Imaging Identity: Text, Mediality and

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Imaging Identity
Text, Mediality and
Contemporary Visual Culture
Edited by Johannes Riquet · Martin Heusser
Imaging Identity
 Johannes Riquet • Martin Heusser
Editors

Imaging Identity
Text, Mediality and Contemporary Visual Culture
Editors
Johannes Riquet Martin Heusser
Tampere University University of Zurich
Tampere, Finland Zurich, Switzerland

ISBN 978-3-030-21773-0    ISBN 978-3-030-21774-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21774-7

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2019
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu-
tional affiliations.

Cover art by Sana Khalesi

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgements

This book has its origins in a conference held at the University of Zurich
in 2015, “Images of Identity,” which could not have been organised with-
out the generous support of the Doctoral Program in English and
American Literary Studies and the English Department at the University
of Zurich. Our warm thanks go to the participants of the conference,
whose stimulating contributions and expertise provided the foundation
for the broad range of topics explored in this book, and to the contribu-
tors who joined us in the years after the conference. We are also grateful to
Salma Ghandour, Gabi Neuhaus, Martino Oleggini and Regula Schuler,
who were part of “Images of Identity” as student assistants. Many thanks
go to Sana Khalesi for the cover image of this book, which was originally
displayed in her exhibition, “My Eye-ran Off,” at the “Images of Identity”
conference. We are indebted to our former colleagues from the English
Department at the University of Zurich for their support and advice at
different stages of the project. We would also like to thank Essi Vatilo for
her assistance in the final stages of the project. Finally, our thanks go to
Lina Aboujieb and Ellie Freedman at Palgrave Macmillan for their support
and guidance.

v
 Contents

1 Identity and Modern Visual Culture: Textual Perspectives  1

Johannes Riquet and Martin Heusser

Part I Digital Images of Identity  33

2 From the “Belfie” to the Death-of-Me: The Affective

Archive of the Self/ie 35
Misha Kavka

3 Calculating Lives? Memory, Archive and Identity in a

Digital Era 61
Holger Pötzsch

4 Modelling Vision: A Semeiotic Approach to Algorithmic

Images 83
Stephanie Schneider

vii
viii CONTENTS

Part II Written Images of Identity 103

5 Ideal Identities and Impossible Translations: Drawing on

Writing and Writing on Drawing105
Tilo Reifenstein

6 On Identification and Narrative Identity: Self-Formation

in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine123
Nicole Frey Büchel

7 Art, Arcadia and Images of Identity in John Banville’s

Frames Trilogy147
Alexander G. Z. Myers

Part III Contested Images of Identity 163

8 W. B. Yeats’s The Dreaming of the Bones: Self-­Consuming

Images of Identity165
Chris Morash

9 Larry Burrows’s Images of the Vietnam War:

Photojournalism, Memory and Civic Spectatorship in Life
Magazine187
Martin Heusser

10 “That was my truest voice”: Rap Identities Between

Authenticity and Fame211
Ana Sobral

11 Terrorist Self-Fashioning: Politics, Identity and the

Making of “Martyrdom” Videos—From the 7/7 Bombers
to Four Lions237
Michael C. Frank
 CONTENTS ix

Part IV Idealised Images of Identity 259

12 Islands as (Floating) Images: Towards a Poetic Theory of

Island Geography261
Johannes Riquet

13 “Come see my land”: Watching the Tropical Island

Paradise Die in Poetry279
Daniel Graziadei

14 Island Images and Imaginations: Beyond the Typical

Tropical301
Godfrey Baldacchino

Index319
 Notes on Contributors

Godfrey Baldacchino is Pro-Rector and Professor of Sociology at the

University of Malta, Malta, and UNESCO Co-Chair (Island Studies and
Sustainability) at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada. He was
the founding editor of the Island Studies Journal and is the editor of The
Routledge International Handbook of Island Studies (2018).
Michael C. Frank is Associate Professor at the University of Zurich,
where he holds the chair of Literatures in English of the Nineteenth and
Twentieth Centuries. The author of The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism
in Public Discourse, Literature, and Film (2017), he has recently co-edited
a thematic issue of the European Journal of English Studies on “Global
Responses to the ‘War on Terror’” (2018). Other fields of interest include
the narrativisation of space, migrant literature and literary explorations of
the post-9/11 condition.
Nicole Frey Büchel holds a PhD in English Literature. She is an Academic
Associate at the English Department of the University of Zurich, where
she works as an instructor and student advisor for future secondary school
teachers. Her main research areas include British and American literature,
fictional life writing and narrative identity formation.
Daniel Graziadei was born and raised on the Southern side of the Alps.
He studied Comparative, English and Spanish Literature at Munich’s
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität where, nowadays, he teaches at the
Institute for Romance Philology. Daniel is a founding member of the
international research group Island Poetics. He wrote his doctoral thesis

xi
xii Notes on Contributors

on islands in the archipelago of contemporary Caribbean literatures in

English, French and Spanish. Currently he investigates inter- and transcul-
tural misunderstandings in literature. Apart from being a scholar, Daniel is
a poet, performer, member of the art collective mo| men| tos, as well as a
translator of contemporary Italian and Spanish poetry. [www.danielgrazia-
dei.de]
Martin Heusser is an emeritus professor at the English Department of
the University of Zurich, where he held the chair for Literatures in English
of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. He is the author of a mono-
graph on Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and a book-length
study of the poetry of E. E. Cummings. Apart from articles on James
Fenimore Cooper, Thomas Hardy, William Carlos Williams, Alan
Ginsberg, Katherine Anne Porter, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Jeffrey
Eugenides, his published work focuses on the field of word and image
studies. His current interests lie in the role of spatiality in Thomas Hardy’s
work.
Misha Kavka is Professor of Cross-Media Culture at the University of
Amsterdam. She is the author of two books on reality television, Reality
Television in the Edinburgh UP ‘TV Genres’ series (2012) and Reality
Television, Affect, and Intimacy (Palgrave Macmillan 2009). She is also the
co-editor, with Jennifer Lawn and Mary Paul, of Gothic New Zealand: The
Darker Side of Kiwi Culture (2006) and, with Elisabeth Bronfen, of
Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century (2001). She has pub-
lished widely on affect, gender and celebrity in relation to film, television
and social media technologies.
Chris Morash is the Vice-Provost and holder of the Seamus Heaney
Professorship in Irish Writing in Trinity College Dublin. He is the author
of A History of Irish Theatre (2002), A History of the Media in Ireland
(2009) and Mapping Irish Theatre (with Shaun Richards, 2014), and has
co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre with Nicholas
Grene (2016). He has also published on Irish cultural history, and literary
responses to famine.
Alexander G. Z. Myers studied English Language and Literature and
History, receiving his MA at the University of Zurich in 2010. He then
completed the Teaching Diploma for Secondary Education and a PhD in
English Literature at the University of Zurich in 2017, under the supervi-
sion of Prof. Dr. Martin Heusser. Alexander’s thesis—Always Already
 Notes on Contributors  xiii

