Nick is one of the founders of the interdisciplinary practice of visual culture. He’ll talk to us about his most recent writing, which explores the contemporary visibility of the war on Gaza, and how this enabled global solidarity.

David will present some of the thinking in his incredible book Under Representation, which unpicks how both postcolonial thinking has failed to properly think about race, and how critical race theory fails to address aesthetics.

The event will feature a short talk by Nick, followed by one from David, and then a conversation together with members of the Beniba Centre and the Scottish Universities Jewish Staff Network.

Overview

To See in the Dark – a conversation with Nick Mirzoeff

Presented with the Scottish Universities Jewish Staff Network

Nick will discuss his most recent book: To See in the Dark.

To see Palestine is to see the world. Since October 7th 2023, the forces of racial capitalism and settler colonialism have become all too visible in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. In To See In the Dark, Nicholas Mirzoeff explores how images, and especially video, viewed outside Palestine enabled a dramatic switch in public opinion, leading to a global uprising against the genocide. In this groundbreaking analysis, he connects the personal and the political through his own anti-Zionist Jewishness and its histories of violence. The result is a new collective and anti-colonial way of seeing, intersecting online and embodied experience.

“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

Genocide’s Wake – a conversation with David Lloyd

Presented with the Beniba Centre for Slavery Studies

“Genocide aims to abolish the life in common in which the atomized self-for-itself was unknown. What remains is the diminished fragment of shattered life, the wreckage cast up on the shore after the storm. Its loneliness is the longing for a collectivity that its very survival in the form of the individual forecloses. And beyond the terror of awaiting at every moment the sudden arrival of one’s own death is the abyss in which every person, every relation, every document or dwelling, every loved and shared place that might have borne witness to one’s existence and one’s passing will have been obliterated.”

This is a quote from Genocide’s Wake , one of a series of crucial articles David has written recently for Communis Press. For us, this quote stands in for so much of David’s thought, combining anti-colonial, anti-Zionist Palestinian solidarity—‘fragmented’ indexes his engagement with Nadera Shalhoub-Kervorkian and her writing—along with a critique of the regimes of the ‘atomised self’; the solitary confinement of individuation, the person, the proper and property, drawn from David’s entanglements with Black Studies thinkers and friends of Arika like Fred Moten, Hortense Spillers, Denise Ferreira da Silva.

David will speak about and share some of the thinking from these vital pieces during this talk.