Iconographies of Occupation is the first book to address how the "collaborationist" Reorganized National Government (RNG) in Japanese-occupied China sought to visualize its leader, Wang Jingwei (1883-1944); the Chinese people; and China itself. It explores the ways in which this administration sought to present itself to the people over which it ruled at different points between 1939 (when the RNG was first being formulated) and August 1945, when it folded itself out of existence. What sorts of visual tropes were used in regime iconography and how were these used? What can the intertextual movement of visual tropes and motifs tell us about RNG artists and intellectuals and their understanding of the occupation and the war? Drawing on rarely before used archival records relating to propaganda and a range of visual media produced in occupied China by the RNG, the book examines the means used by this "client regime" to carve out a separate visual space for itself by reviving pre-war Chinese methods of iconography and by adopting techniques, symbols, and visual tropes from the occupying Japanese and their allies. Ultimately, however, the "occupied gaze" that was developed by Wang's administration was undermined by its ultimate reliance on Japanese acquiescence for survival. In the continually shifting and fragmented iconographies that the RNG developed over the course of its short existence, we find an administration that was never completely in control of its own fate-or its message. Iconographies of Occupation presents a thoroughly original visual history approach to the study of a much-maligned regime and opens up new ways of understanding its place in wartime China. It also brings China under the RNG into dialogue with wider theoretical debates about the significance of "the visual" in the cultural politics of foreign occupation more broadly.

The Properties of Violence focuses on two connected issues: representations of lynching in late-nineteenth and twentieth-century American photographs, poetry, and fiction; and the effects of those representations. Alexandre compellingly shows how putting representations of lynching in dialogue with the history of lynching uncovers the profound investment of African American literature - as an enterprise that continually seeks to create conceptual spaces for the disenfranchised culture it represents - in matters of property and territory. Through studies ranging from lynching photographs to Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Beloved, the book demonstrates how representations of lynching demand that we engage and discuss various forms of possession and dispossession. The multiple meanings of the word "representation" are familiar to literary critics, but Alexandre's book insists that its other key term, "effects", also needs to be understood in both of its primary senses. On the one hand, it indicates the social and cultural repercussions of how lynching was portrayed, namely, what effects its representations had. On the other hand, the word signals, too, the possessions or what we might call the personal effects conjured up by these representations. These possessions were not only material - as for example property in land or the things one owned. The effects of representation also included diverse, less tangible but no less real possessions shared by individuals and groups: the aura of a lynching site, the ideological construction of white womanhood, or the seemingly default capacity of lynching iconography to encapsulate the history of ostensibly all forms of violence against black people.

The sun-god Ra re-awakens from thousands of years of hibernation in a sarcophagus hidden at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea so he can resume his plan to take control over the people of the Earth. In his guise as a museum researcher, he assumes possession of an ancient stone that gives him supreme power over the world. In his final mission, the erfin Mirrortac travels with his family across the cosmos in an effort to stop Ra and his allies from achieving their plan. An epic battle between the forces of good and evil embroils many worlds and peoples in this fast-paced fantasy adventure.