Develops a comparative de-colonial framework for visual culture studies

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.

"“The Right to Look offers the fledgling discipline, and the thriving interdiscipline [of visual studies], a historical narrative against which it must now measure its claims to grasp the present. It marks a coming of age that has brought cultural studies past the variability and the enchantments of its postmodern moment. It highlights the need for responsibility toward actual pasts, and toward the actual demands of contemporary realities. These are significant achievements.”" - Public Books

"“[V]isual studies will no longer be the same before and after this book. . . . Mirzoeff's work does it all: offering new perspectives, blurring the boundaries between disciplines, disclosing what had been hidden, and shooting trouble.”" - Leonardo Reviews

"“[T]his monograph functions as an important historiographical intervention, revealing how the field of the visual has been constituted as modernity’s central epistemic field. Providing detailed historical analysis, this book is a valuable and important addition to the emergent field of visual cultural studies as well as to visual anthropologists seeking to understand and teach how the visual methods they deploy or theorize are circumscribed within a larger historical context of the visual.”" - Visual Anthropology Review