To see Palestine is to see the world. Since October 7th 2023, the forces of racial capitalism, settler colonialism and white supremacy have become all too visible in Israel's war on Gaza. Urban, networked Gazan youth have documented and shared their struggle with the world using social media strategies, derived from movements from Tahrir Square to Black Lives Matter.

In To See In The Dark, Nicholas Mirzoeff explores how these videos and photos transmitted and viewed outside Palestine, via platforms like Instagram and TikTok, enabled a dramatic switch in public opinion, leading to the global uprising against genocide.

In this groundbreaking analysis, he also connects the personal and the political via his own anti-Zionist Jewishness, weaving an autotheory of domestic, political and sexual violence. Through this exploration, he finds new collective anticolonial ways of seeing, combining online and embodied experiences.

About the Author
Among the founders of visual culture as a field, Nicholas Mirzoeff has also written extensively on Jewishness and Palestine . His books include How To See The World, The Right to Look and The Appearance of Black Lives Matter. He has written for the Guardian, Hyperallergic and The Nation. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

'Mirzoeff deftly dissects the violent abstractions that are characteristic of the drone's remote-controlled gaze, arguing incisively for a return to ways of seeing that are grounded in solidarity and resistance'

-- Candice Breitz, artist

'Mirzoeff sharply urges us to divest from a mere spectatorship to a genocide, and insists that we see in relation, in solidarity and as an anti-colonial collective. To See in the Dark is to settle for no less than to see Palestine free'

-- Simone Browne, author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness

'If ever we ever needed a contemporary rejoinder to John Berger's Ways of Seeing, this is the book. Timely and clearly written, To See in the Dark is a manifesto to solidarity, a foraging, salvaging and a way to unset alongside the opaque lives of Palestinians, who struggle under organized, genocidal state violence. Through engaging visual works of Palestinian and other artists, Mirzoeff leads us past the "colonial visual screen" and over the rubble, to see new solidarities that arise from associating with the oppressed by dissociating with systems of oppression whose surveillance, checkpoints, prisons, and drones appear in the "white sight" of genocide'

-- Stephen Sheehi, co-author of Camera Palaestina: Photography and Displaced Histories of Palestine



Book Information
ISBN 9780745351155
Author Nicholas Mirzoeff
Format Paperback
Page Count 176
Imprint Pluto Press
Publisher Pluto Press
Dimensions(mm) 215mm * 110mm * 12mm