In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality by Nicholas Mirzoeff
  • Robyn Wiegman (bio)
The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Nicholas Mirzoeff. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. 408 pages. $89.95 cloth; $26.95 paper.

One does not have to linger for very long in the pages of The Chronicle of Higher Education to know how thoroughly the word global now serves as both a description and aspiration of the contemporary research university in the postindustrial West. Every major research institution in North America proclaims a global perspective, and many are revising the tourist sensibilities of their study-abroad programs by building brick and mortar campuses around the world to reconfigure the territorial scale and scope of their educational brand names. My own institution hopes to open its much-debated Kunshan campus in China soon, while exploratory missions have reportedly been completed for other student markets in India and Brazil. With the massive reorganization of wealth that has characterized the era of neoliberal capitalism—now historically indexed to the 1970s as a retraction of the nation-state compact in favor of the market as the primary “rationality” of the social order—the knowledge industry is seeking to outrun the economic decline of a domestic clientele by reimagining its contributions to the enhancement of contemporary life in the expansion of its geographic and intellectual terrains. As the discursive figure for this refashioning, the global has proven remarkably flexible in its ability to house a diverse collection of projects that revise the nation-centered traditions of the disciplines. Under its auspices, scholars have developed compelling critical frameworks to reject the forced boundedness of territory, culture, language, and identity. The current transdisciplinary consensus on cutting-edge research emphasizes the non-national, postnational, transnational, worldly, and planetary as important agendas for the global university’s twenty-first-century pursuits.

Nicholas Mirzoeff’s The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality is not a book centrally concerned with the global university and its imperative to transform nation-based practices of knowledge production, but it might be worthwhile to use the occasion of its recent publication to reflect on the historical and institutional contexts that prompt and condition it. To date, the book’s reception has [End Page 253] emphasized its interdisciplinary intervention into disciplinary forms, with Mirzoeff’s commitment to visual cultural studies rightly heralded for its challenge to the canonical traditions and national metrics that have governed art history. In its own terms, The Right to Look is a “critical interpretation of media and mediation.” Its main object of study is not the image but “visuality,” which is defined as “both a medium for the transmission and dissemination of authority, and a means for the mediation of those subject to that authority.” Its method is comparative and its political commitment is to a “decolonial” (xiv) framework that can use “the visual archive to ‘speak’ for and about subaltern histories . . . as opposed to simply being illustrative of them” (xv). The archive it studies is impressively transnational, moving across “three continents” and “two hemispheres” (xiv) in pursuit of the genealogy of visuality that founded and continues to sustain the Anglo-American-French imperial project. Three specific periods organize this endeavor, beginning in the seventeenth century with the plantation slavery complex (1660-1860) and its reliance on what Mirzoeff calls the visuality of “oversight” (50). The second formation is imperialism (1860-1945), evinced by the visual orders of colonialism, territorial world war, and fascism, and the third is the military-industrial complex (1945-present), which centers the biopolitical as its primary technique of management in a global war on terror that quite literally universalizes visuality’s sovereign reach. To contest this history, Mirzoeff offers the concept foregrounded in his title, “the right to look,” which names the act of “autonomy” that opposes visuality as the dominant authority of modernity by asserting, in the face of violence, exclusion, and negation, the “right to the real as the key to a democratic politics” (4). His main political references are the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), abolitionism, the Commune (1871), the General Strike (1926), and the Arab Spring (2010-present).

As this overview indicates, The Right to...

pdf

Share