Crisis Vision

Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance

Torin Monahan author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Duke University Press

Published:30th Sep '22

Should be back in stock very soon

This paperback is available in another edition too:

Crisis Vision cover

In Crisis Vision, Torin Monahan explores how artists confront the racializing dimensions of contemporary surveillance. He focuses on artists ranging from Kai Wiedenhöfer, Paolo Cirio, and Hank Willis Thomas to Claudia Rankine and Dread Scott, who engage with what he calls crisis vision—the regimes of racializing surveillance that position black and brown bodies as targets for police and state violence. Many artists, Monahan contends, remain invested in frameworks that privilege transparency, universality, and individual responsibility in ways that often occlude racial difference. Other artists, however, disrupt crisis vision by confronting white supremacy and destabilizing hierarchies through the performance of opacity. Whether fostering a recognition of a shared responsibility and complicity for the violence of crisis vision or critiquing how vulnerable groups are constructed and treated globally, these artists emphasize ethical relations between strangers and ask viewers to question their own place within unjust social orders.

"A methodical and insightful account of the cultural production of differential systems of oppression that characterize the surveillant present. . . . What’s notable throughout is the incisiveness of Monahan’s critique which refuses to shy away from scrutiny even as he lauds each artwork for its investigation of crisis vision." -- Gary Kafer * Journal of Cultural Economy *
"The contribution of Monahan’s Crisis Vision: Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance to the surveillance studies body of work is unique in its line of inquiry and the theoretical tools that it gifts to the intersectional field of surveillance studies scholars and artists." -- Ausma Bernot * International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy *
"Crisis Vision offers a richly textured methodological framework for better understanding the myriad ways in which visuality is put to the service of surveillance cultures rooted in racial prejudice and violence. Monahan 's call for a disruptive politics rooted in relations of collective opacity, and his thoughtful deliberation on contemporary art practices that answer this call, is a most welcome addition to the field of critical surveillance studies." -- Claudette Lauzon * Surveillance & Society *

ISBN: 9781478018759

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 318g

232 pages