Nicholas Mirzoeff
The Appearance of Black Lives Matter
Free e-book, download
[NAME] Publications is pleased to announce the release of Nicholas Mirzoeff’s long awaited free e-book The Appearance of Black Lives Matter. Mirzoeff’s book examines the transformation of visual culture from the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in the summer of 2014 to the inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017. By studying visual material from a variety of historical periods and sites, Mirzoeff develops a case for the space of appearance, a space “where we catch a glimpse of the society that is to come.” A limited edition print book with artwork by Carl Pope will also be released later this year by [NAME].
Nicholas Mirzoeff is a visual activist, working at the intersection of politics and global/digital visual culture. He is considered one of the founders of the academic discipline of visual culture in books like An Introduction to Visual Culture (1999/2009), The Visual Culture Reader (1998/2002/12) and How To See The World (2015/16). Mirzoeff was Deputy Director of the International Association for Visual Culture from 2011–16. From 2013–17, he was Visiting Professor of Visual Culture at Middlesex University, London and is currently a Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU.
Excerpt from book:
“Afterword
“The 2016 presidential election was underscored by the unspoken question: do Black Lives Matter? Its result reaffirmed that for the white majority, the answer remains ‘no,’ or at best, ‘only once we have everything we need.’ These changes are indicative of a systemic collapse in the hegemonic postwar concept of the social, mirrored by the ongoing implosion of social democratic parties across the West. Majorities of white people in the United States and the UK, and significant minorities of whites in other Western countries no longer accept the antiracist formation of the social.
“That is a politer way to say that they do not accept people of color and indigenous populations as belonging to their society, so they have attempted to displace the concept of society with that of race. ‘Race’ is now being deployed to mean a nation of culturally and ethnically homogenous individuals, who accept the need for strong leadership as the means of coherence in everyday life. If that sounds like fascism, so be it. It is where we are now.
“Against that violence, I want a space in which to appear—whether an institution or public space—that doesn’t reproduce white supremacy, that doesn’t represent a prison, in which there isn’t expropriated labor, there isn’t extinction, and there isn’t genocide. What would that look like?”
[NAME] is a Miami-based, non-profit press and cultural office founded in 2008 dedicated to facilitating the production of books by artists, experimental designers, and transdisciplinary theorists. Later this summer [NAME] will also be releasing JOHN RUSSELL: DOGGO in collaboration with Kunsthalle Zürich; Marilyn Gottlieb-Roberts: A Durable Tale; and a limited edition album and zine by Poorgrrrl.