About the Book
In The Right to Look, Nicholas Mirzoeff develops a comparative decolonial framework for visual culture studies, the field that he helped to create and shape. Casting modernity as an ongoing contest between visuality and countervisuality, or "the right to look," he explains how visuality sutures authority to power and renders the association natural. An early-nineteenth-century concept, meaning the visualization of history, visuality has been central to the legitimization of Western hegemony. Mirzoeff identifies three "complexes of visuality"-plantation slavery, imperialism, and the present-day military-industrial complex-and explains how, within each, power is made to seem self-evident through techniques of classification, separation, and aestheticization. At the same time, he shows how each complex of visuality has been countered-by the enslaved, the colonized, and opponents of war, all of whom assert autonomy from authority by claiming the right to look. Encompassing the Caribbean plantation and the Haitian revolution, anticolonialism in the South Pacific, antifascism in Italy and Algeria, and the contemporary global counterinsurgency, The Right to Look is a work of astonishing geographic, temporal, and conceptual reach.
Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations ix
Preface. Ineluctable Visualities xiii
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction. The Right to Look, or, How to Think With and Against Visuality 1
Visualizing Visuality 35
1. Oversight: The Ordering of Slavery 48
2. The Modern Imaginary: Anti-Slavery Revolutions and the Right to Existence 77
Puerto Rican Counterpoint I 117
3. Visuality: Authority and War 123
4. Abolition Realism: Reality, Realisms, and Revolution 155
Puerto Rican Counterpoint II 188
5. Imperial Visuality and Countervisuality, Ancient and Modern 196
6. Anti-Fascist Neorealisms: North-South and the Permanent Battle for Algiers 232
Mexican-Spanish Counterpoint 271
7. Global Counterinsurgency and the Crisis of Visuality 277
Notes 311
Bibliography 343
Index 373
About the Author :
Nicholas Mirzoeff is Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. He is the author of several books, including An Introduction to Visual Culture, Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture, and Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews, as well as the editor of The Visual Culture Reader.
Review :
"The Right to Look is a brilliant book, original, ambitious, and constantly surprising. Nicholas Mirzoeff is at the center of the most advanced thinking in visual culture studies, and The Right to Look is a very important project within the field. It is a genuinely postcolonial text that puts visual culture studies on a broad historical and political basis for the first time." Terry Smith, co-editor of Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, and Contemporaneity "Nicholas Mirzoeff's The Right to Look is a passionate and magisterial intervention in the field of visual culture studies. Emphatically arguing that the domain of human visual experience and all its technical prostheses and metaphorical extensions is a fundamentally ethical and political domain, Mirzoeff ranges over an amazingly varied historical and geographical terrain. Everything from the administration of the colonial plantation, to missionary and military adventurism, to drone attacks and counter-insurgency flow-charts, to the latest in tactics of spectacle and surveillance is analyzed with a sure sense of the crucial detail and the revelatory anecdote. This is a brilliant contribution to visual studies, one that sets a very high standard for this emergent discipline." W. J. T. Mitchell, author of Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9-11 to the Present and What Do Pictures Want? "[V]isual studies will no longer be the same before and after this book... Mirzoeff's work does it all: offering new perspectives, blurring the boundaries between disciplines, disclosing what had been hidden, and shooting trouble." - Jan Baetens, Leonardo Reviews "The Right to Look masterfully engages with a wide range of visual artefacts that have disseminated visuality and countervisuality in modernity." Charmaine Fernandez, Limina "This volume advances and enhances Mirzoeff's reputation as one of the intellectual leaders of visual culture studies. Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty." - C. J. Lamb, Choice "This ambitious, dense, and highly theoretical critical interpretation of history as it has been inscribed and manifests in visual artefacts draws on the full scope of cultural studies and postcolonial discourses as well as elements of social science, visual studies, art history, and philosophy." - Judith R. Halasz, Visual Studies "One of the most creative, interesting, and certainly ambitious books I have read in a long time... Mirzoeff has also provided us with a myriad of ways in which people have sought to counter visuality. In doing so, he has provided an intriguing blueprint of hope to those seeking to "democratize democracy,"[15] as well as a fascinating study for those with an interest in the power of aesthetics and rhetoric, those who are concerned about the discourse of war and capitalism, American hegemony, and the theory of epistemological justification. I cannot recommend this book enough." - Juneko J. Robinson, Consciousness, Literature, and the Arts
