Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject

Description

Theorizing vision and power with the histories of psychoanalysis, media, scientific method, and colonization, Scenes of Projection poaches the prized instruments at the heart of the so-called scientific revolution. It demonstrates that the scene of projection is neither a static diagram of power nor a fixed architecture but rather a pedagogical setup that operates as an influencing machine of persistent training.

Jill H. Casid is professor of visual studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minnesota, 2005).

"In Shadows of Enlightenment, Jill Casid sets herself no less a task than the rethinking of modernity and the formation of the European subject. Concerned with the psychic, affective, and material powers of projection and propelled by queer, feminist, and postcolonial revisions of psychoanalysis, Casid ultimately takes her readers from the mythic origins of representation to exemplary instances of contemporary art. And in the course of traversing the history and charting the geography of projection, even as she tarries with darkness, she produces nothing short of illumination." -Lisa Saltzman, Bryn Mawr College