Taking a selective approach to the history of the color rosa mexicano (Mexican Pink), this essay explores its employment in art, architecture, fashion, design, and activism over the last century, investigating what might make it “Mexican” and shedding light on its relationship to gender, sexuality, and Indigeneity.
This article reinterprets Aby Warburg’s engagement with Reformation-era visual culture as an early contribution to media theory. It argues that Warburg theorized the image as both a medium of anthropological polarity and as a more concrete Bilderfahrzeug, an “image vehicle” shaped by its material and technological conditions. The essay thereby reconstructs Warburg’s approach to premodern images and print media as a Reformation-era media ecology, emphasizing his attention to the interrelation of visual media, ritual practice, collective memory, and political agitation.
This essay conceptualizes the neologism “airborne hospitality” to characterize animal-focused cinematic representations and visualization processes that collectively reimagine air as a transspecies community-building medium. It brings Jacques Derrida’s theorizations on hospitality into dialogue with literary and cultural interpretations of air to analyze human-avian caregiving and other vertically oriented practices of hospitable intimacies in Indian filmmaker Shaunak Sen’s 2022 documentary All That Breathes and to envision alternative emancipatory aesthetics in response to airborne toxicity.
Working through what might be called a miscegenating methodology, this essay draws our attention to Delores A. Fullman (1930–1992), a Chicago-born Black woman with an artistic identity as a classically trained vocalist. It seeks to counter Fullman’s near excision from art historical, biographical, and critical accounts of the early work of her fellow Black Mountain College student and friend, Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), in whose collegiate life and art she prominently figured.
Appearing in the middle of the second installment of Tristram Shandy is the marbled leaf that Laurence Sterne called the “motly emblem of my work.” This essay traces just one reagent involved in the making of that page, the bright red pigment called “rose pink.” It offers a history of that book that takes it seriously as a luxury commodity manufactured in an empire for color. Readers wishing to receive a hand-painted sample of that pigment may request one to be mailed, free of charge, at motleyemblem.org/rose-pink.
Apostrophe cuts to the core of the fragile poetic speech act. What happens to this trope in the slave society of ancient Rome, where enslaved literary secretaries were routinely used for dictation, and poetry itself was thus turned into a practice of address to a domestic human landscape purposefully summoned as responsive? This essay tries to think the political consequences of apostrophe—after Barbara Johnson, Lauren Berlant, and Virginia Jackson—into a context of Roman slavery, under which the trope became a focal point for enslaver anxieties of authorship.
Working through what might be called a miscegenating methodology, this essay draws our attention to Delores A. Fullman (1930-1992), a Chicago-born Black woman with an artistic identity as a classically trained vocalist. It seeks to counter Fullman's near excision from art historical, biographical, and critical accounts of the early work of her fellow Black Mountain College student and friend, Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), in whose collegiate life and art she prominently figured.
This essay conceptualizes the neologism "airborne hospitality" to characterize animal-focused cinematic representations and visualization processes that collectively reimagine air as a transspecies community-building medium. It brings Jacques Derrida's theorizations on hospitality into dialogue with literary and cultural interpretations of air to analyze human-avian caregiving and other vertically oriented practices of hospitable intimacies in Indian filmmaker Shaunak Sen's 2022 documentary All That Breathes and to envision alternative emancipatory aesthetics in response to airborne toxicity.
Appearing in the middle of the second installment of Tristram Shandy is the marbled leaf that Laurence Sterne called the "motly emblem of my work." This essay traces just one reagent involved in the making of that page, the bright red pigment called "rose pink." It offers a history of that book that takes it seriously as a luxury commodity manufactured in an empire for color. Readers wishing to receive a hand-painted sample of that pigment may request one to be mailed, free of charge, at motleyemblem.org/rose-pink.
This essay uses the concept of indexicality as elaborated by linguistic anthropologists—a form of semiosis in which aspects of signs point for some (but not all) people who encounter them to contextual information—to study how James Baldwin thinks about sexuality and uses music in his last novel, Just Above My Head.
This essay makes the case that the dog's gaze is an important formal element in Western art in the ways in which it makes elements of a picture come together, visually and narratively. As a doppelg & auml;nger for the artist and for the viewer, the dog comes to represent the affective power of being seen.
This article explores patterns of paranoid cognition and interpretation in John Donne's writing, using his sermons, satires, and love poems as case studies. I analyze the discursive infrastructure of paranoid thinking through close attention to its grammatical, rhetorical, and logical symptomatology before considering the entanglements of paranoid affect and academic reading through the work of Paul Ricoeur, Eve Sedgwick, and (perhaps more surprisingly) T. S. Eliot. REPRESENTATIONS 173. (c) 2026 The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734-6018, electronic ISSN 1533-855X, pages 12-39. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University
This article brings together the philosophical concept of tautology and the study of prosody in disclosing how William Wordsworth's metrical practice introduces into the phenomenology of language tautological structures that yield a new dimension of poetic truth. The model that the article adduces through meter is then generalized to other aspects of Wordsworth's poetics in order to explore the broaderaesthetic and ethical affordances of atautological poetics. REPRESENTATIONS 173. (c) 2026 The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734-6018, electronic ISSN 1533-855X, pages 40-67. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at https://online.ucpress.edu/journals/pages/reprintspermissions.
