Suffering Art and Aesthetics PDF

Suffering, Art, and Aesthetics
This page intentionally left blank

Suffering, Art, and Aesthetics
Edited by Ratiba Hadj-Moussa and Michael Nijhawan

SUFFERING , ART, AND AESTHETICS
Copyright © Ratiba Hadj-Moussa and Michael Nijhawan, 2014.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-42607-9
All rights reserved.
First published in 2014 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the
World, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers
Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above

companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United

States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-49069-1 ISBN 978-1-137-42608-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137426086
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Suffering, art, and aesthetics/edited by Ratiba Hadj-Moussa &

Michael Nijhawan.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Suffering in art. 2. Arts and society. 3. Aesthetics, Modern.

I. Hadj-Moussa, Ratiba, editor of compilation.
II. Nijhawan, Michael, editor of compilation.
NX650.S94S84 2014
700.1 08—dc23 2014003097
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Integra Software Services
First edition: July 2014
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
C o n t e n ts
List of Figures vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Suffering in Arts: Rethinking the Boundaries 1

Ratiba Hadj-Moussa and Michael Nijhawan
1 In Praise of Ambiguity: On the Visual Economy of

Distant Suffering 23
Fuyuki Kurasawa
2 Denial and Challenge of Modernity: Suffering,

Recognition, and Dignity in Photographs
by Sammy Baloji 51
Bogumil Jewsiewicki
3 Event, Image, Affect: The Tsunami in the Folk Art

of Bengal 75
Roma Chatterji
4 Vocalizations of Suffering 99
Caterina Pasqualino
5 The Art of Suffering: Postcolonial (Mis)Apprehensions

of Nigerian Art 121
Conerly Casey
6 The Past’s Suffering and the Body’s Suffering: Algerian

Cinema and the Challenge of Experience 151
Ratiba Hadj-Moussa
7 The Diasporic Rasa of Suffering: Notes on the

Aesthetics of Image and Sound in Indo-Caribbean and
Sikh Popular Art 177
Michael Nijhawan and Anna C. Schultz
vi Contents
8 The Art of Inflicting Suffering: Animals and Spectators

in the Crucible of Contemporary Art 207
Nathalie Heinich
Notes on Contributors 225
Index 227
Figures
1.1 The symbolic structure of the image (Kurasawa) 26

1.2 The circulation of the image (Kurasawa) 29
2.1 Colonie belge, B. Jewsiewicki collection 53
2.2 Series “Corps et masques,” by Sammy Baloji, with
permission 56
2.3 “Travailleurs nus,” by Sammy Baloji, with permission 61
2.4 “Masque” by Sammy Baloji, with permission 66
2.5 Slave Trade, B. Jewsiewicki Collection 69
3.1 Third register of a tsunami pata. Artist: Banku
Chitrakar, village: Habichak 80
3.2 Fourth register of the same pata. Artist: Banku
Chitrakar 80
3.3 First register of a flood pata. Artist: Mantu Chitrakar,
village: Naya 82
3.4 Last register of a flood pata. Artist: Moina Chitrakar,
village: Naya 83
3.5 First frame of Gurupada’s “international” tsunami
pata. Village: Naya 87
3.6 Last register of Tagar’s tsunami pata 91
3.7 First register of Tagar’s tsunami pata 91
5.1 Spirit Possession by Abdulhamid Yusuf, Kano,
Nigeria, 1995 136
5.2 Witchcraft by Abdulhamid Yusuf, Kano, Nigeria, 1995 137
5.3 Evil Eye by Abdulhamid Yusuf, Kano, Nigeria, 1995 138
5.4 Evil Words by Abdulhamid Yusuf, Kano, Nigeria, 1995 139
7.1 1984 and the Storming of the Golden Temple by the
Singh Twins 181
7.2 Nineteen Eighy-Four by the Singh Twins 183
This page intentionally left blank
Ac k n ow l e d g m e n ts
We began the work on this volume a few years ago when realizing our
shared interest in issues of violence, suffering, and art. At that time,
we both had conducted research on cinema and transnational media in
North Africa (Ratiba), and the politics of performance in South Asia
and its diasporas (Michael). In both scenarios the effects of political
violence and social suffering were pervasive. Little did we know, how-
ever, that our common journey would lead us to a long and winding
path of conceptualizing a topic that on the one hand seemed saturated
with new ideas, especially in the field of visual studies, and on the other
hand lacked an adequate focus in our own disciplines of sociology and
anthropology. Hence, it was not an easy task either to locate our voice
or to assemble texts that would represent what we thought best cap-
tured a multidisciplinary take on rethinking the relationship between
art and suffering. We are therefore especially grateful to all those who
worked with us, entrusted us with their thoughts and ideas, and had
the stamina to join our “stubborn” persistence in turning this work of
collected articles into a hopefully compelling book.
Our thanks go first and foremost to our contributors for their fair
play in accepting to revise their texts as many times as we judged it
necessary, their patience through the process of book completion, and
all their encouragements and critical feedback they offered at different
stages. In the last few years we have also benefited from conversations
with colleagues and graduate students at York University and else-
where who have supported us and kept us on track with our enterprise.
Willi Goetschel, Kate Pendakis, Roma Chatterji, Chris Berry, Martin
Lefebvre, and the anonymous reviewers of our work for Palgrave
Macmillan deserve a special note of thanks for their positive feedback
on the design of the volume as a whole and specifically on how to
frame our introductory chapter. We would also like to thank Peter
Couto, Duygu Gül, Kate Pendakis, and Jason Webb for their editorial
work and for their revisions at various stages of the manuscript. We are
indebted to Rana Sukarieh for the final copy editing before manuscript
submission under heavy time constraints and to Alicia Filipowich from
x Ac k n ow l e d g m e n ts
the York Center for Asian Studies for her support in various adminis-
trative matters. Debbie A. Tacium translated the French contributions
by Nathalie Heinich, Caterina Pasqualino, and Bogumil Jewsiewicki
for us. A grant we received from the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Profes-
sional Studies at York University, in addition to support from its Vice
Dean of Research, Barbara Crow, sponsored these translations. The
Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)
provided support for student research assistance.
Our deepest appreciation goes to all the artists whose work is
included and contemplated upon in this book. Bogumil Jewsiewicki
played a central role in securing our cover image. Our heartfelt merci
goes to Sammy Baloji, who graciously allowed us to use one of his
photographs for that purpose. We finally owe thanks to the editorial
team at Palgrave Macmillan, especially to Robyn Curtis for overseeing
a very smooth peer review process and to Erica Buchman as our edito-
rial contact along with Susan Eberhart and Arvinth Ranganathan who
guided us through production stages.
Last but not least we want to thank our dear ones. Michael owes
his sanity to Shobna and Mayur for keeping the everyday alive with
many joyful moments and musics. Ratiba thanks Clara for being the
art and the lightness in her life.
Introduction
S u f f e r i n g i n A rts : R e t h i n k i n g
the Boundaries
Ratiba Hadj-Moussa and Michael

