" The Right to Look is a brilliant book, original, ambitious, and constantly surprising. Nicholas Mirzoeff is at the center of the most advanced thinking in visual culture studies, and The Right to Look is a very important project within the field. It is a genuinely postcolonial text that puts visual culture studies on a broad historical and political basis for the first time." Terry Smith, co-editor of Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, and Contemporaneity "Nicholas Mirzoeff's The Right to Look is a passionate and magisterial intervention in the field of visual culture studies. Emphatically arguing that the domain of human visual experience and all its technical prostheses and metaphorical extensions is a fundamentally ethical and political domain, Mirzoeff ranges over an amazingly varied historical and geographical terrain. Everything from the administration of the colonial plantation, to missionary and military adventurism, to drone attacks and counter-insurgency flow-charts, to the latest in tactics of spectacle and surveillance is analyzed with a sure sense of the crucial detail and the revelatory anecdote. This is a brilliant contribution to visual studies, one that sets a very high standard for this emergent discipline." W.
J. T. Mitchell, author of Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9-11 to the Present and What Do Pictures Want? "[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."--Jan Baetens, Leonardo Reviews "The Right to Look masterfully engages with a wide range of visual artefacts that have disseminated visuality and countervisuality in modernity." Charmaine Fernandez, Limina"This volume advances and enhances Mirzoeff's reputation as one of the intellectual leaders of visual culture studies. Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.
"--C. J. Lamb, Choice "This ambitious, dense, and highly theoretical critical interpretation of history as it has been inscribed and manifests in visual artefacts draws on the full scope of cultural studies and postcolonial discourses as well as elements of social science, visual studies, art history, and philosophy." --Judith R. Halasz, Visual Studies "One of the most creative, interesting, and certainly ambitious books I have read in a long time. Mirzoeff has also provided us with a myriad of ways in which people have sought to counter visuality. In doing so, he has provided an intriguing blueprint of hope to those seeking to "democratize democracy,"[15] as well as a fascinating study for those with an interest in the power of aesthetics and rhetoric, those who are concerned about the discourse of war and capitalism, American hegemony, and the theory of epistemological justification. I cannot recommend this book enough.
"--Juneko J. Robinson, Consciousness, Literature, and the Arts.