Introduction: The authority of likeness

Randolph, Adrian W. B.

doi:10.1080/02666286.2003.10406219

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 4 publications

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“…Thus when ancient Greek philosophers acknowledged the benefits of the mirror as a surface that reflected the community's collective and corrective gaze (Bartsch 2006; Melchoir-Bonnet 2001), when late Medieval and Renaissance identity found expression through a coat of arms, gendered norms, and physiognomic signs (Berger 1994; Perkinson 2009; Randolph 2003; Simons 1988; 1995) and when John Belot wove the face into the threads of the cosmos and the movement of the stars (Magli 1989, 111), they were producing a face that could only be rendered legible when tethered to a preexisting order that both preceded and enveloped man. The face was both produced by a historically situated viewer at the same time as it framed the cultural expectations of what is a face.…”

Section: Producing the Facementioning

confidence: 99%

Faces of the Self

Seth

2019

J. Race Ethnicity Politics

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This paper traces the centrality of the human face in the construction of modern individuality. It argues that the face of individuality no less than that of typology, is mired in and born of historical and political conditions that are subsequently disavowed in order that the individual (and the face she bears) is rendered a product of nature, an instantiation of the universal. Attempting to denaturalize and defamiliarize the authority invested in the face, this paper maps out three interrelated arguments: that the human face is historically produced; that its history is closely tethered to the production of modern subjectivity, and that its status as a purveyor of meaning relies upon the reiteration of preexisting norms through which it can be “read.” And yet, while this paper turns to the nineteenth century to trace the novel privileging of the face as an extension of selfhood, interwoven through this history is the figure of the “effaced” Muslim woman and the Muslim terrorist type.

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