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Regarding the Torture of Others
... Uno de los hechos más sorprendentes del caso era que los propios asaltantes habían filmado, generando así las pruebas condenatorias que luego ayudarían a declararles culpables en la sentencia firme, pronunciada en junio de 2019. Como diría Sontag (2004) al referirse a otro repertorio de imágenes de violencia: «el horror que se mostraba en las fotografías no se podía separar del hecho de que las fotografías habían sido tomadas» (p. 3). ...
... En primer lugar, hemos de considerar aquel sobre la proliferación de imágenes del sufrimiento, que incluye trabajos sobre las representaciones fotográficas del daño y del sufrimiento (Carrabine, 2014), la cultura de la humillación (Mills, 2016) y las reflexiones sobre las imágenes de tortura (Sontag, 2003(Sontag, , 2004 y la digitalización del mal (Butler, 2007). ...
... De hecho, se grababan y distribuían imágenes íntimas sin consentimiento antes de la llegada de los teléfonos inteligentes y las redes sociales. Por su parte, las fotografías del sufrimiento y la humillación tienen una potencia histórica notable, como nos recuerdan Sontag (2004) en su reflexión sobre fotografía de linchamientos de personas afroamericanas en los Estados Unidos entre 1880 y 1930 o Bourke (2005) en su trabajo sobre los combatientes británicos y estadounidenses posando junto a sus enemigos asesinados durante las guerras mundiales del siglo xx. Sin embargo, la nueva realidad de la creación y puesta en circulación de representaciones fotográficas del dolor y el sufrimiento -images of harm (Carrabine, 2014)-tiene que ver con que ha cambiado el uso y los fines de las fotografías (Lister, 2007), que han dejado de ser «objetos guardados y almacenados para pasar a ser mensajes diseminados que se ponen en circulación y porque [...] los eventos están diseñados en parte para ser fotografiados» (Sontag, 2004, pp. ...
Los capítulos de este libro abordan distintos aspectos de la «cultura digital» entendida como un entorno que actúa sobre nuestra forma de estar juntos, nuestros vínculos sociales y nuestras sociabilidades —en suma, nuestra forma de vivir.
La mediación de las interacciones, la difusión de contenido digital, las formas de violencia en línea, la apropiación de la escritura, la organización política en las redes sociales, la transmisión y socialización son algunos de los temas abordados en estas páginas. Y es que las Nuevas Tecnologías y las redes sociodigitales son portadoras de una revolución «mediológica» y «epistémica». Mediológica, porque la materialidad de la cultura se transforma, se refunde en el crisol técnico de la digitalización. Textos, imágenes, videos y sonidos se convierten en binary units. Comúnmente hablamos de «multimedia», pero de hecho deberíamos hablar de «uni-media», ¡ya que la tecnología es única! Y permite, en soportes diferenciados, recibir contenidos culturales previamente separados por una valla mediática hermética. Pero la revolución también es epistémica, porque las TIC nos hacen pensar y sentir diferente, «consumir» y producir cultura diferente, «estar con», hacer sociedad diferente. Contribuir a la reflexión sobre las dinámicas y desafíos de nuestras sociedades digitales desde las Ciencias Sociales ha sido el objetivo de este trabajo colectivo.
... Because of these photos.« (Sontag 2004). Wie sich in dieser Anschuldigung die vorausgesagte Gewalt gegen die Amerikaner im Allgemeinen, d.h. ...
... So schreibtButler (2009: 85), dass insofern die Fotos die Szene potentiell an Zeitungen und Nachrichtenmedien übermitteln, die Folter für die Kamera intendiert war, d.h. für eben diese Kommunikation.Sontag (2004) wiederum hebt hervor, dass das Entsetzen über das, was die Fotos zeigen nicht von dem Entsetzen getrennt werden kann, dass sie überhaupt aufgenommen wurden. 4. ›Third-person‹-Todesvideos: Das Sterben in der 3. Person ...
... Because of these photos.« (Sontag 2004). Wie sich in dieser Anschuldigung die vorausgesagte Gewalt gegen die Amerikaner im Allgemeinen, d.h. ...
... So schreibtButler (2009: 85), dass insofern die Fotos die Szene potentiell an Zeitungen und Nachrichtenmedien übermitteln, die Folter für die Kamera intendiert war, d.h. für eben diese Kommunikation.Sontag (2004) wiederum hebt hervor, dass das Entsetzen über das, was die Fotos zeigen nicht von dem Entsetzen getrennt werden kann, dass sie überhaupt aufgenommen wurden. 4. ›Third-person‹-Todesvideos: Das Sterben in der 3. Person ...
Der Syrienkonflikt begegnet uns seit seinen Anfängen vor allem in Videos, die zunächst mit Smartphones, später auch mit hochauflösenden Actionkameras aufgenommen wurden. Verbreitet über das Internet werden diese Videos von einer internationalen Berichterstattung, aber auch von Kunst- und Filmschaffenden aufgegriffen. Mareike Meis entwickelt in diesem Kontext eine Forschungsperspektive, die auf innovative Weise Videos der Gewalt und des Todes für einen wissenschaftlichen Zugriff erschließbar und damit verbundene aktivistische, jihadistische und rechtspopulistische Praktiken im Spannungsfeld von Ästhetisierung und Politisierung kritisierbar macht.