Elsewhere: Pastoral, Memory, and Identity in the Novels of John Banville—is

a study of the interrelation of the pastoral mode and postmodern litera-
ture. It was published in August 2018 for Swiss Studies in English (vol.
144).
Holger Pötzsch is Associate Professor at the Department of Language
and Culture, UiT Tromsø, Norway. His research focuses on media and
war, the politics of digital technologies, as well as border cultures and
technologies. He has published in journals such as New Media & Society,
Media, War & Conflict, Memory Studies, Games & Culture, Journal for
Borderlands Studies and EPD: Society & Space, among others. He has con-
tributed to edited collections on war films, games and border studies. He
is currently co-editing (with Phil Hammond) War Games: Memory,
Militarism, and the Subject of Play, to be published with Bloomsbury in
2019.
Tilo Reifenstein is Lecturer in Critical Studies at York St John University.
He is a trustee and the honorary secretary of the Association for Art
History and deputy editor at the Open Arts Journal. He has recently co-­
edited (with Liz Mitchell) a special issue (no. 7) of the Open Arts Journal
with the theme Between Sensuous and Making-Sense-Of (2019).
Johannes Riquet is Associate Professor of English Literature at Tampere
University. He is the author of The Aesthetics of Island Space: Perception,
Ideology, Geopoetics (2019) and the co-editor of Spatial Modernities:
Geography, Narrative, Imaginaries (2018). He is currently working on a
new book on interrupted railway journeys in literature and cinema and a
project on contemporary representations of the circumpolar Arctic along-
side his continued interest in islands. He is a founding member of the
international research group Island Poetics. His research interests include
islands, spatiality, the links between literature and geography, phenome-
nology, deconstruction, cinema and diasporic imaginaries.
Stephanie Schneider studied Urban Planning in Hamburg and
Rapperswil as well as Angewandte Kulturwissenschaften in Lüneburg. She
worked as a project collaborator at the Department of Geography,
University of Zürich, and as a lecturer at HafenCity University Hamburg.
She is a PhD student at Leuphana University Lüneburg. She is a member
of the Doctoral Research Group Knowledge Culture/Digital Media in
Lüneburg and of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Semiotik (DGS) advisory
committee (section Kulturwissenschaft). In 2015 and 2018, she received
xiv Notes on Contributors

a Hardwick Fellowship from the Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism,

Texas Tech University, Lubbock (USA).
Ana Sobral is Assistant Professor of Global Literatures in English at the
University of Zurich. She is finishing her second book on rap and postco-
lonial studies. She has published articles and book chapters on cultural
memory in the Caribbean, rap and poetry in the Global South, Islamic
feminism, the performative aspects of the Arab Spring, and the links
between popular music, migration and cosmopolitanism. Her articles have
appeared in journals such as, among others, African American Review,
European Journal of English Studies and Journal of Modern Literature.
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 The missing brother is reborn as an image made of images in

Zahra’s Paradise2
Fig. 1.2 Who is capturing whose image? Digital surveillance in Zahra’s
Paradise5
Fig. 1.3 Early modern self-fashioning: Matthias Buchinger, a
phocomelic. Engraving after M. Buchinger, 1724. Credit:
Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0 9
Fig. 1.4 Frontispiece and title page of the first edition of Robinson
Crusoe (1719). British Library, C.30.f.6 10
Fig. 1.5 ‘Digital rain’ in the opening shot of The Matrix (Lana and Lilly
Wachowski, USA 1999) 20
Fig. 1.6 Identity projected on surfaces: the mirror scene in Memento
(Christopher Nolan, USA 2000) 22
Fig. 2.1 The two superimposed triangles of the scopic register (Lacan
1979, 107) 45
Fig. 2.2 Kim Kardashian in a bathroom selfie that went viral (Kardashian
2013)48
Fig. 2.3 Sean Matteson unintentionally captured Moorthy in the
background of his selfie on the edge of Taft Point. Image
courtesy of Sean Matteson/AP (McCormick and Safi 2018) 53
Fig. 9.1 Original photograph by Larry Burrows for the cover of Life, 16
April 1965. The International Center of Photography—The
Life Magazine Collection, 2005 196
Fig. 10.1 Ironic depiction of violence in the music video of “T.I.A.” 221
Fig. 10.2 K’naan as ‘bohemian’ urban rapper in “Take a Minute” 224
Fig. 10.3 K’naan wearing a Vietnamese conical hat in “Wavin’ Flag
(Celebration Mix)” 226

xv
xvi List of Figures

Fig. 10.4 K’naan as generic pop star in “Is Anybody Out There?” 228
Fig. 11.1 “Getting me pictures—Mujahid style”: a character from Four
Lions shooting a terrorist selfie in a jihadist training camp (Chris
Morris, UK 2010) 238
Fig. 11.2 Al-Qaeda deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri and “the Martyr Shehzad
Tanweer” in the propaganda video released by al-Sahab on 8
July 2006 246
Fig. 11.3 Omar and his wife Sofia watching the “bloopers” of Waj’s
martyrdom video in the opening sequence of Four Lions (Chris
Morris, UK 2010) 249
Fig. 11.4 Sequence showing Barry’s abortive martyrdom message before
cutting to a dejected Omar watching the video on his notebook
computer at home (Chris Morris, UK 2010) 250
Fig. 12.1 Woodcut sketch by Ambrosius Holbein from the 1516 edition
of Utopia272
Fig. 13.1 The illustration accompanying “Rejected Text for a Tourist
Brochure” in the anthology Caribbean Dispatches: Beyond the
Tourist Dream (Courtesy of Ximena Maier) 283
Fig. 13.2 The poem “Allspice” as printed in Olive Senior’s over the roofs
of the world (Courtesy of Olive Senior and Insomniac Press) 285
Fig. 14.1 One of many images where the tropical, erotic and exotic meld
together in an expression of lush and enticing island exuberance
(https://pixabay.com/illustrations/island-tropical-paradise-
beach-sea-1515109/)302
Fig. 14.2 Women from Katorai village on Sibiru island (Mentawai group),
now Indonesia (Photograph by Albert Friedenthal, 1910) 305
Fig. 14.3 Shetland in a box, already on this map from 1806. The islanders
are not amused and have reclaimed the right to their location
(Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division) 308
Fig. 14.4 1967 licence plate for Prince Edward Island: does this help the
Green Island Province of Canada attract hi-tech, hip and cool?
(Photograph by A. W. McPhee) 313
 CHAPTER 1

Identity and Modern Visual Culture: Textual

Perspectives

Johannes Riquet and Martin Heusser

As the title of W. J. T. Mitchell’s influential book What Do Pictures Want?

The Lives and Loves of Images (2005) suggests, images have demands on
us. Conversely, we want things from images, and both sets of demands
evolve within shifting image cultures. The close “relationship between the
visual object and […] modernity” (Saltzman and Rosenberg 2006, ix) has
become a critical commonplace. If we live indeed, in the words of James
Elkins, “in an especially visual culture” where we “see more images in our
lifetimes than any other culture has” and “may be able to assimilate more
images per minute than any other culture” (2011, 2), it bears asking how
the rapidly changing economies of vision that shape our everyday lives
relate to the constitution of contemporary identities.
The recent graphic novel Zahra’s Paradise (Amir and Khalil 2011), set
in Tehran in the aftermath of the protests following the disputed
re-­election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as President of the Islamic Republic

J. Riquet (*)
Tampere University, Tampere, Finland
e-mail: johannes.riquet@tuni.fi
M. Heusser
University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
e-mail: heusser@es.uzh.ch

© The Author(s) 2019 1

J. Riquet, M. Heusser (eds.), Imaging Identity,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21774-7_1
2 J. RIQUET AND M. HEUSSER

of Iran in June 2009, offers a wealth of material for reflecting on the

demands of and on images in contemporary globalised culture. In doing
so, it rehearses the promises contemporary image culture offers for the
active construction and negotiation of (personal, cultural, political) iden-
tity while also cautioning against the pressures exerted by images them-
selves. Zahra’s Paradise revolves around a young man (Mehdi) who
disappears in the protests, and the story follows the efforts of his mother
and brother (Hassan) to find him. In an important scene, the brother
orders 1000 copies of an image of his brother at a copy shop (a recurrent
location in the graphic novel), with the words “Missing” and his phone
number printed above and below the image. As the machine churns out
the flyers, they pile up to form the outline of the missing brother: a figure
made entirely of images and words, thereby taking shape as an image
itself—a three-­dimensional image rendered in the two dimensions of the
comic page and evoking a hologram in its striped, semi-transparent appear-
ance (Fig. 1.1). “The whole world is still,” we read in the captions, “as if

