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.

About the Author
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.

Reviews
"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 *



Book Information
ISBN 9781478018759
Author Torin Monahan
Format Paperback
Page Count 232
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 318g