracks a growing anti-nautch narrative targeting the baiji and khemta dancers of Bengal whilst popular circulation of their imagery through Kalighat paintings flourished. Part III, ‘Murdering Dance’, examines two real murders: the 1873 Tarakeshwar case, a sensational event that rocked Calcutta and was captured in several notable Kalighat paintings, and the 1875 Sonagachi murder case of Golap, a sex worker in Calcutta. Visual traces of these two murders are read as part of an anti-nautch discourse in which colonial law and native patriarchy centred violence against a dancer’s body within debates on female sexual desire and deviance, and against which subaltern women performed their insurgent gestures of refusal.