Fig. 1.1 The missing brother is reborn as an image made of images in Zahra’s
Paradise
 1 IDENTITY AND MODERN VISUAL CULTURE: TEXTUAL PERSPECTIVES 3

everything hinges on my brother’s rebirth out of the machine’s wondrous

womb” (2011, 70). Indeed, the brother never returns in flesh and blood:
as of now, he only exists as an image. Mehdi’s “rebirth” is thus a medial
event and predicated on the dissemination of images. In this medial
rebirth, an image of individual identity carries the hope for a renewal of
political identity.1 This is accentuated by the image itself: throughout the
graphic novel, the brother’s face in the flyer remains blank, which makes
him emblematic of an entire generation, a generation of young and politi-
cally committed Iranians fighting for political change.
Zahra’s Paradise is thus invested in the power of images to bring about
change and reshape identities. These images, furthermore, are distinctly
associated with new technologies. This is already announced in the cover
image of the book, which shows an arm holding up a mobile phone on
whose display we see an image of people holding up banners on Azadi
(Freedom) Square, the main site of the 2009 protests. While the identity
of the person holding up the phone is not revealed—the face is cut off—
we see the same image that is shown on the display behind her head (sev-
eral details suggest that it is a woman). The simultaneity of event and
image that recurs in Zahra’s Paradise—and the presence and dissemina-
tion of images as an event in itself, suggested by the visual parallel of hold-
ing up banners as well as phones—make this graphic novel a unique
reflection on the politics of contemporary image culture.
This image culture, furthermore, is shown to interweave different
medialities that originated in different times, exemplifying Henry Jenkins’s
thesis about the convergence of old and new media, the “circulation of
media content across different media systems, competing media econo-
mies, and national borders” and the central role of “consumers’ active
participation” (2006, 3) within these processes. While Jenkins’s book is
not about visual culture per se, it acknowledges the central importance of
images within the global convergence of media cultures that interests him:
like Zahra’s Paradise, Convergence Culture prominently displays a small
digital screen (an iPod) on its cover; the image on this screen (which
shows a tropical beach) is surrounded by countless other images on a wall
made up of what looks like TV screens. In Zahra’s Paradise, images are
produced and disseminated by a variety of technologies and media plat-
forms including copy machines, mobile phones and the online blog writ-
ten by Mehdi’s brother Hassan, also named Zahra’s Paradise. The copy
machine’s serial production of printed images to be distributed on the
streets, connected to the pamphlet culture enabled by the invention of the
4 J. RIQUET AND M. HEUSSER

printing press (the chapter is significantly entitled “The People’s Press”),

thereby exists side by side with the immaterial distribution of images in the
digital world. Indeed, the production of the graphic novel itself exempli-
fies this convergence: initially published serially as a webcomic in seven
languages simultaneously, and later as a hardcover book, Zahra’s Paradise
emphatically belongs to a global media culture where images cross
“national borders” as well as “different media systems” (Jenkins 2006, 3).
This is exemplified by the self-reflexive last panel of the copy shop chapter:
in the bottom right-hand corner of the panel, which shows a street in
Tehran, we see one of the flyers with Mehdi’s image. It is partly inside and
partly outside the panel, whose frame is interrupted while a curved line
indicates the flyer’s movements in the wind: a true ‘flyer,’ the image, as it
were, leaves the confines of the comic page to enter other medial spheres.
Importantly, however, images in Zahra’s Paradise not only circulate
between different medial spheres, but they also interact with words, in
ways that self-reflexively speak to the format of the graphic novel, in itself
a combination of words and images. For one thing, Hassan’s blog, which
provides the main narrative voice of the book and whose declared aim is
to “make Mehdi’s absence official” so that “the world will take notice”
(2011, 59), operates primarily in the realm of the verbal, complementing
the image in articulating an identity for the lost brother and, by implica-
tion, the “lost generation” (2011, 14) for which he stands. Furthermore,
the banners held up by protestors contain images, notably Ahmadinejad’s
crossed-out face, as well as words, such as “Where is my vote?” The ban-
ners—present, as mentioned above, on the very title page—thereby self-­
reflexively evoke the speech bubbles and captions of the graphic novel.
Throughout the text, digital screens flash both images and words; at the
bottom of the copyright page, we see a small image of a mobile phone
displaying the words “By art we live,” updating the Renaissance topos of
survival through art for the digital age. We return to this idea at the end
of the book in the grieving mother’s allusion to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18,
the former’s “As long as I can breathe you will never die” (1997, 217)
recalling the latter’s “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see/So long
lives this, and this gives life to thee” (1997, 13–14). Explicitly conjoining
art and contemporary communications technology, the image on the
copyright page thus comments on the graphic novel’s own status as not
only a piece of art, but also a medial product. In their articulation of politi-
cal identities, words give meaning to images and vice versa, and both are
inflected by the technological apparatuses that produce and spread them.
 1 IDENTITY AND MODERN VISUAL CULTURE: TEXTUAL PERSPECTIVES 5

However, these apparatuses not only help to disseminate art and politi-
cal activism (and art as political activism), but also serve oppressive func-
tions, and here we return to the question of what images want from us. For
the images in Zahra’s Paradise not only enable the articulation of identities
but also constrain it. This is most evident in the second chapter, when
Hassan, who is taking pictures or filming the events in front of Evin Prison
with his mobile phone (whose Apple logo is clearly visible), is warned by an
elderly man: “You think you’re capturing their image, but it’s Siemens
that’s capturing yours!” (2011, 47; boldface in original). This is followed
by a panel which (partially) shows the faces of Hassan, his mother and the
man through a circular lens on a black background (Fig. 1.2). On the one

Fig. 1.2 Who is capturing whose image? Digital surveillance in Zahra’s Paradise
6 J. RIQUET AND M. HEUSSER

hand, this seems to be a close-up of Hassan’s phone, which is visible in the

preceding panels. On the other hand, the disproportionate size of the lens,
the odd angle and a bizarre antenna-like structure on top of the lens,
accompanied by the letters “WHIRRRR,” make it clear that this cannot be
only Hassan’s phone. As such, the panel also suggests the faceless and global
gaze of digital surveillance in which Hassan’s photographing or filming
inevitably becomes entangled: “Your digital shroud: everything you see,
say, or even think … is frozen in their diabolical bandwidths” (2011, 47).
It remains unclear who “they” are: Iranian intelligence, global corporations
and media conglomerates, or both. Rather, the scene suggests that the pro-
duction and dissemination of images, as well as the identities emerging
from them, are complex and ambivalent. These images of identity are
caught in a global media web where, to return to Jenkins, “the power of
the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in
unpredictable ways” (2006, 2).2 In the process, it becomes unclear what
can be regarded as an ‘Iranian’ image of identity: “Aren’t Iranians running
Silicon Valley, eBay, Google, Yahoo?” (2011, 47), asks Hassan, further
complicating the identities associated with the producers and disseminators
of images.
With this comment on the asymmetrical distribution of seeing, Zahra’s
Paradise addresses important issues related to Nicholas Mirzoeff’s notion
of “the right to look,” which he treats in his eponymous book-length
study of visuality. Visuality in this specific context is, as Mirzoeff explains,
not a theoretical approach to “the totality of all visual images and devices”
but an imaginary practice based on the gathering of “information, images
and ideas” on an immense scale for the exercise of power and control vis-­
à-­vis specific groups of people or entire populations. Crucially, “[t]his abil-
ity to assemble a visualization manifests the authority of the visualizer.”
The right to look claims (and depends on) mutuality and exchange: “It
means requiring the recognition of the other in order to have a place from
which to claim rights and to determine what is right.” The right to look
lays claim to seeing and looking back at those who look at you. And with
this it is, as Mirzoeff reasons, “the claim to a subjectivity that has the
autonomy to arrange the relations of the visible and the sayable” (2011,
2). Ironically, Zahra’s Paradise suggests, it is with the help of Western
panoptic control, Western surveillance technology and former colonial
tactics of counterinsurgency that the authorities in the world of the graphic
novel are creating and maintaining visuality and regulating the access to
what may be seen, what may be looked at—and reserving the supreme
 1 IDENTITY AND MODERN VISUAL CULTURE: TEXTUAL PERSPECTIVES 7

right to look. This struggle over the right to look and visual authority is
addressed in several chapters of Imaging Identity: Text, Mediality and
Contemporary Visual Culture, notably those of Part III (“Contested
Images of Identity”).
In Zahra’s Paradise, then, the status of the image remains fundamentally
ambivalent. Politicised images, the graphic novel suggests, can both
empower and frame you, serve power and undermine it.3 The panel with
the mobile phone lens visually resembles the vignettes at the beginning of
each chapter, where we see a detail from the chapter as a circular image
inside a black square. We are cautioned against the power of the image: it
remains unclear who ultimately benefits from the images in and of Zahra’s
Paradise. Do they empower the protestors? Are they appropriated by the
Iranian authorities? Or by global actors? In a context where representations
of Iran and Iranians are easily appropriated by foreign governments to
demonise a political enemy and thereby legitimate interventions and eco-
nomic sanctions,4 Zahra’s Paradise asks pertinent questions about the com-
plex lives of images. Combined with words, they help the young protestors
create their own identities, but the medial networks that produce, dissemi-
nate and discursively reframe them can be equally liberating and constrain-
ing, contributing to the “digital shroud” that makes Mehdi, Hassan and
their peers traceable and shapes their identities in partly invisible channels.

