| The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality Contributor(s): Mirzoeff, Nicholas (Author) |
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ISBN: 0822349183 ISBN-13: 9780822349181 Publisher: Duke University Press OUR PRICE: $29.40 Product Type: Paperback Published: October 2011 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Language Arts & Disciplines | Communication Studies - Art | Criticism & Theory - Social Science | Media Studies |
| Dewey: 302.222 |
| LCCN: 2011027508 |
| Physical Information: 1.07" H x 6.35" W x 9.23" (1.43 lbs) 408 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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. |