num_pages: 408
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 visualityplantation slavery imperialism and the present-day military-industrial complexand 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 counteredby 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.
language: English
title: The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality
publisher: Duke University Press Books