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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
164496
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| Summary/Abstract |
Over the last 30 years, post-structuralist, feminist and other IR theorists have asked questions of the ways in which discourses on sovereignty seek to foreclose political possibility. To do so, they have advanced a decentralised, contested, incomplete and relational understanding of politics that presupposes some sort of intersubjective agency, however fragmented. There is one site, however, that appears to confound this line of argument insofar as it is commonly understood to exemplify an entirely non-relational, anti-political ‘desolation’: the concentration camp. Drawing on feminist theory to establish the terms of an aesthetic mode of ‘interruption’, this article will identify a compelling challenge to this position in a comic book drawn by Horst Rosenthal, a German–Jewish detainee at Gurs in Vichy, France, who was later killed at Auschwitz–Birkenau. Rosenthal’s piece will be read as an ‘aesthetic interruption’ that mounts a powerful critique of the logic underpinning his concentrationary experience, and in so doing demonstrates one way in which (to however painfully limited a degree) the political might be ‘brought back in’ to discussions about sovereign power.
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| 2 |
ID:
168866
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| Summary/Abstract |
Several scholars have raised concerns that the institutional mechanisms through which transitional justice is commonly promoted in post-conflict societies can alienate affected populations. Practitioners have looked to bridge this gap by developing ‘outreach’ programmes, in some instances commissioning comic books in order to communicate their findings to the people they seek to serve. In this article, we interrogate the ways in which post-conflict comics produce meaning about truth, reconciliation, and the possibilities of peace, focusing in particular on a comic strip published in 2005 as part of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report into the causes and crimes of the 1991–2002 Civil War. Aimed at Sierra Leonean teenagers, the Report tells the story of ‘Sierrarat’, a peaceful nation of rats whose idyllic lifestyle is disrupted by an invasion of cats. Although the Report displays striking formal similarities with Art Spiegelman's Maus (a text also intimately concerned with reconciliation, in its own way), it does so to very different ends. The article brings these two texts into dialogue in order to explore the aesthetic politics of truth and reconciliation, and to ask what role popular visual media like comics can play in their practice and (re)conceptualisation.
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| 3 |
ID:
139422
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| Summary/Abstract |
Images play an increasingly important role in global politics but pose significant and so far largely unexplored methodological challenges. Images are different from words. They circulate in ever more complex and rapid ways. I argue that the political significance of images is best understood through an interdisciplinary framework that relies on multiple methods, even if they are at times incompatible. I defend such a pluralist approach as both controversial and essential: controversial because giving up a unitary standard of evidence violates social scientific conventions; essential because such a strategy offers the best opportunity to assess how images work across their construction, content and impact. I counter fears of relativism, arguing that the hubris of indisputable knowledge is more dangerous than a clash of different perspectives. The very combination of incompatible methods makes us constantly aware of our own contingent standpoints, thus increasing the self-reflectiveness required to understand the complexities of visual global politics.
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