Nijhawan
This book is about the relationship between suffering, arts, and

aesthetics and the ways in which it is shaped by social actors in cul-
tural contexts that are not evoked in the canonical texts on art and
aesthetics in the West. By providing new perspectives on how forms
and experiences of social suffering are expressed within cultural gram-
mars of vision, affect, and the everyday, contributors to this volume
deal with how to render and to write about both highly visible and
endemic forms of suffering.
In a recent introductory text to the sociology of suffering, Iain
Wilkinson (2005) rightly remarks that, whereas the scandal of suffer-
ing has been a recurrent motif in the humanities, and whereas the
sociological classics of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim have long ago
identified suffering as a key to understanding social change, the iden-
tification of suffering as a predicament of the modern condition has
only recently acquired a new dimension and urgency for social anal-
ysis. It has acquired this urgency in the face of the industrial scaling
up of new (nuclear) war machineries and processes of militarization;
it is related to the ravaging and disastrous extraction and mindless
consumption of the planet’s natural and human resources that in
many parts of the world continue to engender and perpetuate disas-
trous working and living conditions; and it remains a pressing concern
2 R at i b a H a d j - M o u s s a a n d M i c h a e l N i j h awa n
with regard to the present forms of politically motivated violence by

repressive state regimes and non-state actors alike.
Moreover, the perseverance of those for whom living under these
conditions has been the daily challenge of life has motivated social
scientists to think differently about social suffering in a world where
suffering itself is not an isolated moment or an individual expres-
sion but a social relation in which the collective dimension needs to
be reckoned with. More than that, this relation also marks instances
where a number of “historically shaped, scientific and other ratio-
nalities” (Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997, xi) intersect with political
prerogatives and cultural imaginations, so that, in the words of these
three leading scholars in the field, “it is no longer useful to insist
upon artificial boundaries that divide an unruly world into tidy ana-
lytic chambers. The most interesting questions for theory and practice
concerning social suffering are in the cracks between our categories
and in the discursive processes that traverse our disciplines” (ibid.).
With similar concerns and an interdisciplinary agenda in mind, our
book takes a closer look at the domain of art. It asks how we can
conceptualize the relationship between art, aesthetics, and suffering
by taking seriously the challenges placed upon us by bodies of theory
that have for a long time pointed at the ethical and political dilem-
mas of such a project. As has been clearly demonstrated in a number
of recent texts (e.g., Costello and Willsdon 2008; Guerin and Hallas
2007; Kaplan 2005), the very exercise of researching and writing on
art and suffering has triggered ethical and political reflections inas-
much as the representation of suffering has elicited debates on how to
make the subjective experience of ordinary people intelligible in the
face of mass-produced death and destruction. When we reflect on art-
works and art practices that are situated at the very edges of everyday
human experiences of vulnerability, loss, and ongoing suffering, we are
absorbed by the same predicaments. Thus, as we enter spaces where
the certainties of thinking and speaking are crumbling, what could a
study on suffering, art, and aesthetics contribute?
Underneath this question, there are historical assumptions about
the representability of suffering that we need to briefly reiterate here.
To mention a few significant turning points in the conceptualization of
large-scale suffering in relation to theorizing categories of art and aes-
thetics, Theodor Adorno’s questioning of the expressive capabilities
of art after Auschwitz comes first to mind. Adorno’s injunction—
sometimes trivialized or misunderstood as a moral prohibition—
expressed a profound concern and disenchantment with the belief in
art’s spontaneity, autonomy, and authenticity when weighed against
“the pressure of material historical forces” (Ray 2009, 138; see also
Introduction 3
Jimenez 1986). He famously regarded the disintegration of language

and representation as a sign of a crisis of reason, from which modern art
could no longer offer any transcendental escape (Menke 1998, 215),
and effected a change from the Kantian notion of the sublime, which
still allowed for a distancing aesthetic mediation, to a new notion
that has lost this distancing capacity (Ray 2009, 138): too strong
were the memories of a fascist aesthetics and too overwhelming were
the mass media-produced images of wartime propaganda. Hence, if
there was a category of aesthetic evaluation to be retrieved in art,
it had to be repositioned as a subversive and somewhat paradoxical
element that runs against the grain of (rationalizing) discourse, the
commodification of mass culture, and the aestheticization of the polit-
ical. According to cultural theorists, it is Adorno’s intervention that
has effectively produced a “European and American consensus among
critical intellectuals” (Ray 2005, 70) with lasting implications on how
the relationship between suffering and art has hitherto been addressed
in the Western world. And this legacy has also affected the way social
scientists have framed the question of suffering’s relation to art and
aesthetics.1
From this injunction two key questions have followed: First, since
the notion of suffering’s postulated non-representability is anchored
in the social imaginations of “the West” (e.g., Rancière 2004), what
does this imply for a project that looks at how suffering, art, and
aesthetics are related in cultural contexts that, while defined by
encounters with the West, have also retained a different way of imag-
ining this relationship? Second, we need to reconcile the fact that
representations of the suffering of (cultural, colonized, and racialized)
others have for long been integral to the very representation of such
suffering (Boltanski 1999; Halpern 2002). It is this twofold perspec-
tive that art theorists in particular, at least until very recently, have
hardly ever acknowledged as the locus of new theoretical interventions
(Chow 2012) or simply as the point from where to ask novel ques-
tions. These are questions that do not use by default the European
canon of high art but instead look at the ways in which art’s very bor-
ders are opened and become “un-disciplined,” in the sense that they
do not necessarily belong to art disciplinary locations. In a nutshell, we
want to think further about the various ways in which art is at once
diffused in the social fabric and formulated through different media
and expressive acts.
Poststructuralist conceptualizations of “trauma art” have indicated
some of the ways by which the certainty of this legacy and its pre-
tention to universalism can be shattered and disciplinary locations
questioned. As Jill Bennett (2005, 4) writes in Empathic Vision, art
is not looked at here primarily in its “pleasure-producing or redemp-

tive” function. Rather it is considered how art itself challenges some
of the categorical distinctions that have been stipulated to separate
the realities of trauma and war from the representational functions of
art in their accounts of such trauma. What these theorists are con-
cerned with, instead, are theoretical frameworks in which the focus
moves from the meanings of art to an understanding of “the inherent
qualities or modus operandi of art” to the extent that the latter can “in
distinctive ways, register and embody affect” (ibid.). This point is thus
clearly linked to the post-Kantian aesthetic or the loss of “the notion
of distanced perception” (ibid., 127). Bennett illustrates this with spe-
cific examples such as Gordon Bennett’s series “Notes to Basquiat,”2
which is read as displacement of the “immediate shock of 9/11 [that]
was felt viscerally around the globe” (ibid.). Gordon Bennett’s assem-
bling of scenes of very disparate sufferings on the canvas, in “Notes
to Basquiat,” forces the viewer to confront the traumas of colonial
violence within the same temporal horizon of events such as 9/11.
The events of 9/11 have arguably resulted in a new horizon for
conceptualizing suffering and art in their relations to the political
dimension. As Allan Meek (2009, 173) has recently remarked, how-
ever, the very effort of constructing 9/11 as a “virtual trauma” seems
to have also “implicitly reaffirmed the moral legitimacy of the West,”
as the prioritization of this event creates visibility for particular forms
of suffering within a hegemonic political order, yet further marginal-
izes the experiences of suffering of those living in the Southern
Hemisphere or the marginalized spaces of neoliberal capitalism.
The effect of this reaffirmation of a hegemonic political order can
ironically be observed in regard to other events as well, such as the
Abu Ghraib torture scandal in the wake of the US military interven-
tion in Iraq. Alongside new artwork, such as Botero’s, which plays on
the flat surface of the tortured bodies3 (Ebony 2006; Laqueur 2007),
we have to also account for the dehumanization and depersonalization
of suffering, the politics of mourning (Butler 2004), and how this all
relates to the dominant regimes of representation (Rancière 2004).
Indeed, the discussion generated in the public debate by the images
of Abu Ghraib torture, and to some extent in Western art theory
(e.g., Eisenman 2007), might be regarded as prolonging the silence
on the enduring effects of making certain bodies more vulnerable than
others, precisely in those moments of “pornographic intensity” when
instead of undoing the “identificatory habits that typically accompany
catharsis” (Chow 2012, 30) these images further entrench ideologies
of otherness.
Introduction 5
These and other examples have further convinced us that we need