Imaging Identity
This initial example raises a number of questions about the nexus of image,
word and identity that are addressed, with varying emphasis, by the con-
tributors of this volume. Like a recent collection entitled What Is an Image
in Medieval and Early Modern England, this book aims to “[explore] the
status of the visual image in relation to another sign system and medium,
namely words and texts” (Bevan Zlatar 2017, 12), in a specific historical
period, in this case the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Unlike the
former collection, it does not focus on “a particular location” (2017, 12);
indeed, its global and transnational span is appropriate in view of the
increasingly global production and circulation of images. This global
approach is combined with a specific focus: all chapters examine the
­constitution of different identities at the intersection of the visual and
the verbal.
Of course, images have long been used in combination with words and
narrative to fashion, refashion and challenge identities in different genres
8 J. RIQUET AND M. HEUSSER

and media. A few eclectically selected examples will have to suffice here.
The Renaissance invention of perspective painting (Panofsky 2002) went
hand in hand with the exploration of the subject and its interiority in early
modern plays like Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Othello. In the age of discov-
ery, written and visual texts combined on world maps to negotiate identi-
ties of self and other; as Tom Conley argues in The Self-Made Map, the
popular genre of the isolario or island book, which combined maps of real
and imagined islands around the globe with written descriptions, both
projected an autonomous self and fragmented subjectivity (Conley 1996;
see Riquet in this book). The famous micrographic self-portrait by the
twenty-nine-inch-tall German magician, musician and calligrapher
Matthias Buchinger from 1724 (Fig. 1.3) offers a particularly striking
example of self-fashioning via portraiture as it had developed since the
fifteenth century (West 2004, 206). The caption describes the crafting of
self in words and images: “This is the Effigies of Mr. Matthew Buchinger,
being Drawn and Written by Himself. […] This little Man performs such
Wonders as have never been done by any, but Himself.” The writing of the
self thereby takes place not only in the caption but also in the drawing
itself as Buchinger’s hair consists entirely of psalms and the Lord’s prayer
written in tiny letters. The verbo-visual portrait itself is thus one of the
“Wonders” described in the caption, and Buchinger’s identity as an artist
is boldly asserted and performed in a process of self-authorship that
bridges, rather contradictorily, bragging and religious piety. A similar
(though much more earnest) form of self-authorship occurs on the title
page of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), which promises an
account of the life of Robinson “Written by Himself.” The text and the
frontispiece (Fig. 1.4), which shows Robinson proudly standing on his
island, in the centre of the image, thus underscore the centrality of the
(bourgeois) self as author of his own destiny (cf. Watt 2001).
Indeed, the German word Bildungsroman carries the image in its very
name (see Frey Büchel, Chap. 6). A hundred years later, as Jessica A. Volz
maintains, nineteenth-century women writers crafted strong selves for
their female protagonists through literary images “in a society in which
the reputation was image based” (2017, xi). Influenced by “portraiture,
the looking glass, architecture and landscape painting,” so Volz’s ­argument,
these authors were exploring their culture’s investment in external
­appearances and public images and “painted with words” through “the
use of visual cues, analogues and references to the gaze” (2017, 3). Thus,
“[v]isuality, which functions as a continuum linking visual and verbal
modes of communication and understanding, empowered women novel-
 1 IDENTITY AND MODERN VISUAL CULTURE: TEXTUAL PERSPECTIVES 9

Fig. 1.3 Early modern self-fashioning: Matthias Buchinger, a phocomelic.

Engraving after M. Buchinger, 1724. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0

ists at a time when self-expression was particularly constrained for their

sex, allowing them to control the gaze and speak through pictures” (2017,
xi). More generally, as Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski
10 J. RIQUET AND M. HEUSSER

Fig. 1.4 Frontispiece and title page of the first edition of Robinson Crusoe
(1719). British Library, C.30.f.6

contend, the emergence of a plethora of visual practices and technologies

in the nineteenth century is at the roots of a development that led to “the
seemingly endless saturation of the contemporary world by images”
(2004, xi).
Much has been written about the nexus of modernity, technology and
these new visual cultures. On the one hand, critics have emphasised that
the visual technologies and media that emerged in the nineteenth century
“were all too often focused on constructing a certain view of the ‘rest’ by
the West” (Schwartz and Przyblyski 2004, xi). This strand of criticism sees
visual culture as a tool for projecting imperialist identities against colonial
otherness, as in Russell A. Potter’s discussion of the ways in which the
Arctic and its inhabitants were turned into visual spectacles to be consumed
by nineteenth-century British and American audiences (2007). Susan
 1 IDENTITY AND MODERN VISUAL CULTURE: TEXTUAL PERSPECTIVES 11

Sontag’s discussion of photography as a sublimated form of violent control

relies on this understanding of modern visual culture: “[Taking a picture]
turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed” (1973, 14).
Other accounts have focused on the reconfiguration of visual subjectivity
through modernity’s internal developments such as the rise of the railways.
Thus, Wolfgang Schivelbusch has argued that the experience of travelling
by train in the nineteenth century led to the emergence of a new form of
panoramic perception, a sense of detached contemplation of the landscape
resulting from the visual overstimulation of the traveller at close range
(1986, 52–69). So pervasive was the influence of the train that in 1878
Nietzsche used it as a metaphor for what he perceived as a new visual con-
sciousness: “With the tremendous acceleration of life mind and eye have
become accustomed to seeing and judging partially or inaccurately, and
everyone is like the traveller who gets to know a land and its people from a
railway carriage” (1996, 132). Two influential essays, Charles Baudelaire’s
“The Painter of Modern Life” (1863) and Georg Simmel’s “The Metropolis
and Mental Life” (1903), explored how these fleeting perceptions shaped
new forms of subjectivity in a different but related context, namely the
hypervisual arena of the modern city (cf. Crary 1990, 23–24).
It was cinema that would come to embody this new visual conscious-
ness, and theories exploring the subject positions created by the cinematic
apparatus soon followed. While the figureheads of Soviet avant-garde cin-
ema, notably Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, were interested in the
revolutionary potential of cinematic images—their potential to mobilise
spectators—post-Lacanian film theory tackled the flipside of this potential
by arguing that classical Hollywood cinema produced a pleasurable illu-
sion of a coherent world held together by the camera/viewer, a regression
into imaginary completeness for the spectator (Baudry 1974–1975; Metz
1977). In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey explored
one of the ideological dimensions of the scopophilic pleasure offered by
Hollywood, arguing that classical cinema posits the male spectator as the
subject of the gaze while reducing the female body to the status of a fetish-
ised visual object. At the same time, Mulvey recognises cinema’s potential
to challenge patriarchal ideology and create new, active subject positions
for female spectators (1988). Cinema’s role in shaping modern visual con-
sciousness can hardly be overestimated, but it has been supplemented with
a flood of new technologies in recent decades. In the early twenty-first
century, our lives have become more permeated by multi- and transmedial
texts and images than ever before.
12 J. RIQUET AND M. HEUSSER

