This article examines the role of visuality in both the imposition of settler colonial authority and its contestation. As a specific case study, I discuss a group of images made by photographer Gar ...Lunney under the auspices of the National Film Board of Canada's Still Photography Division (NFB) during the historic 1956 Arctic tour conducted by then Canadian Governor General Vincent Massey. I argue that these images thematize visuality itself and, as such, expose the colonized North American Arctic of the 1950s as a field of racialized visuality. In the first part of the essay, I closely read Lunney's 1956 images and their histories, with particular attention to indications of the gaze. In the second part of the essay, I turn to recent decolonizing strategies for approaching the colonial photograph, again using Lunney's photographs of the 1956 tour as a case study. I identify two key decolonizing strategies: first, attention to the agency of the sitter in the photograph and, second, recent Inuit re-narrativizations and remediations of images.
This article analyzes landscape representations through the chiaroscuro technique in José Donoso’s 1997 posthumous novel El Mocho in dialogue with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 The Scarlet Letter. The ...chiaroscuro motivates not only a landscaping visuality, but also truncated and shadowed subjectivities. As Donoso overcomes the apophrades, or the influx of a literary precursor, the author dissolves landscapes and subjectivities according to a poetics that reformulates the museal order and the emergence of forms in the chiaroscuro technique.
Este estudio analiza la representación de paisajes a través del claroscuro en la novela póstuma El Mocho (1997) de José Donoso, en diálogo con La letra escarlata (1850) de Nathaniel Hawthorne, y el modo en que esta técnica plástica motiva tanto una visualidad paisajística como la emergencia de subjetividades ensombrecidas y “mochas”. Superando la apophrades, o la influencia de un antecedente literario, Donoso difumina paisajes y subjetividades según una poética que redice el orden museal y la emergencia de las formas en el claroscuro.
The article discusses the notion of the Anthropocene as a kind of anthropological machine, closely related to the regime of visuality. Giorgio Agamben points out that the anthropological machine is ...always an optical machine, which helps to induce visibility as an essential element of power. Similarly, Nicholas Mirzoeff discusses Anthropocene visuality as a technique which is always hierarchical and autocratic, helping to maintain the visualizer’s material power. Mirzoeff suggests that the biopolitical effects of visuality can be confronted by “countervisuality”, a strategy, which abandons visuality in order to achieve political equality. However, in this article I will argue that Anthropocene visuality should not be abandoned but rather reversed or redirected. In this regard, reversed visuality would mean not the replacement of the aesthetic with the political, but, on the contrary, the replacement of anthropocentric aesthetics with a different kind of aesthetics, which includes a non-human or not-quitehuman gaze. If Anthropocene visuality silently presumes that the place from which it represents will remain forever intact, then post-Anthropocene visuality demonstrates that the mechanisms of exclusion and subjection are easily interchangeable and that every living being can potentially bec ome “bare life”.
In the year 806 CE the Japanese monk Kūkai returned from a journey to China and brought a large amount of visual artefacts with him. Commentators have wondered since what role these visual media play ...in Kūkai’s Buddhist thought. It has been speculated that the art works show that Kūkai values visual media higher when it comes to transmitting the teaching of the Buddha. Proponents of this view usually refer to a single passage from Kūkai’s writings to warrant their interpretation. By analysing the respective passage in detail and showing how it connects to Kūkai’s other writings, this article argues that Kūkai did not prefer the visual to the verbal in transmitting the dharma. Mandalas certainly play an important role in Kūkai’s thought, but their role differs from what these modern interpreters suppose: first, when Kūkai speaks about ‘mandalas’ he often does not refer to paintings, but to the structure of reality or to ritual procedures. Second, mandala paintings have an ambiguous role in esoteric ritual, because they were added rather late in the development of esoteric ritual. For Kūkai they serve primarily as storyboards for ritual performance. Third, the first glance at a mandala is an important moment during esoteric initiations, but it is only the beginning of a rigorous training. Moreover, the crucial moment in esoteric ritual is the union of the practitioner with the deity; glancing at the mandala has no role to play in this mystic union. Fourth, mandala paintings can be used, according to Kūkai, to reveal the deeper structure of texts, but in this role they are not superior to the written medium but rather play a helping role. Fifth, Kūkai believes that texts
paintings can be misleading whenever they are taken as representations of a rigid structure of reality. In Kūkai’s eyes, the visual cannot, therefore, solve the problem how the Buddha can transmit his dharma.
