Introduction: Visualizing Violence

Abstract

This special issue emerged from a 2018 Modern Languages Association (MLA) Convention panel that was curious about the possibilities and limitations of the visual arts when documenting social, political, economic, and ecological violence in postcolonial contexts and people’s resistance to them. The essays included here not only enquire into the ethics and politics of representing colonial and postcolonial violence through speculative fictions, art, cinema, and mixed-media installations; they also supplement and reinvigorate investments in a dynamic and capacious “postcolonial” through critically analyzing contemporary collusions amongst partisan politics, systematic violence, and national and corporate interests. Drawing upon rich and complex debates on visual cultures and modes of representing violence, our collection takes on the following broad questions: What are the limits and possibilities of art, sculpture, theatre, live performances, photographs, narrative cinema, and experimental documentaries in narrating political-sexual-economic violence without titillating audiences and retraumatizing its victims? How might formal interventions disrupt maker and consumer scopophilia/s in contexts of postcolonial war zones, refugee populations on the move, and ecological disasters? How might innovative visual vocabularies and strategies help imagine empowering futures for postcolonial peoples and cultures for whom such imaginations have been terminally foreclosed by ongoing wars and resultant deaths, depression, and ecological devastation?

Keywords:

• Algeria
• colonialism
• film
• Guatemala
• India
• Kenya
• material culture
• Nigeria
• Palestine
• performance art
• sculpture
• South Korea
• violence

This special issue emerged from a 2018 MLA panel that was curious about the possibilities and limitations of the visual arts in documenting social, political, economic, and ecological violence in postcolonial contexts as well as resistance to them “from below” (Young 2003, 26), especially in relation to the post-2016 rise of oppressive right-wing fundamentalist and xenophobic powers across the world. The role of images as critical archives of cultural memory and/or protest against war, genocide, and ethnic violence is not new – think, for instance, of Picasso’s Guernica, Nick Ut’s iconic photograph “The Terror of [the Vietnam] War”, films like Hotel Rwanda or Schindler’s List, Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus or the infamous home video footage of the LAPD’s ruthless assaults on Rodney King. Each has galvanized generations the world over, around causes of equity, peace, and justice. However, with the accessibility and popularity of the Internet, smart phones, and social media platforms in the last two decades, photographs and videos have increasingly functioned as visual witnesses to our everyday lives, as modes of knowledge production and dissemination about the world and its ways, and mobilization for sociopolitical action (both the productive and harmful kinds) and activism. Consider, for instance, the iconic 9/11 footage of the two planes crashing into the Twin Towers in New York City that were repeatedly telecast on US television screens, stoking both Islamophobic violence and public support for the subsequent wars on terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq (Spivak 2004; Butler 2006; Puar 2007). Or the Abu Ghraib photographs that became a

critical prism through which elite and popular views on US foreign policy [we]re refracted … [such that] heretofore banned sight of American troops in the role of sadistic torturers … [became] an integral part of our understanding of the Bush administration’s “war on terror”’

and our critique of the same (Andén-Papadopoulos 2008, 5).

In his book Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir (2013), author-activist Sanjay Kak notes how when the occupying Indian government suspended cell phone and texting services in 2010 to curb and silence local protests against Indian army and state violence and political oppression, young Kashmiris took to “Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter” to document visually and verbally clashes between the locals and the Indian forces, as well as peaceful protest rallies in Kashmir. As he puts it, the international community thus got “the equivalent of a ball-by-ball commentary of street battles, with a rich context that was impossible to ignore” (xvi). More recently, NPR correspondent Diane Cole writes of the controversial photograph of the lifeless 3-year-old boy Aylan Kurdi washed ashore on Turkey’s beaches that finally jolted awake the world from its apathy to the Syrian war situation and the resultant refugee crisis. It took Aylan’s photo, she underscores in her article “Study: What Was The Impact Of The Iconic Photo Of The Syrian Boy?”, to mobilize “empathy and concern” and bring in “record donations to charitable organizations around the world to aid the victims [of the Syrian war]” (13 January 2017).

