Home / Crisis Vision

Crisis Vision

Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance

Crisis Vision

Book Pages: 232 Illustrations: 29 illustrations Published: September 2022

Author: Torin Monahan

Subjects
Media Studies, Cultural Studies > Surveillance Studies, Art and Visual Culture

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.

Praise

"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

“With his deeply researched new analytic of crisis vision, Torin Monahan illuminates the violent workings of surveillance to index and atomize the extractive logics of racial capitalism. Framing creative output and interventions through analytics of transparency, avoidance, disruption, and the radical possibilities of opacity, Crisis Vision is an indispensable interrogation of the political potentiality of critical surveillance art to reveal, question, unsettle, disrupt, and, at times, mirror the very logics of surveillance.” — Simone Browne, author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness

“This book provides a vital new theory for understanding how racial logics constrain social and political possibilities in the present. Crisis vision is a way of seeing that magnifies differences among people, transfers blame for economic and environmental crises onto the marginalized, and promotes violence. Torin Monahan carefully considers the capacity of surveillance artworks to improve our understanding of this harmful way of seeing and generate alternative visions that foster an ethics and poetics of relationality in its stead.” — Rachel Hall, author of The Transparent Traveler: The Performance and Culture of Airport Security

Buy
Availability: In stock
Please read our FAQ's to learn more about Pre-Orders
Price: $25.95

Open Access

Request a desk or exam copy

Author/Editor Bios Back to Top

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.

Table of Contents Back to Top
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
Sales/Territorial Rights: World

Rights and licensing
Additional InformationBack to Top
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-1875-9 / Cloth ISBN: 978-1-4780-1611-3 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-2338-8
Publicity material

Top