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  1. Seeing through race

    Mitchell, W. J. T. (William John Thomas), 1942-
    Cambridge, Mass : Harvard University Press, 2012.

    According to W. J. T. Mitchell, a "color-blind" post-racial world is neither achievable nor desirable. Against popular claims that race is an outmoded construct that distracts from more important issues, Mitchell contends that race remains essential to our understanding of social reality. Race is not simply something to be seen but is among the fundamental media through which we experience human otherness. Race also makes racism visible and is thus our best weapon against it. The power of race becomes most apparent at times when pedagogy fails, the lesson is unclear, and everyone has something to learn. Mitchell identifies three such moments in America's recent racial history. First is the post-Civil Rights moment of theory, in which race and racism have been subject to renewed philosophical inquiry. Second is the moment of blackness, epitomized by the election of Barack Obama and accompanying images of blackness in politics and popular culture. Third is the "Semitic Moment" in Israel-Palestine, where race and racism converge in new forms of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Mitchell brings visual culture, iconology, and media studies to bear on his discussion of these critical turning points in our understanding of the relation between race and racism.

    Online Harvard University Press eBooks

  2. Cloning terror : the war of images, 9/11 to the present

    Mitchell, W. J. T. (William John Thomas), 1942-
    Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2011.

    The phrase 'War on Terror' has quietly been retired from official usage, but it persists in the American psyche, and our understanding of it is hardly complete. Nor will it be, W. J. T. Mitchell argues, without a grasp of the images that it spawned, and that spawned it. Exploring the role of verbal and visual images in the War on Terror, Mitchell finds a conflict whose shaky metaphoric and imaginary conception has created its own reality. At the same time, Mitchell locates in the concept of clones and cloning an anxiety about new forms of image-making that has amplified the political effects of the War on Terror. Cloning and terror, he argues, share an uncanny structural resemblance, shuttling back and forth between imaginary and real, metaphoric and literal manifestations. In Mitchell's startling analysis, cloning terror emerges as the inevitable metaphor for the way in which the War on Terror has not only helped recruit more fighters to the jihadist cause but undermined the American constitution with 'faith-based' foreign and domestic policies. Bringing together the hooded prisoners of Abu Ghraib with the cloned stormtroopers of the "Star Wars" saga, Mitchell draws attention to the figures of faceless anonymity that stalk the ever-shifting and unlocatable 'fronts' of the War on Terror. A striking new investigation of the role of images from our foremost scholar of iconology, "Cloning Terror" will expand our understanding of the visual legacy of a new kind of war and reframe our understanding of contemporary biopower and biopolitics.

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