Copyright @ 2018. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 47 Trauma Emma Hutchison Trauma imagery holds immense political power. By bringing hardship, pain and suffering into focus, trauma images shock and horrify. They present what witnesses perceive as an impossible spectacle: tragedy so difficult to comprehend that, in the words of Maurice Blanchot (1995: 7), it “escapes the very possibility of experience.” Trauma turns our understanding of reality upside-down. Seeing human hardship, pain and death, it is as if our eyes are deceiving us. Yet, as we look, we know our eyes are not. And it is here, in this sheer impossibility of witnessing trauma, that trauma can also captivate. Trauma can hypnotise, fascinate, enthral, aggravate, anger and dismay. Trauma can motivate us. A prominent recent example illustrates the compelling visual politics of trauma: the image of three-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi washed up on the shores of Turkey. So tragic and traumatic was this image it rallied countless movements in support of refugees worldwide (Feneley 2015; Withnall and Dathan 2015). Some nations, prominently Germany, made dramatic shifts in their humanitarian intake policies as a consequence. What is it about images of trauma that they can so decisively frame – and seemingly almost shape – political debate and policy? All trauma imagery is shocking in its own right. So why do some images resonate and gain political traction while others fail to evoke an active response? How can images of trauma draw viewers together in solidarity and in pursuit of particular political ends? I examine the politics and possibilities that can be both opened – and somewhat paradoxically, closed – by imaging trauma. I focus specifically on the role of affect and emotion, showing how the emotions communicated, interpreted and enacted through imagery are key to trauma’s political potentials. This may, at first glance, seem a commonsensical proposition. Of course witnessing trauma is an act laden with intense emotions. But how exactly emotions work in times of crisis – that is, the emotions that are signified and elicited through images and the social significance and capacities they hold – is a culturally, contextually bound process. How and, indeed, whether images of trauma can resonate with and mobilise viewers is contingent upon historically embedded forms of feeling that shape how and for whom viewers should feel. But trauma can in this way, through its various visualisations and the ensuing affective dynamics and agency at play, be politically instrumental. Images of trauma can be part of a complex array of social processes through which existing forms of political power and order are reinstated. Or, on the contrary, trauma imagery can disrupt established political patterns and sow seeds of genuine political transformation. EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/15/2018 10:08 PM via UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND AN: 1715202 ; Bleiker, Roland.; Visual Global Politics Account: s1097571.main.ehost 298 Copyright @ 2018. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. The emotional politics of imaging trauma Images have for long been considered central to communicating and “making sense” of trauma (see Kaplan 2005: 136–8). Imagine trying to comprehend, for instance, the horrors of the current global struggle against Islamic State, the spate of recent terrorist attacks around the world, or any of the various recent devastating natural disasters such as the 2015 Nepali and 2011 Fukushima earthquakes, without the arresting portrayals proliferating throughout the media. Traumatic imagery seems to illuminate the visceral nature of tragedy and human hardship far better than can any words. For many scholars, the communicative power of trauma imagery lies in its unique ability to capture aspects of tragedy that are difficult to say: the deeply emotional dimensions (for instance Baer 2001: 1–21; Berger 1991). Images of trauma are intensely emotional. They lay bare the pain and distress of victims and survivors, capturing and communicating powerful emotions and affects. In so doing, images can create understandings of tragedy that elicit equally distressing emotions. Seeing is in this sense about feeling. Images act as receptacles of emotion; they resonate affectively, procuring and enacting emotions that enable viewers to make sense and meaning of what is being seen, even when the trauma being visualised seems so utterly devoid of sense or meaning (Bronfen 2006: 33–4; Zelizer 2010: 7). Emotions are thus a critical element of how viewers perceive trauma through images. Emotions help to make trauma knowable and, significantly, in turn influence the conditions through which individual and collective responses to trauma are made possible. Whether it be political outcry or paralysis, action or inaction, emotions are embedded within, and help to produce, the social understandings that can mobilise (or fail to mobilise) political agency and community after pivotal traumatic events. Recognising that emotions are grounded in cultural contexts therefore provides a crucial link: it allows for an understanding of how images and emotions “work” together after trauma. Simply put, emotions can be “pulled upon” in response to visualising trauma, and this process can take place in politically significant ways. Witnessing trauma through imagery can “steer” an audience’s emotions, affectively resonating – “pulling” – in this or that way depending on what is seen and how feelings have been historically cultivated to prompt viewers to perceive the respective trauma. Trauma imagery can in this way solicit emotions – and wider social meanings – that pull people together and mobilise collectives around hardship and suffering (Fierke 2012: 79, 28). Boundaries of responsibility and care may consequently be expanded. Somewhat paradoxically, imaging trauma can also be practice whereby “us/them” and “inside/ outside” communal boundaries are collectively intensified. Trauma imagery and political restoration Even though traumatic events suggest the vulnerability and insecurity of established forms of power and order, images of trauma often confirm and entrench prevailing forms of political power and community (Brassett and Vaughan-Williams 2012; Edkins 2003). In other words, the very community that trauma undermines can – through visual representations and ensuing meanings – end up being restored. Trauma images become icons of the very communities they belie. Political traumas, such as those of war, civil conflict or terrorism, are one occasion when we frequently see images playing this kind of restorative role. Let us examine one example more closely: a transnational terrorist attack that became a distinctly “national trauma” rallying a nation together: the Bali bombing of 2002. Late on the evening of 12 October, the Islamist group Jemaah Islamiyaah set off two bombs outside the popular expatriate-only Sari Bar in Kuta, on the island of Bali, Indonesia. The bombing resulted in the deaths of 202 people. 88 victims were Australian. Australia thus quickly became the country in which the impact of the attack was most sharply felt. Indeed, in the aftermath an incredible solidarity and strengthening of the national community was observed: it seemed that the nation was “at one” with the victims. Within the media, an ensuing sense of trauma – the shock and the gravity of loss – was invoked as damaging Australia’s “collective soul” (Ragg 2002: 5). EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/15/2018 10:08 PM via UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND AN: 1715202 ; Bleiker, Roland.; Visual Global Politics Account: s1097571.main.ehost 299 Copyright @ 2018. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Dominant visual portrayals of the bombing in the media demonstrate the combined emotional and political potentials of imaging trauma. They show how images “frame” trauma, guiding an audience to emotionally enact a sense of injury and loss and producing social understandings that prompt trauma to become a politically restorative collective experience (Alexander 2012: 3). Consider images employed to depict the bombing and its aftermath in Australia’s sole national print news source, The Australian. The visual narrative they created told of a uniquely Australian national tragedy. Initial images brought forth the sublime horror and shock of the violence and harm: they graphically presented the horror and pain of victims and survivors, encouraging distant Australian viewers to imagine and empathise with the trauma of experiencing the blasts first-hand. The front page in Figure 47.1, on the first day of newspaper coverage, is particularly poignant. Graphically presenting the pain and horror of unknown others, the image stops viewers short. The extent of the carnage is shocking. It seems to present things as they really “are,” giving the viewer a sense of authenticity, of being there and experiencing the horror alongside direct victims. Viewing the image in conjunction with the headline – “Terror hits home” – moreover creates a powerful “image-text” (Mitchell, Chapter 34): it pushes the trauma into the lives of Australians, explicitly directing viewers to make sense of the bombing as an injustice and tragedy perpetrated upon all fellow nationals. Ensuing media coverage furthered the “national trauma” narrative, yet it did so through imagery that provided the grounds for emotional understandings based not only on the collective harm but also on the shared loss and need for a collective response. These images shifted away from those depicting the initial destruction to those that visualised the more exact impact of the bombing: the young, seemingly resilient lives that were lost. Portraits of smiling faces – the young Australians who were either missing or pronounced dead – were posted on front pages. Victims were pictured as they were before: drinking beer with mates, cradling infant children, sitting on beaches soaking in the sun. Later on, families and schoolchildren were shown – heads bowed and weeping – at church and public memorial services. Images of mourning were also complemented with those portraying the compassion, outrage and expediency of the Australian political and security response. Then Prime Minister John Howard was shown surveying the bomb site and the media pronounced that Australians were the victims of a new “Season of Terror.” This type of commemorative and political imagery undoubtedly seems expected in the wake of a shocking terrorist attack. Countless other examples of political traumas imaged prominently in the media could be drawn upon: the terrorist attacks in Washington and New York on 11 September 2001, the London bombings of 7 July 2005, or the recent November 2015 and March 2016 European bombings in Paris and Brussels. Following these attacks the abundance of visuals – of the bomb sites, ensuing trauma and stages of mourning – drew citizens together around shared understandings of loss and pain (Kaplan 2005; Miller 2003; Weber 2006a). Yet, there nevertheless remains a distinct visual politics at play: It is precisely in the supposed “normality” and obviousness of such imagery that it gains representational authority and political power (Tagg 1988: 21–2). As Judith Butler (2009) famously puts it, such imagery distinguishes the tragedy as “grievable.” It provides an emotional object of identification, in this case (of the Bali bombing) for the Australian community, and as such brings the attack into focus as an injury and loss endured by all Australians and not simply by the individuals directly impacted. They suggest that the trauma is distinctly national trauma with which all Australians should identify and should feel. EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/15/2018 10:08 PM via UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND AN: 1715202 ; Bleiker, Roland.; Visual Global Politics Account: s1097571.main.ehost 300 Copyright @ 2018. