The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of VisualityIn 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. |
Contents
The Right to Look or How to Think With and Against Visuality | 1 |
Visualizing Visuality | 35 |
Puerto Rican Counterpoint I | 117 |
Puerto Rican Counterpoint II | 188 |
Mexican Spanish Counterpoint | 271 |
Notes | 311 |
Bibliography | 343 |
| 373 | |
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Common terms and phrases
abolition African Algeria American artist Atlantic world authority Battle of Algiers Black Bois British called Camille Pissarro Caribbean Carlyle Carlyle's century Chartism claim colonial Commune counterinsurgency counterpoint countervisuality created culture Declaration decolonization depicted domination Domingue emancipation empire enslaved Fanon fascist figure film force Foucault France Frantz Fanon French Revolution Froude genealogy global Gramsci Haiti Hero Ibid imaginary imagined imperial visuality indigenous insurgency Iraq island Jamaica José Campeche labor land leader liberty Makandal Maori means military missionaries modern Napoleon National necropolitics nonetheless Oller overseer oversight painting Pan's Labyrinth Papahurihia Paris Paris Commune photographs Pissarro plantation plantation complex planters police political population primitive produced Puerto Rico Quoted Rachida radical Rancière realism reality regime revolutionary right to look Saint Saint-Domingue seen sense slave slavery social society South space strategy strike subaltern sugar sustain tactic tion Toussaint violence visible W. E. B. Du Bois