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A Pedagogy of Empathy for a World of
Atrocity
Esther Lezra
Published online: 07 Nov 2014.
To cite this article: Esther Lezra (2014) A Pedagogy of Empathy for a World of Atrocity, Review of
Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 36:5, 343-371, DOI: 10.1080/10714413.2014.958374
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714413.2014.958374
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The Review of Education, Pedagogy,
and Cultural Studies, 36:343–371, 2014
Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1071-4413 print=1556-3022 online
DOI: 10.1080/10714413.2014.958374
A Pedagogy of Empathy for a World of
Atrocity
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Esther Lezra
In times of escalating acts of global violence and chaos, visual and narrative
representations of discrete acts of violence interlock in a deeply interdisciplinary
social text of multiple media and modes of transmission. Representations of
atrocity—photographs and documentary accounts as well as creations of imaginative culture, such as songs, art, and story-telling—record and transmit a social
text that Frederic Jameson once eloquently termed the hurts of history. Take, for
instance, the uncanny echo in the visual composition of Figures 1 and 2. This
article grapples with a theory that seeks to understand such connections.
Positioned as pedagogues in a narrative horizon of social and historical hurt,
we are called upon to develop an ethical pedagogical model through which
our students may empathetically perceive, understand, experience and respond
to the representations of violence that they witness every day.1 At the 2007
Association for Integrative Studies Conference, Lynne Constantine and Suzanne
Scott offered an inspiring panel and workshop called ‘‘Toward an Interdisciplinary Pedagogy of Social Justice’’ in which just such a method was beginning to be
explored. American, global, and transatlantic studies have produced groundbreaking scholarship that argues that the object of inquiry (in this case, the wide
social text of atrocity revealed by recurring cultural representations of atrocity) is
best approached with a method that matches it.2 The challenge we face lies in the
delicate tension created by the double vision required by a pedagogy of hurt and
hope. The following questions remain: How do we create a pedagogical narrative
around the social text of hurt that doesn’t dwell so much in grief or blame that we
cause violence to our students? How much discourse and disciplinary packaging
can we responsibly use to keep our students at a safe distance from the very real
hurt of the social text they inhabit? And finally, how to accomplish this without
dismissing the over-exposure of aggrieved communities to acts of institutional
and state violence that urgently demand a change? In my attempts to answer
some of these questions, I have found it effective to illuminate the social text
of hurt by using objects of study that are geographically, temporally, and even
culturally distant both from each other and from our students. For this reason,
there are two steps involved in both my research and classroom. First, I examine
343
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E. Lezra
Figure 1. Lynndie England and Iraqi man in Abu Ghraib prison, Iraq, early twenty-first century. In
the public domain. Retrieved from http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/AG-10B.JPG (color
figure available online).
geographically and temporally disparate acts of atrocity through the multiple
modes of cultural expressions and then attempt to weave these distant and
disparate wounds into a wider social narrative in which our students can see
reflected some of the hurts so often disavowed by dominant social media and
cultural narratives. A pedagogy of locational and historical distance—whereby
the case-studies we present to the students occur outside of their social texts
and familiar historical contexts—encourages students to see through categories
of difference (locational and historical) and to understand that distant suffering
is part of a wider historical and social text of pain.
In The Political Unconscious (1981), Frederic Jameson argued for a new understanding of narrative (historical, literary, cultural, visual, etc.) as a symbolic act
with material consequences. In particular, he demonstrated that a new grammar
was needed to read through History’s symptomatic and consistent disavowal of
human suffering. The aim was to reveal and to release the collective pain
held within these stories.3 Jameson taught historians and literary and cultural
critics alike that, to unearth the counter-stories held within dominant history, we
had to learn to read and narrate the past in a new lexicon. This article proposes
and illustrates what such a lexicon might look like from a pedagogical perspective.
The continued recurrence of human atrocity, and the proliferation of the spectacle
of unbounded organized power (both today and in the past; state and non- or
counter-state) require a new kind of pedagogy; one that seeks to expose our students to a new critical understanding of atrocity based in an ethics of empathy.
This pedagogy—a pedagogy of empathy—is by no means an apology for illegitimate
organized violence.4 It draws on, builds on, and attempts to dismantle binary formations (state=counter-state; dominant=subaltern) that have explained, through
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Figure 2. John Gabriel Stedman and Bartolozzi, ‘‘Frontispiece.’’ Narrative of a Five Years Expedition
against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. [1790] Original sketch by Stedman, engraving by Bartolozzi.
Eds. Richard and Sally Price. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. (With the
permission of Richard and Sally Price.)
Note. Although all images in Stedman’s narrative are engraved after original sketches by Stedman, different
engravers were employed to sculpt different images. In the Colonial Art of Demonizing Others, the caption
under this image is mis-cited as having been engraved by William Blake, when it was Bartolozzi who engraved
it. I take the opportunity this publication offers to correct the record.
subaltern and postcolonial studies, differential social and political distributions
of power. This article views history, literature, and cultural expressivity as working together as an elaborate chain of socially shared and historically sanctioned
signifiers.5 And the latter translate and continue to present atrocity as spectacle,
inviting potential witnesses—who might imagine that they disapprove of what
they see—into a position of complicit spectatorship from which they no longer
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can disapprove of but sanction—and somehow also produce—the violence they
see. Times of acute and escalating global atrocity require highly creative forms
of thought. Interdisciplinary research, thought, and study is precisely what we
need in these times. Inter- and cross-disciplinary methods of reading and thinking
are required to think through patterns of atrocity that persist because of the deeply
entrenched transnational, transhistorical, and translingual ideological frameworks
that are the contexts of the social injury from which the atrocities arise.6
The deep interdisciplinary method of reading and pedagogy I propose breaks
from traditional methods of inquiry bounded by nation, language, and geography.
This methodology takes shape in a transhistorical comparative study of several
written and visual representations of torture within different historical, cultural,
and geopolitical contexts. Despite their important differences, the disparate
instances of cultural representations of atrocity analyzed here can be understood
as a series of uneven and yet recurring symptomatic expressions of a collective
transhistorical and transnational archive of subjection, complicity, and perpetration of the violences of history. By teaching students how to see and analyze
not only the patterns but also the absences and omissions of this archive, we invite
them to critically engage with the work and develop a concern for social justice. By
modeling an interdisciplinary, creative inquiry into translocational and transhistorical representations of atrocity rooted in a concern for social justice, this article
pursues the pedagogical question: To what extent is an interdisciplinary cultural
and literary study not only adequate but necessary to a social justice understanding and perception of recurring patterns of atrocity we might not see otherwise?
DEFINING THE PRINCIPAL TERMS: ATROCITY, PEDAGOGY OF EMPATHY,
AND THE SYMPTOMATIC METHOD OF READING
An act of atrocity is an act of violence that is perceived to exceed the boundaries of
what a legitimate punitive measure—either against an individual or a collective
group of people—would be for retribution for the unjust infliction of an injury.
Atrocities never stay in the past. They are enacted, experienced, witnessed, and
translated. They take multiple forms. What makes an act of violence an act of atrocity (rather than a pain-ridden event such as a death by accident, sudden disease or
other uncontrollable natural events) is not only the element of deliberation behind
it, but also the affective horror and the poetics of disavowal that the act generates in
its documentation and dissemination. Such acts do not disappear with mourning
or grief, but exceed any sort of narrative of closure or containment. At the core
of what Jameson has called the hurts of history, these acts circulate through time
space and across cultures, from past to present, from distant imagined objects
of study onto the screens, whiteboards, and transparencies of our classrooms.
Despite centuries of inquiry into the problem of human atrocity, we continue
to struggle with how to narrate, tell, and learn from it. This is especially difficult
in times when the persistence of atrocity—as a material practice and as a mode of
producing and disseminating knowledge—threatens the dominant narratives
of progress, prosperity, and modernity that shape our ways of seeing and
understanding our world. Abuse, violence, and oppression have no ideological
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attachments; they occur in conditions where an excessive amount of power is
concentrated and institutionalized and can translate into isolated events as well
as into patterns of abuse and atrocity. There is ample historical evidence that
atrocities are committed as much by aggrieved communities who have endured
injustice over extended periods of time as they are by state actors whose position
of power enables them to abuse it. It not my purpose here to level an uncritical
litany of blame against a monolithic master oppressor; such criticisms have
been articulated but are neither effective nor helpful in my project of building
a pedagogical prism of empathy.
