This chapter considers the ekphrastic essay in British history, from nineteenth-century art writing to twentieth and early twenty-first-century writing about photography and experimental essay films. If ekphrasis is the attempt to render visual representations in verbal form, the ekphrastic essay can also register the limits of that representation in our inability fully to depict or describe such experiences as strife, pain, and human suffering. Ekphrastic essays, this chapter suggests, take the problem of bearing witness as part of their formal logic, using the doubt and critical force of the essay form to trace the image of suffering. From Walter Pater’s meditations on the quiet despair of Botticelli’s Madonnas, to John Akomfrah’s three-screen examinations of climate change and colonial violence and John Smith’s small-scale films that challenge representations of the ‘War on Terror’, ekphrastic essays compel us to notice what we cannot so easily see.

In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Vasco Miranda describes the artist Aurora da Gama Zogoiby’s work as ‘“Epico-Mythico-Tragico-Comico-Super-Sexy-High-Masala-Art” in which the unifying principle was “Technicolor-Story-Line”’. This also seems like a fitting description for Salman Rushdie’s visual style of storytelling. This chapter maps the broader context of the writer’s engagement with visual art and culture. It begins by examining the playful and political mobilization of visual intertexts in The Moor’s Last Sigh through the links between the character Aurora Zogoiby and the Hungarian Indian painter Amrita Sher-Gil. It then juxtaposes the visual interweaving in the 1995 novel with The Golden House by considering the visually established connection between the DC Comics supervillain Joker and the then soon-to-be elected president of the United States, Donald Trump. Beyond this engagement with the visual on a narrative level, Rushdie has collaborated with artists such as Anish Kapoor and Tom Phillips. Many others have created visual artworks based on Rushdie himself and his fictional work. The last section of the chapter analyses Rushdie and Kapoor’s collaboration, Blood Relations, a project that attempts a convergence of verbal and visual media, linking debates around visual representation, political engagement, and aesthetic autonomy in the face of violence.

This chapter considers the observation, comparison and visual representation of a range of altitudinal limits in the Himalaya: plants, animals, crops and human habitation. These limits were addressed especially through the lens plant geography. The chapter begins by examining the absolute limits of vegetation and attempts to divide up the Himalaya using a vocabulary of verticality borrowed from the horizontal (tropical, temperate and arctic). The second section extends these debates to animals. The third section examines debates over the ‘tropicality’ of the Himalaya, and inconsistences in the line of perpetual snow. The fourth section considers the altitude limits of cultivation, firewood and human habitation. The final section considers attempts to represent and understand these altitude limits visually by considering charts made by William Griffith and Richard Strachey. The chapter argues that as much as from abstract scientific interests, observations of altitude thresholds were wrapped up with the concerns of empire. Ultimately, applying existing horizontal divisions meant simultaneously overwriting pre-existing local cosmologies, and broader South Asian imaginings.

This essay discusses a series of links connecting Caribbean literature and the visual arts, paying particular attention to shared conceptual, critical preoccupations and visual vocabularies, as well as rhetorical strategies and aesthetic across art forms. It traces important stages in the ongoing dialogue between literature and art, including the foundational role of interdisciplinary movements, journals, art spaces and collaborations among writers and artists.