Image Theory: Genealogies and Influences

If it is true that “[m]odern life takes place onscreen” (1999, 1), as Mirzoeff
would have it, the modern proliferation of images has gone hand in hand
with a steady stream of image theories. In his introduction to What Is an
Image?, Elkins presents the sheer mass of such theories as a both disorient-
ing and liberating predicament: “There is, luckily, no way to summarize
contemporary theories of the image” (2011, 1). Mitchell has described
this “pictorial turn” (1994, 11–34) as a relatively recent phase in cultural
theory in analogy to the earlier linguistic turn. However, he also suggests
that its origins go back as far as the semeiotics of Charles S. Peirce and the
language philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1994, 11–13). Indeed,
debates about the nature of images emerged in different contexts around
the turn of the twentieth century. Other early image theorists include
Sigmund Freud, whose investigations into the workings of the psyche fre-
quently engage with visual drives and the signification of dream images,
and Henri Bergson, whose critique in Matter and Memory (1896) of “the
subject/object opposition” in philosophy entails “defining both con-
sciousness and the material world as ‘images’” (Trifonova 2003, 80).
Bergson thus “use[s] the image to bridge the gap between mind and mat-
ter” (2003, 80); for him, images are material and perception is not essen-
tially different from matter (2003, 80–81). They also include, as Chris
Morash demonstrates in Chap. 8, debates about the theatrical image in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that revolve around the
question whether the image should be considered in terms of an external
appearance and representation or, conversely, a manifestation of con-
sciousness in the minds of spectators.
These early debates are taken up in more recent theories of the image.
Thus, Jacques Lacan returned to Freud in his concept of the mirror stage
as a constitutive process of identification that grounds human identity in
an illusory image (2006), and recent theorists have in turn drawn on Lacan
to explore the imaginary investments offered by contemporary media cul-
ture. Peirce and Bergson are the main points of departure for Gilles
Deleuze’s monumental “attempt at the classification of images and signs”
(1986, xiv) in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-
Image (first published in French in 1983 and 1985). Mitchell’s Iconology:
Image, Text, Ideology (1986), which discusses the signifying mechanisms of
images in relation to words by outlining a “rhetoric of images” and explor-
ing “what images say” (1986, 1–2), signals its indebtedness to another
 1 IDENTITY AND MODERN VISUAL CULTURE: TEXTUAL PERSPECTIVES 13

early classic of image theory, Erwin Panofsky’s Studies in Iconology (1939),

in its very title. Jacques Rancière, in turn, refers back to the modernist
debates about the theatre in The Future of the Image (2007; see
Morash, Chap. 8).
Rancière’s philosophy of the image in the context of modern and post-
modern aesthetics has become one of the most influential contributions to
image theory in recent years. For Rancière, what is at stake in a discussion
of the (artistic) image is not the relationship between image and reality.
Because images interact with other images or with the environment in
which they appear, their direct referential function (i.e., what the image
‘shows’) may move into the background. Images are rather “operations
that couple and uncouple the visible and its signification or speech and its
effect, which create and frustrate expectations” (2007, 4–5). Images are
active operations, in other words, organised activities between the visible
and the sayable (2007, 6). “Image” therefore refers to two things: on the
one hand, to a more or less accurate resemblance or similarity, and on the
other, to “operations that produce what we call art” (2007, 6). The latter
introduce differences as a function of artistic expression. The image
according to Rancière relates to and associates with the notion of regime
because it is the manifestation of a relationship between the visible and the
sayable. What he calls “imageness” therefore does not designate proper-
ties or qualities of the visual representations themselves but is rather “a
regime of relations between elements and between functions” (2007, 4)—
in practice, the way in which visual and verbal contents interact with each
other. They mutually condition and contradict each other and out of this
irresolvable tension arises ambivalence “in which the same procedures cre-
ate and retract meaning” (2007, 5). The mutual incongruence and
­incommensurability of word and image thus becomes the motor of mean-
ing-making in the interpretation of an image.
While based on an altogether different approach, John Berger, another
pioneering theorist of the “pictorial turn,” also conceptualises meaning as
the result of “functions” when talking about fundamental qualities of pho-
tographs: “[…] unlike memory, photographs do not in themselves preserve
meaning. They offer appearances—with all the credibility and gravity we
normally lend to appearances—prised away from their meaning. Meaning
is the result of understanding functions” (1980, 55). While Berger does
not directly explain what he means by “functions,” he continues his argu-
ment by inserting a quote from Sontag’s On Photography: “And function-
ing takes place in time, and must be explained in time. Only that which
14 J. RIQUET AND M. HEUSSER

narrates can make us understand” (Sontag 1973, 23). With this, Berger,
like Rancière, addresses the need for some operative form of interaction
between the visible and the sayable, arguing that images are basically mute
except for their immediate referential function. Yet this also implies that
they can be made to speak, and that they can be made to speak in different
ways. As such, they can lead to active subject positions and stimulate politi-
cal action, an insight that is also central for recent theories of civic specta-
torship advanced by Ariella Azoulay (2008, 2012) as well as Robert
Hariman and John L. Lucaites (2007, 2016; see Heusser, Chap. 9). In
addition to shedding light on the signifying systems of images, then, recent
theories have debated the different and sometimes contradictory ways in
which images position their viewers by offering them models of identity—
as well as allowing for the active (re-)construction of identities by audiences.
The contributors of Imaging Identity engage with both the image cul-
tures and the image theories that emerged around the turn of the twenti-
eth century and have proliferated in recent decades. While the “modern
culture” referred to in the title of the introduction may be an irritatingly
vague term, this collection zooms in on a phase of modernity that was
inaugurated by a series of social, political and technological transforma-
tions and ruptures on the one hand and the emergence of modernist sen-
sibilities on the other. While it acknowledges the continuities between
recent image cultures and the visual regimes and practices of earlier phases
of modernity, including the nineteenth century (Frey Büchel, Chap. 6)
and even early modernity (Riquet, Chap. 12; Graziadei, Chap. 13), its
contributors are guided by the conviction that the flood of emerging
image cultures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries calls for a
­re-­evaluation of the links between image and identity from textual and
cultural perspectives.
Accordingly, the chapters of this volume all explore the constitution of
personal, national and cultural identities at the intersection of the verbal
and the visual, focusing on the multiple relations between identities, words
and images across a range of media. Their authors come from various dis-
ciplines including literary studies, media studies, sociology, art history and
semiotics, but they share an interest in textuality and narrative. They are
attentive to the ways in which the medialities and (im)materialities of
modern image culture inflect our conceptions of and articulations of iden-
tity, examining and interrogating the cultural and political force of selfies
(Kavka, Chap. 2), digital algorithms (Pötzsch, Chap. 3; Schneider, Chap.
4), social media (Sobral, Chap. 10), computer-generated images
 1 IDENTITY AND MODERN VISUAL CULTURE: TEXTUAL PERSPECTIVES 15

(Schneider, Chap. 4), photojournalism (Heusser, Chap. 9), painting

(Myers, Chap. 7) and branding (Graziadei, Chap. 13; Baldacchino, Chap.
14), to mention just a few. They also reflect on the image theories that
emerged in the same time span—from early theorists such as Peirce
(Schneider, Chap. 4) and Yeats (Morash, Chap. 8) to influential twentieth-­
century models like those proposed by Roland Barthes (Kavka, Chap. 2)
and Jacques Derrida (Reifenstein, Chap. 5), as well as more recent theo-
ries by thinkers such as Hariman and Lucaites (Heusser, Chap. 9) and Jill
Walker Rettberg (Pötzsch, Chap. 3).

