Visuality has become a keyword for the field of visual culture. However, while many assume that it is a postmodern theoretical term, the word was coined by the Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle in his lectures On Heroes (1841). The centrality of Carlyle’s discourse of visualized heroism to Anglophone imperial culture was such that any claim to subjectivity had to pass by visuality. Here lies the contradictory source of the resonance of ‘visuality’ as a keyword for visual culture as both a mode of representing imperial culture and a means of resisting it by means of reverse appropriation. Reading Carlyle in the imperial context leads to a distinction between Visuality 1, which is proper to modernity, and a Visuality 2 that exceeds or precedes the commodification of vision. This tension was played out in the work of Carlyle’s admirers Oscar Wilde and W.E.B. Du Bois and in the politics surrounding the abolition of slavery.
Barrett , Joseph H. (1997 ([1841]) Review of Carlyle’s On Heroes. Reprinted in D.J. Trela and Rodger L. Tarr (eds) The Critical Response to Thomas Carlyle’s Major Works. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press .
2.
Bhabha, Homi (1994) The Location of Culture. London: Routledge .
3.
Blanchard, Mary Warner (1998) Oscar Wilde’s America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press .
4.
Burns, Sarah (1996) Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press .
5.
Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge .
6.
Carlyle, Thomas (1989 ([1837]) The French Revolution, ed. K.J. Fielding . Oxford: Oxford University Press .
7.
Carlyle, Thomas (1915[1839]) ‘Chartism’, in English and Other Critical Essays. London: J.M. Dent .
8.
Carlyle, Thomas (1993[1841]) The Norman and Charlotte Strouse Edition of the Writings of Thomas Carlyle: On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, notes and introduction by Michael K. Goldberg, text established by Michael K. Goldberg, Joel J. Brattin and Mark Engel. Berkeley: University of California Press .
9.
Carlyle, Thomas (1843) Past and Present. London .
10.
Carlyle, Thomas (1869[1853]) ‘Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question’. Reprinted in Critical Memorial Edition of the Works of Thomas Carlyle, vol. 18, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. Boston: Dana
11.
Estes , 1869. Carlyle, Thomas (1855) ‘Model Prisons’, pub. March 1850. Reprinted in Latter-Day Pamphlets. London: Chapman Hall .
12.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press .
13.
Crary, Jonathan (1988) ‘Modernizing Vision’, in Hal Foster (ed.) Vision and Visuality. Seattle, WA: Bay Press .
14.
Crary, Jonathan (1991) Techniques of the Observer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press .
15.
Da Costa, Emilia Viotti (1994) Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823. New York: Oxford University Press .
16.
Du Bois, W.E.B. (1986) Du Bois: Writings. New York: The Library of America .
17.
Dyer, Richard (1997) White. London: Routledge .
18.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1987) Representative Men: Seven Lectures in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. IV, introduction by Wallace E. Williams, text established by Douglas Emory Wilson. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press .
19.
Finley, Gerard (1999) Angel in the Sun: Turner’s Vision of History. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press .
20.
Foster, Hal (ed.) (1988) Vision and Visuality. Seattle, WA: Bay Press .
21.
Foucault, Michel (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage .
22.
Gage, John (1969) Color in Turner: Poetry and Truth. New York: Praeger .
23.
Gilbert, Olive (1993) The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, ed. Margaret Washington . New York: Vintage Classics .
24.
Gilroy, Paul (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press .
25.
Gosse, Edmund (1963[1907]) Father and Son. New York: WW Norton .
26.
Greenberg, Kenneth S. (1996) Honor & Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press .
27.
Halberstam, Judith (1998) Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press .
28.
Hall, Catherine (2002) Civilizing Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867. Chicago: University of Chicago Press .
29.
Harris, Kenneth Marc (1978) Carlyle and Emerson: Their Long Debate. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press .
30.
Hartman, Saidiya V. (1997) Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press .
31.
Heffer, Simon (1995) Moral Desperado: A Life of Thomas Carlyle. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson .
32.
Holt, Thomas (1992) The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press .
33.
Jay, Martin (1988) ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’, in Hal Foster (ed.) Vision and Visuality. Seattle, WA: Bay Press .
34.
Jones, Amelia (2004) Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press .
35.
Joyce, Patrick (1994) Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .
36.
Lavally, Albert J. (1968) Carlyle and the Idea of the Modern: Studies in Carlyle’s Prophetic Literature and its Relation to Blake, Nietzsche, Marx and Others. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press .
37.
Lee, Yoon Sun (2004) Nationalism and Irony: Burke, Scott, Carlyle. New York: Oxford University Press .
38.
Levine, George (1997) ‘Carlyle, Descartes and Objectivity’ , Raritan17 (Summer): 45-58 .
39.
Levine, Philippa (2003) Prostitution, Race & Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire. New York: Routledge .
40.
Lewis, David Levering (1993) W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919. New York: Henry Holt .
41.
Lewis, Lloyd and Smith, Henry Justin (1936) Oscar Wilde Discovers America (1882). New York: Harcourt Brace and Company .
42.
Mbembe, Achille (2001), On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press .
43.
Metz, Christian (1982) The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press .
44.
Morris, Pam (1999) ‘Heroes and Hero-Worship in Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley’ , Nineteenth-Century Literature54(3): 285-307 .
45.
O’Toole , Fintan (1998) ‘Venus in Blue Jeans: Oscar Wilde, Jesse James, Crime and Fame’, in Jerusha McCormack (ed.) Wilde the Irishman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press .
46.
Painter, Nell Irvin (1996) Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol. New York: W.W. Norton .
47.
Perera, Suvendrini (2002) ‘What Is a Camp...?’ borderlands 1(1) at %5Bwww.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au%5D
48.
Plotz, John (2000) ‘Crowd Power: Chartism, Thomas Carlyle and the Victorian Public Sphere’ , Representations70 (Spring): 87-114 .
49.
Pointon, Marcia (1990) Naked Authority: The Body in Western Art 1830-1908. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .
50.
Rancière, Jacques (2004) The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum .
51.
Rigney, Ann (1996) ‘The Untenanted Places of the Past: Thomas Carlyle and the Varieties of Historical Ignorance’ , History and Theory35(3), October: 338-357 .
52.
Rose, Gillian (2003) ‘On the Need to Ask How, Exactly, Is Geography “Visual”?’ , Antipode35(2): 212-221 .
53.
Schoch, Richard W. (1999) ‘“We Do Nothing But Enact History”: Thomas Carlyle Stages the Past’ , Nineteenth-Century Literature54(1), June: 27-52 .
54.
Semple, Janet (1993) Bentham’s Prison: A Study of the Panopticon Penitentiary. Oxford: Clarendon Press .
55.
Sinfield, Alan (1994) The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment. New York: Columbia University Press .
56.
Smajic, Srdjan (2003) ‘The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story’ , ELH70(4): 1107-1135 .
57.
Smith, Terry (1993) Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press .
58.
Wilde, Merlin Holland and Hart-Davis, Rupert (eds) (2000) The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. London: Fourth Estate .
59.
Williams, Raymond (1958) Culture and Society 1780-1950. London: Chatto and Windus .
60.
Wilson, Kathleen (2003) The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century. London: Routledge .
61.
Zamir, Shamoon (1995) Dark Voices: W.E.B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888-1903. Chicago: University of Chicago Press .
