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If I were to choose a single image to represent the interest and challenge of working with visual materials, I think it would be the rather outlandish bit of kitsch in figure 1 and not a more attractive or impressive example. Part of the appeal for me, I would have to admit, is the visual humor of the situation, for this image of Oscar Wilde appears on a collectible cigar card, one that adult smokers were apparently meant to save, just as young baseball fans now save and cherish the cards of their heroes. In fact, this must have been one of the first such cards, which had only been in use for a few years when it appeared sometime around 1882. The novelty of the enterprise of collectible cards might explain Wilde's unexpected appearance here, where it is surprising to find a literary subject.

Among other things, photographs are deposits of social relations. To put it another way, they are social relations temporarily hardened into images—figured, captured, frozen. The most obvious of those relations, that between the photographer and the sitter, has been a regular subject of inquiry for art history. Acknowledging but leaving that kind of interest aside for the moment, we may explore other sorts of relations in and around a photograph and pursue a line of inquiry more in keeping with visual culture. Here's a quick example.

Mimic (1982) is an early and much discussed picture by the Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, with the discussion centering largely on two topics: its subject matter and its setting (fig. 1). The subject is racism, and in this regard Mimic is “characteristic,” as Wall's best critic, Michael Fried, has observed, “of Wall's engagement in his art of the 1980s with social issues” (Why 235). Subsequently, as Fried also notes, “Wall has tended to distance himself from the overtly political concerns that are front and center in works like Mimic” (64). Indeed, in recent interviews Wall has insisted on this distance, remarking, for example, that “[t]wenty-five years ago I thought subject matter had some significance in itself” and going on to say that “Mimic was about racism in some way, about hostile gestures between races, but I'm glad the picture itself is good and it doesn't need that to be successful. Now I try to eliminate any additional subject matter—those things are for other people, they're not my problem” (Denes). His point here is not exactly that Mimic isn't antiracist—actually, its antiracism is so obvious and uncontroversial that a recent critic, Régis Michel, has complained that it “verges on political correctness” (63). The idea is rather that the success of the picture—the fact that it's a “good” picture—has nothing to do with those politics. Which leaves open the question of whether the picture's success has nothing to do with any politics or nothing to do with the particular politics of antiracism. In other words, is the picture's success independent of politics as such? Or is there a politics of the good picture?

When Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in “Experience” (1844) that “men seem to have learned of the horizon the art of perpetual retreating and reference,” he means that we see through our current moment by looking forward. The “art” that Emerson evokes to describe the restlessness and expansiveness of the nineteenth century is the art of perspective: we gain perspective, in other words, when we project for ourselves an image of the world in which everything takes shape in relation to something else. “All our days are so unprofitable while they pass,” says Emerson, because we orient our present toward our prospects; taking the long view “degrade[s] today” by distancing us from where we are. We retreat from our momentary positions to be part of the big picture. We want to stay relevant, but Emerson looks askance at our constant need to look toward the emerging pattern of events. “The men ask, ‘What's the news?‘” he says, “as if the old were so bad” (472).

In what is of late one of the most quoted passages in American Letters, W. E. B. Dubois describes the Double Consciousness that makes the Negro “a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world” (5). Paradoxically, given the visual logic of his accounting, the very power of DuBois's notion has obscured the incident whose recounting generates it. Describing his boyhood initiation into racial self-knowledge in his early life “as a little thing, away up in the hills of New England … in a wee wooden school-house,” DuBois focuses on a moment in which he and his schoolmates splurge on “gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange.” The social ritual is “merry” until an authoritative onlooker, a “tall girl, a newcomer,” “refused my card— refused it peremptorily, with a glance” (4). At this precise moment, we're meant to believe, the boy's individualist faith in character as destiny is “forever shattered” (Lewis 33). With the girl's refusal, “the shadow swept across me”; “it dawned upon me that I was different from the others, … shut out from their world by a vast veil” (DuBois 4).

There is a dearth of research on cartoons in the African indigenous languages of South Africa. This article seeks to fill this gap by analysing isiZulu cartoons from a post-colonial point of view. The study adopts systematic visuo-textual analysis as a qualitative research technique because cartoons are the primary sources of data collection and analysis. These cartoons are composed by Mqapheli Mngadi, and they are published in the isiZulu newspaper Isolezwe. Through the application of the post-colonial theory, Barthes’ semiotic theory, and Aristotelian rhetoric theory, the findings demonstrate pertinent post-colonial issues depicted in the selected cartoons. These issues are economic, social, and political in nature. They range from issues such as gender-based violence, flux identities, difficult economic living conditions, unemployment, racism, corruption, and leadership concerns in government. These issues are depicted creatively through literal and figurative visual representation that are marked by caricature, metaphor, and personification. They are also depicted through satire as a persuasive technique, which has been determined to be effective in appealing to the audience’s logical reasoning, emotions, and character. Contribution: This article contributes to research on the decolonisation of knowledge production and representation in African media and popular culture. The article examines several perspectives on the role of visual media in shaping and expressing indigenous worldviews and experiences. Furthermore, by connecting fields such as visual communication, linguistics, rhetoric, media studies, and postcolonial theory, it opens up new avenues for critical engagement with indigenous language media while emphasising the intellectual and cultural significance of cartoon art in contemporary South African society.

