a conversation with the author Nicholas Mirzoeff and Laura Raicovich

To see Palestine is to see the world. Since October 7th 2023, the forces of racial capitalism, settler colonialism and white supremacy have become all too visible in Israel's war on Gaza. Urban, networked Gazan youth have documented and shared their struggle with the world using social media strategies, derived from movements from Tahrir Square to Black Lives Matter.

In To See In The Dark, Nicholas Mirzoeff explores how these videos and photos transmitted and viewed outside Palestine, via platforms like Instagram and TikTok, enabled a dramatic switch in public opinion, leading to the global uprising against genocide. In this groundbreaking analysis, he also connects the personal and the political via his own anti-Zionist Jewishness, weaving an autotheory of domestic, political, and sexual violence. Through this exploration, he finds new collective anticolonial ways of seeing, combining online and embodied experiences.

Nicholas Mirzoeff is the author of many books including White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness (2023) and How To See The World (2016). His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Nation and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is Professor and Chair in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU.

Laura Raicovich is a New York City-based writer and curator known for her critical work on cultural institutions and dedication to equitable cultural production. Her recent book, Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, was published by Verso Books. With a collective of artists, musicians, and culture workers, Raicovich opened The Francis Kite Club, a public social club in NYC’s East Village in 2023. She is also editor and curator of Protodispatch, a digital publication featuring artists’ takes on the local and global conditions that make their work necessary; she initiated the forum with Mari Spirito and Protocinema in 2022. In 2020, Raicovich co-founded Urban Front, a transcontinental consultancy addressing the challenges facing cities through a progressive cultural and activist lens. Prior to these projects, Raicovich served as Director of the Queens Museum and Interim Director of the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art; she was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the Bellagio Center, and the Tremaine Curatorial Fellow for Journalism at Hyperallergic. She is the author and editor of several books, and lectures internationally and continues to work on projects that explore art, freedom of speech, and equity.