The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality

by Nicholas Mirzoeff

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.

Genres: Art History, Art, Theory, Nonfiction, Cultural Studies, Photography, Cultural

408 pages, Paperback

First published October 10, 2011

Reviews

[Krista Turner · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book really caused me to re-conceptualize some things. It's terrifying and eye-opening, but a good read. Plus there is a methodical and clear progression of his argument (which is not always the case with academic writers).

[Irene Wang · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Zaira Torres · Rating 3 out of 5]

La verdad la lectura me fue muy compleja, lo utilice para argumentar el tema de la visualidad en mi tesis, lo leí un par de veces porque me costó la lectura, sin embargo los ejemplos que aporta y el trasladarlo a lo práctico me ayudó a entender mejor el texto.

[Jalmar Lange · Rating 4 out of 5]

The concept of Visuality was very interesting, used this for my film course when discussing representation

[Danya · Rating 3 out of 5]

very foucaultian

[Ana · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very dense book and Mirzoeff's writing is very academic. Besides that, this is a wonderful book. It brings together the notions of Foucault and a number of queer theorists in a comprehensive critique of the normative state of affairs or visuality. The organization of the book into historical stages was a plus for me, and it felt like each chapter was a book in its own right since they beautifully characterized the specific types of visuality and countervisuality in the period.
Must read for sure.

[Ayanna Dozier · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book posits and delivers a countervisual exploration of history that is antiauthoritarian in hopes of exhuming examples for present (and future) potentials of social change. Mesmerizing and meticulous, one of the great theoretical books of the decade.

[Samira Makki]

Pretty intense

[Karla Kitalong]

Another book for updating/reclaiming my visual communication mojo.