Abstract

MIRZOEFF, Nicholas. The right to look. ETD [online]. 2016, vol.18, n.4, pp.745-768. ISSN 1676-2592.  https://doi.org/10.20396/etd.v18i4.8646472.

This essay is drawn from the my book "The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality". It was first composed as a presentation for the Visual Culture Conference at the University of Westminster, organized by Marq Smith and Jo Morra in 2010, in which I developed a comparative decolonial framework for visual culture studies, the field that he helped to create and shape. Considering modernity as an ongoing contest between visuality and counter visuality ("the right to look"), I explained 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. I identified three "complexes of visuality": 1. the slavery in the plantations; 2. The imperialism; and 3. the present-day military-industrial complex. I explains how, within each, power is made to seem self-evident through techniques of classification, separation, and aestheticization. At the same time, I showed 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.

Keywords : Complexes of Visuality; Visual Culture; Visuality; Countervisuality.

        · abstract in Portuguese | Spanish     · text in Portuguese     · Portuguese ( pdf )