This chapter examines how people of the Black diaspora in the United States have articulated their histories and experiences in comics and graphic novels, and how they have developed singular aesthetic strategies to counter a white comics imaginary and its stereotyped depiction of Black bodies and culture, in order to construct more accurate images of themselves. This includes revisiting American history – particularly enslavement and Civil Rights activism – through a Black lens and with Black readers in mind. This historical rewriting engages with the social, political, and cultural contributions of Black people, filling voids and questioning occlusions. The chapter studies groundbreaking works of this nature by authors such as Kyle Baker, Roland and Taneisha Laird, and Joel Christian Gill. It also highlights the importance of graphic novels depicting the Black communal experience in the context of resistance to violence and the fight for social justice. Finally, it discusses the importance of Black embodiment and the embracing of Black culture, from early works such as Jackie Ormes’s strips in the 1950s to contemporary graphic novels like Ebony Flowers’s Hot Comb (2019).

Taking the narrow notion of manga outside of Japan as its starting point, this chapter refrains from introducing the diversity of comics in Japan in support of a transculturally open approach. From a form-conscious perspective, it conceptualizes manga as a highly affective type of comics that share characteristics with non-Japanese comics far beyond the “manga” label. Following a brief historical survey of what “manga” has meant in English since the 1980s, the device of affective eyes takes center stage. Graphic narratives by Osamu Tezuka, Keiji Nakazawa, Keiko Takemiya, and Jirō Taniguchi serve as examples for how extreme close-ups of eyes have operated across periods and genres, namely, not only as representations of interiority or ethnicity, but also as material signposts and guides of visual perception: eyes draw attention, get readers involved prior to critical interpretation, establish intimacy with characters, provide a node for a page’s visual fragments, help to obscure the divide between inside and outside, subject and object, self and other. Moving gingerly into an ocular history of manga as an affective form of comics, the chapter seeks to turn away from essentialist, as well as culturalist, definitions of what manga is in favor of how it operates.

The chapter explores translation between images and language through the practice of audio description for blind and partially sighted theatre audiences. This practice exceeds analytical models such as ekphrasis or intersemiotic translation because of the particular circumstances in which the texts are received: they are performed live alongside their sources (set, costume, lighting, gestures), and in dialogue with other performance modalities (such as live and recorded sound). The embodied nature of the practice affects how the describer constructs a spectatorial ‘gaze’, particularly in relation to performers’ bodies. Examples are drawn from two performances that foreground bodies and the gaze: Beauty and the Beast (Julie Atlas Muz and Mat Fraser, 2013), and a short cabaret act, Scarf Dance by Amelia Cavallo. The latter performance suggests ways in which attention to the gaze in burlesque might help to develop a ‘critical audio description’.

This chapter argues that Samuel Beckett’s plays function as a kind of fulcrum in a theatrical history of staging and thematising surveillance, extending from Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859) through Augusta Gregory’s Spreading the News (1904), to Enda Walsh’s Arlington (2016) and David Lloyd’s The Press (2009) and The Pact (2021). Surveillance agencies rely heavily on technology to gather information, but depend on human beings to store, order, and interpret it, and dramatic narratives exploit inconsistencies and injustices arising from slippages between data and its application. Boucicault, Gregory, Walsh, and Lloyd are counterpointed to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Catastrophe, and What Where, which theatricalise the structuring influence of monitoring and scrutiny on the texture of Irish social experience, personal and public. Once classified in an archive or record, or interpreted in policy and implemented in practice, ‘intelligence’ plays out less as a function of rigorous analysis than ideological determination.

Here I turn to Merleau-Ponty’s account of the way we experience others in and through their attitudes and engagements. I show how he rejects all accounts of originally experiencing of the other as an analogue, whether consciously or by way of analogical appresentation. He is keenly aware of the original and intercorporeal expressivity of others, in which our being animated is already our being expressive and in which our bodies can best be compared with works of art. What is expressed is inseparable from the way it is expressed. He goes on to show that our comportment at once expresses our unique styles and our original enculturation. Though we are exposed to the gazes of others, Merleau-Ponty makes a compelling case against Sartre that we can never be objectified as mere things. The experience of the other is of a unique and transcendent existent who can always shatter our preconceptions.

Chapter 10 explores the work of Foster Parents Plan (PLAN), whose presence in the Asian region began in the 1950s, extending its scope beyond Europe from where it originated during the Spanish Civil War. PLAN was distinct from other humanitarian programmes in that it developed a child sponsorship scheme. The language of development, financial assistance to so-called Third World nations and humanitarian aid invariably reflected earlier practices of colonialism, such as sending administrators to colonies and developing narratives of Western superiority. PLAN at this time shows a hybrid form of humanitarianism in which the organisation never entirely relinquished its charity label. The human rights campaigns that marked this period were absent from PLAN’s firmly embedded form of humanitarianism, which retained elements of colonial paternalism as well as newly formed concepts of social justice, underpinned by moralism. Max Harris, Australian writer, poet and journalist, took an active and leading role in promoting the aims of PLAN in the region. He did so with great zest and enthusiasm. A study of the correspondence with the children that Harris sponsored, which aimed to capture the voices of children, reveals these voices were severely compromised and appropriated to serve the fundraising endeavours of PLAN itself. These attempts reflected Western constructs that aimed to elevate PLAN donors and sponsors to the status of saviours of ‘Third World’ countries and communities and satisfy their gaze.