... This photograph echoes a number of racial stereotypes of young Black menfor example, the emphasis on size and the link with violence. Sontag (25) argued that "The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one'. In the twenty years since, this trend has intensified. ...
In December 2022, the death of Christopher Clunis was made public. He had actually died in February 2021. Christopher Clunis was convicted of the manslaughter of a stranger, Jonathan Zito. He attacked Mr Zito at a train station. This paper will argue that this terrible event became a totemic symbol of the wider failings of the policy of community care. The image of Clunis being driven away from Court was repeatedly used in newspaper and other media reports as a reference point. The image reflects a number of long-standing traits in the representation of the “mentally ill.” These are combined with a racial stereotype of Black men. The paper examines historical representations of the mentally ill as a context for a discussion of the Clunis case. The paper uses the work of Stuart Hall as an analytical tool to examine the questions of race and representation, and the moral panic following failings of community care.
... The second photo of an uninhabited, traditional classroom ( Figure 6) is photojournalistic in style, taking on a history of 'bearing witness, and being a reliable document, or recording of reality (Ledin and Machin 2018, 41). Yet this is also 'reality interrupted' (Sontag 2004), showing a moment in time but not the complex and messy processes of schooling. The low-level (denoting a power position) but oblique angle, which denotes detachment (it's not a frontal angle) creates a stark contrast with the intimate parent-child-school-home relations at play in Data Event 1. ...
Affectively charged social media exchanges pertaining to remote schooling in Hungary during the early stages of the pandemic provided unique insights into dispositions towards technologically mediated learning. In this article, we explore how parents and teachers responded to the increased porosity, mobility, and visibility of classroom interactions during pandemic-related school closures. We wanted to know what emotive responses to the intensification of digital media use in the home revealed about boundaries of learning in Hungary. Data were gathered with SentiOneTM’s AI-based social listening tool and analysed by coupling an attunement to affect with a multimodal analytic. We found a lack of shared understanding of what technologically mediated learning from home entails placed boundaries of learning under threat. To enable shared understandings and strengthen trust between students, teachers, and parents, we propose protected spaces that escape public scrutiny for joint digital practices to evolve.
... In adapting Omi and Winant's idea of 'racial formation' to 'digital racial formation', Lisa Nakamura suggests that we need to move away from traditional, more static modes of analysing visual objects to greater emphasis on their meaning as users interact with them (Nakamura 2008: 17-18 , which show Americans grinning beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree'. But she also points out that in 'our age of infinite digital self-reproduction and self-dissemination', the Abu Ghraib pictures were 'less objects to be saved than messages to be disseminated, circulated' (Sontag 2004). Controversies such as the Abu Ghraib photographs, the Muhammad cartoons published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, and the Quran burnings in the United States also present challenges for comparative and transnational analyses of racialised and ethnically marked cultural dynamics. ...
Being Cultural is an ambitious collection of original readings which introduces students to key theory and key issues within cultural studies and popular culture. Bringing together established writers such as Andy Bennett, Douglas Kellner, Chris Rojek, Barry Smart and John Storey with academics researching cultural texts in new and innovative ways, the book challenges our common-sense notions of ‘culture’, placing debates centrally within the power dynamics and dominant meaning-making of capitalist society. In understanding the production and consumption of such texts, the book outlines theoretical discussion from the Frankfurt School, British Cultural Studies, Semiotics, Subcultural theory, and Postmodernism, as well as investigating special topics such as digital media, sport, advertising, social networking sites, celebrity, video games, the body, cinema, reality TV, and issues of gender and ethnicity. With a total of twenty-five chapters presented in a user-friendly style — including chapter summaries and suggestions for further reading from the authors — this is an essential text for any student new to the subject.
... As we see in Figure 4, the images that result from concept reenactment vary in quality. In this case, the student is responding to Susan Sontag's (2015) Regarding the torture of others, an article first published in 2004 in The New York Times Magazine, that denounces the Bush administration's efforts to silence the scandal triggered by the publication of images of torture of prisoners in the hands of American military in Abu Ghraib. The image shows the student's attempt at digitally recreating a particularly well-known image from the series, which shows a hooded prisoner balancing on a stool, his arms outstretched. ...
In an era in which “all media are mixed media” (Mitchell, 2002), visual information is central in interpersonal and mass communication. Despite this daily consumption of visual information, “digital natives” (Prensky, 2001) are not prepared to critically engage with images (Brumberger, 2016). Scholars in the field of visual literacy identified a curricular bias towards written texts (Elkins, 2007), and the need for more training of visual literacy in higher education (Metros & Woolsey, 2006). However, the discussion of visual literacy in higher education is dominated by studies that measure teaching strategies (Bowen, 2017; Johnston et al. 2017) but rarely discuss the meaning of visual literacy from a student perspective. Visual reflection is a learning experience that involves reading, writing, thinking, and feeling with and through images. This study investigates undergraduate students’ experience with visual reflection in a visual studies class through a phenomenographic approach to 29 visual journals and a thematic analysis of 9 semi-structured interviews with students. The objective is discussing the potential contribution of visual reflection to students’ multimodal literacies. This study contends that the promotion of visual reflection needs to be systematically implemented in all fields engaged in knowledge production as visual reflection enhances academic learning, fosters multimodal literacies, and promotes the visualization of knowledge.
