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Author Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 1962-

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

Publication Info. Durham, NC : Duke University Press, [2011]
©2011

Item Status

Location Call No. Status OPAC Message Public Note Gift Note
 Moore Stacks  P96.W62 M57 2011    DUE 05-10-24  ---
Description xix, 385 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
Series E-Duke books scholarly collection
e-Duke books scholarly collection.
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 343-371)and index.
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.
Summary In The Right to Look, Nicholas Mirzoeff develops a comparative de-colonial framework for visual culture studies, a field that he has helped to create and shape. Casting modernity as an ongoing contest between visuality and counter-visuality, 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. He describes how, within each of these, 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 counteredoby 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, anti-colonialism in the South Pacific, anti-fascism in Italy and Algeria, and the contemporary global counterinsurgency, The Right to Look is a work of astonishing geographic, temporal, and conceptual reach.
Subject Mass media and world politics.
Mass media and world politics.
Communication and culture -- Political aspects.
Communication and culture.
Mass media -- Political aspects.
Mass media -- Political aspects.
Visual communication -- Political aspects.
Visual communication -- Political aspects.
Visual communication.
Other Form: Print version: Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 1962- Right to look. Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press, 2011 9780822348955 0822348950 9780822349181 0822349183 (DLC) 2011027508 (OCoLC)700406654
ISBN 9780822348955 (cloth)
0822348950 (cloth)
9780822349181 (paperback)
0822349183 (paperback)
9780822393726
0822393727