It is necessary to account for the narratives of communities subjected to nonstate atrocity, such as victims of nonstate terror.7 But following Foucault’s notion
of power as neither legitimate nor illegitimate, but as the grammar through
which societies work out their conflicts, a pedagogy of empathy would disturb
and trouble the distinction between state and non-state atrocity.8 It focuses
instead on atrocities as events that arise out of long histories of hurt. In this sense,
a pedagogy of empathy privileges what Raymond Williams has termed structures
of feeling, the affective social text of atrocity. The question becomes: Out of what
feelings of hurt do acts of inhumanity arise, and what older social hurts do they
rehearse? Caribbean, black, and postcolonial critical traditions have extensively
documented the complex and dialectic nature of violence.9 What I do here is
suggest how the objects of my analysis are first and foremost symptomatic representations of atrocity. On a historical level, a symptomatic representation refers to
the atrocity committed; on a cultural level, it refers to the mediatic expressions
through which knowledge of these atrocities are circulated. And finally, the
symptomatic representation can lead us to the social fabric of hurt in which these
acts and their representations occur. To locate a wider social document of recurrent historical hurt, one must juxtapose and read a selection of cultural pieces as
symptoms, or units of grammar in a narrative that only unfolds across distance.
Approached in this way, a transhistorical and shared hurt emerges. Hence, the
pedagogical method that unfolds is characterized by a poetics of empathy, as
well as by a poetics of distance.
Thus, our students’ perception of violence is mediated through the historical,
geographic, and cultural distance between them and the visual and written narratives of hurt they study. This enables a prism of reading and of understanding
violence that is transferrable and translatable to social texts of hurt closer to them.
Such a prism is crucial to a deeper understanding of the ways in which we
disavow on a daily basis our roles—complicit bystanders, or victims of the
hurt; sometimes both and yet neither—in the horizon of hurt we inhabit. In this
pedagogy, the abuse of power and the violence unleashed by this abuse are two
intimately related aspects of the wider text of a transhistorical, multilocational,
and multilingual social body in pain.
The ideological manipulation of consciousness can create a context in which
individual and collective acts of atrocity appear to be acceptable or justifiable.
This process of manipulation is one of transgression and translation, which
introduces itself into the social consciousness through physical, material, and
ideological boundaries. Through a sequence of adaptations and translations it
transforms into an act, a form or a discourse that is no longer recognizable as
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abuse. The moment that the act is unrecognizable and co-opted by social
narratives that translate it as something else—for example, ‘‘waterboarding’’ or
‘‘widespread organized violence’’ instead of ‘‘torture’’ or ‘‘revolution’’—we
begin to accept the burdensome vocabulary of disavowal.10 To varying degrees,
we become incapable of seeing, let alone naming, atrocity when it stands before
us. Whether it takes the shape of state repression or violent popular uprising, we
are to some degree complicit in atrocity. A pedagogy focused on acts of atrocity
at a distance has the surprising capacity to create a deep empathy because it both
requires and generates a highly creative approach to seeing, perceiving, and delineating knowledge. As Clifford Geertz points out, thinking is not only a social
act with real consequences, it is also an ethical act with the possibility of social
transformation.11 Teaching atrocity in an interdisciplinary way has an ethical
or social justice component to it that ultimately heightens our students’
understanding of social-justice problems and the role that social justice-based
knowledge can have in building a global society where state-backed atrocities
committed against individuals and communities in the name of state-centric
notions of ‘‘human rights’’ or ‘‘international security’’ are understood as crimes
against humanity.
THEORETICAL INTERVENTION
Once committed, atrocities continue to bleed across time, space, and discipline.
They exceed containment, traveling through time, space and across cultures.
Despite centuries of philosophical and theoretical engagement with the problem
of human atrocity, it haunts our collective consciousnesses in the narratives and
histories we tell, in the images and forms that we make. The narratives of
humanitarian progress on which our educational systems are often constructed
domesticate or even erase knowledge of such events. On the other hand, the body
of scholarship around the historical, psychological and material processes that
produce the conditions for individual and collective acts of atrocity is vast. Some
of the most compelling scholarly writings of the last sixty years have been
informed by the need to understand recurring patterns of violence underlying
the collective experience of human beings.12
A close study of the complicity between witness and agent in an act of violence
demonstrates that this complicity is never resolved. Rather it translates unevenly
and in unexpected ways across geopolitical boundaries, languages, and historical
contexts. The dynamic of complicity between the witness and agent of atrocity is
echoed in the ways that we (as researchers, writers, and teachers) in turn witness
(represent, explain, and contextualize to our students) the atrocities we study.13
Echoing Susan Sontag, I start from the premise that the act of researching and
investigating recurrent patterns of atrocity is necessarily also an act of violence.14
But not to inquire, investigate, and teach these pressing questions is in itself an
act of denial and erasure. Rather than staking out a critical position outside of
complicity for the scholar, student, or teacher of historical atrocities, it is necessary
to struggle through the intellectual and pedagogical paralysis that can result from
the understanding of atrocity as always already a consensual and collective act.
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To address the self-critical paralysis and disengagement from acts of violence
that are themselves so harmful to our students, a comparative cultural study of
the notion of complicity is necessary. What is at stake in these cultural images,
and what drive the representations of atrocity are not simply the material violence of the suffering felt, witnessed, represented, and translated, but more
importantly, the continuing structures of complicity that enable the conditions
for atrocity to be produced. We learn from Frederic Jameson that, in its linear narrative form, history moves from one atrocity to the next, repeatedly returning to
tell recurring hurts of history.15 I view this recurrence as a result of multiple
failed repressions of horror at the violence and atrocity human beings hold in
common across time and space. This horror is documented, in unexpected ways
and places, through unlikely visual and textual translations.
Some of the questions I point toward are: How does the study of historical
terror and torture throw light upon the political and cultural dynamics of
spectatorship, witnessing and complicity that still function to support global
violence and terror today? How do the spatial and temporal distances attendant
to representations of violence from other times and places function to provide
spectators with illusions of innocence and satisfaction about their own safety?
Even if we condemn torture as an inhumane act of violence—no matter the
circumstance—to what extent do representations of it make us complicit in the
spectacular visibility on which the proclaimed effectiveness of torture depends?
What happens when=if we cannot locate a critical position outside of complicity
in torture and other forms of calculated violence? What happens to the subject
in search of enlightenment through education when they cannot find spatial or
temporal distance from acts that dominant nation-based narratives locate=
translate elsewhere in time or place? How do we bring these pressing issues ethically and empathetically into our classrooms and is it possible to do so without a
certain form of pedagogical violence?
The study of torture, atrocity, and other forms of calculated violence is necessary to disrupt the senseless and yet somehow timeless myths of modernity and
enlightened subjectivity that infuse our classrooms. Calling both students and teachers out of comfortably regulated parameters of inquiry, it demands that we take
a closer look. ‘‘We,’’ the educated, liberal subject—and our students—are not
opposed to the sight of the monstrous ‘‘other’’—the atrocities of human modernity—as long as we experience it through the reassuring mechanisms of distancing, othering, and repression so well perfected by institutionally sanctioned
processes of inquiry, teaching, and representation. But when we are no longer
able to place ourselves at a historical, temporal, spatial, or even disciplinary distance from such acts of atrocity, we must finally face the monstrosity of ourselves.