Yet the visual medium has long been under scholarly scrutiny for its ethics and politics of representation. In his now-canonical essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) cultural critic Walter Benjamin highlights how endlessly reproducible films sans their “aura” often hypnotize audiences into uncritical immersion into the narrative. This obfuscates understanding cinema as produced within and in conversation with specific sociopolitical conditions, formalistic traditions, and material economies, thereby compromising its potentials for social awareness and change in status quo. Similarly, Susan Sontag in On Photography points out how “repeated viewings” of violated subjects often “deaden[s] conscience … [rather than] arouse it” (1977, 3). Liisa Malkki (2012) also draws attention to the double erasure of postcolonial refugee subjectivity and agency as journalists’ and humanitarian NGO photo lenses zoom in on refugee women and children’s faces for their posters to appeal to the financial beneficence of readers and contributors from rich, white countries. These pictures, notes Malkki, are deliberately framed this way so their subjects might be reproduced as abject, history-less, silent Third World refugee figures to indulge the benevolence and pity of distanced, privileged benefactors and consumers.

Even supposedly firsthand, unadulterated modes of storytelling implicate the spectator and risk fetishizing the subject. The world watched as the bodies of Jordan Russell Davis, Eric Garner, John Crawford, Michael Brown, Laquan McDonald, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, George Floyd, and countless other black men or boys were murdered in cold blood. Where there were no explicit doc cam or cell phone footages of these men and boys’ violent deaths, their deaths were made explicit through their mutilation stories or still photographs, which took on a kind of serial quality as more details of their cases emerged. Each time, the gruesome deaths of their fated forefathers were invoked to build the case to hostile, apathetic, or self-satisfied white audiences against white supremacy and implicit bias. Across the pond, anonymous social media users and their online activist counterparts had been uploading secret footage of the extrajudicial beatings and murders of Palestinian men Basel al-Araj, Haitham Siyaj, and 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir, to name just a few. Concomitantly, viewers were witnessing a developing archive of personal or store security camera recordings of IDF brutalities, such as the violent arrests of 15-year-old Fayez B., and 11-year-old Ahmad Abu Sbitan. And then there was the everyday riot footage of violence workers against West Bank and Gaza protestors dovetailing that against pipeline protestors protecting indigenous lands of Hunkpapa and Sihasapa bands of Lakota Oyate, the Ihunktuwona and Pabaksa bands of the Dakota Oyate, and the Hunkpatina Dakota on the borders of North and South Dakotas in the US. These footages met, intersected, and now travel together as a world anthology of the subaltern documentary.¹

These converging Afro-Native-Palestinian rhetorics of biopolitics, which have been formed in part by the proliferative optics of state-enacted violence made possible by the digital civic sphere and the independent film industry, treat this filmography as already read, and take for granted the critical literacy needed to consume digital violence. A growing archive of BIPOC death and/or harm on social media has made possible long-overdue public conversations about systemic racism, reparations, and police/ICE reform. Folks camped with their TVs and digital devices in the midst of a COVID lockdown are being saturated with images featuring the destruction of black and brown bodies. This “brutality archive,” unmediated, threatens to produce a repressed generation that is activism-paralyzed. The lack of public pedagogies to keep pace with the private scopophilias of mainstream audiences threatens to doubly pathologize race and ethnicity. Brutalized Palestinian and Black American bodies – usually curated as male – risk being internalized as bodily substitutions in a cinema of perceived lack. Whether one ascribes to Mulvey’s Freudian brand of sexual lack, in which fetishized bodies in cinema act as stand-ins for the phallus to defer the threat of castration, or whether we are compelled to move beyond this phallogocentric mode of understanding visuality, the fact remains that a catalogue of digital brutality in the vein of the cell phone candid risks anthologizing the black and brown body as lacking, disabled, and/or amputated.

The rise of black male visibility in disability films forms a romanticizing response to – as well as a displacement of – the realism of wartime reporting and the brutal reality that black male bodies were subject to sacrifice for the state. Their representation in film, though often quixotic as a medium, was already issuing from a position of lack. Conversely, the millennial brutality archive forms a response to the history of romanticization of black men on film while daily their bodies are sacrificed by the state. We might catalogue both of these filmic renderings under liberalism, though their conditions of assembly differ in terms of source, mediation, and dissemination. The Afro-Native-Palestinian brutality archive is sourced by witnesses and most often produced, with little to no craft that would inhibit its realism, by activists who are often black, native, or Palestinian themselves, instead of manufactured by white liberal Hollywood elites. It is at first mediated and disseminated by black and Palestinian communities in mourning, as well as millennial social networking activists, and finally by the global digital media consumer. We should mention that these levels of reception happen almost instantaneously, which makes ownership of these materials hard to pinpoint. It is precisely these socialist conditions that endow the brutality archive with transformative potential, but with the caveat that audiences deal with our culture of black and subaltern disability.

