Research Area B Transcultural Visuality (B4)

Project Leaders: Sumathi Ramaswamy, Barbara Mittler, Christiane Brosius
Project Members: Laila Abu-Er-Rub, Cathrine Bublatzky, Roos Gerritsen, Kajri Jain, Monica Juneja, Thomas Maissen, Kavita Singh, Melanie Trede, Paola Zamperini

Transcultural visual studies are emerging as a new challenging field within art history, globalisation and media studies. The term can be traced back to the interest attached to debates around ‘pictorial turn’ (W. J. T. Mitchell 1994) as well as ‘intervisuality’ (e.g. Mirzoeff 2001) or ‘interocularity’ (Mirzoeff 2000) as well as the role of media in migration and globalisation contexts. The role of images in the context of diverse cultural processes and historical phenomena is acknowledged yet, at the same time, it is still a marginal field within the Humanities.
The flow of images across geographical, cultural and disciplinary borders has become a centre-stage focus of attention, for instance, in the case of the Mohammad cartoon debate. Assuming that the flows are by no means symmetrical but are driven by varying forces, motivations and discourses, the aim is to address this transgressing mobility of images as a key challenge by tying it to current theoretical debates as well as concrete case studies deriving from the Cluster’s agenda and the group-members' own research.

The agenda of this learning group revolved around a systematic follow-up of questions related to the role of visuality and visual culture in the context of transcultural flows and asymmetries between Asia and Europe and within Asia. A core group of scholars from Heidelberg and abroad engaged in key arenas of transcultural visual culture in terms of theory and methods within their research fields: “archiving practices” (2009); “icon: affect and spectacle” (2010); “colour: transculturality's sensoriums” (2011). They shared an interest in overcoming Eurocentric concepts of looking at and researching ‘visuality’, emphasising the transcultural entanglements of images and image-related practices as they journey across the globe, history, media spaces and social contexts. The idea of the learning group was to address the structural anomaly of visual flows, to enable faculty to thoroughly discuss key issues related to the cluster and to learn from peers as well as experts in the field. Another aim was to engage, beyond the frame of the individual research questions, with given topics of the cluster, addressing concepts of publicity, media flows and shifts, migrating images and people.