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Abstract
This essay considers the complex response to the global circulation of images of Fabienne Cherisma, a fifteen-year-old girl who survived the Haitian earthquake on 12 January 2010. A week later, Cherisma was fatally shot by police allegedly warning looters away from crumbling buildings in Port-au-Prince. Numerous foreign photographers took pictures of her body which would go on to win prestigious international awards for photojournalism. Using Alexander Weheliye’s tracing of “enfleshment” through Hortense Spillers’ notion of the “pornotrope” to read Blackness into discourses of biopolitics, and considering what Diana Taylor has called “percepticide” in crimes against humanity, I examine the humanitarian responses to the images of Cherisma’s death. I read the missing notion of the bystander within these significant concepts in human rights discourses and analyze how its framing exposes biopolitical anxieties of viewers’ own vulnerable condition rather than a concern for Cherisma’s and, by extension, other Haitians’ experiences with disaster.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the special issue editors for their inordinately helpful feedback and suggestions; Molly Reinhoudt and Krista Benson for their invaluable research assistance; and Harmony Bench, Molly Farrell, Devin Fergus, Jill Galvan, Jennifer Gully, Leslie Wingard and the conveners Wendy Hesford and Amy Shuman and the participants of the 2013 The Human Rights Working Group Symposium, “Global Human Rights, Sexualities, Vulnerabilities,” at the Ohio State University.
Notes
1. In this cataclysmic disaster, I return to Hannah Arendt’s trenchant claim that states confer human rights on citizens: that without civil rights, one has no human rights; humanitarian and human rights discourses largely rely on the absence of state protections of the civil rights of its subjects – perhaps through state collapse, war, disaster, displacement, or oppression. Thus the victim and survivor must be hailed as a human rights claims-bearing subject rather than a recognition of any intrinsic humanity or inalienable right.
2. John Darley and Bibb Latané’s research in the 1960s are the foundations of this branch of helping or altruism research.
3. In using the plural first-person pronoun and possessive, “we” and “our,” I specifically allude to the porous boundaries of national-international news media audiences; however, as Lilie Chouliaraki contends, these viewers are largely from the Global North and imagine themselves against those “sufferers” and, importantly, those not viewers of the Global South: “television construes the nation as an ‘imagined’ community by homogenizing differences internal to the nation state and, similarly, I argue that transnational news flows construe a ‘beyond the nation’ community by establishing a sense of a broader ‘we’. This ‘we’, I assume, is the ‘imagined’ community of the West, which inhabits the transnational zone of safety and construes human life in the zone of suffering as the West’s ‘other’” (10).
4. Giorgio Agamben uses an “obscure figure of archaic Roman law” (12) in order to delineate the creation of homo sacer, or sacred man, who may be killed and yet not sacrificed (12). Thus stripped of legal, political, civil and human rights, Agamben posits this figure as exposing the fundamental limits of sovereignty and “the very codes of political power” of modern politics “in which human life is included in the juridical order [ordinamento] solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed)” (12).
5. I allude to Laura Marks’s notion of “haptic visuality” that activates the senses beyond sight and recognizes the sensuality of the viewing experience.
6. The winners of these awards were: James Oatway of Times LIVE, Picture of the Year International at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, University of Missouri, Award of Excellence for “Everything is Broken,” 2010 (“Award”); Lucas Oleniuk of Toronto Star, National Newspaper Award for Best News Feature Photography, Canada, 2010 (“2010”); Michael Winiarski of Dagens Nyheter, award for News Storyteller, Dagens Nyheter, 2010; Olivier Laban-Mattei, independent photojournalist, Grand Prix Paris Match for his coverage of Haiti, including the aftermath of Cherisma’s death, 2010; and Paul Hansen of Dagens Nyheter, Best International News Image at the Swedish Picture of the Year Awards through Pressfotografernas Klubb Sverige, 2011(Brook, “Brouhaha”).
7. Ben Golder’s essay provides an excellent overview of the longstanding critical controversy over Foucault’s ambiguous deployment of “new rights” and a reassessment of what has been considered the later Foucault’s embrace of liberal humanism rather than an expansion of the concept of rights beyond traditional limitations of governmentality.
8. See Pete Brook’s eighteen-part coverage of the photojournalists’ interviews for Prison Photography.
9. Spillers details the connection among dehumanization, captivity, sensualization, and powerlessness achieved through “pornotroping”: “This profound intimacy of interlocking detail is disrupted, however, by externally imposed meanings and uses: (1) the captive body becomes the source of an irresistible, destructive sensuality; (2) at the same time – in stunning contradiction – the captive body reduces to a thing, becoming being for the captor; (3) in this absence from a subject position, the captured sexualities provide a physical and biological expression of ‘otherness’; (4) as a category of ‘otherness,’ the captive body translates into a potential for pornotroping and embodies sheer physical powerlessness that slides into a more general ‘powerlessness’” (67; original emphasis).
10. Leon Sheleff (1974) identifies the criminal triad as “perpetrator-victim-bystander” and research has shown how the perceived passivity of bystanders might encourage the perpetrator to intensify or continue her harming actions just as the intervention of the bystander might stop further harm.