The Right to Look

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.

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"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?

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List of Illustrations; Preface; Acknowledgments Introduction. The Right to Look, or, How to Think With and Against Visuality Visualizing Visuality One. Oversight: The Ordering of Slavery; Two. The Modern Imaginary: Anti-Slavery Revolutions and the Right to Existence Puerto Rican Counterpoint I Three. Visuality: Authority and War; Four. Abolition Realism: Reality, Realisms, and Revolution Puerto Rican Counterpoint II Five. Imperial Visuality and Countervisuality, Ancient and Modern; Six. Anti-Fascist Neorealisms: North-South and the Permanent Battle for Algiers Mexican-Spanish Counterpoint Seven. Global Counterinsurgency and Post-Perspectival Visuality Notes; Bibliography; Index

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