The black and brown bodies of the Global South (or Global Capitalism’s casualties) become doubly pathologized through a cinema of dismemberment without a pedagogy of collective mourning. In his introduction to Black Camera’s 2017 special issue on “#BlackLivesMatter and Media,” Charles “Chip” P. Linscott asks, “what are the aesthetic implications of black life and black death?” The answer to that question, he concludes, is in the global ramifications of black life and death in “contemporary artistic, cultural-expressive, and mediatic productions” (77). He notes that BLM’s “objects” are symbiotic with a cultural “zeitgeist,” and that BLM is part-mediator, part-mediated by contemporaneous cultural production constellating around its discourse (77). This is why, for instance, BLM has provided ancillary reinforcement for LGBT+, indigenous, and Palestinian rights, and other equality movements. The Jewish Voice for Peace, for instance, regularly links between BLM and Standing Rock online platforms. If one of the implications of the aesthetics of black life and black death is travel, what exact messaging is shared across these global platforms? Do audiences participate in the aesthetics of mortality in a way that reinforces change, or do they simply consume and, in turn, nihilistically accept – perhaps even take compulsive pleasure in – black death without participating in the collective mourning that Michele Prettyman Beverly contends is necessary to preserving a Black Optimist sentimentality (2017, 83)? For obvious reasons, this multifaceted question depends upon the race and intersectionality of the consumer/participant, but for purposes of time, we might consider the case within a general framework of gaze theory.

The tragically familiarizing mode of police brutality and black and Palestinian death caught on film baits the viewer with a kind of catharsis, as it actually confirms the millennial/Gen-Z subject’s knowledge/control of his or her world. (We distinguish between millennial, Gen-Z, and other generational subjects because we argue the reality of the postcolonial martial order is hardwired into those weaned on the Internet in a way that is much more vivid and indeed functions a priori, more so than it is for previous generations.) To use Clifford T. Manlove’s helpful rewording of the Freudian death instinct² and its manifestation in unpleasurable cinematic repetition, “the compulsion to repeat returns that which the subject has learned is unpleasant or harmful to the subject” (2007, 89). The myth of repeated spectatorship and control has clinical applications in trauma therapy’s concept of rumination, where the subject returns to the site of the trauma narrative recurrently, though ultimately disadvantageously to recovery. Laura Mulvey, a la the Lacanian Mirror Stage, argues the subject–object identification occurring during the one-way cinematic gaze is always one marked by misrecognition, and hence, inspires more looking. In the case of the brutality archive recording the black or Palestinian (usually) male body, this misrecognition is doubly vexing by the documentary medium/representation which masquerades as bare reality, hence, entirely comprehensible; and for a viewer of colour, this misrecognition is exponentially vexing by the double or intersectional consciousness of the racialized viewer. If this misrecognition promotes more and more looking, we enter into territories of rumination, re-traumatization, and mistaken mastery. All of these psychological phenomena are detrimental to overall mental health, and, we might insist, are in due course paralyzing without recourse to tangible catharsis of in-person community speech acts. We need a public safety net to deal critically with scopophilia in the “age of mechanical reproduction”.

Collective mourning is a type of critical literacy. Beverly’s essay, which is deeply indebted to Karla F. C. Holloway (2003) and Anne Anlin Cheng’s (2000) work on race and grief, provides a touchstone for thinking about ways to systematize race violence education. Beverly reflects on the insistence of Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, that her son’s casket be exposed to funeral attendees and attendant news media – that we all be made to look; she argues Till-Mobley’s act constituted a two-fold demand that audiences both “grieve” and experience “grievance” (83). The gesture transcended the private spaces of ceremony and ritual to less traditionally appropriate, public spaces of news and social networking (84). Coupled with counter-images of black life and wholeness, such as “Bree Newsome scaling a flagpole to take down a confederate flag in South Carolina,” “Freddie Gray painted on a building in West Baltimore,” and “the photo of a poised black woman in a billowing dress being accosted by a group of armored police officers,” Beverly argues participatory black mourning can recuperate black life as cherished, worried over, and celebrated (84). Our concern is that these experiences – whether recuperative or not – are still, in many cases, processed in the glow of the computer screen, often without recourse for collective reflection, especially for individuals whose cultural and familial backgrounds tend toward the rugged individualistic rather than the communal.

