- To See In The Dark
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- To See In The Dark
I hope you got the email explaining that I’ve moved my newsletter to Beehiiv because Substack sold what was left of its soul to Bari Weiss and the far-right. It will always be free and I will never ask you for money.
Soon after I started writing these newsletters about the genocide in Gaza from the perspective of an anti-Zionist Jew, caught in academia, some friends kindly suggested I think of making them into a book.
I thought to myself that it could be done, if only there was a radical press, open to short format, non-traditional projects. And there is: the Vagabonds series at Pluto Press.
So the book now exists and can be pre-ordered. I’m promoting only because we can be sure it won’t be pushed by bookstores and the online chains, given the subject. All proceeds—if there are any—will, of course, be donated to help people in Palestine.
What was important to me was writing this—it was cathartic and purpose-giving at once. I hope it will be of use to people in solidarity with Palestine, whether individually, at teach-ins, or even in class.
I’m terrible at self-promotion so I’ve just pasted in the copy from the Pluto website:
Nicholas Mirzoeff To See In the Dark: Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7th
(Pluto Press)
The print book
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.
The book will be published January 20, 2025. If you’d like to pre-order you can do so here.
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
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
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 genocid
Newsletters will resume in 2025.