Right to Look

Mirzoeff Nicholas Mirzoeff

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.

Sujets

• History of art
• Cultural studies

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 18 novembre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822393726
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

T H E R I G H T T O LO O K

Duke University PressDurham & London2011

T H E R I G H T T O LO O K

A C O U N T E R H I S T O R Y O F V I S U A L I T Y

Nicholas Mirzoef

© 2011 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States oF America on acid-ree paper ♾

Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan

Typeset in Bembo by Tseng Inormation Systems, Inc.

Library oF Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear

on the last printed page oF this book.

For K R I S , KA R I N , and KAT H L E E N

with great love and respect, and in solidarity.

And for H A N N A H in hope of better futures

ix xiii xvii

1

35

48 77

117

123 155

188

L I S T O F I L L U S T R AT I O N S

. Ineluctable Visualities P R E FA C E

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

. The Right to Look, or, I N T R O D U C T I O N How to Think With and Against Visuality

..........................Visualizing Visuality

O N E . Oversight: The Ordering oF Slavery

T W O . The Modern Imaginary: Antislavery Revolutions and the Right to Existence

..........................Puerto Rican Counterpoint I

T H R E E . Visuality: Authority and War

F O U R . Abolition Realism: Reality, Realisms, and Revolution

..........................Puerto Rican Counterpoint II

C O N T E N T S

196

232

271

277

311 343 373

F I V E . Imperial Visuality and Countervisuality, Ancient and Modern

S I X . Antiascist Neorealisms: North-South and the Permanent Battle or Algiers

..........................Mexican-Spanish Counterpoint

. Global Counterinsurgency S E V E N and the Crisis oF Visuality

N O T E S

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

I N D E X

Marie-rançoise Plissart romDroit de regards, 1985 2 Jean-Baptiste du Tertre, “Indigoterie,”Histoire générale des Antilles Habitées par les François, 1667 36 Plan of the Battle of Waterloo37 John Bachmann,Panorama of the Seat of War: Bird’s Eye View of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and the District of Columbia, 1861 38

PLATES (Appear after page 204)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

I L LU S T R AT I O N S

FI GURES

1 2

3 4

Anonymous,Johnny Heke(i.e.,Hone Heke), 1856 Jean Baptiste Du Tertre, “Indigoterie” (detail), 1667 Anonymous,e Awakening of the ird Estate, 1789 José Campeche,El niño Juan Pantaleón de Avilés de Luna, 1808 William Blake,God Writing on the Tablets of the Covenant, 1805 James Sawkins,St. Jago[i.e., Santiago de]Cuba, 1859 Camille Pissarro,e Hermitage at Pontoise, 1867 rancisco Oller y Cestero,El Velorio[e Wake], 1895 Cover oFParis-Match Bubbles scene romRachida, 2002 Still oF Oelia romPan’s Labyrinth, 2006