Masks and Faces

Focusing on masks and faces as figures and objects that carry ethical and political meanings, this volume examines the scientific, cultural, visual, and philosophical histories and traditions in which they are imbricated and which allow them to gather force and to become central to how human relationships are made.

Offering interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives on masks and faces, the book studies the prominent role they play in shaping ideals and norms of political personhood; their deployment as evidence in the creation of racist hierarchies; and their role in demarcating the human and non-human. Through historical and theoretical analyses of different case studies from around the world, the book offers a global perspective that will enable readers to reflect on the interweaving of aesthetics, ethics and politics in the making of faces and masks into figures around which the visual world is organized and valorized. Moving from past to future, from essays that examine methods for facial classification and the production of facial casts in the service of racial science, to essays that reflect on the future of the human face in light of deepfake technologies, or in relation to the posthuman turn, the collection historicizes modern Western conceptions of masks and faces, and the conceptual, ethical, and political hierarchies in which they are embedded.

This book will be an invaluable work for researchers, librarians, advanced students, and curious learned readers who are interested in philosophy, history of science, visual studies, and cultural studies. More broadly, it will appeal to those engaged with innovative approaches to the study of the relationship between aesthetics, ethics, and politics, as these are explored through the figures of masks and faces, as well as through reflections on the meaning of the face in present-day digital societies.