To See in the Dark: Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7 - Paperback

by Nicholas Mirzoeff (Author)

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.

He activates this new visual politics in this groundbreaking analysis and offers practical tools to sustain it. Connecting the personal and the political via his own anti-Zionist Jewishness, he weaves an auto theory of domestic, political, and sexual violence. Through this exploration, he finds new collective anticolonial ways of seeing, combining online and embodied experiences.

Author Biography

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.