The Visual Culture Reader - Softcover

'This volume is required reading for anyone interested in media studies or visual culture. It brings critical visuality studies up to the moment and introduces new directions for future work. Summing Up: Essential. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.' - A. M. Laflen, Marist College in CHOICE

'This is a first rate collection covering the range and the depth of critical visual studies today. An essential guide for anyone concerned with the power of the image and the image of power.' - McKenzie Wark, Eugene Lang College, USA

'This 3rd edition of Nicholas Mirzoeff’s The Visual Culture Reader is unrecognizable from the collection’s first edition published way back in the last millennium. Its content, character, and urgency are invigorating and galvanizing. If the Reader’s first edition gave shape to Visual Culture Studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry, this 3rd edition will, I believe, mould visual culture itself.' - Marquard Smith, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Visual Culture & Director of Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster, UK

'With this volume, Mirzoeff has assembled an invaluable resource for scholars and practitioners of visual culture across disciplinary and geographic boundaries. Combining foundational texts and cutting-edge contemporary scholarship, the Third Edition of the VCR charts the emergence of critical visuality studies and brings the field into the twenty-first century.' - A. Joan Saab, University of Rochester, USA

Ten years after the last edition, this thoroughly revised and updated third edition of The Visual Culture Reader highlights the transformed and expanded nature of globalized visual cultures. It assembles key new writings, visual essays and specially commissioned articles, emphasizing the intersections of the Web 2.0, digital cultures, globalization, visual arts and media, and the visualizations of war. The volume attests to the maturity and exciting development of this cutting-edge field.

Fully illustrated throughout, The Reader features an introductory section tracing the development of what editor Nicholas Mirzoeff calls "critical visuality studies." It develops into thematic sections, each prefaced by an introduction by the editor, with an emphasis on global coverage. Each thematic section includes suggestions for further reading. Thematic sections include:

• Expansions
• War and Violence
• Attention and Visualizing Economy
• Bodies and Minds
• Histories and Memories
• (Post/De/Neo)Colonial Visualities
• Media and Mediations

Taken as a whole, these 47 essays provide a vital introduction to the diversity of contemporary visual culture studies and a key resource for research and teaching in the field.

Contributors: Ackbar Abbas, Morana Alac, Malek Alloula, Ariella Azoulay, Zainab Bahrani, Jonathan L. Beller,Suzanne Preston Blier, Lisa Cartwright, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Beth Coleman, Teddy Cruz, René Descartes, Faisal Devji, Henry Drewal, Okwui Enwezor, Frantz Fanon, Allen Feldman, Mark Fisher, Finbarr Barry Flood, Anne Friedberg, Alex Galloway, Faye Ginsburg, Derek Gregory, J. Jack Halberstam, Donna Haraway, Brian Holmes, Amelia Jones, Georgina Kleege, Sarat Maharaj, Brian Massumi, Carol Mavor, Tara McPherson, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Timothy Mitchell, W. J. T. Mitchell, Naeem Mohaiemen, Fred Moten, Lisa Nakamura, Trevor Paglen, Lisa Parks, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Jacques Rancière, Andrew Ross, Terence E. Smith, Marita Sturken, Paolo Virno, Eyal Weizman