Vision is not just a simple recognition of what passes through our field of sight, the reflection and observation of light and shape. Even before Freud posited dreams as a way of “seeing” even as we sleep, the writings of philosophers, artists, and scientists from Goethe to Cézanne have argued that to understand vision as a mere mirroring of the outside world is to overlook a more important cognitive act of seeing that is dependent on time.
           
Bringing together a renowned international group of contributors, Vision in Motion explores one of the most vexing problems in the study of vision and cognition: To make sense of the sensations we experience when we see something, we must configure many moments into a synchronous image. This volume offers a critical reexamination of seeing that restores a concept of “vision in motion” that avoids reducing the sensations we experience to narrative chronological sequencing. The contributors draw on Hume, Bergson, and Deleuze, among others, to establish a nuanced idea of how we perceive.

Images play a key role in political communication and the ways we come to understand the power structures that shape society. Nowhere is this more evident than in the process of empire building, in which visual language has long been a highly effective means of overpowering another culture with one’s own values and beliefs.
           
With Visualizing Portuguese Power, Urte Krass and a group of contributors examine the visual arts within the Portuguese empire between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. With a focus on the political appropriation of Portuguese-Christian art within the colonies, the book looks at how these and other objects could be staged to generate new layers of meaning. Beyond religious images, the book shows that the appropriation of the visual arts to reinforce important political concepts also took place in the outside the religious sphere, including adaptations of local artistic customs to reinforce Portuguese power.