... Photographs are snapshots of events (Ledin and Machin, 2018: 42), where 'the distinction between photograph and reality -as between spin and policy -can easily evaporate' (Sontag, 2004). As lay spectators, we are often unaware of how our perception of such snapshots and reality itself is shaped by an image and the conventions that the photographer employed, including different artistic techniques such as, for example, the use of black-and-white photography; decisions made by the photographer as to proximity, angle, setting, editing, and photoshopping; and devices such as the use of children. ...
This article considers, in social semiotic terms, the visual self-representations created by lesbian, gay, bi, trans, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ, thereafter queer) Romani visual activists and artists, and some of the processes used in the course of a transdisciplinary, collaborative research project. Undertaken in 2019, its aim was to investigate, through queer intersectional research-informed interventions, the potential of this semiotic material – photographic renditions of the lived experiences of queer Roma – to challenge dominant stereotypical misrepresentations and an overall lack of visibility of queer Roma. Another goal was to further enhance the impact and accessibility of the knowledge co-produced with and by the queer Romani visual activists and artists by giving a visual form to their lived experiences of antigypsyism intersecting with homophobia, transphobia, sexism and other forms of oppression. This approach to co-producing knowledge enabled the queer Romani visual activists and artists not only to exercise control over the process of creating the visual self-representations, but also to spell out, in a visual form, the terms in which queer Roma wish to be represented.
... 48 In this regard, what Sontag writes of the Abu Ghraib pho to graphs extends to those that were dis sem i nated from Cizre and Sur: "The hor ror of what is shown in the pho to graphs can not be sep a rated from the hor ror that the pho to graphs were taken." 49 The very exis tence of the images and their pub lic dis sem i na tion with impu nity attest to the fact that nei ther the par tic i pants of these pho to graphic encoun ters nor the regime found any thing mor ally ques tion able in them. Thanks to this "moral stu pid ity," 50 these pho to graphs func tion as trophies, or sou ve nirs, which mark the chasm between those who are asso ci ated with the regime and those who are on the receiv ing end of vio lence, whose lives are ren dered "'destruc ti ble' and 'ungrievable.'" ...
In 2016, as the Turkish military's “security operations” targeting Kurdish towns in southeastern Turkey were in full swing, a series of disturbing photographs began to appear on social media. The photographs, which showed soldiers posing in front of derelict houses covered with graffiti written only a few moments before, had an almost “playful” quality to them whereby the act of killing was presented as an object of amusement. To achieve this effect, those who shot the photographs appropriated certain aesthetic practices of resistance, specifically the use of street art by protest movements in Turkey. This article calls the appropriation of these practices and their presentation in the photographs “the grotesque mimicry of joyful dissent.” The photographs' mimicry seeks to serve multiple, and seemingly contradictory, purposes including the erasure of the memory of both the atrocities that were being committed at the time and the former struggles against the regime. What lies underneath this project of erasure and becomes visible in the photographs' display of power is the instability and fragility of the regime's violent rule, both within the region, which it treats as an internal colony, and beyond.
... En el caso del escándalo de Abu Ghraib las terribles fotos que circularon entre amigos abrieron los ojos del mundo a los abusos cometidos por el ejército norteamericano en Irak. Como notó Sontag en su artículo del New York Times, «Regarding the Torture of Others», la administración de George W. Bush apeló a la supuesta distancia entre realidad y representación diciendo que el presidente estaba horrorizado por «las fotografías», como si la culpa del horror estuviera en las imágenes y no en lo que representan (Sontag, 2007). ...
La conmemoración de eventos traumáticos supone la voluntad de crear una «memoria colectiva», pero la idea misma de recordar colectivamente da lugar a una serie de preguntas que este libro intenta contestar. Por medio del análisis de imágenes, recursos metonímicos, espacios de memoria e intervenciones digitales, Margarita Saona presenta algunos de los mecanismos cognitivos y emocionales que nos ayudan a incorporar el sufrimiento pasado de los otros como un legado propio.
... »The Western Memory Museum is now mostly a visual one« (Sontag 2004 Die Fotografen sind dabei Teil der Inszenierung und quasi selbst an der Folter beteiligt, die Folterer grinsen in die Kamera. Das Fotografiertwerden in entwürdigenden Posen ist zentraler Bestandteil der Leiden der Opfer. ...
... Torture whitewash could be included in the trivialization of torture through images (Sontag 2004); for example, the conception of an agent-hero who tortures the terrorist for a greater and higher good is shown in TV series "24" (McCullough 2014) or in the movie Zero Dark Thirty, 2012. ...
Torture is a practice as old as humanity itself, although its objectives have changed throughout history. The participation of medical personnel in the exercise of torture has been common in some historical moments. During the middle ages, torture was the instrument used by justice to obtain confessions, but doctors did not regularly participate in it. For the first time, the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina (1532) is the body of laws that requires the official presence of a doctor in the torture sessions, acting as another judicial official. The twentieth century represented a drastic change in the role of the health professional in relation to torture, who began to play an active part in this process. Torture methods changed drastically, going from the classic methods of inflicting physical pain, to other more modern methods, in which psychological and psychiatric techniques and psychotropics predominate. The Nazi doctors applied mind control techniques with psychotropic drugs to prisoners. In dictatorial countries, such as the former Soviet Union and China, punitive psychiatry was used to punish political dissidents, and in the South American dictatorships, doctors actively collaborated in the exercise of physical torture. The paradigm of torture changed with the events of Abu Ghraib, and the use of torture was justified by the democratic authorities as a war weapon against terrorism. To avoid the participation of health professionals in torture, additional actions are required, such as promoting extra ethical training in doctors, and close monitoring for compliance with all international covenants, agreements and treaties against torture.
