Crisis Vision: Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance

Torin Monahan

Aug. 2022 · Duke University Press

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In Crisis Vision, Torin Monahan explores how artists confront the racializing dimensions of contemporary surveillance. He focuses on artists ranging from Kai Wiedenhöfer, 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.

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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.