a project that decenters the debate on art and suffering from Western
genealogies of trauma and suffering. Indeed, we ought to shift our
attention to alternative theoretical and empirical terrains. The silenc-
ing that Allan Meek (2009) refers to is precisely what we would like to
address in the following paragraphs. We want to capture the changes
in sites, practices, and intersections produced by the encounters of
art and suffering in social settings that are already characterized by a
long-standing métissage or hybridization. Working and thinking at the
edges of social realities that do not belong to the West, several chapters
of this book reflect on what qualifies the “other” in contemporary art
and aesthetics in relation to the violences of modernity.
Thinking through art in the different contexts illustrated in this
book, we call for a reflection that articulates and explores the encoun-
ters between “the West and the Rest” (Hall 1996) to the extent in
which these materialize in specific social and historical contexts in
modernity. We, for instance, approach these processes as a way to iden-
tify the historicities activating colonial sites that are ravaged by modes
of capitalist production and now reframed in the art/photographic
archive by postcolonial artists (Jewsiewicki). Or we problematize the
notion of “tradition” when African forms of creative expression are
deeply entrenched in modernity through the “power of the occult”
(Casey). In other examples too, we consider the intricacies that relate
modernity and postcoloniality while recognizing the specific social
worlds and arrangements of social players in each context. This is
the case for how visual storytelling represents disasters, such as the
Indian Ocean tsunami, where we find that genres and ideas have
undergone iconographic and aesthetic shifts (Chatterji), or when suf-
fering is contained—both limited and included—within the “visual
economy” of the dead bodies of sub-Saharan youth at the gates of
‘Fortress Europe’ (Kurasawa). It is further illustrated by the diasporic
reassemblage of memories and aesthetic sensibilities through which
past sufferings are evoked (Nijhawan and Schultz).
In each such scenario, not only does modernity pose itself in spe-
cific and multiple ways, but it also brings to the fore the métissage that
is constitutive of art forms, and which, as our contributors show, has
the power to generate new subjectivities inasmuch as it points to what
Jacques Rancière (2000) calls the “distribution of the sensible.” This
distribution does not refer so much to social positions (e.g., social
classes) but to ways of thinking or rendering things visible or invis-
ible. “Sensible” means mapping a world whose materiality is based
on the ways in which people, through their bodies’ positioning, their
experiences, and the time/space frame offered by an artwork, define

their relationships (or “identifications”) to the various worlds to which
they belong—these identifications then are also ways of sensing and
belonging. Thus sensible does not equate sensibility. The stakes at the
heart of such a distribution are indeed subject formations, affects, and
experience and are political. Rancière’s (2008) work reminds us how-
ever that we should not consider art as the prefiguration of political
action and intention. Arguing that a piece of art cannot be “political”
because the artist decides so or the context makes it political, Rancière
sees art expression as “un-decidable” precisely because it is not a given
or a prefiguration of the political. There are thus emerging ways of
theorizing art and aesthetics that also help us to critically expand from
prior sociological and anthropological work and deepen, as well as
complicate, the visual dimension considered to be the principal motif
of art expression in Western contexts.
To put this in some perspective: whereas the topic of suffering has
entered the sociological canon through Durkheim’s work on suicide,
Marx’s work on alienation, and, of course, a whole range of more con-
temporary writings on the “weight of misery” (Bourdieu 1993) and
“distant suffering” (Boltanski 1999), the sociology of art itself has
more or less remained silent about the relationship between suffering,
art, and aesthetics. Even Bourdieu (1979, 1987), who has offered
us sharp insights into the centrality of power relations in the making
of art, does not fully escape aesthetic determinism. In contrast, the
aim of this book is to re-situate the tensions that exist in art and to
identify the categories in the making of art and in the processes of
its evaluation. In fact, further below, Nathalie Heinich is upfront in
her challenge of Bourdieu, particularly in her reference to the com-
monsense “value registers” that people use to assess art in everyday
situations.4 It is within these commonsense frames, she argues, that
the entanglement between “aesthesic,” “hermeneutic,” and “ethic”
criteria comes to the fore in accepting or rejecting what is to be con-
sidered art proper. Thus, the question emerging here is not so much
whether art is or is not accessible to ordinary people, but how ordinary
people mobilize their daily categories to delineate what is and is not.
In Heinich’s case, what is at stake is the suffering and harm inflicted
by artworks to nonhuman species! The un/acceptable is, so to speak,
not to be found in the value attributed to the art forms, but is a con-
sequence of those social relations in which juxtaposing value registers
define boundaries between art and not art.
Such insights are not far from anthropological theories on art
and social relations, in the context of which Alfred Gell’s (1998)
Introduction 7
posthumous work Art and Agency features as a yardstick against

which much contemporary theorizing of art unfolds in this disci-
pline. Whereas Gell’s thesis is originally framed around the idea of
an “abduction” of agency that positions art objects and artifacts in
a relational field of effects, so that “rather than being attributable,
unambiguously, to semiotic conventions or laws of nature, agency
is what must be inferred or abducted (into being or existence; Art
and Agency, 20)” (Chow 2012, 42), his critics have rejected the anti-
aesthetic stance by which he wanted to distinguish an anthropology
of art from approaches to art and aesthetics within the humanities.
Challenging Gell, a number of anthropologists have continued to
emphasize the properties of the art object as well as the culturally
specific modes of people’s aesthetic judgments (Layton 2003; Pinney
and Thomas 2001). Thus, in the context of suffering in art, this is
an important aspect to consider. The question of how suffering in
art becomes palpable through its inscription in localities and through
the specific sociality of artifacts, art practices, as well as aesthetic judg-
ments is certainly complex, as some of the contributions in this volume
show. It is further complicated to the extent that anthropological
works often conceptualize art in relation to the cultural honing of
the senses and emotional faculties, and thus subsume not only the
aesthetic, but also affect and emotions within this broader framework
of art (Feld 2012; Hirschkind 2006; Seremetakis 1994).
Our inquiry is attentive to the conceptualization of the shifting
boundaries of suffering, art, and aesthetics. It considers moments
where art transgresses taken-for-granted value scales inasmuch as it
problematizes the fragile and vulnerable social relations that are char-
acteristic of experiences of suffering. We consider small-scale events
as described by Heinich, but recognize in other chapters artistic pro-
cesses that address social suffering in the wake of large-scale events
of collective impact such as the civil war in Algeria. More specifically,
we support a position that speaks in relation to or through the critical
work of artists and their artifacts on suffering. This is not meant as
a rhetorical move; rather, it is an attempt to capture a critical poten-
tial for cross-fertilization that has long been acknowledged to exist
between art and other modalities of expression (Menke 1998).
The chapters of this book suggest that by reflecting on these other
sites that are not commonly explored, art and suffering demand a
certain displacement, a requirement to change one’s place and per-
spective, both literally and conceptually. This entails that we try to
read the intersecting moments of art and suffering as they appear,
adopting mostly a phenomenological stance, and which compel the
actors to move between various dimensions of the social, and vari-