In other words, we must face our underlying complicity and responsibility that
dominant and latent narratives of colonialism, imperialism, and neo-imperialism
allow us to disavow. This study enjoins us to take pedagogical risks. It is not a
risk, nor is it effective as a pedagogical strategy to simply condemn the evidently
violent processes of imperialism, colonialism, or neoliberalism; for it is a style of
critique that allows our students to remain at a comfortable distance in a homogenized world of facile binaries. The deeply discomforting and yet imperative
risk is to consider our complicity in and reliance upon these violent processes.16
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Is the one who witnesses and records the violence simply a medium through
which the violence is remembered, or are they an agent reproducing the
violence? The writers and artists whose representations I study here all have witnessed and meticulously recorded horrific instances of human atrocity. Between
the fact of violence and its representation is the witness, the translator, or the
medium through which the violence is witnessed, documented, translated, and
passed on. Because of the long line of hands=eyes=mouths that document and
translate it, atrocity can take the shape of the uncannily familiar. As pedagogues,
researchers, and teachers we may want to believe that a thoughtful interpretation
or critique of an act of violence or an outright condemnation of it may create a
position outside of complicity or responsibility. However, there always exists
the risk that the image or even class lecture intended to expose or condemn
the violence in fact reifies and reaffirms it. Between the representation and
reception of atrocity in the classroom and on the transhistorical stage, there
intervene multiple moments of expression, production, and translation. These
stages depend, first, upon the sociopolitical context of the act committed and
represented; second, on the medium of representation (art, photography,
documentary, imaginative narrative, history, testimonial, etc.); and third, on
the political legacies invoked by the event and its context.17
READING AND TEACHING CULTURAL DOCUMENTS OF ATROCITY
Taken in their historical context, the representations of atrocity by William Blake
and Francisco de Goya appear, ultimately, to reinforce the violence committed in
Europe and the Americas by imperial and colonial forces. The second set of
representations—one a narrative description by Assia Djebar of French colonial
atrocity in Algeria, the other a narrative description of the experience of torture
under the Moroccan monarch Hassan II by Abraham Serfaty—both serve to show
how representations of atrocity can interrupt and challenge the violence being
described. The difference between the effect of reinforcement and disavowal of
the power of atrocity in the two sets of representations lies in the discontinuous
avowal=disavowal and the uneven translation=denial of spectatorial complicity
that each representation affords.
Eighteenth Century: Documents of Colonial Atrocity from Surinam,
England, and Spain
The first part of the cultural analysis focuses on selected representations of
human atrocity in the Euro-American colonial context of the eighteenth century;
the second part of the article focuses on selected representations of atrocity in
the contexts of North Africa and the United States. Despite their important
geographical, historical, and contextual differences, the disparate instances of
cultural representations of atrocity analyzed here can be understood through
an integrative and comparative method of inquiry. The multiple albeit uneven
translations and transferals of atrocity and spectatorial complicity from one
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representation to another attest to the impossibility of presenting atrocities in a
finite way. No appeasement is possible.
The works of art by Stedman, Blake, and Goya document and translate three
different instances of transatlantic terror. In the first instance, the atrocities
recorded by soldier John Gabriel Stedman resulted from anxiety produced by
conflict between international European forces and a community of maroons in
revolt in Surinam between 1772–1779; the second, within the context of the European panic and fear at the imminent success of the Haitian Revolution recorded
visually by William Blake in 1793; the third within the context of the terror witnessed and experienced by the Spaniards during the Napoleonic invasion of
Spain on the heels of the success of the anticolonial revolution in Haiti. Although
the dynamics of spectatorial complicity in the three documentations vary, these
visual records of atrocity overlap in time as well as in the material conditions
of transatlantic struggle and exchanges that produced them.
Stedman’s narrative persona is represented in his self-portrait on the Frontispiece of the Narrative (see Figure 2). The image and accompanying text suggest
that Stedman presents himself as an unwilling witness and executioner of a monstrous act of colonial violence: the saddened soldier appears on the frontispiece—
after the execution of a maroon fighter—and looks out at the reader with an air of
pain and contrition at the crime just committed. This concentrated power and
moment of colonial terror quickly give way, through the dynamic of visual
and contextual translation, to a moment in which the act of terror somehow slips
from the soldier’s finger onto the vanquished maroon. In the scopic regime of this
image, it is the maroon who is at fault for this atrocity, for it is his dangerous
revolutionary agency, and not the agency of the colonial soldier, that gave cause
for this killing. This drama yields a hermeneutic interaction in which the witness
to the violence, the subjects acted upon and the agents of the violence, terror, and
power shift within an unstable cycle of experience, representation, and witnessing. The colonial terror recorded in this image was collectively documented
and translated through various mediums, in various geographic locations and
over several years. As is suggested by the translation of this figure into the next
related image (Figure 3), and into Blake’s own poetic imaginary (Figures 4 and 5),
the process of translation and documentation involves what we represent but
also how we choose to see it.
Ultimately, to represent=teach=research the scene presented in Figure 5, we
must ask how we position ourselves in relation to it: Do we find ourselves, as
we look at it, close to or at a distance from it? Do we find, in the act of viewing,
a lapse or a collapse of time and space? In accordance with the British romantic
culture of sympathy, the caption under Stedman’s frontispiece (Figure 2)
prescribes a sentiment of comfortably distant empathy and removed sorrow from
the witnesses it anticipates. But as the images of colonial terror related to this one
are translated and transferred from Stedman’s Surinam (Figures 2 and 3) into
Blake’s imaginary revolutionary spaces (Figures 4 and 5), we see the representation of colonial terror being translated and transferred from Stedman’s context
into Blake’s as well as a marked shift in the dynamics of witnessing represented
in Blake’s translations of Stedman’s work. Where Blake’s artistic rendition of
Stedman in this engraving of the Narrative reflects a dynamic of imposed distance
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E. Lezra
Figure 3. John Gabriel Stedman and William Blake, ‘‘Execution of Breaking in the Rack.’’ Narrative of a Five
Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. [1790] Original sketch by Stedman, engraving
by Blake. Eds. Richard and Sally Price. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. (With the
permission of Richard and Sally Price.)
from the suffering body, and paralysis and silent complicity in the face of colonial
horror, Blake’s translations of this image in his own work open up a variety
of other possible relations between the witness and colonial terror and more
specifically, to the tortured body itself.18
As he attempts to grapple with the faceless cruelty of the act, Blake processes
the event into postures invoking grief, anger, desperation, and, ultimately,
revolutionary action.19 The varied and collective documentation of these very
specific instances of colonial terror should be read within the wider context of
other visual representations of the violent legacies contained within the emancipatory promises of the universalizing discourses of protofeminism, abolitionism,
and anticolonial and revolutionary nationalisms.
353
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A Pedagogy of Empathy for a World of Atrocity
Figure 4. William Blake. America: A Prophecy, Plate 3, ‘‘Preludium,’’ [1793] written and engraved by Blake.
Copy M. Yale Center for British Art. In the public domain. Retrieved from http://collections.britishart.yale.edu/
vufind/Record/1668098 (color figure available online).
Like his British contemporaries, Francisco de Goya was watching the disasters
of enlightenment unfold. Goya documented his most disturbing impressions of
the world around him in his Desastres de Guerra, which were published in
1863. But in 1814 Goya had already completed Fusilamientos del 3 de Mayo 1808,
his famous representation of the execution of Spanish peasants at the hands of
E. Lezra
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Figure 5. William Blake. America: A Prophecy, Plate 12 [1793] written and engraved by Blake. Copy M. Yale
Center for British Art. In the public domain. Retrieved from http://collections.britishart.yale.edu/vufind/Record/
1668078 (color figure available online).
French occupying forces. By 1814 the images from the Narrative had been circulating in Europe in various translations for almost two decades. The historical
subjects differ but can be read together as different instances of cultural documentations of the transatlantic circuit of terror that animated Europe at this time.
What emerges when we read Blake and Goya side by side is the recording of a
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transatlantic circuit of terror, where the mechanisms of war and the destruction
of society are sovereign.20
The immediate subject of these pieces is the carnage wreaked by the Napoleonic
soldiers during the French invasion of Spain and the imprisonment of Fernando
VII in the effort to annex the Spanish peninsula to the Napoleonic Empire. The
Desastres (Figures 6–8), completed between 1810 and 1815 but not published until
1863, record the violence forced onto Spanish women, children, and men by
French antimonarchical and antiliberal Napoleonic forces as well as by the
Spanish antiliberal forces. Unlike the earlier piece (Fusilamientos), the Desastres
were not made public until almost fifty years after the events they document,
pointing to the spatio-temporal lapse of these documentations of colonial and
imperial terror. In sharp contrast with the spectatorial distance inherent in Blake’s
artistic renditions of Stedman’s accounts of atrocity in the Narrative, Goya’s
method of visual documentation collapses time and space, blurs the boundaries
between the documented event and the witness and drives the relation of intimacy
between the spectator and the event.
