[ecrea] New Book: Sensible Politics: The Visual Cultures of Nongovernmental Activism

Zone Books is pleased to announce the publication of /Sensible Politics: 
The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism/, edited by Meg Mclagan 
and Yates Mckee.
Political acts are encoded in medial forms---feet marching on a street, 
punch holes on a card, images on live stream, tweets---that have force, 
shaping people as subjects and constituting the contours of what is 
sensible, legible, visible. Thus, these events define the terms of 
political possibility and create terrain for political actions.
Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism 
considers the constitutive role played by aesthetic and performative 
techniques in the staging of claims by nongovernmental activists. 
Attending to political aesthetics means focusing not on a disembodied 
image that travels under the concept of art or visual culture, nor on a 
preformed domain of the political that seeks subsequent expression in 
medial form. Instead, it requires bringing the two realms together into 
the same analytic frame. Drawing on the work of a diverse group of 
contributors, from art historians, anthropologists, and political 
theorists to artists, filmmakers, and architects, Sensible Politics 
situates aesthetic forms within broader activist contexts and networks 
of circulation and in so doing offers critical insight into the 
practices of mediation whereby the political becomes manifest.
 "Photographs, maps, videos, reports, charts, spaces, and 
bodies---these and many other material things assemble into what the 
editors of this remarkable volume call an 'image-complex' that 
conditions how we know what we know, and what we do with that knowledge. 
Sensible Politics is a practical, theoretical guide for thinking and 
acting in the aesthetico-political register that puts art and politics 
together with rigor, imagination,  and urgency. For anyone concerned 
with these matters, this is not just an interesting book, or a useful 
book. It is a necessary book."
---Reinhold Martin, author of /Utopia's Ghost: Architecture and 
Postmodernism, Again/
Sensible Politics "seeks to attend to the dispersion of aesthetics 
across the multiple institutional and discursive networks and platforms 
that constitute political action in the present. And so it does! 
Sensible Politics confounds our current divisions of the aesthetic and 
the political and challenges scholars and activists---scholaractivists 
and activistscholars---to rethink the political potential of images as 
they are absorbed by the concrete apparatuses of contemporary regimes of 
governmentality."
---Elizabeth A. Povinelli, author of /Economies of Abandonment: Social 
Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism/
*For more information or to purchase a copy, please visit 
**http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=13096* 
<http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=13096>
 Contributors include: Barbara Abrash, Negar Azimi, Ariella Azoulay, 
Amahl Bishara, Judith Butler, Eduardo Cadava, Jonathan Crary, Ann 
Cvetkovich, Faye Ginsburg, Sam Gregory, Zeynep Devrim Gürsel, Roger 
Hallas, Andrew Herscher, Sandi Hilal, Kirsten Johnson, Liza Johnson, 
Thomas Keenan, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Jaleh Mansoor, Yates McKee, Meg 
McLagan, Alessandro Petti, Hugh Raffles, Felicity D. Scott, Kendall 
Thomas, Leshu Torchin, Eyal Weizman, Benjamin J. Young, Huma Yusuf, and 
Charles Zerner.
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