The Identity of Images

Before we discuss some of the specificities of the new image cultures in
more detail, however, let us briefly engage with the identity of images
themselves, an issue whose philosophical implications are explored in dif-
ferent chapters of this book through the work of Jacques Derrida
(Reifenstein, Chap. 5), the semeiotics of Charles S. Peirce (Schneider,
Chap. 4) as well as theories of the digital archive (Pötzsch, Chap. 3). As
many scholars agree, a unified definition of ‘image’ seems to be as impos-
sible as an exhaustive overview of different conceptions of the image. The
former of these impossibilities is addressed by Mitchell when he states that
“the word image is notoriously ambiguous” (2005, 2; emphasis in origi-
nal) and can refer, among other things, to

a physical object (a painting or sculpture) and a mental, imaginary entity, a

psychological imago, the visual content of dreams, memories, and p ­ erception.
It plays a role in both the visual and verbal arts, as the name of the repre-
sented content of a picture or its overall formal gestalt […]; or it can desig-
nate a verbal motif, a named thing or quality, a metaphor or other “figure”
[…]. It can even pass over the boundary between vision and hearing in the
notion of an “acoustic image.” And as a name for likeness, similitude, resem-
blance, and analogy it has a quasilogical status as one of the three great
orders of sign formation, the “icon.” (2005, 2)

Etymology is a useful starting point if we wish to sort through this con-

ceptual disarray, but it raises as many questions as it answers. As Raymond
Williams points out, two tensions have characterised the various meanings
of the word and their evolution since the thirteenth century. Firstly, the
word has oscillated between material and mental references; between the
image as “a physical figure or likeness” on the one hand and a “mental
Another random document with
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 15. by the words of the Lord] i.e. the king’s command was
recognised to be in accordance with the Divine will. Read by the
word; the plural words is probably only a textual error.

¹⁶And the priests went in unto the inner part of

the house of the Lord, to cleanse it, and
brought out all the uncleanness that they
found in the temple of the Lord into the court
of the house of the Lord. And the Levites took
it, to carry it out abroad to the brook Kidron.
16. the priests] The work was so divided between priests and
Levites that only the priests went into the house.

unto the inner part of the house] Render, within the house. The
reference is not to the Holy of Holies specially, but to the whole
interior of the house.

uncleanness] compare verse 5; Isaiah xxx. 22.

to the brook Kidron] The brook Kidron is the deep valley on the
east of Jerusalem separating it from the Mount of Olives; 2 Samuel
xv. 23; John xviii. 1. It was treated as an unclean spot, compare xv.
16.

¹⁷Now they began on the first day of the first

month to sanctify, and on the eighth day of the
month came they to the porch of the Lord;
and they sanctified the house of the Lord in
eight days: and on the sixteenth day of the
first month they made an end.
17. to sanctify ... and they sanctified] Two periods of eight days
each were spent in “sanctifying,” the courts apparently requiring
eight days and the house itself eight days.

¹⁸Then they went in to Hezekiah the king

within the palace, and said, We have cleansed
all the house of the Lord, and the altar of
burnt offering, with all the vessels thereof, and
the table of shewbread, with all the vessels
thereof.
18. the table of shewbread] Compare iv. 8 (note), 19; 1
Chronicles xxviii. 16—“the tables of shewbread.”

¹⁹Moreover all the vessels, which king Ahaz in

his reign did cast away when he trespassed,
have we prepared and sanctified; and, behold,
they are before the altar of the Lord.
19. cast away] According to xxviii. 24, “cut in pieces”; compare 2
Kings xvi. 17. The reference is probably to the “bases” and the “sea.”

have we prepared] Render, have we set up. Ahaz had taken

away the supports both of the laver and of the sea (2 Kings xvi. 17).

20‒24 (not in 2 Kings).

The Sevenfold Sacrifice for the Reconciliation of the
People.

The ritual of the sin offering is fully given in Leviticus iv. Ahaz had
broken the covenant, and Hezekiah’s sin offering was intended to
atone for the breach.

²⁰Then Hezekiah the king arose early, and

gathered the princes of the city, and went up
to the house of the Lord. ²¹And they brought
 seven bullocks, and seven rams, and seven
lambs, and seven he-goats, for a sin offering
for the kingdom and for the sanctuary and for
Judah. And he commanded the priests the
sons of Aaron to offer them on the altar of the
Lord.
21. they brought] As the sacrifice was not for an individual but for
a whole people the offering on this occasion consisted of seven of
each of four different sacrificial animals, the bullocks, rams, and
lambs being used for the burnt offering (verses 22 and 24), and the
he-goats for the special sin offering (verse 23).

for the kingdom] i.e. for the kingly house.

for the sanctuary] i.e. for the Temple (compare Leviticus xvi. 16),
but probably inclusive of the personnel of the Temple, i.e. the priests
and Levites, since otherwise they would have been passed over in
the great sin offering.

on the altar of the Lord] Not on the altar of Ahaz (2 Kings xvi.
11).

²²So they killed the bullocks, and the priests

received the blood, and sprinkled it on the
altar: and they killed the rams, and sprinkled
the blood upon the altar: they killed also the
lambs, and sprinkled the blood upon the altar.
22. received the blood] In basons with which they dashed (not as
the text “sprinkled”) the blood against the altar. This dashing was
different from the sprinkling with the finger.
 ²³And they brought near the he-goats for the
sin offering before the king and the
congregation; and they laid their hands upon
them: ²⁴and the priests killed them, and they
made a sin offering with their blood upon the
altar, to make atonement for all Israel: for the
king commanded that the burnt offering and
the sin offering should be made for all Israel.
23. brought near] i.e. to the king and the people.

and they laid their hands] “they” = the representatives of the

people, for whom the sacrifice was to be offered, compare Leviticus
iv. 15.

25‒30.
The Levitical Service of Music.

²⁵And he set the Levites in the house of the

Lord with cymbals, with psalteries, and with
harps, according to the commandment of
David, and of Gad the king’s seer, and Nathan
the prophet: for the commandment was of the
Lord by his prophets.
25. and of Gad ... and Nathan] Neither of these prophets is
elsewhere said to have had a part in inciting David to the
organisation of the Temple music with which the Chronicler credits
him. Their names are introduced in order to emphasise the value of
the musicians of the Temple, whose service is thus declared to have
arisen through the inspiration of prophets; compare 1 Chronicles
xxviii. 19.
 ²⁶And the Levites stood with the instruments of
David, and the priests with the trumpets.
26. with the instruments] LXX. ἐν ὀργάνοις. Compare 1 Chronicles
xxiii. 5.

²⁷And Hezekiah commanded to offer the burnt

offering upon the altar. And when the burnt
offering began, the song of the Lord began
also, and the trumpets, together with the
instruments of David king of Israel. ²⁸And all
the congregation worshipped, and the singers
sang, and the trumpeters sounded; all this
continued until the burnt offering was finished.
27. and the trumpets] Compare 1 Chronicles xv. 24 (note).

together with the instruments of David] Render perhaps, even

according to the guidance of the instrument of David, i.e. led (or
“accompanied”) by them.

²⁹And when they had made an end of offering,

the king and all that were present with him
bowed themselves and worshipped.
29. bowed themselves and worshipped] i.e. first bowed down (on
their knees) and then completely prostrated themselves.

³⁰Moreover Hezekiah the king and the princes

commanded the Levites to sing praises unto
the Lord with the words of David, and of
Asaph the seer. And they sang praises with
 gladness, and they bowed their heads and
worshipped.
30. to sing praises] Since (1) the Hebrew word for “Psalms”
means “Praises,” and (2) the words of David and Asaph are specially
mentioned in this verse, it is clear that the Chronicler by this phrase
means “to sing Psalms.”

31‒36 (not in Kings).

A Great Sacrifice of Burnt Offerings and Thank Offerings.

³¹Then Hezekiah answered and said, Now ye

have consecrated yourselves ¹ unto the Lord,
come near and bring sacrifices and thank
offerings into the house of the Lord. And the
congregation brought in sacrifices and thank
offerings; and as many as were of a willing
heart brought burnt offerings. ³²And the
number of the burnt offerings, which the
congregation brought, was threescore and ten
bullocks, an hundred rams, and two hundred
lambs: all these were for a burnt offering to the
Lord.
¹ Hebrew filled your hand.