Adolescents often use root word and affix knowledge to figure out unknown words. Anglin (1993) found that younger readers favor the Part-to-Whole strategy, and Tyler and Nagy (1989) confirmed the importance of root-word knowledge for middle school students. This study seeks to understand the different strategies middle school readers use so that teachers can leverage these approaches in future morphological instruction. The authors interviewed 20 seventh- and eighth-grade students from two middle schools in the Southeastern United States. Males and females were represented evenly across sites. They chose these two schools because each served populations of either proficient or struggling readers and could showcase the problem-solving strategies used by these different groups of readers. Study data were collected through 20-minute interviews led by the authors of this article. Students were asked to problem solve 12 morphologically complex words, with follow-up questions about their problem-solving processes. Because they focused on how students might use morphology beyond orthography and phonology, when students mispronounced a word, the interviewer gave them the correct pronunciation. Based on their findings, the authors discuss strategies and make instructional recommendations to support students in determining word meanings. The article concludes that although only part of comprehensive vocabulary instruction, morphological problem-solving strategies can be powerful tools in a student's literacy tool belt. Their analysis suggests students use sophisticated strategies when trying to figure out the meanings of morphologically complex words. (Contains 6 figures and 3 tables.)

Cuba assumes a special place in the genealogy of the latin American Baroque and its twentieth-century recuperation, ongoing in our twenty-first century—the neobaroque. As Alejo Carpentier has pointed out (and as architectural critics confirm), the Caribbean lacks a monumental architectural baroque heritage comparable with that of the mainland, such as the hyperornate Churrigueresque ultrabaroque of central Mexico and Peru (fig. 1). Nevertheless, it was two Cuban intellectuals, Alejo Carpentier and José Lezama Lima, who spearheaded a new turn in neobaroque discourse after World War II by popularizing the notion of an insurgent, mestizo New World baroque unique to the Americas. Carpentier and Lezama Lima are the key authors of the notion of a decolonizing American baroque, a baroque that expressed contraconquista (counterconquest), as Lezama punned, countering the familiar identification of the baroque with the repressive ideology of the Counter-Reformation and its allies, the imperial Catholic Iberian states (80). Lezama and Carpentier argue that the imported Iberian state baroque was transformed into the transculturated, syncretic New World baroque at the hands of the (often anonymous) native artisans who continued to work under the Europeans, grafting their own indigenous traditions onto the iconography of the Catholic baroque style. The New World baroque is a product of the confluence (however unequal) of Iberian, pre-Columbian, and African cultures during the peaceful seventeenth century and into the eighteenth in Spain's and Portugal's territories in the New World. The examples studied by Lezama and Carpentier are all from the monumental baroque sculpture and architecture of Mexico, the Andes, and Brazil's Minas Gerais province: the work of the Brazilian mulatto artist O Aleijadinho (Antônio Francisco Lisboa [1738–1814]; see fig. 2 in Zamora in this issue) and the indigenous Andean artist José Kondori (dates unknown; see fig. 1 in Zamora), central Mexico's Church of San Francisco Xavier Tepotzotlán (fig. 1), and the folk baroque Church of Santa María Tonantzintla (see fig. 3 in Zamora), to mention a few landmarks and names.

This wide-ranging study of language and cultural change in fourteenth-century England argues that the influence of oral tradition is much more important to the advance of literacy than previously supposed. In contrast to the view of orality and literacy as opposing forces, the book maintains that the power of language consists in displacement, the capacity of one channel of language to take the place of the other, to make the source disappear into the copy. Appreciating the interplay between oral and written language makes possible for the first time a way of understanding the high literate achievements of this century in relation to momentous developments in social and political life.

Whenever I think about Charles Olson’sprojectivismI start out with a visual apparition. Instead of reckoning first with words or language or a language-based grammar of some kind, I see a material apparatus hanging in an imagined space. This apparatus has a plastic, tangible shape, and buoyancy, somewhat like a mobile or constellation hanging in the air as if formed by the condensation of kinetic energy within a field of appearance in my mind.¹ Its appearance is shaped by a choreographic modelling of the projective impulse, an archetype of an eruption of energy that is aroused by the attention