The right to look : a counterhistory of visuality / Nicholas Mirzoeff.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 1962-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Mass media and world politics.

Communication and culture--Political aspects.

Communication and culture.

Mass media--Political aspects.

Mass media.

Visual communication--Political aspects.

Visual communication.

Physical Description:

pages ; cm

Place of Publication:

Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2011.

Summary:

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, 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. Book jacket.

Contents:

Oversight : the ordering of slavery

The modern imaginary : anti-slavery revolutions and the right to existence

Visuality : authority and war

Abolition realism : reality, realisms, and revolution

Imperial visuality and countervisuality, ancient and modern

Anti-fascist neorealisms : North-South and the permanent battle for Algiers

Global counterinsurgency and the crisis of visuality.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780822348955

0822348950

9780822349181

0822349183

OCLC:

700406654