31. answered and said] i.e. answered the thoughts or expectation

of the people as expressed by the Sacrifices and the Songs;
compare Job iii. 2 (Revised Version).

ye have consecrated yourselves] Hebrew “filled your hand”;

compare xiii. 9; Exodus xxviii. 41.
 sacrifices and thank offerings] The phrase means simply the
special type of sacrifices which were termed “thank offerings.” The
fat of such offerings was burnt on the altar, the breast and right thigh
were reserved for the priests, but the remainder belonged to the
offerer and was used for a joyous meal (Leviticus vii. 12 ff.). The
burnt offering was entirely consumed on the altar, no portion being
kept by priests or offerer (Leviticus i. 1‒13): hence such sacrifices
represented a greater cost and are accordingly said to be given by
those who were “of willing heart,” i.e. conspicuously pious and
generous.

³³And the consecrated things were six

hundred oxen and three thousand sheep.
33. the consecrated things] The term was applied (1) to gold and
other valuables offered in the Temple; compare xv. 18; 1 Chronicles
xviii. 8‒11; (2) to those parts of the various sacrifices which were
assigned to be eaten by the priests; Leviticus xxi. 22 (“the holy
[bread]”), xxii. 2, 3, 15 (“the holy things”). Here the reference is more
general, i.e. to the thank offerings (verse 35) themselves.

³⁴But the priests were too few, so that they

could not flay all the burnt offerings: wherefore
their brethren the Levites did help them, till the
work was ended, and until the priests had
sanctified themselves: for the Levites were
more upright in heart to sanctify themselves
than the priests.
34. the priests] According to Leviticus i. 5 f. the task of flaying the
sacrifice was to be performed by the offerer. Either this passage
marks a later stage in the customary ritual, or perhaps this occasion
was regarded by the Chronicler as exceptional because the offerings
were brought on behalf of the “congregation” in general. The verse
presents other difficult features. Who were the priests who had not
yet sanctified themselves? What is the significance of the evident
contrast between the attitude of the priests and that of the Levites, to
the disadvantage of the former? It would seem that there were
priests who had deliberately or slackly failed to comply with
Hezekiah’s injunction (verses 4, 5) and were therefore still ritually
unclean from the pollution of the previous reign. In general we infer
that the Levites had either been less deeply involved in the idolatries
of Ahaz or at least were more zealous than the priests for the
restoration of the worship of Jehovah alone. Possibly this tradition
may truly represent the historical facts; or it may be an inference
derived from 2 Kings xvi. 16 where the subservience of the high-
priest Urijah to king Ahaz is mentioned (so Kittel). Less probable is
the view of Benzinger that this verse has been added by the
Chronicler to the midrashic source upon which he is here depending,
and that it represents merely the Chronicler’s personal predilection
for the Levites as distinct from the priests.

³⁵And also the burnt offerings were in

abundance, with the fat of the peace offerings,
and with the drink offerings for every burnt
offering. So the service of the house of the
Lord was set in order.
35. with the fat] Compare vii. 7; Leviticus iii. 3, 17.

the peace offerings] i.e. the thank offerings (verse 31).

drink offerings] compare Numbers xv. 5, 7, 10. The offering was

to be of wine, and the quantity used was to correspond with the size
of the animal sacrificed.

was set in order] i.e. was re-established.

 ³⁶And Hezekiah rejoiced, and all the people,
because of that which God had prepared for
the people: for the thing was done suddenly.
36. that which God had prepared for the people] It was God, not
Hezekiah, who had done it all.

suddenly] In the very first year of Hezekiah’s reign (verse 3).

Chapter XXX.
1‒12 (not in 2 Kings).
Hezekiah Invites all Israel to keep the Passover.

From verse 2 it appears that this Passover took place in the first
year of Hezekiah while the Northern Kingdom was still standing. The
invitation to share in it at Jerusalem which Hezekiah is here (verse 1)
said to have sent to north Israel is opposed to all historic probability.
The Chronicler, however, was little likely to be troubled by that
difficulty, even if he had observed it (see note, verse 5). Furthermore
it is a plausible suggestion that the references to Ephraim,
Manasseh, etc. in verses 1, 10, 11, 18 really reflect conditions of the
Chronicler’s own circumstances, regarding which see the note on xv.
9. It is therefore a mistake to suggest that the date may be wrong
and that the Passover really took place in the sixth year of Hezekiah
after the fall of Samaria on the ground that the invitation would then
be more credible.

¹And Hezekiah sent to all Israel and Judah,

and wrote letters also to Ephraim and
Manasseh, that they should come to the
house of the Lord at Jerusalem, to keep the
 passover unto the Lord, the God of Israel.
²For the king had taken counsel, and his
princes, and all the congregation in
Jerusalem, to keep the passover in the
second month.
2. in the second month] The Law allowed such a postponement;
compare Numbers ix. 10, 11.

³For they could not keep it at that time,

because the priests had not sanctified
themselves in sufficient number, neither had
the people gathered themselves together to
Jerusalem. ⁴And the thing was right in the
eyes of the king and of all the congregation.
3. at that time] In the first month.

⁵So they established a decree to make

proclamation throughout all Israel, from Beer-
sheba even to Dan, that they should come to
keep the passover unto the Lord, the God of
Israel, at Jerusalem: for they had not kept it in
great numbers ¹ in such sort as it is written.
¹ Or, of a long time.

5. to make proclamation] A phrase characteristic of the

Chronicler.
 from Beer-sheba even to Dan] i.e. the extreme points of the
undivided kingdom of David and Solomon. “The existence of the
North Kingdom is either ignored or more probably the writer
assumed that it had already fallen” (Curtis). On the origin of the
phrase and the order in Chronicles (Beer-sheba to Dan not Dan to
Beer-sheba, as in 2 Samuel xxiv. 2, etc.) see Hogg in the Expositor,
1898, pp. 411‒421.

they had not kept it in great numbers in such sort as it is written]

The statement applies to Israel, not to Judah; for the first time an
attempt is made to draw Israel en masse to a regular Passover at
Jerusalem.

⁶So the posts went with the letters from the

king and his princes throughout all Israel and
Judah, and according to the commandment of
the king, saying, Ye children of Israel, turn
again unto the Lord, the God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Israel, that he may return to the
remnant that are escaped of you out of the
hand of the kings of Assyria.
6. the posts] Literally “the runners.”

the remnant that are escaped of you out of the hand of the kings
of Assyria] The phrase applies most naturally to the final downfall of
Samaria through Shalmaneser and Sargon (722‒721 b.c.), but it is
possible of course to interpret it of the repeated disasters at the
hands of the Assyrians in the time of Tiglath-pileser some ten years
earlier.

⁷And be not ye like your fathers, and like your

brethren, which trespassed against the Lord,
 the God of their fathers, so that he gave them
up to desolation ¹, as ye see.
¹ Or, to be an astonishment.

7. to desolation] Render, as margin, to be an astonishment;

compare xxix. 8 (same Hebrew word).

⁸Now be ye not stiffnecked, as your fathers

were; but yield yourselves ¹ unto the Lord, and
enter into his sanctuary, which he hath
sanctified for ever, and serve the Lord your
God, that his fierce anger may turn away from
you.
¹ Hebrew give the hand.

8. yield yourselves] Literally “give the hand”; compare 1

Chronicles xxix. 24 “submitted themselves”).

sanctified for ever] Compare vii. 16.

⁹For if ye turn again unto the Lord, your

brethren and your children shall find
compassion before them that led them
captive, and shall come again into this land:
for the Lord your God is gracious and
merciful, and will not turn away his face from
you, if ye return unto him. ¹⁰So the posts
passed from city to city through the country of
Ephraim and Manasseh, even unto Zebulun:
 but they laughed them to scorn, and mocked
them.
9. shall find compassion] Compare Psalms cvi. 46 (a similar
phrase in Hebrew).

