Escenas de proyección. Reenviós del sujeto iluminista

Santiago de Chile: Ediciones/Metales Pesados

Spanish translation of Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject, trans. by Fermín Rodríguez and Paola Cortes-Rocca

Escenas de proyección toma los instrumentos proyectivos de la revolución científica –desde el telescopio de proyección y la cámara oscura, hasta la luz solar y el microscopio– para demostrar que la escena es un complejo dispositivo de poder que produce su propio sujeto. En la medida que saca al yo de su vulnerabilidad e instala la fantasía de una visión de un sujeto racional e inmanente respecto de todas las figuras minoritarias, raciales, queer, feminizadas, perpetúa una estructura de dominación.

A lo largo de este libro, Jill H. Casid nos lleva desde los orígenes míticos de la representación hasta instancias ejemplares del arte contemporáneo, con el objetivo de explorar el potencial de transformación de las tecnologías de proyección e invertir su dirección en virtud de posiciones no normativas. Es decir, traza conexiones reprimidas entre elementos de la escena y elementos que cruzan de una escena a otra, para así abrirla y reinventar el sujeto, inaugurar devenires, liberar el potencial del por qué-no, del no no-aquí y del no no-todavía.

Cover image: Zoe Leonard, Arkwright Road, 2012. Courtesy of the Artist, Gallery Gisela Capitain, Cologne and Hauser & Wirth, New York.

“Sombras del Iluminismo: escenas de proyección,” introduction from Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Spectator (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), Spanish translation by Fermín Rodriguez for theory dossier edited by Jorge Pavez Ojeda on “cinema y sus medios” in special issue of Escrituras Americanas vol. 5, no 1/2 (July 2021), 4-52.

Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject

University of Minnesota Press

’Introduction: Shadows of Enlightenment’  

Crossing the history of psychoanalysis, media history, the history of scientific method, and the history of colonization, Scenes of Projection poaches the prized instruments at the heart of the so-called “scientific revolution” (the projecting telescope, the camera obscura, the magic lantern, the solar microscope, and the prism) to make the audacious argument that, in the wake of colonization and from the beginnings of what is retrospectively enshrined as the origins of the Enlightenment, the scene of projection has functioned as a pedagogical contraption for producing a fantasy subject of discarnate vision and the exercise of “reason,” that is, as a shaping instrument and machine of not just psychic but also material production. As an apparatus that produces its subject, the scene of projection is neither a static diagram of power nor a fixed architecture but, rather, a pedagogical set-up that operates across a range of sites as an “influencing machine” of persistent training and repetitive exercise. If the scene of projection is not to be a machine for the production of a flattened terrain for the fortress ego that seeks to remake the world in confirmation and consolidation of its disavowed vulnerability and susceptibility, the scene of projection is necessarily also a scene for doing history for a different future, an apparatus for producing an opening by the tracing of the belied connections in and across precisely those scenes of projection that might seem not only disparate but disavowed in relation to what would seem their geographic, cultural, or temporal place--that is, the queerly disorienting, the anachronistic, the minor, the backward, the ostensibly surpassed, or the better left behind.

Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn

Yale University Press

Edited by Jill H. Casid and Aruna D'Souza

Essays by Esra Akcan, Jill H. Casid, Talinn Grigor, Ranjana Khanna, Kobena Mercer, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Parul Dave Mukherji, Steven Nelson, Todd Porterfield, Raqs Media Collective, Kishwar Rizvi, David Roxburgh, and Alessandra Russo

Epilogue: ‘Turning the “Fearful Sphere”’

With globalization steadily reshaping the cultural landscape, scholars have long called for a full-scale reassessment of art history's largely Eurocentric framework. This collection of case studies and essays, the latest in the Clark Studies in the Visual Arts series, brings together voices from various disciplinary and theoretical backgrounds, each proposing ways to remap, decenter, and reorient what is often assumed to be a unified field. Rather than devise a one-size-fits-all strategy for what has long been a divided and disjointed terrain, these authors and artists reframe the inherent challenges of the global—most notably geographic, political, aesthetic, and linguistic differences—as productive starting points for study. As the book demonstrates, approaching art history from such alternative perspectives rewrites some of the most basic narratives, from the origins of representation to the beginnings of the “modern” to the very history of globalization and its effects.

Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization

University of Minnesota Press

Sowing Empire reconsiders the Georgic as discursive and material practices of imperial relandscaping through which particular formations of family, nation, and colonial empire were engendered and naturalized but also how these discursive and materials practices contained within them the seeds for resistant re-versings. A study that treats landscaping and transplantation between England, France, and the West Indies as discursive and material technologies of empire, the project is distinctive in its methodology (drawing on and revising Foucauldian discourse studies, postcolonial work on hybridity and transculturation, and psychoanalysis), its geographic and historical range, and the scope of its materials (encompassing, in its analysis, colonial plantations, survey maps, natural history texts, travel literature, picturesque European gardens, the imaginary gardens of bestselling novels, and paintings).  The book explores one of the main material ways in which what we take as "European" was produced out of the history of colonialism.