ous versions of modernity, ways of being and belonging. However, in
our understanding, this displacement does not necessitate leaving “the
West” and entrenching oneself in the confines of putative peripheries.
The chapters of this book are, indeed, themselves challenged by this
displacement, which is at once real and not too real, tracing the divide
between ensembles (East, South, West) and rendering them pervious
to each other.
Visual Worlds
Our book takes shape around three analytical frames with contem-
porary salience: (1) the ethics and politics of the image; (2) the
re/conceptualization of violence, suffering, and the everyday; and
(3) the role of emotions and affects in relation to art and political
subjectivities. The visual dimension, the image, has become the yard-
stick against which entire “regimes of truth” on suffering are assessed.
The visual is the most obvious means—the obvie in Roland Barthes’
terms—through which suffering is rendered intelligible, and it is also
the field that has received the most scholarly attention. For instance,
this is indicated in debates on the “visual turn,” which problematize
the image and insist on the complex relations with its contexts. The
“visual turn” calls for a double stance in which power forces are at play:
first, it shows the capacity of imagery to bring out the most contro-
versial issues; second, it asks us to question where the need for images
originates and what demands are served by them. This second stance
helps to interrogate what is at stake in an image, more specifically in
the “visuality complex,” which is related, as Nicholas Mirzoeff (2011)
reminds us, to the history of domination and legitimatized authority.
Indeed, Mirzoeff’s “visuality complex” is entirely interlocked
within colonial history, whereby authority over enslaved people is
claimed and asserted. Accordingly, visuality “is an old project”
(Mirzoeff 2011, 2) that demanded the capacity to envision the future
and to “see” it, in a word to envision the future of history. Visuality’s
original domain, asserts Mirzoeff, is in fact the plantation in the con-
text of slavery, and is therefore quasi-isomorphic with authority, that
is, with the capacity to control enslaved people. “If visuality had
been the supplement to authority on the plantation,” writes Mirzoeff,
“authority was now the light. Light is divine. Authority is thus visi-
bly able to set things in motion, and that is then felt to be right: it is
aesthetic” (ibid., 3 our emphasis). There are two important lessons to
be learned from Mirzoeff’s work. The first relates to the reframing of
visuality as integral to technologies of power and dominance, and the
Introduction 9
second to countervisuality.5 Whereas Mirzoeff affirms the authority of

the “visuality complex,” his notion of countervisuality opens the space
for other versions that constitute this complex and thus make it more
heterogeneous.
Kurasawa’s chapter echoes this argument, as he analyzes images of
distant suffering as “tyranny” that need to be assessed in terms of the
reality claims they make and the possibility of spectator empowerment
they allow. Kurasawa takes a specific interest in the mass-produced,
commoditized images that constitute today’s “visual economy” of vio-
lence and suffering. This “visual economy” does not merely stipulate
an aftermath, so to speak, of the event of suffering. On the contrary, it
organizes the relations of power that establish the socio-visual field in
which conventional (i.e., accepted) and typified images circulate that
are mediated and intensified by hyper-mechanized capitalist produc-
tion: for example, the various versions of hunger that are sold ad nau-
seam to us to help relieve the pain of others. For Kurasawa, however,
the visual economy of suffering and violence has its internal coun-
terpart in what he refers to as “ambiguity” and which is intrinsically
related to the position of an insurgent reader/interpreter. Kurasawa
examines the corresponding “audience”/interpreter generated by this
ambiguity in order to chart out the emancipatory potential of images.
According to Jonathan Crary (1990), audience and interpreter,
broadly defined, have a long and complex history that helps us to
understand the changes that occurred in the visual field starting in the
nineteenth century. While several authors have pointed to the tech-
nological transformations of this period, Crary focuses instead on the
advent of a new observer. The latter’s emergence was an epistemolog-
ical shift and a phenomenological revolution whose consequences we
are still experiencing. To limit ourselves to just one of Crary’s argu-
ments on the matter, until the late eighteenth century, the camera
obscura still relied on various senses, notably the tactile ones. With the
emergence of other visual techniques, the observer relied for the first
time on no other senses but vision. Furthermore, the new observer
had no fixed locus from where to sense, as she could be anywhere,
floating and flowing like the system that concurs to her birth, that is,
the capitalist system, which, since Marx, has no particular location.
Crary’s modern observer is now being disrupted by other emer-
gent observers who, while being also part of the Western legacy (e.g.,
colonization), belong to other localities and places, and inflect their
relations to images. Our chapters make a strong argument against the
idea of a floating audience/interpreter as someone who is dislodged
or disincarnated from specifically local moral and cultural forces. While
Kurasawa, and more so Chatterji, acknowledge the impact of external
and global influences on local audiences, at the same time they argue
for an interpreter that is socially situated.
From a different angle, but close to the one taken by Kurasawa
(and Mirzoeff), Jewsiewicki addresses the visual insurgency or battle
that Sammy Baloji and other artists in the Democratic Republic of
Congo have undertaken to recover the pain and experience of the
uprootedness of their “fathers” who had left their villages and cut ties
to work under the “authority” (read visuality) of their capitalist patres
familias. In a paradoxical manner (or seemingly so), Jewsiewicki situ-
ates Baloji as an “observer,” someone who intervenes in the wasteland
of abandonment, to insure that this history is not lost forever, and
also to assert the presence of the abandoned and the consequences of
exploitative practices for the inhabitants of Katanga. For Jewsiewicki,
this observer has a voice and therefore an agency that is located in a
specific time and place, and which replaces the lost (never heard) voice
of the fathers.
Whereas in Jewsiewicki’s and Kurasawa’s work the “visuality com-
plex” is embedded mainly within the production and reception of
images, in Chatterji’s chapter this complex is further developed to
delineate the intricacies between image and sound (sung poetry).
Chatterji analyzes mainly those rural paintings or “patas” that account
for natural and war catastrophes in India. Given the specificity of her
case study, Chatterji insists on a different logic of the image, based
on the idea that the divine shows itself through the image to the
viewer, as well as the idea that emotional states are captured in specific
visual codes. However, this entails that a certain distance is required
when dealing with suffering. Viewers arrive at a meaning of the images
as their “content” comes alive in song performance. Imagining and
imagination are thus the outcome of a subtle combination of elements
within a performative process, and echo rasa theory’s assertion that
“[t]his world is the world of becoming” (Chatterji), which reinserts
other effects into the plane of the painted image (the choice of words,
voice modulations, tears, body gestures) and acknowledges, by the
same token, the creativity and the imaginative and narrative capacity
of the interpreter.
This last point brings us to the debate on the “visuality complex,”
its relation to visibility, and the ways in which the latter problema-
tizes some of the most contemporary political and ethical issues on
the visualization of suffering. The most recent writings on visibil-
ity in sociology and social theory (Aubert and Haroche 2011; Mubi
Brighenti 2011) point to “an injunction to visibility” in the Western
world (Aubert and Haroche 2011) by which people are compelled to
Introduction 11
make their inner self visible. Many critics have looked at this type of
visibility as one that creates surface-like individuals while transforming
their technological support to what Baudrillard (1985) has called “the
procession of simulacra.”
However, visibility in its relation to visuality is also seized through
claims of recognition as it is exemplified in Baloji’s gesture of appro-
priation and, as we see below, in the stubborn bodies of the people at
the fringes in Hadj-Moussa’s chapter and in the re/creation of inter-
generational links in Nijhawan and Schultz’s text. Honneth (2006)
argues that denying recognition is denying visibility in the public
sphere. Several chapters of this book consider the issue of political
visibility to be most significantly at stake when speaking, representing,
and reconfiguring suffering.
Again, we ought to ask the question of how suffering is rendered
visible in art and how this visibility challenges “the distribution of the
sensible” (Rancière 2000): that is, how a community disrupts the lim-
its of the invisibility of its suffering and the places assigned to it? In this
fashion, we approach from different angles the processes of making
suffering visible, their timid as well as failed attempts. To take but a few
examples, we can cite the contributions by Pasqualino, Hadj-Moussa,
and Jewsiewicki, where we find that who are in the margins literally
expose their bodies, in terms of both exhibiting them and putting
them in danger, insofar as their demands for recognition exceed the
tolerable. In Pasqualino’s chapter, the singing voice is the raw mate-
rial that is used to demand recognition. In Jewsiewicki’s chapter, as we
mentioned, there is another telling of a tragic tentative claim to recog-
nition, not only locally but also globally. Indeed, in Baloji’s work, the
temporal superpositions conveyed by his images could be seen as a
screaming photographic gesture, a criticism and political assessment
aimed at reinscribing the suffering of the “fathers” in the present and
thus reconnect them and their suffering to their sons. But it is evident
that visibility and its modalities are not the only ones at play when it
comes to claiming recognition, as we see later. There also exist other
modes where visibility is located in a contrapuntal way with other sen-
sory regimes (such as listening), and other experiences such as the
ordinary.
Affective Attunements
This book also speaks to the ways in which feelings and affects are
given shape to, thus affecting both processes of making suffering
visible or audible and the broader recognition claims that we have
addressed in the section above. Art often draws on culturally shaped

