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London ; New York Routledge 2000. Large 8vo softcover 272pp index, b/w illus. very good, corners bumped. Olu Oguibe, Stuart S. Golding Endowed Chair in African Art, University of South Floridan"Following his excellent critical anthology on visual culture, Professor Mirzoeff brings us a wonderful body of pioneering scholarship in this volume, one that recommends itself as essential reading in this fascinating, new area of study." --This text refers to the Library Binding edition. nnAbout the AuthornNicholas Mirzoeff is Associate Professor of Art and Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the author of Bodyscape: Art, Modernity and the Ideal Figure, and the editor of The Visual Culture Reader (1998), both published by Routledge. nnBook DescriptionnThe emerging field of visual culture poses rough terrain for beginners with its nuanced distinctions and reliance on postmodern theory. Not until An Introduction to Visual Culture has any book attempted to present a comprehensive and accessible approach to this exciting new subject. nnNicholas Mirzoeff begins by defining what visual culture is, and explores how and why visual media--fine art, cinema, the Internet, advertising, performance, photography, television--have become so central to contemporary everyday life. He argues that the visual is replacing the linguistic as our primary means of communicating with each other and of understanding our postmodern world, demonstrating this through powerful examples, from Diana's funeral to the Latina singer Selena, and from the X-Files to Independence Day. nnMirzoeff then examines the importance of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and the body in visual culture. These various forms of social discourse provide essential tools for reading images and thus define the study of visual culture as an inherently political project. Mirzoeff tackles the difficult subject of the gaze and the "other" and offers the reader a clear synthesis of these concepts. nnLively and provocative, An Introduction to Visual Culture offers an accessible entry to this new way of understanding images. .