The colonial and transatlantic context I describe in relation to the documentary
art of Stedman and Blake is also relevant to Goya’s images. Written reports of
violent confrontations between Spanish and French forces had been making their
way through colonial documents and letters from the Caribbean to Spain, and the
island of Santo Domingo=Saint Domingue had been the stage for many of the
Figure 6. Francisco de Goya. Los Desastres de La Guerra, Plate 1, ‘‘Tristes pensamientos de lo que ha de
acontecer’’ [1863]. In the public domain. Retrieved from http://commons/wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GoyaGuerra_%2801%29.jpg
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Figure 7. Francisco de Goya. Los Desastres de La Guerra, Plate 30, ‘‘Estragos de la guerra’’ [1863]. In the
public domain. Retrieved from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Goya-Guerra_%2830%29.jpg
French–Spanish political conflicts for decades before the independent nation of
Haiti forced them to the mainland. If the image of the Fusilamientos of 1808 can
be read (see Figure 9) as a cultural documentation of the historical and lived terrors of Europe in the eighteenth century, given the immediate relation between
the French-Spanish confrontations in the Caribbean and the struggle for empire
on the European peninsula, it can also provide additional context to the images of
terror brought back by Stedman and engraved by William Blake. Because the
latter’s images were widely and quickly circulated in Europe, it is not unreasonable to imagine that Goya may have had access to them. This is not an argument
about direct artistic influence, but rather a move to place Goya and Blake in the
wider context of the transatlantic circuit and to place their work within a common moment of historical horror and despair at the acts of terror so intensively
experienced, documented, and circulated throughout Europe and the Atlantic.
The double dynamic of both facing and refusing terror can be seen in the
Fusilamientos del 3 de Mayo. At the center of Goya’s piece those about to be
executed stand facing the faceless and indistinct French executioners, who themselves stand in a position that refuses the gaze of the spectator=witness both outside and within the frame. On the left, a man stands as if in sacrificial resignation,
his face expressing horror as he looks, through Goya’s horror, into the past and
future of disastrous violence.21 Behind him crouch those who will go next. One
head is bowed in submission and denial; another bears a look of defiance and
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Figure 8. Francisco de Goya. Los Desastres de La Guerra, Plate 36, ‘‘Tampoco’’ [1863]. In the public domain.
Retrieved from http://commons/wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Goya-Guerra_%2836%29.jpg
Figure 9. Francisco de Goya. El Tres de Mayo, 1808, o Los Fusilamientos [1814]. In the public domain.
Retrieved from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:El_Tres_de_Mayo,_by_Francisco_de_Goya,_from_
Prado_in_Google_Earth.jpg#filelinks (color figure available online).
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horror. The figures echo and intensify the horror we perceive in Blake’s witnesses
of the transatlantic enterprise. Re-iterating the denial of the images of Blake and
Stedman, the absent face or gaze in Goya’s representation looks away and will
not reflect the horror of the event. Despite the comforting distance between
the outside witness and the victim allowed by the Narrative’s Frontispiece, the
pointing hand and direct gaze of the soldier suggest a voyeuristic complicity.
However, by clearly delineating a position outside and beyond the frame, they
allow the uncomfortable witness a way out. Goya’s piece does not allow a
position beyond the frame: the spectator huddles in the shadows of the event,
alongside other crouching witnesses. If the agents of terror faced the fear of their
victims, would they still be able to follow through?
Ian Baucom’s compelling and sophisticated analysis of the transhistoricity of
atrocity posits what he describes as a demoniacal force of creative destruction
and destructive recreation. According to him, this disembodied force is reiterated
and registered in a vastly distributed network of agencies, desires and acts of
violence; Baucom argues that for Goya, war is the demoniacal and simultaneously
creative and destructive force that exercises its sovereignty over contemporaneous social life and is visibly and invisibly present in every phenomenon (Baucom 2006, 171–172). Writing about the central force of destruction that rules
Goya’s vision as well as the atrocities we continue to witness today Baucom
(2006) argues:
If we are to shake free from this nightmarish moment . . . it might be by recognizing, now,
as then, that this is the type [necropolitical force of war, this inimical life, this unjust
enemy] whose contours it is our task to trace and whose authority, meaning and power
it is our responsibility to contest. (188)
The authority of this force can both be traced and contested, I believe, from
within the same image: for although it is beyond doubt that Goya’s pieces document the sovereignty of war and the utter abjectness of its victims, as I will show
in my reading, they also do something else. They bring a fierce testimony to the
horrors of human atrocity posing an ethical question, or, as I will argue below,
unleashing a quiet rage that demands a response. As I see the affect Goya works
with, the sober outrage in his pieces refuses the sovereignty of human atrocity
while bearing witness to the sovereignty of human resilience in the face of
unspeakable horror. It asks us to wonder if we sit by those who, hidden by the
dynamics of representation in the crowd of horrified witnesses, choose to refuse,
deny, or look in horror at this past visionary document of terror. Do we also stare
in paralyzed horror into the violence both on the peninsula and in the Caribbean
in the years surrounding the anticolonial revolutionary movements but possibly
far into the future, into the legacy of violence that continues into the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries? Blake’s figures propose that we raise our arms in
despair to our eyes and deny the veracity of what it is we see. The eighteenthcentury visual and written representations of torture that I have addressed here
represent torture as a condemnable and yet unchallenged instrument of a powerful, rampant, and monstrous imperialism. The range of attitudes of complicity,
denial, horror, and revolutionary agency registered in these eighteenth- and
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359
nineteenth-century images echo the range of affective and political attitudes in
our contemporary circuits of terror. In an almost uncanny way, the brutal acts
of terror enacted by U.S. military personnel in Iraq forcefully bring into the
twenty-first century the spectatorial dynamic of refused complicity that I have
pointed out in the artwork of Blake and Goya. This seems to suggest that whether
we speak of practices of terror and torture through the past or identify them as
continuing practices in our present, the position we take as we encounter and
represent them will always contain the range of relations of spectatorship and
denial (complicity, horror, denial, and comfortable neoliberal empathy)
contained in transatlantic, transnational, and now global circuits of terror.
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Documents from Algeria and Morocco in the Nineteenth and
Twentieth Centuries: Assia Djebar and Abraham Serfaty
The next two representations, by authors Assia Djebar (Algeria) and Abraham
Serfaty (Morocco), reflect the creation of the imperial subject through torture
and atrocity in the context of the processes of imperialism and colonialism specific to Algeria and Morocco in the twentieth century. In the narrative representation of Djebar and Serfaty, the breaking of the subject is cast not as a result of
the unbounded power produced by the atrocities of empire, but as the moment of
production of a dialogue that presses against the power that atrocities claim. For
both writers the subject is neither broken by torture nor is power unconditionally
affirmed by the committed atrocity. Djebar’s reconstruction of the Algerian past
invokes a symbolic body divided by multiple languages—French, Arabic, and
Berber. This Algerian past, which can be identified with the tortured body,
becomes the site through which the complex subjectivities of Algeria—divided
by internal and external histories of imperialism—communicate, almost
impossibly.
The critical framework that I am using here considers Djebar’s representation
of French colonial terror in Algeria as an intervention through literary narrative
into the collective network of horror that I have identified in the artwork of
Stedman, Blake, and Goya. Djebar’s examination of nineteenth-century French
colonial documents stands as a powerful anticolonial feminist stance. It becomes
all the more meaningful in that it arises out of 1980s fundamentalist Algeria.
Describing her relation to Algerian history through the French language, Djebar
explains that she re-writes history and, in so doing, constructs a counter-history.