... 5 Despite reports of the International Committee of Red Cross, journalists, and protests of other humanitarian organizations about tortures carried out by Americans in Iraq, there was little interest from American authorities or US public opinion. Susan Sontag (2004) noticed in her famed text that it was the photographs which made it "real" to them. People were not prepared for this form of activity, taking photos, done by soldiers, despite the fact that photographs taken by perpetrators of their victims go back to the Second World War and Nazi photographs and to the photographs of lynching in America which were made to serve as trophies. ...
This interdisciplinary collection of essays explores the impact of media, emerging technologies, and education on the resilience of the so-called post-truth society. This book explores if a return to civic participation, enhanced critical media literacy, journalism for the public good, techno-interventions and lifelong learning systems can collectively foster a more engaged global citizenry.
The post-truth society is associated with a raft of terms that challenge the very notion of what should constitute a democratic and inclusive society: the decline and fall of reason; the disruption of the public sphere; the spread of misleading information; fake news; culture wars; the rise of subjectivity; the co-opting of language; filters, silos and tribes; attention deficits; trolls, polarisation and hyper-partisanship; the conversion of popularity into legitimacy; manipulation by "populist"; leaders, governments, and fringe actors; algorithmic control, targeted messaging and native advertising; surveillance and platform capitalism.
The contributions from scholars, technologists, policy-makers and activists raise critical questions about the nature and power of knowledge in the 21st century. Readers are challenged to question their own role in perpetuating certain narratives and to also understand the lived context of people on all sides of a given debate. The diverse perspectives by geography, sector, gender and world-views will widen the appeal of this work to an international audience trying to understand the resilience of the post-truth society.
... 7 Cita original en inglés: «It now seems probable that the defining association of people everywhere with the war that the United States launched pre-emptively in Iraq last year will be photographs of the torture of Iraqi prisoners by Americans in the most infamous of Saddam Hussein's prisons, Abu Ghraib» (Sontag, 2004). Esta pérdida de sentido es lo que fundamentó la crítica de Susan Sontag a las fotografías de guerra publicadas en medios masivos cuando escribió en 1973: «Sufrir es una cosa; otra es convivir con las imágenes fotográficas del sufrimiento, que no necesariamente fortifican la conciencia ni la capacidad de compasión [...] Las imágenes pasman. ...
En este artículo propongo una relación entre la noción moderna ruina y determinadas representaciones fotográficas de la ciudad de Nueva York durante las primeras semanas de impacto de la pandemia de covid-19, en marzo de 2020. El corpus de imágenes está constituido por fotografías publicadas durante este periodo en la portada del diario The New York Times, seleccionadas por considerarlas representativas de un género fotográfico que denomino de lo que no está. Este género se caracteriza por representar espacios referenciales de la ciudad (casi) vacíos de personas. En mi análisis, identifico aspectos comunes entre este género y las representaciones de ruinas popularizadas en Europa durante los siglos XVII y XVIII, los momentos iniciales de la modernidad. Para establecer estos vínculos me baso de la noción de «supervivencia» acuñada por Aby Warburg, la cual permite identificar reapariciones culturales anacrónicas —inesperadas— que ofrecen claves para reflexionar sobre el presente.
איך כותבים על דימויי סטילס ווידיאו שאי אפשר להתבונן בהם – דימויים שלא רק מתארים מעשי תקיפה אכזריים כלפי בריות אנושיות ולא אנושיות, אלא תוקפים בעצמם את חוש הראייה ואת עצם היכולת להתבונן ולהיות צופה? דימויים שלא נועדו רק לתעד אלימות, אלא גם ליטול חלק פעיל בהפעלתה ובהעצמתה? בשבעה באוקטובר 2023 שודרו ופורסמו בטלגרם ובטוויטר סרטונים חיים של רצח, הצתה, חטיפה והטלת מום באזרחים ישראלים בבתיהם שצולמו ע"י מחבלי חמאס שלבשו על גופם מצלמות גו פרו. המאמר מראה כי השימוש בתקשורת דיגיטלית וברשתות החברתיות לא היה נספח או תוספת לאירוע, אלא חלק בלתי נפרד מן ההיגיון הצבאי והדתי של נקמה וגאולה. מי שמפרסם תמונות אלימות ומשתף אותן עם אחרים מייצר, משדר ומכוונן אָפקט, ומאפשר את כינונן של קהילות אָפקטיביות שנוצרות מתוך צפייה בתמונות ההשפלה ומהפצתן. דרך השידור החי והשימוש ברשתות החברתיות נוצרת תחושה של חיבור חברתי וזו מקבלת מעמד פוליטי אנטגוניסטי שמיוחס לא רק להיבט הייצוגי או הרפרנציאלי של הדימויים אלא בראש ובראשונה לצורת הפנייה האָפקטיבית שלהם. בנסיבות אלו נוצר פרדוקס בנוגע לדימויי האלימות והתקבלותם השונה בתכלית בקהילות שונות: ככל שהדימויים נראים "אמיתיים" יותר, גולמיים ובלתי מצונזרים, כך הם מעוררים ביתר שאת את הממד הפנטזמטי והרפאי, הספקטרלי, של האלימות.
