Enfilade

From the University of Minnesota Press:

Jill H. Casid, Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 328 pages, ISBN: 978-0816646692 (cloth), $83 / ISBN: 978-0816646708 (paper), $28.

Theorizing vision and power at the intersections of 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: the projecting telescope, camera obscura, magic lantern, solar microscope, and prism. From the beginnings of what is retrospectively enshrined as the origins of the Enlightenment and in the wake of colonization, the scene of projection has functioned as a contraption for creating a fantasy subject of discarnate vision for the exercise of ‘reason’.

Jill H. Casid demonstrates across a range of sites 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. Thinking with queer and feminist art projects that take up old devices for casting an image to reorient this apparatus of power that produces its subject, Scenes of Projection offers a set of theses on the possibilities for felt embodiment out of the damaged and difficult pasts that haunt our present.

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).

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C O N T E N T S

Introduction: Shadows of Enlightenment

1  Paranoid Projection and the Phantom Subject of Reason
2  Empire through the Magic Lantern
3  Empire Bites Back
4  Along Enlightenment’s Cast Shadows
5  Following the Rainbow

Conclusion: Queer Projection, Theses on the ‘Future of an Illusion’

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index