This chapter returns to a long-standing issue in in language and identity research based on life story interviews - the need for theoretical and methodological rigour (Pavlenko, 2007). It begins with background: first a brief discussion of identity that highlights those aspects of the construct that later come to the fore, and second, presentation of a version of positioning theory (PT) recently developed by the author (Block, 2017). This version draws on the original PT model developed by Rom Harré and his associates but importantly, it expands on this model with the addition of constructs taken from sociolinguistics, sociology and social theory, including authenticity and authentication (Bucholtz, 2003), belonging (Guibernau, 2013), field and habitus (Bourdieu, 1993, 2000), discourse formations and gaze (Foucault, 1989, 2003) and resistance (Seymour, 2006). The second half of the chapter examines an excerpt from an interview with an English-medium instruction lecturer, drawing on constructs developed in the first part. The aim is to show how the version of PT presented can lead to a detailed and nuanced interpretation of the construction of identity, turn by turn, in an interaction.

The role of embodiment in social interactions has attracted increasing attention in the last decade, both in the area of conversation analysis and that of cognitive science. Embodiment refers to all aspects of nonverbal, bodily behaviour, such as body posture and orientation, hand movements and gaze. This chapter will explain the concept of embodiment in both cognitive science and conversation-analytically informed research on social interaction, will present a state-of-the art review of research on embodiment in childhood interaction and will make clear the implications of this research for embodied practices in interactions with children, especially for childhood educators.

The chapter deals with the absence of Aeneas’ gaze on Dido in Aeneid 1. When the queen makes her way to the temple of Juno, no passage in the narrative informs the reader that the hero has turned his eyes on her. Right away, the lack of any responses to Dido’s first appearance clashes with the expectations of the readers. From Ovid to Valerius Flaccus, from Probus to Pöschl, readers express their dissatisfaction with the hero’s behaviour by filling in the gap left by Virgil, developing a sort of ‘ghost text’, an alternative, virtual Aeneid that ends up overlaying the real one. It is argued in conclusion that Virgil may have left the narrative void in Book 1 on purpose, in order to fill it himself in Book 6, where Aeneas’ gaze and emotions towards Dido, at her last appearance in the poem, are surprisingly highlighted.

While the stereotype of the oriental villain and the practice of yellowface have been discussed by scholars, less has been said about how practices of cinematography and editing more subtly controlled the representation of Asian immigrants in American film. This chapter examines how orientalism informed American feature-length silent films, including Chinatown Nights (1929) and A Tale of Two Worlds (1921), by visualizing the negative impact of Chinese immigration, depicting the investigation of Chinatown’s people and spaces by white American heroes, and concluding with the reassertion of occidental dominance over oriental people and spaces. In contrast, films such as The Tong-Man (1919) presented resistance to cinematic regulatory gazes by casting Asian American actors in key roles, including silent film’s only Asian American star, Sessue Hayakawa, to challenge those orientalist constructions of subjectivity and objectivity. This chapter demonstrates that, while many silent films depicted Chinatown as a space for white American adventure and Chinese immorality, some demonstrated an appreciation for Chinese immigrants who desired the American dream and assimilation in America’s melting pot.

Chapter 6 shifts the focus to female performers within the classical music industry. Francesca Placanica considers the increased opportunities which female performers, both singers and instrumentalists, gained throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, not only in terms of being able to achieve star status, but also through being able to integrate into professional orchestras. Focusing upon the trumpeter Alison Balsom and percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, she considers the new opportunities that have developed over recent decades for women to maintain careers as virtuosa performers of instruments historically deemed unsuitable for women to play. Placanica also deftly probes the high degree of sexualisation which many contemporary performers, including Yuja Wang, Katherine Jenkins, and Vanessa Mae, face in the contemporary classical music industry and how this can be negotiated in a mediatised culture.

This chapter seeks to locate George IV’s fleeting visit to Edinburgh in what cultural historian Peter de Bolla has described as the domain of the scopic. It does so by focusing on the visual culture of the visit as witnessed in the production of images – both official and unofficial – by various artists, including David Wilkie, John Wilson Ewbank and William Home Lizars. This chapter argues that a multiplicity of visual experiences was proffered by the king’s visit to Edinburgh. Not only in the production of traditional art historical media like paintings, engravings and sculpture, but also in the ways in which the city itself in terms of its body politic, its architectural embellishments (‘the Athens of the North’) and its topographical landscape were described as being displayed to the kKing in a sequence of staged tableaux. He, in turn, is described as being revealed to the gawping gaze of his Scottish subjects.