Cities are real, physical, material concentrations of human activities and built environments, but they are also portals that allow and require unique ways of perceiving relations across space and time. Photography, especially the genre of seductive urban landscape views so often deployed by airlines, realtors, and city boosters, distorts our perceptions of space-time. These distortions are particularly serious in the unique configuration of Indigeneity and transnationalization that constitutes the lands presently known as Canada and British Columbia. Drawing inspiration from Sontag's dark but essential Regarding the Pain of Others, and focusing on the Vancouver global city region, this article seeks to develop critical captions for urban landscape views as what Eugène Atget portrayed as crime-scene evidence.
O impacto narrativo da fotografia surge como argumento fundamental e presença temática estruturante, em relação ao conteúdo e ao sentido, em obras de diversos gêneros no cinema e na literatura, como pode ser verificado em destaque nos filmes Blow-Up, Retratos fantasmas, Elena e Aftersun. O objetivo deste artigo é ressaltar um percurso crítico acerca das obras citadas em sua singularidade e seus modos de composição, analisando a especificidade da imagem fotográfica em sua relação com questões teóricas e cognitivas sobre presença e ausência, memória e esquecimento, considerando seus efeitos disruptivos e os conceitos de fotoliteratura, de autoficção e de metaficção.
In this chapter, I argue for a documentary film pedagogy aimed at developing film and media literacy—that is the capacity to critically analyse, historicize and produce film, moving images and media. Through a workshop where the Swedish children’s documentary film The Quiet One (2011) is screened for two Swedish teenagers, a metamodal film pedagogy of iterations of seeing, talking about and making film is suggested. Metamodal as a concept is introduced to focus on how something can be explored through practice—in this instance, how the way that the camera expresses a certain point of view is investigated with the creative exploration of multiple views. The talking–seeing–creating pedagogy has been developed from a model championed by the Swedish Film Institute, ‘se-samtala-skapa’, and is here introduced under the English acronym of TASC. Considering the outcomes of the workshop, I suggest that working with the TASC film pedagogy develops the critical capacity to reflect on the constructedness of moving images while learning technical skills within the realm of moving image production. This approach also facilitates what Jenkins et al. call ‘civic imagination’, where the exercising of multiple viewpoints and perspectives constitutes an imagination of what a new possible future would look like and the belief that one can be part of such future.
En el texto «¿Por qué la guerra?» de 1933, Einstein y Freud abordan la posibilidad de educar al hombre contra la barbarie. En él se define el proceso de civilización como un predominio progresivo de la razón que tiende a la eliminación de la crueldad de la esfera social mediante la educación de los instintos primarios. Pero la intrínseca ambigüedad de la violencia (constructora y destructora) en Freud permitiría comprender la guerra civilizada como una forma histórica de crueldad estéticamente tolerable, al estar su violencia ligada a «un cierto grado de hipocresía» del Kulturmenschen necesario para mantener el orden de la civilización. En diálogo con las ideas de Adorno, Elias y Bauman, este artículo examina críticamente las contradicciones dialécticas en torno a la crueldad en el mundo moderno. En él se concluye que el ocultamiento y la negación de la violencia cruel son mecanismos necesarios para mantener la ilusión de una superioridad ética de la civilización sobre la barbarie.
In this chapter, I examine the ways in which “harsh interrogation” methods, such as indefinite detention, hooding, use of vicious brutality (such as the use of dogs), and force-feeding, function as acts of torture. Although singularly they may only be “abusive,” when used together or in tandem (“clustering”), they cross the line into torture. Torture is an issue of public morality. My focus is on the role of medical professionals who have enabled torture by standing by, keeping silent, or actively participating in the abuse of detainees. To understand how this occurs, we need to look at the context and the ways the language as well as the practice have an effect. For example, there is widespread use of euphemisms; e.g., “stress positions,” “sleep adjustment,” “takeout,” and “waterboarding” to create a climate of acceptance. Key medical associations such as the American Medical Association (AMA) and the World Medical Association have issued declarations prohibiting doctors from participating and calling for them to step forward. However, we must go beyond whistle-blowers taking personal risks, however commendable, and, thus, put in place scaffolding to make it easier to report and investigate suspected abuse or torture. I set out guidelines for doing so in my essay.
The media representations of death and dead body
Este artículo aborda el aspecto poco estudiado de la ambigüedad moral y jurídica del verdugo —quien históricamente ha permitido al poder político la posibilidad de negación de la violencia moralmente repudiable—, a partir del análisis compa- rativo de tres casos míticos e históricos: 1) el suplicio del capitán Añasco a manos de la Gaitana durante la Conquista, 2) el martirio de Becket provocado por los caballeros de Enrique II de Inglaterra y 3) las masacres de liberales en la cordillera occidental colombiana durante la Violencia. Se demuestra que la legitimidad de la violencia cruel se encuentra ligada a los conceptos de deber y sacrificio, pero requiere también una posibilidad de negación que preserve la moralidad de la au- toridad. Un demonio sin instrucciones que ejecuta autónomamente una voluntad colectiva de castigo aparece como mecanismo histórico necesario para modular la relación que el poder político mantiene con la crueldad funcional a sus fines.
