Watching Babylon by Nicholas Mirzoeff

Watching Babylon by Nicholas Mirzoeff

Groundbreaking and compelling, Watching Babylon examines the experience of watching the war against Iraq on television, on the internet, in the cinema and in print media. Mirzoeff shows how the endless stream of images flowing from the Gulf has necessitated a new form of visual thinking, one which recognises that the war has turned images themselves into weapons. Drawing connections between the history and legend of ancient Babylon, the metaphorical Babylon of Western modernity, and everyday life in the modern suburb of Babylon, New York, Mirzoeff explores ancient concerns which have found new resonance in the present day. In the tradition of Walter Benjamin, Watching Babylon illuminates the Western experience of the Iraqi war and makes us re-examine the very way we look at images of conflict.

'A rich and helpful look at our dark timesMirzoeff explains how watching Babylon-Iraq is simultaneously constructing and destroying the world we inhabit' - Chris Hables Gray

'A tour de force of cultural criticism. Mirzoeff lays bare the complex and inexorable interconnections between the US-UK axis of power and Iraq - interconnections that strategically belie the brute logic of 'difference' currently determining the state of world affairs'

"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

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)

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780415343107
ISBN 10	0415343100
Title	Watching Babylon
Author	Nicholas Mirzoeff
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Taylor & Francis Ltd
Year published	2004-11-04
Number of pages	216
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.