understandings of how we, as art recipients, can be affected at all.
It further stipulates ideas and new understandings of how our affective
ties are linked or in specific ways mediated by creative processes. In the
context of suffering in art, this can take such different expressions
as the idea of an “affliction as a form of grace,” which indicates a
complex shift between devotional and political registers in Indian folk
art (Chatterji), to the idea that suffering reaches us through irrita-
tion, anxiety, and banality, as in the Algerian context (Hadj-Moussa).
In this book, we examine how social actors register and relate to spe-
cific aesthetic properties and understandings, in ways in which these
become formative of processes of self-formation and subjectivity. This
can occur in moments where someone in an audience deeply appre-
ciates the inherent quality of an artwork, it can occur on the basis
of repetitive practices of shaping emotional knowledge such as in the
context of religious ritual, or it can take place by cultivating a specific
relationship between art practices and the senses that is unorthodox
and yet unheard of.
As exemplified in Jill Bennett’s work mentioned earlier, the turn
to affect as a modality to relate between the artwork and recipient as
an understanding of suffering that is different from its realist impres-
sion or representation has also led, as we have already mentioned,
art and literary theorists to theorize the shift from representation to
viscerality, embodied experience, and practices of estrangement. Con-
temporary “trauma art” in particular is not postulated as a “vehicle
for the interpersonal transmission of experience.” Rather, it is seen as
offering possibilities to encounter emotional landscapes that “emerge
from a direct engagement with sensation as it is registered in the work”
(Bennett 2005, 7, emphasis added).
Kurasawa’s “phenomenological intensification,” as a process of ori-
enting oneself to artworks that force the interpreter into positions
where his or her privileged means of access is shaken up, aims at iden-
tifying a similar engagement. Indeed, “critical practices of visuality”
cannot be thought of without this reconsideration of emotional rup-
tures, insofar as the “encountered sign” necessarily conflates the
feeling with those of interpretation and critique. Such subtle shifts
from the more clearly discernible emotional categories of empathy,
compassion, or catharsis—all of which tend to imply the idea of
a particular and critical agent—to more fluid forms and processes
through which affect works within and between bodies and artworks
are important to reckon with.
In fact, Sianne Ngai’s (2005) suggestion to use the terms emotion
and affect “more or less interchangeably” might serve us well, as
Introduction 13
she does clearly acknowledge that “affects are less formed and struc-
tured than emotions, but not lacking form or structure altogether;
less ‘sociolinguistically fixed’, but by no means code-free or meaning-
less; less ‘organized in response to our interpretations of situations’,
but by no means entirely devoid of organization or diagnostic pow-
ers” (Ngai 2005, 27, emphases in original). Either way, the chapters
force us to reckon with the importance of affect and emotions in the
(non)formalized and (non)institutionalized modes of artistic practices
inside and outside of the Western art institution. They circumscribe
social fields and cultural arenas where art blurs with everyday life, and
where we begin to see not only the dynamics of how affect and emo-
tions circulate in the public domain but also of how they are registered
by audiences, that is, how and to whom they become recognizable and
intelligible.
For a considerable time now, performance theory has highlighted
the dynamics between art and reception by also pushing the bound-
aries between artist and audience interactions. A key example of
projects on suffering and violence that implicate audiences in posi-
tions of compromised distance and emotional proximity is the work
by Marina Abramović, which has had a lasting impact on the con-
temporary art scene (Fischer-Lichte 2008). Abramović’s performances
exacerbate the relationship that exists between the performance scene,
the exhibited artist’s body, and the audience in compelling us to reflect
on the embodiment of violence in that relation, as well as on the
defiant position that the artist creates vis-à-vis reality in constantly
reassessing the relationship between the tolerable/intolerable in its
strong resonance with politics.
Whereas dramatic performances such as those of Abramović are
openly defiant or constantly subversive of cultural appropriations,
Pasqualino’s work on the Cuban Palo Monte and the use of voice
in flamenco work assumes a high degree of conformity in relation
to understandings of “innate suffering” in particular song genres
and their vocalization. Pasqualino’s work situates the intensifying
and externalizing power of particular voices in positions of social
marginality. These positions are defined by ideologically charged lega-
cies of social and political exclusion and continuing forms of political
oppression of the Roma in the European context. The affects that
come to the fore through the embodied voice of Gypsy song are
those of an excruciating pain and intensity that remain closely inter-
laced with the ways in which the genre is performed and evaluated.
Yet Pasqualino also draws attention to the modulation and circula-
tion of the voice between bodies. The back-and-forth movement of
the voice captures something that moves us beyond or outside of
the immediate frame of the highly visible reality of social marginal-

ization and exclusion. Pasqualino points at the complexity of suffering
in these art practices that result from a continuous circularity between
what is regarded by participants as the transcendent quality of voice,
which is based on spiritual registers, and the immanent forms of suf-
fering, which convey the density of affect brought to the fore only by
a particular performer’s voice.
Pasqualino’s text requires therefore a reading strategy that under-
stands the relation to symbols and idioms not simply as assimilative
gestures on the part of the subaltern, but one that is sensitive to
the nuances of song production and perception that evade the grasp
of straightforward rationality and intelligibility. In referring to the
“underneath sensations,” Pasqualino charts out webs of affective cir-
culation in which matter, life, and artistic work intersect. This is one
example where we can grasp that a singular focus on the agency
question (Gell 1998) would be entirely limiting.
Like Pasqualino, Casey is also interested in theorizing the circu-
lation of affects, yet she does so from a very different theoretical
angle. Embedding her work in an anthropological tradition that is
best associated with Michael Taussig’s Mimesis and Alterity (1993)
and a range of other postcolonial anthropologists who have theorized
the performative aspects of power and resistance in the postcolony
(e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 1999; Mbembe 2001), Casey investi-
gates how popular forms of cultural expression encapsulate a “politics
of the occult.” Casey draws attention to how “affective sensorial
experiences” become deeply interlaced with everyday aesthetics and
postcolonial art in Nigeria. She demonstrates how these art forms
become productive of self-other relations in Nigerian society, and also
situates—to use Heinich’s term in her chapter—the different values
scales people use to make sense of these artworks in the emerging
context of religious conflict and new religious movements. In doing
so, Casey draws attention to aesthetic sensibilities and how these
become responsive to emergent forms of the social associated with
relations of subjugation, uncertainty, and danger. With this focus on
the uncertain, she achieves a twofold objective: to highlight how a
society’s emotive institutions have powerful social implications and
to capture the changing dynamics and instabilities by which art-
works not only mediate different cultural flows through different
media (e.g., ritual, Nollywood cinema, religious discourse, and dance)
but also effect their politicization. Thus, Casey’s chapter reminds
us how communicative aspects of art could be embedded within
the recapitulation of an affective quality of the art and how the
Introduction 15
latter is strongly articulated with spirituality, the political, and the