Video compression can exert dangerous and violent effects on human bodies. Following flicker, a visual disturbance that results from the compression of moving images, this chapter explores entanglements between unruly bodies and disorderly images, focusing on the interplay between medicine, electrical infrastructure, and visual media. At the heart of this chapter is a neurological condition known as photosensitive epilepsy, which urges us to seek out a richer historical account of video compression that heeds its corporeality: the harmful and gratifying bodily sensations that compressed moving images can provoke, the queerness of dysfunctional media, and the sensory politics of standards and infrastructure. In conversation with disability studies and queer phenomenology, I probe the media culture of neurology to show how people with photosensitive epilepsy, along with various light-emitting and light-projecting devices, have been central to the formation of this medical field. I then examine the influence that neurological research has had on the work of a number of experimental film artists, offering a critical analysis of several works in which compressed and flickering images play a leading role. These exchanges ripple through mainstream audiovisual spaces as well as marginal paracinematic objects like epilepsy warnings and broadcasting guidelines for the prevention of flicker.
The present study aims at conducting a close analysis of the representation of trauma in contemporary Pakistani fiction. Drawing on the debates of Caruth, LaCapra, and Herman among others, this study analyses The Shadow of Crescent Moon by Fatima Bhutto in order to trace the experiences of the characters undergoing the trauma of war and forced migration in the novel. The novel depicts the people who migrate to a fictional area Mir Ali in Pakistan in the aftermath of the 9/11 war on terror, but these people remain under constant threat of death due to the ongoing tussle between the army and freedom fighters. The study explores the trauma of migrants who are dragged to war grounds against their will. Overall, this study helps in illuminating the human cost of forced migration and trauma, as well as the resilience and adaptation of individuals and communities in the face of adversity.
The author has a crackly relationship with photography. In fact, they have at times struggled to see eye to eye. Photography has seemed awkward, with its sharp, obvious, physical boundaries and flat, printed surface. Yet, as an artist, the author has come back to photography again and again. When making autobiographical work, the author brought the camera with me to places where there has been pain. But the author has often wondered if photography cannot offer enough. In this chapter, autobiography is fragmented and messy. It includes sexual violence, and moreover, the folding of these experiences into the self. The aim is to discover if and how these experiences alter interactions with hierarchy but also influence artistic vision and methodology.
This article analyses the reports of various military and intelligence institutions in the United States in response to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal which destroyed the reputation of the armed forces in the Iraqi theatre of war in 2004. The photographs delegitimised the mission and provoked strong reaction from the occupied Iraqis. The reports attributed culpability for the abuses perpetrated on the imprisoned Iraqis to 'sadistic' and criminal soldiers and deflected responsibility from senior members of the military and the decay within the institution itself, brought on by the discourse of terror and the introduction of techniques amounting to torture. This article, taking Abu Ghraib and the avoidance of responsibility for atrocity as an example, seeks to comment on the presumed limitations imposed on the applicability of international law during the 'War on Terror', the brutality of the military as an institution and the resulting alterations in the mind-set of individualsbyinherentdehumanisation of theenemyin conflict.
This chapter considers the frictions between status quo and change with reference to three recent theatrical works that offer images of Northern Ireland. Stacey Gregg’s Shibboleth (2015), David Ireland’s Cyprus Avenue (2016), and Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman (2017) vividly illustrate some of the intricate and, at times, counterintuitive, ways in which Northern Ireland in the second decade of the twenty-first century remains an overdetermined site of ambivalent affects and negative attachments, in a cultural discourse now further inflected by Brexit. At the opening of the chapter, I look to Seamus Heaney’s 1975 poem “Act of Union” as a paradigmatic example of the tropes that congeal around the North. In the ensuing decades, the narrative of the North as a dysphoric site of grim tribalism, atavistic violence, paranoia and perpetual conflict became deeply etched in the cultural and political discourse, so much so that in an essay published in 2001, Ronan McDonald warned that “The central danger of all writing about the Troubles is the danger of cliché” (233).
It is now more than twenty years since the Good Friday Agreement proposed a new narrative for Northern Ireland. In the post-Agreement context the challenges of imagining a cultural space that is not predetermined by political violence and sectarianism, while still respecting the legacy of the Troubles, are complex and ongoing. I explore how Shibboleth, Cyprus Avenue and The Ferryman each refract the ambivalences of the affective patterning of the North. All three share a temporal zone in the political penumbras of post-Agreement governance and Brexit, their production contexts overlap unevenly in several ways: Shibboleth and Cyprus Avenue both opened on the Peacock Stage at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin; The Ferryman was produced and Cyprus Avenue was co-produced by the Royal Court Theatre, London, and both transferred to highly successful West End and New York runs. They invite audiences to think and feel in particular ways that are freighted with political implications. My analysis of their affective textures draws on Birte Heidemann’s theorising of the North’s negative liminality, Stefanie Lehner’s work on transformative aesthetics and memory, and Sianne Ngai’s reflections on the aesthetics of negative emotions. Using these frames, I investigate how the tangle of “dysphoric affects” (3) that adheres to the North continues to find expression. In particular, I propose that Ngai’s notion of “animatedness” with its racialised aspect, elucidates the politics of powerlessness and agency embedded in these plays, and how they reproduce and restructure the tropes associated with a Northern Irish imaginary. Finally, it is not a little ironic that of the three, the two plays with the highest public profiles, greeted with the strongest public acclaim, offer an intoxicating blend of “dysphoric affects” (Ngai 3) that arguably reify rather than deconstruct the set pieces of Northern Irish exoticism, violence and extravagant temperamentality.
