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IAS Book Launch: To See in the Dark
16 January 2025, 5:30 pm–7:30 pm
Join author Nicholas Mirzoeff for the launch of his book To See In the Dark. Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Institute of Advanced Studies
Location
-
IAS Common Ground (G11)ground floor, South Wing, Wilkins BuildingUCL, Gower St, LondonWC1E 6BTUnited Kingdom
ABOUT THE BOOK
To see Palestine is to see the world. Since 7 October 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.
To See In the Dark. Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7 will be published by Pluto Press in January 2025.
ABOUT THE EVENT
Nicholas Mirzoeff will read from his book and afterward be in conversation with Max Haiven, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies.
The book launch is supported by Pluto Books and RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab
About the Speaker
Nicholas Mirzoeff
Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University
Nicholas Mirzoeff is a visual activist, working at the intersection of politics, race and global/visual culture. He is chair of the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. In 2020/21 he was ACLS/Mellon Scholar and Society fellow in residence at the Magnum Foundation, New York.
He published two books in 2023: White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness (MIT Press) and the third edition of An Introduction to Visual Culture (Routledge). A frequent blogger and writer, his work has appeared in The Nation, the New York Times, Frieze, the Guardian, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.