These lapses and flexible dialogues are captured in the concept of translation
in her work. The language of the other identifies another time and space, which,
in the context of Djebar’s historical writing, points to the continued and undeniable otherness of a past that we continue to document. In Fantasia: An Algerian
Cavalcade (translated 1989), the languages of literary, visual, and cultural documentation emerge also as modes of translation and interpretation whose unevenness exposes past events. In looking back to the ‘‘other’’ language of the ‘‘dead
Arabo-Berber past,’’ Djebar finds herself caught in a moment of epistemological
and disciplinary violence. She represents the act of transcribing, recapturing, and
translating as an experience of deep violence that the mediating body must
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experience to be able to listen to and relay the colonized people’s suffering.
She translates Arabic and Berber collective suffering into the language of a
colonial history that had always denied their presence; oral histories and received
knowledge into written documents; unfinished, returning events into a closer
present:
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In the language known as the language of the other [French, dominant history] I found
myself possessed by the need to reminisce about an elsewhere, about a dead Arabo-Berber
past, [her] own . . . so much so that to write becomes to inscribe, to transcribe and write
from the depths (écrire en creux), to bring back to the text, to the paper, to the manuscript,
to the hand, to bring back at the same time the funeral chants and the dead bodies. (Djebar
2004, 118)
Inserting the past into the present, Djebar raises the voices, bodies, and visual
representations of the dead whose stories lie at the core of the French dominant
historical documents. Djebar looks to the past of undeniably violent repression by
the French colonial armies to weave into it the stories of fierce and passionate
Algerian resistance that consistently refuses the colonial representations of a
pacified Algeria.22 The methodological key to her work is to write ‘‘from the
depths’’—the depths of history, the depths of language, and from the depths
of a pain that renders language incomprehensible.
Inserted at the center of the novel between the Algerian colonial past and its
civil war is a passage titled ‘‘Deletion.’’ I read this section as a mise-en-abyme or
narrative representation of her method of writing ‘‘from the depths.’’ Here,
Djebar describes what it means to reconstruct a counter-colonial image of
Algeria. It is only from the depths of her symbolic cave that repressed subjectivities can be wrenched back out of all of the languages and histories that have
conquered, claimed, and performed atrocities on them. It is the historical space
inhabited by the death of many hundreds of people. It is a space of torture
and transcription. From Djebar:
The conquest of the Unconquerable . . . Faint images flake off from the rock of Time. The
flickering flames of successive fires form the letters of French words, curiously elongated
or expanded, against cave walls, tattooing vanished faces with a lurid mottling. . .
And for a fleeting moment I glimpse the mirror-image of the foreign inscription,
reflected in Arabic letters, writ from right to left in the mirror of suffering; then the letters
fade into pictures of the mountainous Hoggar in prehistoric times. . .
To read this writing, I must lean over backwards, plunge my face into the shadows, closely examine the vaulted roof of rock or chalk, lend an ear to the whispers that rise up
from time out of mind, study this geology stained red with blood. What magma of sounds
lies rotting there? What stench of putrefaction seeps out? I grope about, my sense of smell
aroused, my ears alert, in this rising tide of ancient pain. Alone, stripped bare, unveiled, I
face these images of darkness. . .
How are the sounds of the past to be met as they emerge from the well of bygone centuries? . . . What love must still be sought, what future be planned, despite the call of the
dead? And my body reverberates with sounds from the endless landslide of generations
of my lineage. (Djebar 1985, 46)
Djebar’s perceptual rearrangement highlights the challenge of reading a past
that is obscured by the alien languages and modes of inscriptions that define
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dominant colonial and national history. She looks to these tangible accounts with
a wide-angle vision that doubles the event and its records back upon themselves.
By juxtaposing events of the past and present in a narrative that does not progress but rather stutters, stumbles, doubles back, and leaps forward as it echoes,
she compels her readers to acknowledge the terrors of history. This process of
excision, erasure, and translation gives shape to the construction of a comfortable
narrative with violent edges. The collapsed vision of the writing witness in
Djebar’s literary rendition of the spectatorial dynamic makes possible the articulation of stories that colonial and national histories have denied. Djebar’s method
of writing between and from within the inner folds of history does not emerge as
a ritual through which historical injustices of violent colonization are finally
purged from the record. On the contrary, the narrator’s intrusion into the text
highlights the impossibility of any historical purging ritual that would put the
dead to rest. Their stories, repressed and forgotten, re-emerge to connect with
other metaphorical and material caves (both within and against the forces of
colonial and state domination).
The power of stories like this is that they resist exact historical or ideological
mapping. Djebar’s writing, a conceptually and materially torturous and violent
process of remembering, narration, imagination and translation, carries the
material events, bodies, objects, and unspoken encounters out of the inaccessible
archives of history and into the language of counter-history. The language
blurs disciplines and modes of representation to register the anxiety that the
perpetration of terror caused in the colonial subject itself. In the physical and
metaphoric cave of memory in which thousands of Arabo-Berber people were
suffocated by French colonial troops, Djebar bends her pen and her body to
the task of weaving an archive of the undeniable violences of history.
The cave appears as both a historical space of the death of hundreds of
tribes-people as well as the metaphoric space from which stories, bodies, and
violent acts will be unearthed. Djebar represents her process of unearthing so
as to recapture, through performance, mimicry and ritual, the silenced contours
of violence. As an inheritor of the brutal confrontations and encounters between
Arabic and French cultures, languages, and ideologies, Djebar conceives of the
position from which she writes as requiring her to read the two languages as
mirrors that efface one another. She must collapse into an impossible contortion
to perceive the languages=spaces=histories (French, Arabic, and Berber) whose
existences deny and yet sustain one another. This collapse of the perceiving body
blurs and defies preordained epistemological systems, opening up another space
from which other types of narratives can emerge.23
In other words, the act of torture doubles for Djebar as an epistemological tool
that enables the production of a counter-knowledge. Broken down into its different historic components, the subject demonstrates a possible communication
between these components. Torture then becomes the site where the imagined
universalism, monolingualism, and mastery of empire are intimately challenged.
Whereas Djebar looks through the nineteenth century to tell of Algeria’s anticolonial political strife and its aftermath in the twentieth century, Abraham Serfaty
chooses to stay in the present. His text describes the anticolonial and antimonarchical political struggles in Morocco from the 1970s to the 1990s. Moroccan
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Arab-Jewish, Abraham Serfaty writes from a torture house in Morocco where he
was imprisoned for radical left wing writings and activism during the reign of
Hassan II. Serfaty’s experiences with torture and negotiations with the official
record in the torture house bring into tangible form the power of negotiation,
articulation, and intervention that the tortured body can wield. Serfaty was
released from a lifetime sentence of imprisonment in Morocco in 1991 due, in
part, to a petition with international support. A member of the Communist Party
in both France and Morocco, he had been arrested for overt political activism in
both countries during the 1960s and 1970s. After many months of hiding in
Morocco, he was again arrested in 1974. In particular, he is known for his radical
anticolonial stance on the Israeli Zionist movement, nonrecognition of the state of
Israel and for his active resistance to Morocco’s colonial annexation of Berber
territory in the Western Sahara. What makes it necessary to place Serfaty’s and
Djebar’s representations of atrocity side by side is that they both place the tortured body in a position of generation of alternative stories rather than in a position of absolute abjection and destruction at the hands of imperial power. Both
authors delineate and unearth silenced violences of the underground chambers
of history. His short book Le Maroc, du Noir au Gris (Morocco, from Black to Grey)
was first published as a long article in France in 1985 while he was still in the
Moroccan prison of Kenitra.24 Serfaty describes in cold but intimate detail both
the tools of torture and the characters and voices of the torturers he had come
to know in the torture-house where he had been secretly held for months before
being taken to the official state prison.
In the later and expanded version of his testimony, published in France after
his release, Serfaty outlines in detail the collective lineage of political alliances
and resistance from which his own particular experience with the state apparatus derives. In a section of the book ‘‘Face aux Tortionnaires’’ (Facing the
Torturers) the language Serfaty uses to describe the tools, the torturers and
his body echoes the dynamic of facing and effacement that I have discussed
regarding Djebar’s work. Serfaty’s text faces the memory of the torturers and,
by virtue of being disseminated (albeit in France, nevertheless in the public
eye), obliges the state structure of the monarchical régime under Hassan II to
face and acknowledge the long history of resistance to state violence. The testimonial section re-enacts forcefully the exposure of his body to the discipline
of state violence thereby making his torture the shame of the monarchical
machinery.