Yolocaust é um projeto do artista israelense Shahak Shapira que reorganiza fotografias realizadas por visitantes do memorial das vítimas do Holocausto em Berlim postadas em diversas redes sociais sobrepondo-as com imagens de campos de extermínio nazistas. No presente trabalho, analisa-se algumas imagens, com especial atenção em como aspectos temporais e documentários fazem as imagens operarem memórias sobre os campos de morte.
Savaş fotoğrafları an’ı çerçeveleyen, sosyo-kültürel ve tarihsel nitelikler taşıyan fotoğraflardır. Aynı zamanda bu fotoğraflar yayınlandıkları gazetelerde, metin dolayımıyla, yeniden çerçevelenirler. Bundan dolayı savaş fotoğrafları çözümlenmeye ihtiyaç duyan metinlerdir. Bu çalışmanın amacı ise Türkiye basınında yer alan Dağlık Karabağ Savaşı’nı fotoğraflar üzerinden çözümlemektir. Bu amaçla çalışma Hürriyet, Sabah, Milliyet, Türkiye ve Posta gazetelerinde yer alan fotoğraflar ve fotoğraflara eşlik eden fotoğraf altı yazıları ve haber başlıkları üzerinden gerçekleştirilmiş, çalışmada görsel içerik analizi ve göstergebilimsel çözümleme kullanılmıştır. Buna göre içerik analizinin öne çıkan sonuçlarından biri Azerbaycan tarafının çok sayıda, Ermenistan tarafınınsa az sayıda fotoğrafla temsil edilmesi olmuştur. Göstergebilimsel çözümlemenin sonuçları ise öne çıkan üç tema/mit üzerinden sunulmuştur. Bunlar haklı savaş-haksız savaş, askeri başarı-askeri başarısızlık ve dostluk-düşmanlık mitleridir. Bu birbirine karşıt anlatılardan ilki Azerbaycan, ikinciler ise Ermenistan için kullanılmıştır. Araştırmanın bulgularından yola çıkarak gazetelerin ideolojik konumlarının Dağlık-Karabağ Savaşı’nın temsilinde etkili olduğu söylenebilmektedir. Gazetelerin temsili iktidarın savaşa dair dış politikasıyla da örtüşmektedir. Son olarak gazeteler Dağlık-Karabağ Savaşı’nı, militarizmi ve savaşı yücelten öğeleri kullanarak temsil etmişlerdir. Basın savaşlarda, barışa katkıda bulunabilecek bir yayıncılık tarzını benimsemeli, dost-düşman ya da biz-onlar anlatısına odaklanmak yerine tüm tarafları kapsayan hak ihlallerine ve insanlık hikayelerine odaklanmalıdır.
British theatre is renowned for tackling topical, red-hot events pertaining to immediate history: the war in Iraq, for instance, prompted swift and diverse responses from British playwrights. The representation of recent history will be analysed in this paper through the representation of torture, and more specifically the Abu Ghraib scandal, in Simon Stephens’s Motortown (2006). Written during the 7/7 bombings in London, the play is permeated with the sense of horror associated with the war against terror and the war in Iraq: it blurs the line between the frontlines and the home front, as Danny, a former squaddie, re-enacts on British soil the acts of torture inflicted on prisoners in Abu Ghraib. This paper will show how, drawing on In-Yer-Face aesthetics, the playwright subverts the framing of torture and reflects on the anti-war movement.
This article focuses on the performative recognition offered to victims through political apologies for conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV). It engages with understandings of political apology as an act of acknowledgment and moral visibility that has the capacity to further include marginalized accounts of violence or injustice within exclusive national histories/memberships. I introduce feminist understandings of visibility as ambivalent alongside a differential politics of “grievability” in order to suggest that political apologies must always recognize and make visible particular accounts of violence and subject positions; however, they simultaneously obscure others. I problematize the gendered and gendering effects of this process in relation to two cases of apology for CRSV: the Japanese imperial “comfort women” and the US Abu Ghraib torture scandal during the Global War on Terror (GWoT).
In this article, I analyze the 2018 video game Detroit: Become Human as a potentially political text from the perspective of literary and cultural studies. I argue that it features and presents narrative choices in a way that encourages players to make decisions not solely for personal or empathetic reasons but also through a political contemplation, and I contend that the manner in which the game narratively presents individual agency and populist imaginations of “the people” complicates this political project. To do so, I first present an approach to narrative, agency, and politics in video games more generally, before then discussing questions of agency and politics in Detroit: Become Human on three levels: in its narrative presentation, in how the gameplay politicizes player choice, and in how both the narrative and the ludic elements in the game complicate its interest in politics. This contribution thus suggests ways of both studying the connections of agency and politics in video games and culturally contextualizing this particular way of representing (a)political choices.
