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Wanted: The Outlaw in American Visual Culture Rachel Hall. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009.
By exploring a subject as seemingly innocuous as wanted posters, Rachel Hall embarks on a genealogy of "professional fugitive display" and examines the extent to which these cultural texts simultaneously delineate and reinscribe state-sanctioned ideology. Hall proposes that the wanted poster, as a plea for justice, appears to offers me- the "law-abiding citizen"- an opportunity to serve the greater good while satisfying my perverse desire for the spectacle of violence. In so doing, fugitive displays seek to produce "the vigilante viewer," an individual who, "in submission to police authority," becomes conscious of criminal activity and scans cultural terrain for those who violate the law (7). Hall situates the wanted poster, therefore, as an "instrument of surveillance" wielded to normalize cultural practices...