Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture - Hardcover

Mirzoeff, Nicholas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0415343097 ISBN 13: 9780415343091

Publisher: Routledge, 2004

Synopsis

This groundbreaking book examines the experience of watching the war against Iraq on television, on the Internet, in print media and in cinema. Looking at the endless stream of images from Iraq requires a new form of visual thinking that highlights the intersection of local and global while recognizing the way in which the war turned images themselves into weapons. Making striking connections between the history and legend of ancient Babylon, the Babylon that is Western modernity and everyday life in the modern suburb of Babylon, New York, Nicholas Mirzoeff explores that part of the ancient which is still present in the modern. Taking cues from Walter Benjamin he illuminates our Western experience of the Iraqi war by focusing on the intersection of past, present and future in a way which is both original and highly compelling.

About this title

Review

"A tour de force by perhaps the most inventive--certainly the most wide-ranging-- practitioner of visual culture analysis in the world today. Focusing on the deadly vacuity of the Iraq Invasion, Mirzoeff describes the global media war with an unusually subtle attentiveness to its visual dimensions. More importantly, he situates his response inside a broader picturing of how globalizing capital and resurgent nation states are creating what he calls 'an empire of camps." - Terry Smith, University of Pittsburgh

About the Author

Nicholas Mirzoeff is Associate Professor of Art at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Bodyscape; Art, Modernity and the Ideal Figure (1995) and An Introduction to Visual Culture (1999), and the editor of The Visual Culture Reader (second edition 2002)

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0415343097
• ISBN 13: 9780415343091
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 216