Representationùthe production of meaning through language, discourse, and imageùoccupies a central place in current studies on culture. This broad-ranging text offers a comprehensive outline of how visual images, language, and discourse work as "systems of representation." The chapters explain a variety of approaches to representation, bringing to bear concepts from semiotic, discursive, psychoanalytic, anthropological, sociological, feminist, art-historical, and Foucauldian models of representation. The editors explore representation as a signifying practice in a rich diversity of social contexts and institutional sites, including the use of photography in the construction of national identity and culture; the poetics and politics of exhibiting other cultures in ethnographic museums; fantasies of the racialized other in popular media, film, and image; the construction of masculine identities in discourses of consumer culture and advertising; and the gendering of narratives in television soap operas. Representation analyzes contested and critical questions of meaning, truth, knowledge, and power in representation, and the relations between representation, pleasure, and fantasy. Accessible but not simplified, the book offers a unique perspective for teachers and students in cultural studies and related fields

斯圖爾特・霍爾(Stuart Hall)，英國文化研究“伯明翰學派”的代錶人物。現任英國開放大學社會學教授。主要著作有（包括編著）：《儀式抵抗：戰後英國的青年亞文化》（1976）、《編碼/解碼》（1980）、《文化節傳媒語言》（1981）、《調控危機》（1982）、《艱難的復興之路：撒切爾主義與左派的危機》（1988）、《現代性的構成的體》（1992）等。