Despite decades of repression, Serfaty managed to negotiate a space for his
and other echoing political ideologies in Morocco. Through his use of the body
as a collective symbol, his text demonstrates the possibility of rewriting and renegotiating its relationship to the repressive machinery of the dominant authorities.
Under intense international scrutiny, Mohammed VI lifted the sentence of
banishment from Serfaty and placed him as advisor to the King after the death
of Hassan II. This opened up avenues for other political movements (such as
women’s movements) in Morocco.
Written in terms of a collective struggle against state violence, Serfaty presents
his body as a collective body reflective not of one experience but many. His
reference to the torture-house as a ‘‘cave of death’’ (antre de mort) places his text,
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in terms of a method of reading, writing and excavating official histories, in
dialogue with Djebar’s.25
Like Djebar, Serfaty paints the ‘‘scene’’ on which the event takes place:
Je commençerai par la description froide des instruments de torture. Bien entendu,
je ne les ai pas vus lors de la torture elle même, mais par la suite, un par un, au fil des
mois passés dans cet antre de mort. [I will begin with a cold description of the instruments of torture. Needless to say, I didn’t see them before the torture, but afterward,
one by one, over the passage of the months spent in this cave of death.] (Serfaty 1998, 22)
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In language that distances its autobiographical content, Serfaty uses the
grammatically neutral voice to refer to the body—his own—subjected to torture.
His appearance on the ‘‘scene’’ is almost anecdotal, his description focusing
intimately on the tools and mechanisms of torture:
Il y a d’abord les chevalets: deux lourds chevalets de bois massif de 1,20 m à 1,40 m de
hauteur, avec une entaille arrondie et recouverte d’acier au milieu de la poutre supérieure;
les deux chevalets placés en vis-à-vis, le tube d’acier qui vous porte est posé dessus et vous
voilà suspendu. [First, we have the wood beams: two heavy beams of massive wood of
about 1.20 or 1.40 m tall, with rounded waists covered in steel; the two beams are positioned facing one another, the steel rod you are on is placed on top and then there you
are, hanging.] (Serfaty 1998, 22)
The use of the second person plural ‘‘vous’’ (you) is a direct address to his reader
whose participation in the event is elicited. In a deliberate dynamic of negotiation
between the narration of the event as a collective and yet personal experience,
Serfaty uses the personal ‘‘je’’ (I) in the remainder of his testimony. He intentionally places the description of violence in the torture-house alongside of the
collective event of inscription. The ‘‘purpose’’ of physical torture is thus
the inscription of the official record that binds the resistant, contorted body
to the scribes of official colonial history.
This intimate embrace of his torturers ties Serfaty to the collective of people
whose names he refused to divulge in the regular torture sessions. Afterwards,
he would be taken to the torturer’s office for the drafting of what would become
the official record of the final accusations against him. This record would lead
to his imprisonment in the official jail. His interrogators’ goal was to obtain
and record information that would implicate Serfaty’s allies. During the months
of violent ‘‘negotiations’’ of which his body was the principal medium of
exchange, he remained silent. His refusal to cooperate allowed the resistance to
continue temporarily. However, the names of his fellow dissidents were acquired
through different sources.
The torture-house, the ‘‘cave of death’’ that Serfaty describes, lies outside of
official history. Unlike a detention center or a jail, it is a space off the map. Such
a space recalls Djebar’s caves of history from which narratives of violent struggle
and resistance emerge to echo other struggles and resistances that have taken
place in other material and figurative caves of death. The complication in the
dynamic of violence, silencing, and inscription that Serfaty’s text brings to
the fore in my mind is that effacement from the written record can allow
pockets of struggle to survive. In the process of counter-historical and collective
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resistance that Djebar and Serfaty tell, these silences, effacements, and exchanges
off the official record in the ‘‘caves of death’’ must be sought out and read for the
stories of resistance, struggle, and small victories that they offer. Not only this,
but the official records that we do have must be read for the traces of exchanges
and undocumented stories that occur and recur in these caves of death and
memory.
The dynamics of representation of atrocity are of course different in the images
from the late eighteenth century than they are in the images from the twentieth
century. The first set of images arise out of the context of enslavement, abolitionism, and black radicalism, whereas the twentieth-century instances are located
in the context of Algerian and Moroccan anticolonial consciousness. Whereas
Serfaty and Djebar put a limit on the unbounded powers of institutionalized
atrocity, Stedman, Blake, and Goya appear to be defeated by it, despite the fact
that historically each of them had resisted it to some extent. Serfaty and Djebar
actively engage the tortured body with the language of the oppressor. Each, with
slightly different mechanisms, manages to turn the moment of torture=atrocity
into a site of reconnection to other stories, other bodies, and other spaces. In
the case of Serfaty, for example, the placement of ‘‘you’’ as the subject being
tortured enacts an interpellation that inserts the individual and collective
spectator into the act of atrocity in a way that provides a way—through
language—for the tortured subject to move beyond the isolation and disarticulation of self that is embedded in the experience of torture. This implicit line of
connection between the reader=spectator and the victim of torture makes it
impossible for the spectator to assume the position of a detached outsider.
Djebar’s suggestion that the reading=studying subject must, to hear and communicate with the victims of past atrocities, undergo conceptual contortions that
seem to imitate the contortions of a tortured body also makes it impossible for the
reading=studying subject to place herself in the position of outsider. It is possible
that one of the explanations of this difference is the difference between narrative
representation and visual representation, where the visual medium allows
the spectator to walk away or imagine herself outside of the representation,
whereas the narrative interpellation of the written representations place the
viewer inside the moment of torture.
Abu Ghraib, the infamous prison used first by Sadaam Hussein’s regime to
detain and torture political dissidents and then by the U.S. military to detain
and torture civilians identified as resistant to U.S. intervention in Iraq, is another
geopolitical space where the intimate relations between power and subjectivity
are played out on the tortured body. The images that invoke Abu Ghraib—both
the photographs released in 2004 and the artistic renditions painted by
Columbian artist Fernando Botero between 2004 and 2005 (see Figure 10)—bring
the relations between spectatorship, atrocity, and the articulation of subjectivity
against colonial and imperial oppression into the present.
The photographs, artistic representations, and documentaries about Abu
Ghraib constitute a more contemporary version of the circuit of violence and
horror that I have been tracing through Stedman, Blake, Goya, Djebar, and
Serfaty. The photographs of the tortures, Botero’s paintings and drawings of
them and the recent documentary film The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib all blur the
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Figure 10. Fernando Botero, Abu Ghraib, 05 (2004). Graphite on paper, 15!3=4 " 11!3=4 inches, University
of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Gift of the artist, Photo by Benjamin Blackwell.
Reprinted with permission of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
boundaries that separate witness, agent, and victim of violence. Again, the
pivotal piece that provides communication between witness, agent, and victim
is the tortured body. In the spring of 2006 the University of California at Berkeley
housed Fernando Botero’s representation of Abu Ghraib. The pamphlet exhibits
an uncomfortable sense of complicity in its explanatory context for the exhibit.
The New York Times claimed that Botero’s images ‘‘do something [that] the
harrowing photographs of the naked, blindfolded and tormented prisoners do
not: they restore their dignity and humanity without diminishing their agony
or the absolute injustice of their situation.’’ Aside from the underlying debate
on what the photographs do or do not do in comparison to Botero’s rendition,
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the implication is quite clear: In showing Botero’s Abu Ghraib, the exhibiting
institution participates in the presumed restoration of dignity and humanity to
these prisoners. But I would like to suggest that these implications are dangerous.
