Visual Culture and Latin American Studies

The Visual Turn

Amid the "posts" and "turns" of contemporary critical debate, visual culture is booming in the Euro-American academy. There is a palpable feeling in the humanities classroom that sight is currently the favored sense in this regional academic arena. Its objects and methods of study, over the past ten years or so, have been transformed beyond recognition. Traditional disciplines such as English, or indeed my own discipline of Modern Languages—once squarely literary—have recently widened their purview. And now the novel, poetry, and drama vie for attention alongside a wealth of visual artifacts and practices such as film, TV, photography, painting, performance, digital and virtual imaging, etc. In turn, changes in the objects of study have necessitated shifts in the critical tools and modes of analysis required for approaching them.

The emergence of the field of study known as visual culture has been posited as a symptom of, and as a response to, the image-based contemporary cultural landscape that, it is claimed, we now inhabit, and which in turn inhabits us. In the age of the world picture—to cite an essay by Heidegger (1977) that is often positioned as a pre-text in a growing theoretical corpus—the 1990 s witnessed an explosion into print of anthologies, readers, and introductions whose express aim has been to stake out the shifting visual terrains of contemporary culture. In this busy marketplace, the major academic publishers have issued an array of remarkably similar titles that jostle for our attention: Routledge's The Visual Culture Reader (1998), not to be confused with Sage's Visual Culture: The Reader (1999); or Oxford's Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (2001), as distinct from another Routledge title, An Introduction to Visual Culture (1999); or, most recently and simply, Polity's Visual Culture (2003). That this list is by no means exhaustive indicates that visual culture is out there and, for better or worse, resolutely with us at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

To be sure, the rise of visual culture is a relatively new, progressive, and potentially exciting endeavor. Visual culture, as an object of study, not only provides an opportunity to reflect on contemporary image cultures that are purported to be increasingly part of everyday human experience. As a critical practice that comes in the wake of, and builds upon, the methodologies of cultural studies and queer, postcolonial, and feminist theory, among other radical interventions into the humanities, the newness of visual culture also promises to shed light on the pressing political concerns of the day from a different perspective. Nevertheless, the existence of volumes such as those listed above signal that visual culture is already beginning to establish certain orthodoxies. In this essay, therefore, my intention, in part, is to take stock of the visual-culture phenomenon or movement (as object of study and mode of analysis) as it has emerged so far.¹ This is because, as an academic movement on the ascendant, in some of its guises, visual culture displays a tendency to proclaim itself as innovative and progressive, almost utopian—claims that, on further scrutiny, may in fact prove problematic.

Visual culture, as proposed by some of its practitioners, promises to liberate us from the limitations of narrative and textuality, and to enable us to account for visuality, if not necessarily in visual terms, then at least on the visual's terms.² Visual culture also purports to transcend the conventional confines of disciplinarity, and depending on whose account you read, is an "inter-," "trans-," or even "post-" disciplinary mode of inquiry. Most pressingly in the context of the current discussion, however, visual culture has come of age as globalization is calling into question established national boundaries and the allegiances that they foster. Images now circulate transnationally in ways that were barely imaginable a mere 20 years ago. Emerging in tandem with such developments, visual culture concerns itself to some considerable degree with the issues that arise when images travel. Indeed, as W. J. T. Mitchell (1994) states in a seminal essay: "the need for a...