everyday.
Unfoldings of the Ordinary

As discussed in the previous two sections, the chapters in this volume
explore contemporary practices and politics of visuality, emotion, and
affect. In this section, we want to add a third analytic by referring to
the ordinary. Up until here, we have evoked the ordinary mainly as a
way in which everyday experiences of suffering unfold and the form
in which they are expressed. However, rather than just seeing it as a
descriptive category or a mirror against which art deploys itself, we fol-
low here a number of sociologists and anthropologists who suggest a
different direction of approaching the phenomenal quality of ordinary
spaces, sites, and experiences. This literature has led to a new under-
standing of the ordinary. Similarly, we consider the ordinary here to
be more than just a heuristic device that would allow us to reflect
on putatively insignificant practices. Rather, we also recognize it as a
“stumbling block” or inquiry into ways of reflecting about “life” in
the face of suffering.
In fact, what does it mean to say someone suffers in the ordinary
when suffering has been generally conceived of as an extraordinary
experience in an extraordinary moment? As we have argued earlier
in this introduction, the reference to the extraordinary has certainly
contributed to seeking out art as a specialized field of expressing and
articulating this extraordinariness. What the chapters in this book try
to capture instead concerns the thin line demarcating art from what
is not art, and how in negotiating this thin line, artists orient, create,
and produce artistic artifacts and aesthetic modalities that are read by
others in their significance to “speak” suffering. Moreover, with the
inclusion of the ordinary, we conceptualize suffering in “flat” daily-life
situations and their simultaneous aesthetic translation in everyday acts,
or their transference into more specifically designed art expressions.
There has been, of course, a long-standing interest in the practices
of everyday life and popular culture, which, in the wake of the for-
mative works by Antonio Gramsci, Michel de Certeau (1990), and
many other authors, produced a large body of literature on the rela-
tionship between the dominant and popular cultures. However, with
the focus on the ordinary, we want to highlight a somewhat different
idea. Interestingly, we see in de Certeau’s Cultures populaires (1990,
33ff.) an injunction against overemphasizing aesthetic expressions—in
his case the reference is to Amazon Indians—as an effective resistance
to domination. His analysis stresses the tactical moves that speak to the
instantaneity of the everyday’s poesis and to momentarily situated pro-
duction of aesthetic forms at the social margin. De Certeau highlights
the occasional and uncertain temporalities in which they are produced.
As other work in the framework of subaltern and postcolonial the-
ory has suggested, the vernacular and its culturally specific modalities
of fictionalization help to limit these uncertainties in ways in which
the broader discursive effects acquire a graspable form and force,
and thus become intelligible or at least imaginable to local audiences
and publics. What do these cultural expressions consist of? Do they
stipulate the “zombification” of everyday spaces in the postcolony
(Comaroff and Comaroff 1999) or do they appear as sites in which
locally experienced ways of suffering find their form and articulation?
This latter question remains open.
As we consider these tactics of popular art, we need to be cautious
about how we delineate the relationship between art genres and the
experience of suffering in the ordinary. Veena Das (2007) has theo-
rized this issue in her Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into
the Ordinary. For Das, the ordinary is problematized in relation to
the ways those who suffer from violence are required to reinhabit the
spaces of devastation. The notion of reinhabiting the everyday sites
of devastation in the aftermath of violence also shows the continuities
that exist between routine and exceptional forms of violence. And it
is here too that we can fathom a different way of capturing the limits
between the individual and the (forces of) culture.
It might be argued that our focus on art and the ordinary moves
us slightly away from these ideas on severed links and lives to be
recovered to terrains of more distanced mediation that seemingly
allow the reader a more hopeful, though not necessarily less agoniz-
ing encounter. Thus, Hadj-Moussa’s chapter on Algerian films shows
that while the civil war and postwar films initially seem to evade the
question of suffering, they in fact convey the central role of fear
and stillness in the ordinary, and the suffering and harm that are
produced by the nonrecognition of people’s daily experiences and
memories. The pervasive and systematic enforcement of monumental
history in the Algerian context is the ideological baggage with which
these films struggle. Cinema—which is considered to be a minor art
form in Algeria—becomes an important site where individual experi-
ences confront the violence of the Algerian historical conception and
the everyday stillness and sense of abandonment it produces. Hadj-
Moussa is reading this through the lens of the sexed citizen, as the
films essentially show the continuity of the muting and absence of
Introduction 17
men from the heydays of monumentality (1962 to the 1980s) to the

civil war (1992–1999). By projecting women as the “default narra-
tors” of daily life (some fraught by fear and violence) or by forcing
them to confinement and marginalization, those films also show in a
rather subtle way how women partially and often dangerously depart
from monumentality, thus producing other ways of sensing, being,
and experimenting on an everyday basis.
Similar to the aesthetic constellation around rasa categories in
Chatterji’s work, which links together image sound and affect,
Nijhawan and Schultz explore the image-sound combination as they
are daily performed by Sikh and Indo-Caribbean youth in their respec-
tive quest to make sense of “past” suffering from the perspective of
next generations. They show the disjuncture in everyday youth per-
formances in relation to the temporality of past suffering and the
ways it feeds into everyday practices within differently positioned
diasporic ways of being. Their quest strongly echoes Jewsiewicki’s
palimpsest model in feverishly mobilizing (nostalgic) images and songs
that reconnect them and establish their presence as a legitimate one in
the Americas. In evoking past suffering through their daily manipula-
tion of the Internet, they reinstate the signs that have been silenced,
ignored, or used against them through the politics of assimilation.
While their motivations are lodged in the ordinary, they show their
capacity to produce aesthetical moments when their political claims
are not always explicitly at the forefront. One might argue that a
new transnational politics of aesthetics is emerging within these youth-
driven cultural productions: one that relies on the private space, which
allows at once to speak about suffering but also to withdraw from it.
Social suffering, as the result of configurations of power in late
modernity, leads to forms of social injustice that have profound effects
on everydayness and the ordinary. In that regard, the ordinary unfolds
very close to the discourse on rights, the good, and the just, and it is
thus conducive to critique. This discourse is not always articulated
in organized public claims, but often interrupts into and within the
normalized social space of everyday relations, in the form of theatri-
cal asides in conversations, tears when the voice fails to say things
(Pasqualino), or screams and even madness.
Although it might look like a heretic gesture on our part, we would
like to relate what we discussed above to a few arguments that have
been developed in the “sociology of the critique,”6 as a way to discuss
another discrete moment of the ordinary in its intersections with art
forms on the one hand, and the deployment of critique in the public
on the other.
In his recent book on critique, Boltanski (2009) suggests that soci-

ology needs to integrate the ordinary as a formidable potential site
of critique. Without everyday acts and the ordinary, and the expe-
riences that they allow for, there is in fact no possibility for social
critique. More importantly, he points out that ordinary critique lies
on a fundamental understanding of the idea of justice (Boltanski
2009, 61). The concretization of ordinary critique—that is, its poten-
tial for social and political change—is based on the aggregation of
“small critiques” that coalesce together to present the vision of a
(new) common good. The notion of justice is thus deployed as an
intensity scale (“échelle de grandeur”) by which a regime of truth is
either accepted or dismantled. Heinich’s chapter touches upon pre-
cisely this understanding of the ordinary as critique and its inflections
through three case studies that involve contemporary art and the
use or abuse of animals. Heinich adopts a descriptive analysis that
privileges the forms and the contents that these performances and
exhibitions produce within the public. Her overall intention is to
restore commonsense concepts in instances where there is an obvious
conflict over the very question of whether a particular object con-
stitutes art or not. She uses “value registers” (“registres de valeurs”)
to pragmatically analyze public reactions, which in turn become
critical assessments of art forms. As such, she is able to show in
her examples of suffering of animals that the central debate is not
one of values alone but of value registers, which “presents opposing
opinions as well as opposing axiological frameworks in which these
opinions take on their meaning.” Although Heinich does not explic-
itly note this in her text, a certain idea of the just and the right
emerges from the description of the rejection of these art exhibi-
tions by commonsense critique and everyday mobilization of value
registers.
The chapters by Nijhawan and Schultz, Hadj-Moussa, and Heinich
thus all address the everydayness and the ordinary in specific art
forms’ modalities. Cinema is perhaps a privileged mode of expression
whereby the everyday experience of suffering is “naturally” given, due
to the expressive capacity of the cinematic apparatus through tech-
niques of narration, iconic representations (pauses, still shots, dark
screens, large-scale shots of poor neighborhoods or small confined
interior spaces), and sound presentations (musical genres, silence and
silent characters, everyday street sounds, screams, etc.). For Heinich
too, ordinary experience is crucial as the primary grounds from
which perceptions of cruelty emerge. In turn, these ordinary per-
ceptions produce revulsion among the audience of contemporary
Introduction 19
art—hinting surreptitiously to a novel sensibility and the new domain

