The Familial Gaze is a book about longing and the desire for community and connection. By presenting carefully imbricating accounts of a series of intimacies, it also enacts such a vision. Through essays and images, this collection offers readers different ways of seeing those all too familiar images of the family, Madonna and child, husbands and wives, lovers and friends.

Cameron was not a typical Victorian matron. Instead, beginning at the age of 48 when her own children were all grown, she transformed her home into what one guest described as "the funniest place in the world."⁴ It was the place where Cameron directed family members, invited guests (often famous artists and writers of the period)⁵ and household servants to star in her productions. In these visual dramas, "Even the maids and cooks were exposed as Virgin Marys, Ophelias, Beatrices, and mountain nymphs"(46). Most of what became known as Cameron's Madonna pictures were in fact photographs of her parlor maid, Mary Hillier.⁶

I begin this afterword by recounting some of these stories about the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron in order to look at Marianne Hirsch's role in the creation of The Familial Gaze from a slightly different angle. Like Cameron, literally and figuratively, Marianne Hirsch's fingerprints are all over this volume. It is both a testament to her generosity and hospitality as well as her critical engagement. Hirsch not only hosted the conference and co-curated the exhibit that were the beginnings of the volume at her home institution, at that time she also carefully constructed the critical framework through which each of the photographs and papers were to be read.⁷ In The Familial Gaze, Hirsch now invites a broader readership into a conversation about family pictures and their allures. She offers readers entry into a conversation among intimates. Through the volume we become a part of this critical conversation.

By gathering an eclectic group of literary scholars, art historians, curators and artists some of whom are in fact Hirsch's own dearest friends and family members,⁸ she asks readers to reflect on our own family pictures. She also asks us to reconsider what constitutes "the familial gaze." Through the volume we are invited to look at these intimate engagements as a public practice. Hirsch's touch also marks the volume in other ways. There is, for example, a powerful continuity between the themes of this collection and Hirsch's previous work. As in The Mother/Daughter Plot, here again she is engaged in the task of opening up familial discourse to critical interrogation.⁹ And here too she does so out of a desire for a different kind of critical feminist community. For Hirsch such a community must be able to address larger historical legacies. For Hirsch this means imagining a community that can embrace her own family history, what she has referred to elsewhere as her "displaced girlhood."¹⁰

In The Familial Gaze all visions and versions of the familial are haunted by historical traumas, displacements, promises and disappointments. Here again, such legacies cannot be seen as separate or distinct from even the most private of images or recollections. Thus, the legacy of slavery and racism in America looms large over many of the volume's essays, including those by Smith, McDowell, Chong. Wexler, Willis, Abel and Liss.

The works by Spiegelman, van Alphen and Spitzer are each, in different ways, about the Shoah and its visual legacies. Pieces by Sultan, Novak, Miller, Gallop and Leonard offer insights into a postwar American landscape of disappointed promise especially for American Jews. And, as I read it, through the dark shadows of not only the Holocaust but also America's ongoing racial prejudice, many of the essays in the volume speak to the urgency and impossibility of assimilation into an ideal picture of the American family.

The collection as a whole does not allow readers to take comfort in any simple reading of the family anywhere as a respite from history or politics. There is no such thing as "the family" in postwar America nor is home easily found in the promises of European cultural inclusion or class mobility. These ambivalent legacies demand that we see "the familial gaze" as self-contradictory. Like identity it too is inflected by nationality, ethnicity, race and history. Despite and because of this, Hirsch asks us not to give up on community. Instead she argues that even her own family history as viewed in relation to the images and narratives of many others can be generative. For her it seems this means that we should consider appreciating all the more those rare moments of intimacy and connection wherever they occur.

I read this volume as such a moment. In The Familial Gaze Hirsch extends the feminist vision of her earlier work across disciplines and critical practices to create an intimate community of inquiry. In reconsidering the power and allure of family photographs, the collection demonstrates what can happen when these stories and images are shared. In the process of exchange, a different kind of intimacy is enacted. In the public space of an academic conference, an exhibit and a volume, Hirsch blurs the boundaries between public and private images and domains. By gathering the voices and visions of a broad range of scholars and artists and placing them in conversation with each other, Hirsch extends our notion of who is familiar. By queering these boundaries in the construction of the volume as a family album, Hirsch enacts a different kind of intimacy. She opens up the familial gaze.