To See in the Dark: Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7, by Nicholas Mirzoeff (VAGABONDS 006)
Launch event in London on Thursday 16 January
It’s been an honour and a privilege to work with the renowned cultural theorist Nick Mirzoeff over the past few months to bring to the world his latest book, To See In the Dark: Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7, out this month as the sixth book in the VAGABONDS series that I edit for Pluto Press.
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.
Nick dug deep to write this important book, which couldn’t come at a more crucial time.
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 where he is the chair of the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University.
Launch event
Join us in London at 5:30pm on Thursday, January 16 at UCL’s Institute for Advanced Studies Common Ground (room G11, on the ground floor of the South Wing) for a launch event!
What readers are saying
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
40% off
To See In the Dark is available for 40% off now from Pluto, along with other books on community solidarity, including several others in the VAGABONDS series: The barnd new Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity by Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak (stay tuned for launch events in February!), We Are 'Nature' Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones by Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan, and The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future by Cassie Thornton.
Gearing up to launch Billionaires and Guillotines
In the coming weeks, we’ll be Pluto and I will be launching the crowdfunding campaign for Billionaires and Guillotines, a board game where players take on the role of 2-5 rival plutocrats vying to grab the wealth of the world before their actions trigger a revolution where they all lose… a lot more than their assets.
I need your help!
In order to make this game a success, we need folks to sign up early to the Kickstarter campaign. You don’t need to pledge of buy (yet), but the more people we sign up, the higher we’ll be prioritized in a bunch of horrible algorithms!
More…
Learn more about the game
Download a free “beta” version to print and play at home
Watch the tutorial video
More soon!