Sensible Politics: Visualizing International Relations.

• Author: Callahan, William A.

Sensible Politics: Visualizing International Relations, by William A. Callahan, explores the newer dimensions of world-ordering theories. The author approaches these theories in a pragmatic way to engage with enmeshed social practices. The mutual exchanges of multisensory experiences give meaning and value to performatives such as garden-building or film-making. The book meanders through a nonlinear, nonverbal, and nonnormative mode, rather than a naive West-to-East or Right-to-Left analysis. Callahan shies away from a mere Eurocentric analysis of 'visual IR' and tries to incorporate methods of the non-Western 'Other.' He introduces critical aspects of civility/martiality, barbarism/civilization, and Chinese practices and experiences as alternate ways to deliberate on comparative international politics from the vantage point of visuality. This productive tension between various dyads allows the reader to engage with visuality, affect, and artifacts instead of the more pronounced civility, ideology, and images that have occupied center-stage in the existing literature on the subject. The book's chapters deconstruct how concealed power is rendered visible or invisible by certain ideologies promoted by the corporate sector and mainstream political understanding.

The book starts with a focus on the symbolic aspects of visual images in Chapter 1. The second chapter seeks a deeper understanding of the affective aspects of visuality by questioning the critique of ocular-centrism. Chapter 3 attempts to dilute the apparent dichotomy between visuality and visibility by focusing on their complementarity. The social construction of the visual is deconstructed in the fourth chapter to explore alternative and interpretive aspects of international politics, such as films, poetry, and art; and develops a theoretical framework based on the autoeth-nographic experience of producing a research film. Chapter 5 discusses securitization theory through the lens of visuality and its complicated relationship with world-ordering. Visual images have the characteristic of being ambiguous and can be circulated at length with great speed, giving them the power to influence foreign policy events. The next two chapters offer a confluence of the verbal and the visual, as cartography embeds within itself the social construction of cultural and political agendas.

Chapter 8 explores a completely unique concept of the Islamic veil and women's participation in beauty pageants...