Sensible Politics

William A. Callahan, Sensible Politics: Visualizing International Relations (Oxford University Press, 2020).
Discount code ASFLYQ6: so paperback is $19.57

Book abstract:

Visual images are everywhere in international politics. But how are we to understand them? In Sensible Politics, William A. Callahan uses his expertise in theory and filmmaking to explore not only what visuals mean, but also how visuals can viscerally move and connect us in “affective communities of sense.”

The book’s rich analysis of visual images (photographs, film, art) and visual artifacts (maps, veils, walls, gardens, cyberspace) shows how critical scholarship needs to push beyond issues of identity and security to appreciate the creative politics of social-ordering and world-ordering.

It challenges our Eurocentric understanding of international politics by exploring the meaning and impact of visuals from China, Japan, Thailand, Korea, and the Middle East. Sensible Politics offers a unique approach to politics that allows us to not only think visually, but also feel visually—and creatively act visually for a multisensory appreciation of politics.

For Chinese studies: it analyzes early-modern Chinese and Korean maps to explain the PRC’s current policy in the South China Sea (Ch 7). It looks at Ai Weiwei’s film “Human Flow” (2017) to explore the global politics of migration (Ch 6). It discusses the crackdown in Xinjiang through an analysis of women’s fashion and cyber-security (Ch 8, Ch 11). It compares Chinese and Japanese gardens to think about different modes of diplomacy, war, and peace (Ch 10). It uses the Great Wall of China as a concept to critique Trump’s Great Wall of America (Ch 9), and compares Europe’s and China’s cyber experience to think about surveillance as a creative process of social-ordering and world-ordering (Ch 11). And it looks to Chinese toilets as a site of visceral multisensory politics (Ch 4).

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction: Visualizing International Relations

Part I: Visibility/Visuality: A Framework for Analysis

Chapter 1: Visibility: The Social Construction of the Visual

Chapter 2: Visuality: The Visual Performance of the International

Chapter 3: Dynamic Dyads: Visibility/Visuality and East/West

Part II: Visual Images

Chapter 4: Methods, Ethics, and Filmmaking

Chapter 5: Visualizing Security, Order, and War

Chapter 6: Visual Art, Ethical Witnessing, and Resistance

Part III: Visual Artefacts and Sensory Spaces

Chapter 7: Maps, Space, and Power

Chapter 8: The Sartorial Engineering of Race, Gender, and Faith

Chapter 9: Walls as Barriers, Gateways, and the Sublime

Chapter 10: Gardens in Diplomacy, War and Peace

Chapter 11: Visibility, Visuality, and Mass (Self)Surveillance

Part IV: Conclusions

Conclusion: Sensible Politics

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