Introduction: Visualizing Violence

Abstract

This special issue emerged from a 2018 Modern Languages Association (MLA) Convention panel that was curious about the possibilities and limitations of the visual arts when documenting social, political, economic, and ecological violence in postcolonial contexts and people’s resistance to them. The essays included here not only enquire into the ethics and politics of representing colonial and postcolonial violence through speculative fictions, art, cinema, and mixed-media installations; they also supplement and reinvigorate investments in a dynamic and capacious “postcolonial” through critically analyzing contemporary collusions amongst partisan politics, systematic violence, and national and corporate interests. Drawing upon rich and complex debates on visual cultures and modes of representing violence, our collection takes on the following broad questions: What are the limits and possibilities of art, sculpture, theatre, live performances, photographs, narrative cinema, and experimental documentaries in narrating political-sexual-economic violence without titillating audiences and retraumatizing its victims? How might formal interventions disrupt maker and consumer scopophilia/s in contexts of postcolonial war zones, refugee populations on the move, and ecological disasters? How might innovative visual vocabularies and strategies help imagine empowering futures for postcolonial peoples and cultures for whom such imaginations have been terminally foreclosed by ongoing wars and resultant deaths, depression, and ecological devastation?.