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9781478018759 Academic Inspection Copy

Crisis Vision

Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance
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In Crisis Vision, Torin Monahan explores how artists confront the racializing dimensions of contemporary surveillance. He focuses on artists ranging from Kai Wiedenhoefer, 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.
Torin Monahan is Professor of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, author of Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity, coauthor of SuperVision: An Introduction to the Surveillance Society, and coeditor of Surveillance Studies: A Reader.
Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. Avoidance 21 2. Transparency 43 3. Complicity 69 4. Violence 90 5. Disruption 115 Conclusion 139 Notes 147 Bibliography 179 Index 205
"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) "In many ways, Crisis Vision mirrors the artists featured throughout its pages by challenging current and future critical/cultural communication studies scholars to consider their roles within these systems in an ever-evolving digital age. Monahan offers scholars an illuminating work that both presents a vital new theory describing how racial systems persevere through our digital age, while also magnifying marginalized voices and their aspirations toward peace and the freedom to exist." - Jacob Pedersen (Southern Communication Journal) "Crisis Vision is both an exemplary cultural critique of racialized surveillance and a celebration of makers whose works interrupt this status quo. . . . Crisis Vision provides its readers with an aesthetic vocabulary for refusing assimilation by surveillant logics, seeking instead to dismantle them through depiction." - Atilla Hallsby (Cultural Studies)
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