ABOUT THIS BOOK

Visuality of Violence unpacks the way visual documentations and depictions of the practice of racial violence are used in imperialism, capitalism, and neoliberalism in the United States. Ofelia Ortiz Cuevas traces the continuity of racial value through the shifting narratives of race by examining the long-running TV series, COPS, and the museum exhibition, Without Sanctuary, which features photographs of lynching. These case studies provide an innovative holistic mapping of the policing and incarceration of Black and Brown people.

Addressing the frequently ignored experiences of Asian and Native Americans, among others, in its comparative undertaking, Visuality of Violence exceeds intersectional mapping to uniquely charge the spectacle of racial violence as a foundational practice in its continued presence in contemporary society. Cuevas argues that the visual presentations of the racial body throughout history requires a reckoning and acknowledgement of the material and legal effects of the images, narratives, and practices used to maintain hegemonic racial order and inequality.

In holding a theoretical mirror to history, Visuality of Violence reveals liberal mythical reliance on the ideals of western law and its rationalities as the location of justice and freedom, thereby presenting its readers with a new understanding in the quest for peace and liberation.

In the series Critical Race, Indigeneity, and Relationality

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Ofelia Ortiz Cuevas is Assistant Professor and an interdisciplinary scholar in the Department of Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Davis.

REVIEWS

“Visuality of Violence is a valuable and original contribution to contemporary studies of race and visual culture in the United States generally and to investigations of visual representation and the racialized politics of punishment, shame, and affect more specifically. The author’s consideration of racialized and classed shaming of criminalized populations in COPS, alongside the cultural and historical amnesia evident in much of the reception of Without Sanctuary’s lynching photographs, illumines the ideologically productive and morally absolving disconnect between notions of a racist ‘past’ and the material legacies and visual reinforcements of this past in the present.”—Ruby C. Tapia, Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Virginia, and author of American Pietàs: Visions of Race, Death, and the Maternal

“Visuality of Violence bends temporality while inducing uncomfortable intimacies with ‘ocularcentric’ archives of state and state-condoned racist terror. Ofelia Cuevas builds an interpretive and analytical curriculum that facilitates scholarly collective study across the visual texts of gendered racial and antiblack criminalization, colonial warfare, and protogenocidal policing. In fact, she teaches us that such visual forms are brutally material artifacts, cohering regimes of interpretation that constantly return to scenes of bodily violence. This book exemplifies an approach to transdisciplinary radical thinking that confronts the long terror of the everyday.”—Dylan Rodríguez, Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Riverside, and author of White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide, winner of the 2022 Frantz Fanon Book Prize

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Discipline in the Field of Vision: Scenes of Violence in the Visual Regime

Part I

1. The Visual Regime of Racial Discipline: Mobilizing Vision and the Racial Body

2. The Red Record of Material Investment: Racial Discipline in the Mirror of History

Part II

3. Without Sanctuary: A Moment of Opportunity

4. COPS: Racial Discipline at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

Conclusion: The Serpent in the Garden

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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