of “animal rights.” For Nijhawan and Schultz, ordinariness needs to
be reconstructed while it appears more in fragments at the juncture
of formal painting, Web video artifacts, and musical genres inspired
by the rasa theory of emotions and affect. Their case study is specific,
in that it shows how the past comes to the surface of contemporary
diasporic formations. Indeed, while in Hadj-Moussa’s text the past
“escapes” (is avoided) because of the imposition of monumentality
over everyday life, in Nijhawan and Schultz’s text the past is entan-
gled in the everyday. It is the thread by which the everyday and the
ordinary are brought forward and together. It is the everyday of the
diasporic ancestors who help to forge the claims of the present and
to authenticate them, transforming a daily youth aesthetic experience
into a re-elaboration of history and historical events. In that sense, the
Web videos and the paintings are archival critiques at the juncture of
small and ignored past acts, and claims for the right of presence and
the right of existence.
Concluding Remarks
We hope to have shown in this introduction how sociology, anthro-
pology, and history have broadened our understanding of suffering
in art. Notwithstanding their specific interests and unique angles,
the contributors in this volume entered the conversation on suffer-
ing in art with a shared commitment to search for new formulations
and possible transformations of our quotidian perceptions and polit-
ical apprehensions of art and suffering. Yet, having presented these
theoretical developments, the question that scholars, artists, and the
recipients of art are daily confronted with remains: what constellation
of voice, sound, or image could possibly approximate the subjective
realms of suffering or translate the social experiences of powerless-
ness, loss, and recovery? The question persists despite our attempts to
approach it from many different perspectives and ethnographic sites.
In this book we have also pursued, we believe, a rich description of
select forms of arts and aesthetics whose specificity leads to a rethink-
ing of canonical works referenced in much of Western art history and
philosophy. Admittedly, we may have asked more questions than pro-
vided final answers about how to read and write about the visual,
affective, and everyday ways in which suffering is registered in art,
especially so when the cultural grammars are adjacent to those of the
West. However, we hope that this volume raises a genuine interest in
further inquiries.
Notes
1. Pierre Bourdieu, to name one prominent example in sociology, referred
to the realist style in his The Weight of the World in open defiance of a
literary style that would aestheticize the suffering of individuals.
2. For more insights on this artist’s work, see Bennett (1998).
3. Fernando Botero is known for the joyful and playful paintings besides
his important work on Colombian (para)military and Abu Ghraib
tortures.
4. Although Bourdieu is aware that art is a complete social arena and is
indebted to the “forces of the field,” his sociology distances itself from
common sense. In contrast, Heinich views the latter as a starting point,
which implies that values that are given to an artifact do not exist in
some sort of evanescent world ready to be picked up, but are effective
because they are used and in use.
5. Mirzoeff (2011, 34) identifies several complexes of visuality.
6. The “sociology of critique” is the trend that recently emerged in
sociology under the lead of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot.
References
Aubert, Nicole and Haroche, Claudine (eds.). “Être visible pour exister:
l’injonction à la visibilité.” In Les Tyrannies de la visibilité. Être visible pour
exister?, edited by Nicole Aubert and Claudine Haroche, 7–22. Toulouse:
Érès, 2011.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacres et simulation. Paris: Gallilée, 1985.
Bennett, Gordon. “Artwork.” 1998. http://visualarts.qld.gov.au/apt3/
artists/artist_bios/gordon_bennett_a.htm (accessed March 6, 2014).
Bennett, Jill. Empathic Vision. Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art.
Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Boltanski, Luc. Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Boltanski, Luc. De la critique. Précis de sociologie de l’émancipation. Paris:
Gallimard, 2009.
Bourdieu, Pierre. La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Minuit,
1979.
Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic.” Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46 (1987): 201–210.
Bourdieu, Pierre (ed.). La misère du monde. Paris: Seuil, 1993 (English: The
Weight of the World. Social Suffering in the Contemporary World, trans-
lated by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson and others. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1999).
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence.
London & New York: Verso, 2004.
Introduction 21
Chow, Rey. Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture. Durham,

NC, & London: Duke University Press, 2012.
Comaroff, John and Comaroff, Jean. “Occult Economies and the Violence of
Abstraction: Notes from the African Postcolony.” American Ethnologist 26,
no. 3 (1999): 279–301.
Costello, Diarmuid and Willsdon, Dominic (eds.). The Life and Death of
Images. Ethics and Aesthetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the
Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990.
Das, Veena. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
De Certeau, Michel. L’invention du quotidien. Arts de faire 1. Paris:
Gallimard, 1990.
Ebony, David. Botero. Abu Ghraib. New York: Prestel, 2006.
Eisenman, Stephen F. The Abu Ghraib Effect. London: Reaktion Books,
2007.
Feld, Steven. Sound and Sentiment. Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli
Expression, 3rd edition. Durham, NC, & London: Duke University Press,
2012 [1982].
Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New
Aesthetics. London: Routledge, 2008.
Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1998.
Guerin, Frances and Hallas, Roger (eds.). The Image and the Witness: Trauma,
Memory and Visual Culture. London & New York: Wallflower, 2007.
Hall, Stuart. “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power.” In Modernity.
An Introduction to Modern Societies, edited by Stuart Hall, David Held,
Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson, 185–227. London: Blackwell,
1996.
Halpern, Cynthia. Suffering, Politics, Power. A Genealogy in Modern Political
Theory. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002.
Hirschkind, Charles. The Ethical Soundscape. Cassette Sermons and Islamic
Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
Honneth, Axel. La société du mépris. Vers une nouvelle théorie critique. Paris:
La Découverte, 2006.
Jimenez, Marc. Adorno et la modernité. Vers une esthétique negative. Paris:
Klinsieck, 1986.
Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and
Literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005.
Kleinman, Arthur, Das, Veena, and Lock, Margaret (eds.). Social Suffering.
Laqueur, Thomas W. “Botero and the Art History of Suffering.” In Art
and Violence, edited by Thomas W. Laqueur and Francine Masiello, 1–10.
Berkeley: Center for Latin American Studies Working Papers, University of
California at Berkeley, 2007.
Layton, Robert. “Art and Agency: A Reassessment.” Journal of the Royal