Gesturing to Cheng’s thesis in The Meloncholy of Race, Beverly admits that America suffers from an inability to digest black death (86), and attends to the “dire need” of reparations for “our collective mourning or ‘unmourning’” (mourning in order to beat back defeatism), and locates the reparative function in transformative “rhetoric, media coverage, our public rituals, and the ways in which we internalize social and cinematic death” (86). Placing reparative cinema as uniquely positioned to host the transformative mourning imagination, Beverly seems to suggest certain films that sensitively stage collective mourning, such as Ava DuVernay’s Selma (2014), are partial ends in and of themselves. Certainly, select films are ready tools for educational heuristics on violence literacy, but Beverly’s resolution does not account for the reception gap between “highbrow” or even popular cinema and the social media archive.

The unmediated brutality archive can create a distancing effect that fetishizes the body while merely simulating it, carrying viewers farther away from the organic life that the archive aims to defend. The spectacle of police brutality risks collapsing into destructive eroticism that appeals to the phallocentric mode of catharsis. Might we imagine the implementation of violence critical literacy campaigns in schools, pedagogies that resist the privatization of media literacy, and call upon Marxist materialist feminist theory “in pursuit of the public,” to use Robin Goodman’s verbiage, and develop a plan for national violence literacy? As more and more institutions of secondary and higher learning implement data literacy coursework, there appears an opportunity to earmark these initiatives with concomitant campaigns for violence literacy programmes across curricula, ones that cross-examine the limits of Internet literacy without the safety net of institutionalized collective mourning. It seems reasonable to promote violence education just as vehemently and legislatively as sex education. Of the many queries that emerge from this special issue, assignments toward work and action should emerge, too. Should 2021 maneuver toward a partial retrieval of the public and the municipal, let the moment also entail a rejection of the private consumption of race and postcolonial abjection.

While there have been some valuable attempts to study such modes of critical and/or collective mourning of violated, gendered bodies in postcolonial narratives, they have often been area-focused or historical, context-specific enquiries; for example, the Journal of North African Studies’ special issue titled “Violence and the Politics of Aesthetics: A Postcolonial Maghreb without Borders” (vol. 23, 2018). Or if addressing different postcolonial contexts, journal issues have prioritized literary representations of violence such as in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing’s special issue titled “The Global Checkpoint: ‘Rights’ of Passage, Performances of Sovereignty” (vol. 50, 2014). By contrast, “Visualizing Violence” invests diverse, twenty-first-century optics of bearing witness to interlinked forms of violence across postcolonial contexts, including the often-siloed field of Latin American studies and Southeast Asian studies. Herein, this special issue bears forth the guiding principles of Interventions because it not only adds to enquiries into the ethics and politics of postcolonial imaginations of selfhood and othering, but also attends to the shifting dynamics of the local, global, and national broached in earlier special issues of Interventions (Majumdar and Chafer 2017; Bjelić 2018). It supplements and reinvigorates the journal’s investments in a dynamic and capacious “postcolonial” through critically analyzing contemporary collusions amongst partisan politics, media industries, and corporate interests. The authors we have curated not only invest in analyzing how such interests are often mobilized by elites who seek to redefine national borders, human values, and human–environmental relationships, but also explore diverse forms of resistance to such attempts “from below” (Young 2003, 26). Drawing upon rich and complex debates on visual cultures and modes of representing violence (Sturken and Cartwright 2001; Nixon 2011; Baraban, Jaegar, and Muller 2012; Chute 2016), our collection in this special issue takes on the following broad questions: What are the limits and possibilities of art, sculpture, theatre, live performances, photographs, narrative cinema, and experimental documentaries in narrating political-sexual-economic violence without titillating audiences and retraumatizing its victims? How might formal interventions disrupt maker and consumer scopophilia/s in contexts of postcolonial war zones, refugee populations on the move, and ecological disasters? How might innovative visual vocabularies and strategies help imagine empowering futures for postcolonial peoples and cultures for whom such imaginations have been terminally foreclosed by ongoing wars and resultant deaths, depression, and ecological devastation? The results entail an assemblage of excellent scholarship from and about diverse cartographies.