This article explores the benign and malignant power of the visual in the racialised framing of the ongoing “European refugee crisis”. Bringing together literatures on racial discourses, visuality, ...storytelling and decoloniality for the first time, this paper breaks new ground in our understandings of the political possibilities that visual storytelling offers in shifting “lines of sight” in an increasingly vitriolic anti‐refugee climate. It does this by analysing prominent graphic narratives created by the non‐profit organisation PositiveNegatives, animating the refugee experiences of Syrian men in Scandinavia. We consider the affective engagements that such progressive storytelling promotes and the decolonial potential invested in it, arguing that the modality and content of narratives of this genre offer important scope to provoke encounter and empathy. Contributing to geographies of race, migration, visuality and decoloniality, we suggest that these narratives allow new and gently radical ways of resisting the dehumanising impetus of mainstream media discourses.
This article explores how competing actors established, spread, and challenged visual representations of the Chinese nation during the COVID-19 pandemic. It asks: how do official gatekeepers of ...meaning in China imbue their visual construction of a crisis-hit nation with pathos?; and what happens when their critics utilize the resulting repertoire of visual cues for their own ends? To answer these questions, the article first examines the visual libraries of nationalism and national crisis from which Chinese propaganda drew during the COVID-19 outbreak. It then analyses the struggles that ensued over such representations, specifically the use of national flags and the sentiments they elicit. The analysis traces representations of the flag of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from an initial satirical portrayal in a Danish broadsheet to the angry Chinese backlashes that followed on social media, and it shows how the tensions over such portrayals became part of a meme war over the sovereignty of Hong Kong. The analysis shows how representations of the nation can become a matter of existential anxieties during a time of crisis, especially in highly networked communication environments where authoritative official actors and their supporters are no longer in control of the symbols they established as part of their ‘emotional governance’.
C.P. Pow became a significant part of my own academic journey from soon after I joined the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 1999. Our academic inspirations, interests and identities ...overlapped, and we had opportunities to co‐teach and co‐write. I use these overlaps and collaborations as a way into reflecting on Pow's work, mainly during the period up to when he received tenure at NUS in 2011. I focus on two substantive themes. The first has to do with how and why Pow approached the landscape of Singapore beyond the visual or the ‘seen’. The second theme concerns the origins, development and consolidation of Pow's contributions to examining urban Asia in ways that unsettle Anglo‐American‐derived generalizations.
Given the centrality of the visual to modern day life, this article introduces a visually informed approach to critical discursive psychology that facilitates the study of visual materials. We argue ...that the visual is a site where the social world is actively built and maintained, similar to what has been reasoned more generally about language use, and that critical discursive psychology can offer a rigorous approach to examining visual materials that can productively deepen our understanding of psychological concepts. As such, we integrate a consideration of visuality into critical discursive psychology theory, including a conceptualization of visual discourse and visual interpretative repertoires, provide tools for close readings of visual materials and guidance regarding how to employ these tools, and outline the process of identifying visual interpretative repertoires. We further connect these concepts to our previous experience carrying out this approach to inform future inquiries.
One of the most significant features in Claire Denis’s cinema resides in its obscurity. Lack of psychologic explanation, the information necessary to understand the story is given obliquely, where ...floats the opacity which delays meaning and prevents obvious conclusion. In this paper, we think about this opacity through these key elements in Nénétte et Boni (1996); telephone conversation, smell, water, and glass. These are shown repeatedly throughout the film, and they help us find the question of communication, or family dysfunction of the characters, as well as the relation between the images and spectators.First, the telephone conversation by counterfeit telephone cards create random connection between protagonists and unimportant characters, which blurs the center of the story, and makes great contrast to the family’s discord. Second, water suggests the protagonist’s attempted abortion and the family’s secret past. Water is relayed with glass in the scene of the attempted of abortion; the wavy surface of the glass door in a bathroom makes blurry vision which blocks clear vision of protagonist’s brother and of spectators. Glass also functions like soundproofing in another scene. It’s as if Denis creates audiovisual barrier between images and spectators. However, this makes us pay more attention to images on the screen. By avoiding quick access to understanding, Denis calls for our voluntary attitude toward the images.
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