Book Review - Torin Monahan (2022) Crisis Vision: Race and the

For example, the idea of deploying surveillance make-up to dazzle surveillance cameras in public spaces may place a larger target on the backs of black and brown bodies who are already hyper-visible to law enforcement in a lot of the countries of the Global North. [...] Certainly, surveillance plays a crucial role in the functioning of crisis vision, ensuring the maintenance of a semblance of equality and democracy in the distribution of perceptions, while simultaneously enforcing inequality and exclusion. [...] As Lisa Bowleg (2013: 754) observes in her intersectional scholarship on the experiences of black queer men, ‘once you’ve blended the cake, you can’t take the parts back to the main ingredients.’ In the first comprehensive scholarly inquiry of its kind, Monahan’s Crisis Vision: Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance provides readers with the conceptual tools to unravel the frames through. [...] The contribution of Monahan’s Crisis Vision: Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance to the surveillance studies body of work is unique in its line of inquiry and the theoretical tools that it gifts to the intersectional field of surveillance studies scholars and artists. [...] In the words of the author, the purpose of the book is ‘not about watching the watchers, dyadic resistance, or a retreat into privacy.