In her contribution to this issue, Hoda El Shakry demonstrates the extent to which post-Oslo speculative Palestinian literary, conceptual, and visual works engage in world-building that ultimately articulate an emptied-out future. El Shakry resists critical nihilism by insisting upon the generative possibilities within “impossible acts of imagination.” Her theoretical scaffolding is deep and exigent: she draws from affect theory, counter-futurism, and Afrofuturism to convey the political and aesthetic implications of multimedia works by Adania Shibli, Tarzan and Arab, Khalil Rabah, and Larissa Sansour, arguing that post-Oslo violence against Palestinians and the thwarting of Palestinian self-determination cannot be understood separately from motifs of temporality. Ultimately, she argues these works at times “meditate on the present in the absence of a possible future,” and elsewise, perhaps more radically, “proleptically manipulate the present as past to make certain futures conceivable. Rather than mapping a path to a particular future, they expose and disrupt the chronopolitics of the occupation.” Thus, El Shakry’s work pushes beyond anthropological and sociological studies of Palestinian life, often preoccupied, for good reason, on the derelict conditions of Palestinian living in and beyond the Green Line. In a way, her own scholarship participates in the speculative project; it pairs well with that of Ilana Feldman’s “Punctuated Humanitarianism: Palestinian Life between the Catastrophic and the Cruddy” (2016), by restoring an impossible future within the aporia of Palestinian shitlife syndrome.

Affective approaches to colonial violence literacy continue with Jennifer Leetsch’s energetic work on violence and visualities of the sari. Leetsch offers feminist material cultural and affective readings of Kenyan-Indian writer Shailja Patel’s multi-generic project Migritude. Equal parts spoken word, visual art, and autobiography, Patel’s text, in Leetsch’s articulation, mobilizes a suitcase full of saris to bring into view stories of violence, trauma, and healing issuing from the artist’s transoceanic migration from Gujarat to Nairobi. Leetsch situates the sari in imperial and colonial histories and, in counterpoint, examines Patel’s sari-work within Migritude – her unfolding, archiving, sourcing, aestheticizing, and self-making – for its ability to form diasporic connectivity and intimate community across borders. The sari is rendered transnaturing for its capacity to heal. Leetsch’s work advances the field of material culture beyond foundational discourses canonized by Annette B. Weiner (1992, Inalienable Possessions) and Weiner and Schneider (1989, Cloth and Human Experience) by effectively marrying its methodologies with that of postcolonial studies; to that end, Leetsch’s approach is far more conscious of the politics of subject-positioning and spectatorship within museum studies and curation, fields ever fraught by their connection to colonial violence.

While we shift cartographically and generically as we encounter Bethsabé Huaman Andia’s work, Ji-Hoon Kim’s essay, and Robin Goodman’s essay on the challenges of representing gendered forms of violence, El Shakry and Leetsch’s work still provides the soundtrack for their investigations into how live stage performances (Andia), art installations, and documentary film making (Kim), and contemporary US cinema (Goodman) might bear witness with victims of intersectional violence.

Rampant sexual war crimes and genocide marked the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996), affecting the indigenous population foremost. In light of the country’s Truth Commission, which uniquely included specific information about crimes against women, Bethsabé Huaman Andia examines two performance pieces by Regina José Galindo that focus on the sexual violence against indigenous women. Testimonies of violence archived in Guatemala’s Commission for Historical Clarification prompted Galindo’s live-action pieces Why Are They Still Free? (2007) and The Truth (2013); Huaman Andia studies how Galindo uses her own female body to approach the former trauma and continued suffering of women affected by the Civil War. The author demonstrates that Galindo crafts strategies to make previously concealed state-enacted, private, and guerilla wartime violence visible without restaging the self-same violence, and also without retraumatizing or titillating spectators. Huaman Andia’s work makes a demanding and timely contribution to both academic and mainstream (#MeToo) sexual assault awareness initiatives, and her exposition honours women in fair and just contexts of subalterity and global Latinx studies.

