Imaging Culture is a sociohistorical study of the meaning, function, and aesthetic significance of photography in Mali, West Africa, from the 1930s to the present. Spanning the dynamic periods of colonialism, national independence, socialism, and democracy, its analysis focuses on the studio and documentary work of professional urban photographers, particularly in the capital city of Bamako and in smaller cities such as Mopti and Ségu. Featuring the work of more than twenty-five photographers, it concentrates on those who have been particularly influential for the local development and practice of the medium as well as its international popularization and active participation in the contemporary art market. Imaging Culture looks at how local aesthetic ideas are visually communicated in the photographers' art and argues that though these aesthetic arrangements have specific relevance for local consumers, they transcend geographical and cultural boundaries to have value for contemporary global audiences as well. Imaging Culture is an important and visually interesting book which will become a standard source for those who study African photography and its global impact.

Imaging Culture is a sociohistorical study of the meaning, function, and aesthetic significance of photography in Mali, West Africa, from the 1930s to the present. Spanning the dynamic periods of colonialism, national independence, socialism, and democracy, its analysis focuses on the studio and documentary work of professional urban photographers, particularly in the capital city of Bamako and in smaller cities such as Mopti and Ségu. Featuring the work of more than twenty-five photographers, it concentrates on those who have been particularly influential for the local development and practice of the medium as well as its international popularization and active participation in the contemporary art market. Imaging Culture looks at how local aesthetic ideas are visually communicated in the photographers' art and argues that though these aesthetic arrangements have specific relevance for local consumers, they transcend geographical and cultural boundaries to have value for contemporary global audiences as well. Imaging Culture is an important and visually interesting book which will become a standard source for those who study African photography and its global impact.

Focusing on one landmark catastrophic event in the history of an emerging modern nation—the Great Kanto Earthquake that devastated Tokyo and surrounding areas in 1923—this fascinating volume examines the history of the visual production of the disaster. The Kanto earthquake triggered cultural responses that ran the gamut from voyeuristic and macabre thrill to the romantic sublime, media spectacle to sacred space, mournful commemoration to emancipatory euphoria, and national solidarity to racist vigilantism and sociopolitical critique. Looking at photography, cinema, painting, postcards, sketching, urban planning, and even scientific visualizations, Weisenfeld demonstrates how visual culture has powerfully mediated the evolving historical understanding of this major national disaster, ultimately enfolding mourning and memory into modernization.

The rulers of the Mughal Empire of India, who reigned from 1526 to 1858, spared no expense as patrons of the arts, particularly painting and music. They left as their legacy an extraordinarily rich body of commissioned artistic projects including illustrated manuscripts and miniature paintings that represent musical instruments, portraits of musicians, and the compositions of ensembles. These images from the basis of Bonnie C. Wade's study of how musicians of Hindustan encountered and Indianized music from the Persian cultural sphere. Combining ethnomusicological and art historical methods with history and lore, Wade has written a truly interdisciplinary study of cultural life on the Indian subcontinent. Wade focuses first on Akbar, showing how political and cultural agendas intertwined in the portrayal of Mughal court life. She then follows the depictions of music-making through paintings of Akbar's successors, Jahangir and Shah Jahan, to trace the gradual synthesis of Persian and Indian culture. Because music of the period was not notated but was transmitted orally, Wade relies on this wealth of visual evidence to reconstruct the musical life of the Mughals and its relation to the Mughal political agenda. As a major untapped resource, these images suggest new interpretations of the history of the Mughal Empire -- including original ideas about the role of patrons in the production of the arts and, importantly, the role of women in Mughal court life -- that are confirmed and complemented by the written sources of the period. Imaging Sound is a contribution to many fields in its unique combination of sources and methods: it is the study of musical change; of image-making in the pastand the methodological use of images as "texts" in the present; of the role of patronage in the Mughal Empire; and of the development of South Asian culture. In her synthesis of music, literature, art, and culture, Wade deepens our knowledge of the manner in which the orally transmitted tradition of Hindustani music came to be what it is today. The book is beautifully illustrated with more than 180 reproductions of Mughal paintings and manuscripts. These rare images are the basis for a study that is fully immersed both in current intellectual debates and in three centuries of Mughal cultural life.

Engages with the impact of modern technology on experimental physicists. This study reveals how the increasing scale and complexity of apparatus has distanced physicists from the very science which drew them into experimenting, and has fragmented microphysics into different technical traditions.

This ground-breaking study of the Caribbean's iconography traces the history of visual representations of the region,as perceived by outsider and insider alike, over the last five hundred years. It circles the Caribbean while focusing on Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Barbados, tracing the parameters drawn on each society by the colonial encounter and drawing from the methodologies and material of history, literature, art, gender, and cultural studies.

We are currently facing the sixth mass extinction of species in the history of life on Earth, biologists claim—the first one caused by humans. Heise argues that understanding these stories and symbols is indispensable for any effective advocacy on behalf of endangered species. More than that, she shows how biodiversity conservation, even and especially in its scientific and legal dimensions, is shaped by cultural assumptions about what is valuable in nature and what is not.