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Figure 47.1 “Terror hits home,” front page of The Australian, 14 October 2002 Source: The Australian, 14 October 2002. With permission from The Australian/Newspix. As commonplace as this emotional, visual framing of political trauma may appear, it is politically significant EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/15/2018 10:08 PM via UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND AN: 1715202 ; Bleiker, Roland.; Visual Global Politics Account: s1097571.main.ehost 301 Copyright @ 2018. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. in so far as it frequently functions to enable, reconstitute and restore an established community – the nation-state – as the preferred arrangement of political power, order and control. Even though the trauma (of terrorist attacks, civil conflict, war, etc.) in fact suggests the vulnerability, fragility and insecurity of the nation-state, images can appeal to affective sentiments that consolidate and recentralise agency and community at the national level. Such was the situation in this case: the nation-state as community was, paradoxically, strengthened. Power and order were “secured through a failure to secure” (Heath-Kelly 2015). Alternative or marginalised identities and forms of political community (either within or beyond the bounded community of the nation-state) were simultaneously silenced and closed off. Trauma, images and political transformation Although trauma often generates this kind of conservative – restorative – political effect, images can, paradoxically, enact an emotional politics that helps to disturb and transgress established political patterns. Trauma imagery can, simply put, be politically transformative. But, how is it that traumatic imagery can generate these seemingly dual, at-odds political ends? If images function to reinforce and restore the political status quo, how is it that they can also mobilise audiences to reflect upon existing orders and to actively participate to effect political change? The capacity of images to disrupt and transform established political patterns lies likewise in part in emotions – in how traumatic images can affectively resonate with those who view them. So, just as the emotional dimensions of imaging trauma can limit or close off forms of political agency and community, they can also help produce feelings and meanings that reframe how individuals and communities perceive their attachments, identities, affiliations and responsibilities. Emotions and affects that may turn communities inwards, and be collectively mobilised to reinforce the existing political order after, say, the trauma of a terrorist attack, can in particular circumstances be engaged in ways that re-orientate individuals and communities. The emotional dimensions of trauma imagery may as such hold the seeds of political renewal or transformation. Humanitarian crises are one situation when the transformative potentials of imaging trauma are particularly pronounced. Specifically, viewing the trauma of often distant disaster resonates with historically engrained, yet often marginalised or dissident, discourses of compassion and humanitarianism towards the unfortunate or less-privileged. Shocking, abject images of suffering – of “the body in pain” and of especially emotive humanitarian symbols, such as “the mother and child” – are typically key (Dauphinee 2007; Manzo 2008). Such imagery appeals to historically cultivated emotional norms that suggest audiences should feel sympathy at the sight of bodies in pain and be motivated to reach out to alleviate others’ suffering (Abruzzo 2011). The incredible transnational response after the Southeast Asian tsunami catastrophe in December 2004 is, for instance, a telling case in point. When the giant wave struck the shores of more than fourteen countries on 26 December, Boxing Day, an unprecedented outpouring of international solidarity and aid was summoned. Key to this response was the inundation of intensely traumatic and emotional images (Brauman 2009: 108–17; Chouliaraki 2006: 4). Indeed, images of the tsunami created a context in which the catastrophe – the trauma of devastation and loss of life – was perceived as an exceptional humanitarian disaster for which viewers worldwide should feel and mobilise. Images – such as those in Figures 47.2 and 47.3 – achieved this by repeatedly visualising the vast scale of the destruction, human suffering and dependence, and death. They are the type of images that suggest audiences should not just feel in compassionate ways, but in so doing also reconsider their obligations towards those affected. EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/15/2018 10:08 PM via UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND AN: 1715202 ; Bleiker, Roland.; Visual Global Politics Account: s1097571.main.ehost 302 Copyright @ 2018. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Figure 47.2 Amid trash and debris, the shrouded bodies of the deceased lay on a street in downtown Banda Aceh, Sumatra, Indonesia, following the massive tsunami that struck the area on 26 December 2004. Photograph 1 January 2005 Source: Photograph 1 January 2005. Wikimedia Commons, htt-ps:-//c-omm-ons-.wi-kim-edi-a.o-rg/-wik-i/F-ile-%3A-Bod-ies-_in_Ba-nda-_Ac-eh_-aft-er_-200-4_t-sun-ami-_DD--SD--06--07-373-.JP-EG (in the public domain). EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/15/2018 10:08 PM via UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND AN: 1715202 ; Bleiker, Roland.; Visual Global Politics Account: s1097571.main.ehost 303 Copyright @ 2018. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Figure 47.3 Trash and debris line the streets in downtown Banda Aceh, Sumatra, Indonesia, following the massive tsunami that struck the area on 26 December 2004. Photograph 1 January 2005 Source: Photograph 1 January 2005. Wikimedia Commons, htt-ps:-//c-omm-ons-.wi-kim-edi-a.o-rg/-wik-i/F-ile-:St-ree-t_i-n _d-own-tow-n_B-and-a_A-ceh-_af-ter-_20-04_-tsu-nam-i_D-D-S-D-0-6-0-737-4.J-PEG(in the public domain). Traumatic, distressing images can also be influential in cultivating less obvious seeds of political debate and change. The haunting images of systematic prisoner abuse emerging from Abu Ghraib in 2003 sparked major public discussion in the US as well as worldwide on the politics and ethics of torture. Such was also certainly the case following the traumatic image of three-year-old Alan Kurdi. The stark visual of the small boy refugee washed up on the shores of Turkey tugged at heartstrings around the world, prompting a radical shift in public perceptions of the European refugee crisis and mobilising nations worldwide to reconsider their asylum-seeker policies. Significant in all of these examples are the parallel politics of emotions and trauma. In these cases, images prompted audiences to emotionally enact and perceive trauma in ways that transgressed the status quo. Even if temporal, new forms of political agency ensued. Entrenched political orders, and in some cases, policies, were usurped. The visual politics of trauma Images of trauma possess a distinct visual politics. Trauma imagery can either fashion viewers’ emotions to help buttress and strengthen established forms of political order, agency, and community or, indeed, often the very same types of emotions can be orientated in new or changed ways to abet the constitution of alternative, purposive political configurations. Yet, how trauma images function depends on the context in which they are seen. In this respect trauma images neatly highlight what is at stake in visual global politics. Like all representations, images are subjective. The meanings they attain are contingent. But often much more clearly EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/15/2018 10:08 PM via UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND AN: 1715202 ; Bleiker, Roland.; Visual Global Politics Account: s1097571.main.ehost 304 than words, images are interpreted through the forms of feeling through which individuals and collectives have been socially, culturally and historically conditioned. Like the images that prompt them, these emotions can reveal and also conceal particular perceptions, choices and prerogatives. Understanding the power and politics of imaging trauma is thus a process of recognising and appreciating the sociality of emotions and in how emotions have been conditioned to make each of us feel and respond. Copyright @ 2018. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Note This chapter draws on some of my previously published work, most notably Hutchison 2010, 2014 and 2016. EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/15/2018 10:08 PM via UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND AN: 1715202 ; Bleiker, Roland.; Visual Global Politics Account: s1097571.main.ehost 305 Copyright @ 2018. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 48 Travel Debbie Lisle The spread of photography from Europe to the rest of the world from the middle to the end of the nineteenth century is an extremely important origin point for a politically attuned understanding of visuality. The early globalisation of photography was systematically enabled by the existing structures and power relations of colonialism. It also reproduced, strengthened and extended those relations in ways that substantially reduced the freedom of colonised populations. Indeed, we cannot separate the birth of photography from its colonial context – from the fact that the early photographers who took their cameras around the world to visually document “exotic” scenes carried with them the assumptions and prejudices of a supposedly superior European culture. In analysing the power relations that photography enabled and reproduced in the context of colonialism, many scholars have explained how a visual logic of coloniser/ colonised was supported by attending hierarchies of race, gender and sexuality (Hight 2004; Osborne 2000; Ryan 1997). I am particularly interested in how this fundamental entwining of photography and colonialism was also shaped by the rise and spread of mass tourism. As companies like Thomas Cook & Sons began taking middle-class tourists around the world in the mid-nineteenth century, new tourist infrastructures – including photography studios and souvenir shops – developed in “exotic” destinations like Cairo, Istanbul and Jerusalem (Hazbun 2007). Along with posing for portraits themselves, many European tourists to the Middle East, Asia and Africa in the late nineteenth century purchased, collected and traded souvenir cartes-de-visite – the precursors of modern postcards – that depicted local “tribes” (e.g. a “Nubian” in traditional dress), famous landmarks (e.g. the Pyramids) and “typical street scenes” (e.g. an Egyptian market) (Gregory 2003, 2001). I explore the visual politics that connect colonialism, photography and tourism. I examine how practices of tourist photography – of capturing the everyday encounters between different cultures – often reinforce dominant understandings of global politics that further entrench long-standing colonial asymmetries. Using two separate photographs – one from 1919 and the other from 2015 – as examples of colonialism–photography–tourism intersections, the chapter asks three important questions: 1 How do tourist photographs both reflect and produce prevailing colonial asymmetries? 2 How did the global spread of photography within a colonial context develop through the attending practices of tourism? 3 To what extent are practices of tourism and photography still shaped by a lingering colonial imaginary? EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/15/2018 10:08 PM via UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND AN: 1715202 ; Bleiker, Roland.; Visual Global Politics Account: s1097571.main.ehost 306