Imaging Identity

This volume explores the many facets and ongoing transformations of our visual identities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its chapters engage with the constitution of personal, national and cultural identities at the intersection of the verbal and the visual across a range of media. They are attentive to how the medialities and (im)materialities of modern image culture inflect our conceptions of identity, examining the cultural and political force of literature, films, online video messages, rap songs, selfies, digital algorithms, social media, computer-generated images, photojournalism and branding, among others. They also reflect on the image theories that emerged in the same time span—from early theorists such as Charles S. Peirce to twentieth-century models like those proposed by Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida as well as more recent theories by Jacques Rancière, W. J. T. Mitchell and others. The contributors of Imaging Identity come from a wide range of disciplines including literary studies, media studies, art history, tourism studies and semiotics. The book will appeal to an interdisciplinary readership interested in contemporary visual culture and image theory. 

Johannes Riquet is Associate Professor of English Literature at Tampere University, Finland. He is the author of The Aesthetics of Island Space: Perception, Ideology, Geopoetics (2019) and the co-editor of Spatial Modernities: Geography, Narrative, Imaginaries (2018). He is currently working on railway fiction in different media and contemporary representations of the transnational Arctic. Martin Heusser is Emeritus Professor at the English Department of the University of Zurich, Switzerland. His research interests include word and image studies, American studies and literary theory. At present, he is working on representations of the Vietnam War in graphic novels and the role of spatiality in the writings of Thomas Hardy.