They suggest that we, as spectators of these visual documents of violence, can
restore humanity to victims simply by asserting that we do. This is a dangerous
suggestion. We cannot know what the screaming, gasping, expiring, raging,
silent mouths of the victims portrayed by Stedman, Goya, and Botero do or do
not say. They certainly are not thanking us, or Stedman, or Goya, or Botero,
for looking, or for saying what we are saying about them. I wonder, would they
want us to forget, be silent, or look away?
Hopefully, looking at these images side by side does cause some disturbance.
But haven’t we, after all, come a long way? Asks the insistent narrative of Western
progress. Perhaps we are uncomfortable because to put these images side by side
within the context of a presentation on complicity and spectatorship asks us to
consider both our collective legacy and our role in the circuit of violence that
has not yet ended. We need no visual image to see the crouching, naked, and tortured bodies of Iraqi men, hands and heads shielding themselves from the standing, leaning, pressing bodies of the U.S. soldiers, from their pointing fingers. The
photographs from the prison of Abu Ghraib echo the images Stedman brought
back from Surinam at the end of the eighteenth century, repeating and reinterpreting the specific political and historical shape that terror has taken within
the context of the U.S.–Iraqi war. Like Blake’s engraved illuminations of torture,
these prison images have also been transported over time and space. Brought
back from Iraq, they point to the monstrous effects of state-backed atrocity on
humanity. Just like Stedman, who leaned over the dead maroon in the frontispiece of his journal, are we not tempted to claim empathy and disregard our participation in the atrocity?26
The transhistorical correspondence and collective genealogy of documented
horror that I’ve drawn through the several artists and writers from different
eras and locations includes those of us today who look and do not look, who
speak and do not speak, who teach or do not teach about these images or
events. The gesturing arms, mouths, the eyes we have seen project horror, pain,
denial but they also reference the sheer and bare being of the subjects who can
or cannot speak, scream, be silent, or even expire under torture. Perhaps there
is no narrative of closure to be achieved when remembering, showing, or
exposing these events, images, and genealogies. It is perhaps possible that there
is ‘‘nothing to be said’’ because there is no justification for atrocity of this scale.
Perhaps our work as scholars and teachers now is not to explain through more
narrative, but to examine the sometimes-forgetful assumptions embedded in
our modes of learning, knowing, and teaching. Could it be that before we consider what those narratives of progression, action, or solution are, we need first
to delve into the anxieties of division, denial, and refusal of dialogue that disciplinary divisions of study allow? No matter how we receive the practices of terror and torture, whether we speak of them through the past or in our present,
the position we take as we address and represent them will always contain the
range of relations of spectatorship and denial suggested by early circuits and
documents of terror: complicity, horror, denial, and disengaged empathy.
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WHAT EMPATHETIC MODES OF LEARNING AND KNOWING CAN TEACH
Modeling the pedagogy of empathy I use in the classroom, this article has put
disparate representations of atrocity in dialogue across history, language,
location, and genre and has woven them into a multigeneric, transhistorical,
multilingual, and multilocational text of social suffering and agency in the face
of atrocity. Through the questions, theoretical pairings, and choices of research
objects that interdisciplinary inquiry allows us to make, we can create a way of
knowing that changes not only how we know, but also, and perhaps more importantly, what we know. After taking a class on historical genocide, for example, we
can know that atrocity and human injustice know no boundaries and are as old
as humanity. But if we take a class that attempts to interconnect questions of
inter- and intrasocial relations, political ideology, history, art, psychology,
culture, the stories we tell and the current events we consider constructive or
generative of a society of health, then we might come away with an object of
knowledge that transforms the sorts of questions we will ask and the stories
we will tell. After participating in such a class, not only would we discover that
atrocity and human injustice are as old as humanity, but we might also understand that those atrocities are just not isolated events. They are rather, the result
of the interaction among psychological, social, political, ideological, and historical material factors, as well as individual and collective choices. After a class like
this, we would know that changing the way that we think and know things can
directly influence our delimitations of acceptable and unacceptable conditions of
living. We might know not only that atrocity is a historical form of the expression
of power, but also that the questions we ask and the things we choose to know
have the potential to shed light on and change the multiple roles (perpetrators,
victims, witnesses) we play in these social texts of atrocity. Such a class could
contribute to a larger network of knowledge-choices and processes that could
minimize the recurrence of the social, psychological, ideological, and material
conditions that lead to atrocity.
This article has modeled a pedagogy based on practices of boundary crossing
that are crucial to the boundary-challenging processes of social justice awareness
and activity. This approach to the social text of atrocity invites students to activate a practice of empathy based in social justice. This practice minimizes the
tendency to objectify, alienate, and pathologize subjects—both perpetrators and
victims—of violence. A reading and pedagogy of empathy puts teachers,
researchers, and students in a place of learning that is not disengaged from the
object of study. Whether they translate this involvement into complicity with
atrocity or into action to counter it is a choice that will be enabled by an interdisciplinary understanding of the forces of atrocity.
NOTES
1. In the pursuit of imagining a critical theory based humanist-social scientific pedagogy of ethical
witnessing, Geertz (2000–2001), Mudimbe (1996), Trouillot (2003), and Avery Gordon (1997) are
most useful.
2. See Giles Gunn (1992) and David Sill (2001).
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E. Lezra
3. Jameson’s understanding of the hurts of history privileges state-dominated histories shaped by
state-led acts of violence and the ideologies that explain and justify these acts. My understanding
of the hurts of history extends and multiplies the social bodies that experience the hurt:
state-dominated acts and narratives take shape within a multilayered text of suffering and
disavowal. Elsewhere I show that a symptomatic reading of colonial administrative documents
reveals not only anti-colonial struggles but also a deeply repressed horror at the atrocities—both
state and antistate—unleashed by colonialism.
4. For a theoretical treatise on violence that engages what I would like to call a reading or a pedagogy
of empathy, see Taylor Wilkins’s (1992) Terrorism and Collective Responsibility. His complex study
disengages the question of organized violence and atrocity from the perpetrator=victim binary,
troubling the conventional grammar of blame and demonization that this binary encourages.
He reads organized violence as social text that narrates both the hurts that drive the perpetrators
to commit and organize violence and the wounds of the victims. For a piece of expressive
culture that enacts a reading of empathy that disturbs the perpetrator=victim binary, see Gillo
Pontecorvo’s (1962) classic Battle of Algiers.
5. Disparate colonial documents, visual images, objects of expressive culture, and literary narratives
stand as grammatical units in a dominant narrative of organizing, disciplining, and pacifying
power. This narrative withholds other narratives that are partially legible through a symptomatic
reading characterized by a poetics of empathy, where disciplinary, national, and geographical
boundaries are transgressed. Through these poetics, disparate objects of study coalesce across
national, linguistic, disciplinary, and temporal boundaries into a broad social text where shared
social narratives do not just exist side by side but are interlocking nodes in a transnational, multilingual, multilocational, and mobile network of meaning, documentation, self-activity, and knowledge. Agents, witnesses, interpreters, and participants of these networks produce and translate
symbols of self-activity across space, language, and nation. This interlocking multilingual multiregister language can neither be fully embraced nor evaded but must be understood if we are not
to risk the loss of knowledge of sustained resistance and self-activity that consistently have challenged—and continue to do so—the workings, narratives, and structures of domination and
power. In The New American Exceptionalism, we learn from Donald Pease that ‘‘irreconcilable rifts
[during times of conflict, war and violence] state=dominant administrative, controlling and normalizing fantasies emerge to organize people’s relationship to these antagonisms.’’ These fantasies, he warns, ‘‘[do] not refer to a mystification but to the dominant structure of desire out of
which US citizens imagine their national identity’’ (italics added for emphasis). Further, Pease
argues, ‘‘the state uses fantasy in order to avoid having to make logical arguments for domination’’ (Introduction, 1). In the form of images and narratives that serve to dehumanize, degrade
or monstrify communities perceived as threatening by the US state, these fantasies that on one
level can be understood as productive of a validation of authority can be understood as symptoms
of the state’s repressed reliance on fantasy for an authority that, based on a repressed acknowledgment of lack of authority, the state can neither secure nor justify (2).