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/63932/1/shovein_eric_2009.pdf
In their biographical play Sleep Deprivation Chamber (1996), Adrienne Kennedy and her son Adam P. Kennedy retrace family memories to describe the aftermath of police brutality in 1990s America. They narrate the brutal beating of a middle-class, young Black man named Teddy and the events taking place later at trial. The playwrights make use of “memory violence” (Olick 2018) to elicit the spectators’ emotional response and construct a performative encounter in which the figures of perpetrator, survivor and bystander are questioned and redefined. Through this violence of remembering, they manage to insert unrecorded moments of abuse in our collective imaginary, moving from staged nightmares, distant courtrooms and individual sleep deprivation chambers into a figurative shared space where Black lives do matter.
The article explores the infamous photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison that circulated and were made public in 2004. It specifically looks at how the sense of togetherness was enacted by the U.S. military personnel stationed in the site, and the way cameras were instrumental in this process. It argues that the resultant photographs can be seen as tou- rist-like in several respects. A notable aspect of the photographic images is that the soldiers who took them repeatedly appear in the frame themselves. Appearing in and photographing the abusive acts was not only a form of structuring and reinforcing power relations at the prison, but also an attempt to portray a fun-having personnel group. The visual signifiers – thumbs up, smiles, pointed fingers – authenticate the images, lending them some of the qualities of tourist photography. At Abu Ghraib, the soldiers’ photographic practice also partly served as a sense-making mechanism, allowing a symbolic distance between the camera-wielder and unforeseen emergent events. It promised a wishful alternative to the grim realities of the prison: an overcrowded and undersupplied facility with a lack of on-site leadership. The scars of resultant violence – and the notorious photographs that document it – remain relevant, and continue to resurface in recent so- cial and political contexts.
Der Syrienkonflikt begegnet uns seit seinen Anfängen vor allem in Videos, die zunächst mit Smartphones, später auch mit hochauflösenden Actionkameras aufgenommen wurden. Verbreitet über das Internet werden diese Videos von einer internationalen Berichterstattung, aber auch von Kunst- und Filmschaffenden aufgegriffen. Mareike Meis entwickelt in diesem Kontext eine Forschungsperspektive, die auf innovative Weise Videos der Gewalt und des Todes für einen wissenschaftlichen Zugriff erschließbar und damit verbundene aktivistische, jihadistische und rechtspopulistische Praktiken im Spannungsfeld von Ästhetisierung und Politisierung kritisierbar macht.
The invisibilization of political violence, its material traces and spatial manifestations, characterize (post)conflict situations. Yet counter-semantics and dissonant narratives that challenge this invisibility have been articulated by artists, writers, and human rights activists that increasingly seek to contest the related historical amnesia. Adopting "performance" as a concept that is defined by repetitive, aesthetic practices-such as speech and bodily habits through which both individual and collective identities are constructed and perceived (Susan Slyomovics)-this collection addresses various forms of performing human rights in transitional situations in Spain, Latin America, and the Middle East. Bringing scholars together with artists, writers, and curators, and working across a range of disciplines, Performing Human Rights addresses these instances of omission and neglect, revealing how alternate institutional spaces and strategies of cultural production have intervened in the processes of historical justice and collective memory. With contributions by Zahira Aragüete-Toribio,
Salvadoran photographer Elvis Guzmán’s photo exhibit ‘El Autobautismo: De la “I” a la “S”’ (‘Self-baptism: From “I” to “S”’) portrays the quotidian balance between queer survival and celebration by telling the story of three individuals: Isaac, a drag queen; Alex, a trans man; and Stacy, a trans woman. Guzmán’s photos reveal the ephemeral nature of queer identity and the rawness of becoming self in El Salvador as the individuals’ lived realities show a layered experience of trauma and reclaimed identity. In this article, I assert that while photographs and video media are impactful tools in normalizing and educating about situations of violence, their images simultaneously have the potential to reify and retraumatize through the visualization of experienced violence. This analysis of Guzmán’s photo composition contextualizes the embodied experiences of violence within the frame of queer identity and self-baptism in El Salvador in order to illuminate the contradictory and invaluable relationship between violence and visibility.
This chapter documents US counter-terror law demonstrating how torture has come to symbolise American “exceptionalism” where executive power is out of control. The dangerous fusing of patriotism with vengeance and the contumacious disregard of the “Rule of Law” in the US’s rewriting of torture enables the perpetration of wanton sadism against Muslim detainees in Guantánamo, and strategies of sexual humiliation enacted and performed in Abu Ghraib. Such abuse is perpetrated by men and women and authorised by torture lawyers and politicians. The judiciary demonstrates a determination to uphold due process norms and the “Rule of Law”. The chapter concludes by considering the impact this state terrorism and its ever-continuing presence in memory and celluloid has on the psyche and identity of Iraqi people, Muslims and on right-thinking people everywhere.
In an interview following his 7 may 2004 testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Donald Rumsfeld, the United States secretary of defense, admitted knowing about abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison since they were first exposed in January. He also knew of the existence of photographs documenting the abuses, but he had not studied the images until shortly before they were shown to the public during the first week of May. In asserting that “[i]t is the photographs that give one the vivid realization of what actually took place” and that “[w]ords don't do it,” Rumsfeld expressed, and even surpassed, one of the prime clichés of our time, that a picture is worth a thousand words. Before the power of visual images, the subject has an uncontrollable emotional response: “you cannot help but be outraged.”
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