¹¹Nevertheless divers of Asher and Manasseh

and of Zebulun humbled themselves, and
came to Jerusalem.
11. of Asher] Asher is somewhat strange. The parallel with verse
10 alone suggests that we should read of Ephraim; and this is the
more probable if the real significance of the reference is for the
Chronicler’s period (see the head-note, and xv. 9). It is not likely that
Judaism at that time could claim many adherents in the old territory
of Asher (see Hölscher, Palästina, p. 32).

humbled themselves] So xxxiii. 12.

¹²Also in Judah was the hand of God to give

them one heart, to do the commandment of
the king and of the princes by the word of the
Lord.
12. Also in Judah was the hand of God] i.e. the mighty working of
God, which brought some penitents from far parts of Israel,
manifested itself in Judah also.

the commandment of the king ... by the word of the Lord] The
king’s command was according to God’s command in the Law.

13‒27 (not in 2 Kings).

Hezekiah’s Great Passover.
 It seems clear that the story of Hezekiah’s Passover has been
composed by the Chronicler on the analogy of Josiah’s grand
celebration of that feast (see xxxv. 1‒19), which the present festival
even surpasses in some respects—viz. in its scope (for all Israel and
strangers, whereas Josiah’s was for Judeans only) and in its
duration (for two weeks, Josiah’s for one). Josiah’s Passover was
famous because of the account of it in Kings. Doubtless the
Chronicler felt that a celebration of that feast was incumbent upon a
great reforming monarch, and he has therefore credited Hezekiah
with observing it.

¹³And there assembled at Jerusalem much

people to keep the feast of unleavened bread
in the second month, a very great
congregation.
13. the feast of unleavened bread] In the “Passover” were united
two separate “feasts,” (1) the eating of the lamb on the fourteenth of
Nisan, (2) the eating of unleavened bread from the fourteenth to the
twenty-first of Nisan. The combined Feast was sometimes called “the
Passover” and sometimes (as here) “the feast of unleavened bread”;
compare Exodus xii. 1‒14 and 17‒20, and note that the intervening
verses, 15, 16, bind the two feasts into one celebration.

¹⁴And they arose and took away the altars that

were in Jerusalem, and all the altars for
incense ¹ took they away, and cast them into
the brook Kidron.
¹ Or, vessels.

14. the altars] Compare xxviii. 24.

 ¹⁵Then they killed the passover on the
fourteenth day of the second month: and the
priests and the Levites were ashamed, and
sanctified themselves, and brought burnt
offerings into the house of the Lord. ¹⁶And
they stood in their place after their order,
according to the law of Moses the man of
God: the priests sprinkled the blood, which
they received of the hand of the Levites.
15. the second month] Compare verses 2, 3.

were ashamed] Of their former backwardness; compare verse 3,

xxix. 34.

¹⁷For there were many in the congregation that

had not sanctified themselves: therefore the
Levites had the charge of killing the passovers
for every one that was not clean, to sanctify
them unto the Lord.
17. of killing the passovers] “Passovers” (plural rare) = “Paschal
victims”; compare verse 15, xxxv. 8 (“passover offerings”).

¹⁸For a multitude of the people, even many of

Ephraim and Manasseh, Issachar and
Zebulun, had not cleansed themselves, yet did
they eat the passover otherwise than it is
written. For Hezekiah had prayed for them,
saying, The good Lord pardon every one ¹
 ¹ Or, him that setteth his whole heart.

18. of Ephraim, etc.] The list of tribes given here does not agree
with the list in verse 11, but in both cases it may be that the
Chronicler merely wished by his list to designate men of the Northern
Kingdom as opposed to those of the Southern. He could not make
the distinction by using the term “Israel” here, for in Chronicles
“Israel” as a rule is not used in opposition to “Judah”; compare xi. 3
(note). (For a somewhat different view, see the head-note on verses
1‒12 and xv. 9.)

otherwise than it is written] i.e. they were allowed to partake of

the Passover meal, although not purified according to the regulations
of the Law.

¹⁹that setteth his heart to seek God, the Lord,

the God of his fathers, though he be not
cleansed according to the purification of the
sanctuary.
18, 19. The good Lord pardon every one that, etc.] In Hebrew
verse 18 ends abruptly with the word “pardon.” Probably the Revised
Version is correct in disregarding the Hebrew division. The phrase
“the good Lord” is not found elsewhere, and another suggestion is
to transpose the adjective and read (verse 18) ... “The Lord pardon
the good: (verse 19) even every one that,” etc. The LXX., however,
supports the order of the Hebrew text.

²⁰And the Lord hearkened to Hezekiah, and

healed the people.
20. healed the people] By prevention; no plague was allowed to
break out among them, although uncleanness in the sanctuary had
been threatened with death; Leviticus xv. 31.
 ²¹And the children of Israel that were present
at Jerusalem kept the feast of unleavened
bread seven days with great gladness: and
the Levites and the priests praised the Lord
day by day, singing with loud instruments unto
the Lord.
21. with loud instruments] Literally “with instruments of strength.”
It is better to read “with all their might” (as 1 Chronicles xiii. 8). The
change in Hebrew amounts only to the dropping of the smallest letter
(yōd).

²²And Hezekiah spake comfortably unto all the

Levites that were well skilled in the service of
the Lord. So they did eat throughout the feast
for the seven days, offering sacrifices of peace
offerings, and making confession ¹ to the Lord,
the God of their fathers.
¹ Or, giving thanks.

22. spake comfortably] i.e. with kindly and appreciative words.

For the phrase compare Isaiah xl. 2.

making confession] Or, as margin, “giving thanks.”

²³And the whole congregation took counsel to

keep other seven days: and they kept other
seven days with gladness.
23. other seven days] Compare vii. 9 (Solomon’s Dedication
Feast).
 ²⁴For Hezekiah king of Judah did give to the
congregation for offerings a thousand bullocks
and seven thousand sheep; and the princes
gave to the congregation a thousand bullocks
and ten thousand sheep: and a great number
of priests sanctified themselves.
24. sanctified themselves] Compare xxix. 34.

²⁵And all the congregation of Judah, with the

priests and the Levites, and all the
congregation that came out of Israel, and the
strangers that came out of the land of Israel,
and that dwelt in Judah, rejoiced.
25. the strangers] i.e. men of alien descent dwelling in Israel with
certain conceded, not inherited, rights, and with most of the
obligations of the native Israelite. LXX. οἱ προσήλυτοι Compare ii. 17;
1 Chronicles xxii. 2 for the unfavourable side of a “stranger’s”
position.

²⁶So there was great joy in Jerusalem: for

since the time of Solomon the son of David
king of Israel there was not the like in
Jerusalem.
26. since the time of Solomon] For Solomon’s great festival, see
v. 2 ff.

there was not the like] Compare what is said of Josiah’s

Passover; xxxv. 18 (note).
 ²⁷Then the priests the Levites arose and
blessed the people: and their voice was heard,
and their prayer came up to his holy
habitation, even unto heaven.
27. the priests the Levites] So in xxiii. 18, but only in these two
places in Chronicles The phrase is Deuteronomic, and implies that at
the stage of ritual development represented in Deuteronomy all
Levites were potentially priests. Such was not in any case the view
of the Chronicler, and perhaps we ought to read “the priests and the
Levites” both here and in xxiii. 18.
 Chapter XXXI.
1 (compare 2 Kings xviii. 4).
Destruction of Idolatrous Symbols.

¹Now when all this was finished, all Israel

that were present went out to the cities of
Judah, and brake in pieces the pillars ¹, and
hewed down the Asherim, and brake down the
high places and the altars out of all Judah and
Benjamin, in Ephraim also and Manasseh,
until they had destroyed them all. Then all the
children of Israel returned, every man to his
possession, into their own cities.
¹ Or, obelisks.

1. the pillars ... the Asherim] Compare xiv. 3 (note).

in Ephraim also] It is obviously assumed that the Northern

Kingdom had come to an end; compare xxx. 6, 9.

2‒21 (not in 2 Kings).

Organisation of the Priests. Tithe.

If the Temple had been desecrated and closed by Ahaz, it would

follow that the organisation of its Priests and Levites had fallen into
confusion. The Chronicler therefore makes Hezekiah the restorer of