6. Greimas’s (1987) proposal of the primacy of narrativity as an object of study in itself is useful to
understand the transgression of conventional boundaries and disciplinary gates that I suggest are
necessary for a pedagogy of empathy. In his grammar, narrative is a mode of thinking—it is a
continuous process of narration, negotiation, and production of meaning based in continuous
mis-translations (On Meaning. Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory). These mistranslations
serve dominant narratives and ideological frameworks (both state and nonstate, of the colonizer
and of the colonized) to misunderstand and cause violence to the subject=object being
represented.
7. Foucault’s notion of power disturbs the usefulness of such binaries as legitimate or illegitimate
power.
8. Foucault (1995).
9. This article builds on the scholarship already well established by several major studies of historical atrocity where it is shown to be a practice of both those empowered and those divested of
power. Some of the most prominent examples of this important scholarship include C. L. R.
James’s (1963=1989) The Black Jacobins, Fernando Ortiz’s (1940=2002) Contrapunteo Cubano, Franz
Fanon’s (1961) Wretched of the Earth, Albert Memmi’s (1957=1991) The Colonizer and the Colonized,
and Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s (2000) The Many-Headed Hydra. These works establish
A Pedagogy of Empathy for a World of Atrocity
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
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15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
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that atrocity is an instrument of power wielded by communities both within and against the state.
My article, and the pedagogy I propose, complicates a state=counter-state binary of power and
attends to the wider social text of hurt in which these atrocities take place.
It is particularly illuminating these days to follow the multiple grammars through which local and
international news coverage has represented state attempts to deal with events following the
momentous February 20, 2011.
See Geertz (2000–2001).
Hannah Arendt, Franz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gayatri Spivak,
Judith Butler, Elaine Scarry, Giorgio Agamben, Anne Cubilié, Mark Danner, and Susan Sontag,
among others.
See Hartman (1997).
See Sontag (2003). The importance assigned to the visual component of representation in her
written work should be understood in relation to her life-long engagement with film, art and
performance as critical and representative media.
See Jameson (1981).
The term global could apply to these events and their circulation just as well. I have chosen to use
transatlantic and transnational to highlight uneven processes of transferal and translations as
these images travel through time and space.
For instance, the ritual of protest of disappeared people by the mothers and women of the Plaza
de Mayo in Argentina is implicit in the later context of the Colectivo Mala Leche’s representation=reproduction of the dead bodies of the murdered women of Juárez, studied by Rosa-Linda
Fregoso in her talk and forthcoming article. Rosalinda Fregoso presented her material on the
Colectivo Mala Leche in her plenary address at the conference ‘‘Mutli-Ethnic Alliances: A Conversation for the 21st Century’’ at the Center for Black Studies at the University of California, Santa
Barbara, May 12–14, 2006.
I am referring here only to the visual portrait of Stedman. Stedman’s own narrative description of
the colonial and military atrocities he sees reveals a markedly and fascinatingly different
dynamic. For the purposes of this article, however, my analysis here is limited to the artistic
image.
The narrative order into which I have put these sentiments I see evoked in Blake’s own work
should not imply that his representation of revolutionary agency is uncomplicated. I show
elsewhere that his revolutionary vision in fact erases the revolution propelling enlightenment
revolutionary thought at that time.
Ian Baucom argues that the social and material devastation Goya documented reached well
beyond the boundaries of the struggling Spanish nation: what Goya painted, what held Europe
in its grip and what was the moving center of and sovereign in the world the artist observed
was the mobile and mutating system of terror and atrocity that had devastated Europe
(2006, 171–172). What I am calling here the transatlantic circuit of terror relates to what Baucom
sees as sovereign war. Although my article intersects with Baucom in the objects of analysis with
which I begin and end, as well as in some of my perspectives on the relationship of material and
historical violence to its cultural representations, there is a productive difference in what it is I see
in these documents. Although Baucom’s analysis privileges the sovereignty of the state and
the abjection of the subject constructed as inimical to it, my analysis seeks to emphasize the
sovereignty of the relentless struggle for justice waged by those communities and individuals
constructed as monstrous (in my terms) or inimical (in Baucom’s terms).
The placement of this figure at the center of the tableau, in which he is clearly delineated as the
only one whose eyes are fully taking account of the event, the viewer of the tableau can identify
with his horrified gaze, which, I would argue here, collapses the position of the horrified victim
into that of the horrified spectator.
It is necessary also to consider the effect that Algerian and North African Islamic populations are
having on the delineation of how the post-Franco-Algerian French nation perceives and represents
itself—what to do with the Franco-Algerians? They are largely ghettoized in the French metropole, not to mention the populations that were erased from the equation—lost to diaspora—
almost entirely, such as the once fairly substantial population of Algerian Jews. Two French generals, Pélissier and St-Arnaud, are responsible for the violent death by fumigation of two large
Berber tribes (the Sbéah and the Ouled-Riah) in the recesses of the caves into which hundreds
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23.
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25.
26.
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of people had retreated to escape from the French army. Djebar’s examination of the connections
between violence and historical writing through these events is informed by the difference in the
documentation of the events that otherwise would have been similar. St-Arnaud learns from the
public outrage and momentary attitude of paralyzed horror at the violence of Pélissier’s act of
fumigation the danger of recording violence so meticulously. Although he chooses not to make
any official documentation of it, Djebar chooses to exhume the bodies Pélissier meticulously
recorded.
Serfaty was obliged to live in exile in France for years after being released from the Kenitra prison.
After the death of Hassan II, Mohammed VI, responding to international political pressure to
allow Serfaty back into Morocco, galvanized by Serfaty through his consistent activism and untiring public talks, officially allowed Serfaty to return to Morocco, returned his Moroccan citizenship, and, in fact, went so far as to put him on his board of advisors. Serfaty has recently
articulated his relation to the state through a language of humanitarianism rather than overtly
Marxist language (private telephone interview with Serfaty).
This has not been translated. All translations of this text are my own.
Djebar indirectly represents scenes of torture through the imagined dialogue around the scene of
torture in unmapped torture houses in the Algerian countryside in Fantasia during the Algerian
resistance movements to the French in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The victims of
torture whose voices she records and captures are depicted in her writing as having strong agency
and voice, even in the moments of torture.
Recent weeks have produced yet another harrowing example of the pattern of refusal of complicity in atrocity that I have been tracing throughout this article: the recent video footage released
onto the Internet by ISIS showing the ritualized beheadings of James Foley (August 19, 2014), Steven Sotloff (September 2, 2014), David Hanes (September 13, 2014), and Alan Henning (October 3,
2014) has overwhelmingly, in Western media coverage, prompted the comfortable and familiar
discourse of demonization (in this case of ISIS/ISIL) as opposed to the more difficult and
uncomfortable question of the responsibility the targeted self (namely the United States, the
UK, and its allies in the fight against ISIS/ISIL) may have in these actions. It is crucial to understand these beheadings of innocents as a re-articulation or ‘‘blowback’’ of colonial violence. These
beheadings are not something to be celebrated or supported, yet must be understood.
As Richard Falk points out in his analysis of the current state of political relations between Islam
and the West in his September 18, 2014 blog entry ‘‘ISIS, Militarism and the Violent Imagination,’’
what we are seeing currently in the chain of violence between the Islamic State and the West is a
twenty-first century re-configuration of older historical relations, in which the populations of
people that would have been termed ‘‘the colonized’’ in other historical times are actively, radically, and in some cases violently and desperately standing up against what in other historical
times would have been termed ‘‘the colonizer.’’ Falk writes:
[T]he last several decades should teach the West that the days of staging successful colonial
interventions at acceptable costs are long past, and that premising post-colonial interventionist diplomacy on a moral crusade of human rights, democracy, and counterterrorism fools almost no one except some of the people in the metropole, and wins few
real friends in the target societies other than cynical opportunists or desperate insurgents.
(http://richardfalk.wordpress.com/)
This recent cycle of colonizer-colonized atrocity, in which we see ISIS/ISIL and the U.S. and UK
governments speaking in the currency of the limbs of innocent people is yet another illustration of
the urgent need to change the terms of the political, ideological, and imaginative horizon between
colonizer/colonized into one of shared humanity rather than one of mutual destruction and
devastation.
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