In his essay “Testimonies, Landscapes, Reenactments: Visualizing Trauma and Violence in Im Heung-soon’s Documentary Works” Kim studies Korean artist-filmmaker Im Heung-soon’s experimental documentaries (Jeju Prayer and Factory Complex) and media installations (Reincarnation and Things that Do Us Part). Both sets document survivor testimonies in creative-critical ways to call out and protest South Korean state oppression and neocolonial violence that disrupted local lives, livelihoods, and ecologies in the mid-twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By closely reading and analyzing the sociopolitical contexts, material cultures, and innovative formal strategies informing each text, Kim shows how Heung-soon engenders a compelling “decolonized alternative to western trauma studies that have privileged … [trauma’s] inexpressibility as common epistemological ground.” In contrast to the impasse of survivor testimonies pointed out in key works on trauma theory – Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony – Kim carefully unpacks how Heung-soon deploys landscape imaging and reenactment to tap into the mnemonic and spectral dimensions of survivor testimonies such that they become expressed in all their complexity on film. This furthermore underscores how violence is experienced and memorialized at intersections of transnational, local, and transtemporal events, at junctures of extraordinary and everyday aggressions, as well as in textured ways deriving from colonial suffering, national wars, and postcolonial economic oppression.

The last essay in this trio, Robin Goodman’s “Neoliberal Film and Feminism,” tracks how neoliberalism has co-opted feminisms, women’s bodies, and labours within its rhetorics of success as “accumulation” from the 1970s onwards in the US and other parts of the world. Within this context, she reads Rick Rosenthal’s 2013 film Drones and Ana Lily Amirpour’s spaghetti western, film noir styled 2014 feature film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night to show how in both narratives women’s unattached sexualities are seen as disrupting and critiquing neoliberalism’s military and industrial projects such that by the end the women protagonists in both films must be disciplined and made to line up with neoliberal plans via the trope of the family. Her detailed critical analyses of the raging feminist subject in these films, fighting for social justice and holding people accountable for the good of all, and the tragedy of their final ironing out into the folds of the hegemonic neoliberal agendas, usefully supplement current works of theoretical and practical import on the subject, such as Catherine Rothenberg’s The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism (2018) and the Elin Diamond, Denise Varney, and Candice Amich edited work on global feminist disruptions of neoliberal agendas in Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times (2017).

Mohit Chandna’s “Caché, Colonial Psychosis and the Algerian War” resonates with Leetsch and Kim’s essays on colonial violence and survivor memories. However, Chandna takes on the additional charge of exploring the role of cinema as site of encounters amongst the erstwhile colonial power (France), its postcolonial subject/s, and colonial descendants as past violence continues to shape lives and cultures in the modern-day nation-state. To do this, Chandna analyzes Michael Haneke’s 2005 film Caché to foreground cinema’s role in remembering (French) colonial violence through the spatial politics and aesthetics of camerawork, such as erasing the Algerian immigrant Majid in the film from the lives of proper French citizens George and Anna, only to foreground how traces of past and present injustices organize not just the couple’s personal lives and identities but also French national history. Thus, Chandna argues, Caché draws attention to the critical role of the arts in unveiling the obfuscations of imperialist historiographies in order to reclaim and foreground history as lived experiences at intersections of the centre and the margins. While Caché has been a much-studied film in cultural studies circles, Chandna’s exegesis usefully broadens and supplements existing scholarship on French cinema, postcolonialism, and nationhood, including works like Cinema, Colonialism, Postcolonialism: Perspectives from the French and Francophone Worlds by Dina Sherzer (1996) and Nationalism and the Cinema in France: Political Mythologies and Film Events, 1945–1995 by Hugo Frey (2016).

Finally, Andrew Hennlich’s “Out of the Blue and Into the Black: Mobility and Sculptural Opacity in the Work of Flaka Haliti and Serge Alain Nitegeka” offers a fascinating exploration of Haliti and Nitegeka’s art and sculpture as not only witnesses to the tragedies of refugee lives at borders and camps, but also to their enormous resilience and hope for the future: hope for a world that might one day recognize human fragility as a uniting experience before parsing it for its class, race, and ethnic vectors. Hennlich explains how diasporic artists Haliti (Kosovar and lives in Munich, Germany) and Nitigeka (Burundian and lives in Johannesburg, South Africa) sculpt in the dual experiences of refuge and unbelonging into their works through using particular materials (wood and plywood, concrete rebar, etc.), via deploying specific artistic forms and designs, and ensuring viewer interactions with them at their sites of display. This allows the viewers to experience both restrictions on mobility and agency that people in post-conflict societies such as Kosovo and Burundi must confront, especially marginalized populations, immigrants, and asylum-seekers. Drawing upon the Martiniquian cultural critic and theorist Edouard Glissant and his theory of “obscurity” as decolonizing strategy, Hennlich further explores both Haliti and Nitigeka’s aesthetic choices that deliberately oppose western impositions of the requirement of transparency for citizenship and asylum. The two main takeaways from Hennlich’s essay are (1) the power of art to document and overcome the violence of state and neocolonial apparatuses by refusing “universal legibility” and becoming the means of “particular self expression,” as well as agitation for social justice and political rights for the marginalized; and (2) thinking about modes of political disenfranchisement as a shared experience first and then as a function of racial-ethnic identities.

