GLANCES OF POWER

A new history of modern politics through visual culture —from the Age of Revolutions to the Digital Age
Power is never only exercised through laws, armies or institutions. It must also be seen, staged and desired.
From revolutionary paintings and national monuments to political fashion, cinema, advertising, memes and surveillance technologies, images shape the way societies understand authority, belonging and revolt. 
In this ambitious and highly original essay, political scientist and writer Olivia Muñoz-Rojas offers a new history of the last 250 years through the visual codes of power and resistance.
Moving from the French Revolution and Haitian emancipation to Mexican muralism, Haussmann’s Paris, fascist urbanism, the Bauhaus, IKEA, Hollywood, Bollywood, feminist performance,yellow vests and digital activism, she shows how aesthetics has never been merely decorative: it is one of the places where
politics is created, legitimized and contested.
Blending political history, sociology, art criticism, architecture,fashion, film and geopolitics, Glances of Power reveals the recurring patterns through which symbols migrate, are appropriated, commercialized and reactivated across time.
A red cap, a pair of trousers, a mural, a boulevard, a living room, a movie screen or a viral image can all become instruments of domination—or tools of collective resistance.