Despite the different geopolitical foci, visual cultures, and violent contexts that the essays in this issue engage with, they remain in conversation with each other about two things: the radical possibilities for agency, change, and empathy in visual narratives that strategically testify to the complexities of the postcolonial experience and (for this to be fully realized) the urgent need to train/teach global publics on how to read photographs, films, and artwork so they can be critical consumers versus compliant ones. While academic work like this issue remains invested in building towards such critical visual literacies, how might we provide for this to be a more equitably dispersed, public experience? Who is responsible for taking on this civic responsibility – us scholars, filmmakers, or schools? Might it be more effective and less intimidating a practice to build a training/discussion platform within the mainstream film viewing experience that delivers such training or get the director of a Netflix or Hulu streaming series to open with a deep discussion on the subject? Can schools figure out a way to make art appreciation a compulsory class in junior and high school? As noted at the beginning of this introduction, these questions are in some ways both the progenitors of this special issue and possibilities for future work, work that has taken on a sense of urgency in the midst of our current struggles with the COVID-19 pandemic.

As we finish writing this introduction, people across the world are struggling to deal with COVID’s high mortality rates, adverse repercussions of uneven socioeconomic structures at intersections of race, class, and gender, hate rhetoric against Asian-looking people, failure of national leaderships, and necropolitical capitalist cultures that prioritize profit over human lives even in such desperate times. Yet, in the face of such uncertainties, visual means of documentation and communication have kept us anchored. From detailed coronavirus patient diaries from Wuhan and London, anatomical diagrams of what affected lungs look like, video messages from the experts on how to stay safe, animals scoping out cities empty of humans, dropped pollution levels, TikTok’s global 20-second hand-washing dance challenges, pandemic folk art and folk songs, and reimagined architectures for socially distanced engagements – vivid descriptions, images, and videos have kept us informed and entertained, active and engaged, hopeful and resilient. As more and more people visit these archives and/or contribute to them through their own recordings of life under lockdown, mini-lectures and Zoom meetings, Facebook and Instagram testimonies, we must aim to be cognizant of both the potentials and challenges of the screens, machines, and the human eyes focusing and reading them. Otherwise, we might further reinforce the violence and deprivation of the present. Thus, Caren Kaplan notes:

This “strange yet familiar” elegiac landscape masks the continuities of late capitalism’s inequalities. Streets and parks are shown to be eerily emptied of people “as never before” yet some of those very people may have been homeless, unemployed, working too many jobs, uninsured, worried, sad, lost. How does a predilection for the dramatic representation of the empty streets and the affective responses such imagery evokes make it even less possible for the privileged to perceive the less privileged? (Zimmermann and Kaplan 2020)

In the absence of public pedagogies for the visual arts, we see this special issue as provoking a deeper investigation of visual narratives in times of the coronavirus (in postcolonial contexts and otherwise). We hope our essays and the artists engaged with therein will model for you useful ethical critical praxis for reading and recording lives and livelihoods in duress at intersections of the pandemic, existing structural violence, disabilities, and colonial/postcolonial inequalities. May you, like our contributors and their muses, find the courage and the patience to power through the fear and hatred of these times, to be vulnerable even as you stay strong, kind, and sensitive to and for those without your privileges and your voice.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the contributors and reviewers for this special issue, and our colleagues and friends who participated in the “Visualizing Violence” panel at the 2018 Modern Language Association Convention whose generative conversations led to the fruition of this work. We are grateful to Robert J. C. Young and the editorial board at Interventions for their interest, patience, and support during the composition of this special issue, part of which was during the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent chaos. This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1 See Laleh Khalili (2010, 416–420) for more on why martial violence against Palestinians “cannot be understood without locating in a broader global space” given US–Israel collaborations and exchange of information about counterinsurgency strategies, policies, personnel, military training, technologies, and doctrine – all of which have been imparted to these nation-states by their British colonial forbears.

2 Freud theorizes the death instinct and repetition in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).