Anthropological Institute 9, no. 3 (2003): 447–464.
Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001.
Meek, Allan. Trauma and Media: Theories, Histories, and Images. New York:
Routledge, 2009.
Menke, Christoph. The Sovereignty of Art. Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and
Derrida, translated by Neil Solomon. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
1998.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look. A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham,
NC, & London: Duke University Press, 2011.
Mubi Brighenti, Andrea. Visibility in Social Theory and Social Research.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Pinney, Christopher and Thomas, Nicolas. Beyond Aesthetics: Art and the
Technology of Enchantment. Oxford: Berg Publications, 2001.
Rancière, Jacques. Le partage du sensible. Esthétique et politique. Paris: La
Fabrique, 2000 (English: The Politics of Aesthetics. The Distribution of the
Sensible, translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London & New York: Continuum,
2004).
Rancière, Jacques. Malaise dans l’esthétique. Paris: Galilée, 2004.
Rancière, Jacques. Le spectateur émancipé. Paris: La Fabrique, 2008.
Ray, Gene. Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory. From Auschwitz
to Hiroshima to September 11. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Ray, Gene. “From Trauma and the Sublime to Radical Critique.” Third Text
23, no. 2 (2009): 135–149.
Seremetakis, Nadia. The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material
Culture in Modernity. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994.
Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses.
New York: Routledge, 1993.
Wilkinson, Iain. Suffering: A Sociological Introduction. Cambridge, UK, &
Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005.
Chapter 1
In Praise of Ambiguity: On the

V i s ua l E c o n o m y o f D i s t a n t
Suffering
Fuyuki Kurasawa
In the first part of his remarkable Histoire(s) du cinéma, Jean-Luc

Godard comments that Second World War newsreels returned a cer-
tain lost dignity to filmmaking because their restrained realism did not
make suffering into a star (Godard 1998, 121). Casting a glance back
at that epoch, contemporary audiences cannot help but be struck—as
Godard was—by the mutual dependence between the quaint visual
timidity and the explosive iconographic power of these newsreels,
which documented the horrors unfolding in Europe without falling
into the pornographic excesses of much present-day representations
of disasters from around the world. Today, suffering is nothing if not
a star in visual material, but such stardom has been achieved at the
cost of emptying the former condition of substance and effectiveness
in the public sphere, by mediatizing it to the point of overexposure
and clichéd banality. How, then, are we going to counter the further
conversion of suffering into spectacle, so that images of grave crises
occurring in the global South can retain—or perhaps acquire in the
first place—a political and normative capacity to inform citizens and
mobilize public opinion? In other words, how can the visual repre-
sentation of distant suffering be incorporated into a critique of the
existing world order, rather than becoming trivial objects or simple
commodities?
24 F u y u k i Ku r a s awa
In order to try to respond to this problem, this chapter is orga-

nized in three parts. It begins by proposing an analytical model of
what I term the visual economy of distant suffering, which includes
both an iconographic dimension (the symbolic structure of the image)
and its institutional counterpart (the networks of circulation of the
image). After discussing the perils of saturation and spectacularization
that plague the reception of visual material about distant suffering
in our age, the second part of the chapter considers the potential of
visual ambiguity to interrupt these common processes and thereby act
as a catalyst for different forms of engagement with images. However,
since ambiguity is incomplete and politically indeterminate in itself,
the last section examines two interpretive practices of the visual, phe-
nomenological intensification and structuralist expansion, which can
sustain critical reflection on the experience of distant suffering and its
systemic causes.
Before moving on, a few terminological specifications should be
put forth. Throughout the chapter, I employ the notion of a “visual
economy” (Poole 1997, 8–11) to designate the distribution and cir-
culation of relations of power that produce and organize a specific
socio-visual field, resulting in a historically established system of rep-
resentational conventions and typifications consistently reproduced in
images of similar events or situations. A visual economy is composed
of two mutually constitutive dimensions, the iconographic and the
institutional.1 In the first instance, an economy of visuality includes an
ensemble of iconographic tropes and patterns that configure images
and frame their interpretation, a sociopolitically constructed sym-
bolic structure that accounts for representations’ indexical qualities
and generates their range of meanings. Second, this iconography
functions within a visual economy’s institutional aspect, which des-
ignates the networks of social actors and organizations through which
images circulate, in both their production and reception. In analytical
terms, the dual nature of an economy of visuality signifies that nei-
ther iconographic nor institutional dimension determines the other,
but, just as importantly, that neither operates independently of the
other nor can be understood apart from the other. Succinctly put,
the symbolic structure of images affects how, where, and to what
extent they circulate, while their circulation affects how producers
aim to create a symbolic structure and viewers make sense of the
latter.2 Another phrase used in this chapter is “distant suffering,”
which refers to instances of mass and extreme situational and struc-
tural violence perpetrated outside of the North Atlantic region (or at
least involving non-Euro-American subjects) and visually represented
O n t h e Vi s ua l E c o n o m y o f D i s ta n t S u f f e r i n g 25
via the media; it includes various humanitarian crises in the global

South, from genocides and famines to chronic poverty and epidemics
(Boltanski 1993). Accordingly, the set of representational tropes and
institutional relations that constitute and supply meaning to images
of humanitarian crises can be termed the visual economy of distant
suffering.
Unpacking the Visual Economy of Distant

Suffering
While it would be well beyond the scope and purpose of this chapter
to provide a detailed history of how suffering has been portrayed in
Euro-American art, there is little doubt that contemporary images of
distant suffering in the Western media extensively and freely draw
upon a representational template composed of visual tropes created
and reproduced over the course of centuries. Among the best-known
epochal landmarks in this respect would be ancient Greek and Roman
sculpture, Byzantine iconic painting, as well as the visual arts of the
Northwestern European Renaissance, all of which concentrate on rep-
resenting the suffering of divine, noble, or heroic beings. In particular,
depictions of what are designated in Christianity as the “stations of
the cross” and “the passion of Christ”—the final stages of Jesus’ life
and, most importantly for our purposes, the moment of his crucifixion
and that of his dead body’s removal from the cross—have produced
symbolic typifications that recur in the visual economy of distant suf-
fering to this day.3 Perhaps the most influential of these icons is La
Pietà (the scene of Mary cradling Jesus’s dead body),4 whose visual
conventions continue to impact how images of suffering, whether dis-
tant or proximate, are produced and received in our age. Indeed,
the Pietà’s symbolic structure is repeated in numerous salient pho-
tographs from the past few decades: a 1992 Benetton advertising
campaign that used an image of David Kirby, a US AIDS activist, on
his deathbed surrounded by family members5 ; a photograph of Oum
Saâd, a woman in the throes of anguish in the aftermath of a massacre
of civilians in Bentalha, Algeria, on September 23, 1997 (designated as
the “Algerian Madonna” or the “Madonna of Bentalha” by the Euro-
American press);6 a September 11, 2001, picture of Mychal Judge, a
Catholic priest whose lifeless body is being carried out of the World
Trade Center in New York City by emergency responders (which has
been dubbed an “American Pietà”); and an image by the celebrated
photojournalist James Nachtwey of a young man being tended to
by an older woman in Darfur, Sudan, during the genocide, which
was published on the cover of the October 4, 2004, issue of Time

magazine. The striking resemblances between these four photographs
are not simply coincidental or a matter of elective affinity between
them. On the contrary, the Pietà and other foundational icons of
suffering possess an indexical quality inscribed in the visual tropes
and formal conventions that they contain, a symbolic repertoire that
functions at two levels of the circulation of images: producers of the
latter (such as photojournalists, documentary filmmakers, and photo
or film editors) consistently draw upon this repertoire when captur-
ing or framing humanitarian crises, and audiences refer to it when
viewing such images because it provides them with a set of familiar
symbols with which to help make sense of what and who is being
represented.7
Returning to a point made above, then, the visual economy of dis-
tant suffering is comprised of an iconographic dimension, a symbolic
structure that includes situational components (the roles of subjects
and functions of objects in relation to the situation or event being
represented), as well as formal, compositional elements (the positions
of subjects in the frame and in relation to each other). This can best
be summarized through Figure 1.1.
Beginning at the center of the figure, images of distant suffering
represent and contribute to the sociopolitical constitution of a spe-
cific situation or event designated as a humanitarian crisis, which is
itself contextualized and given form through an iconography of suf-
fering freely and selectively referencing symbolic motifs in the history
Environment
(Perpetrators) (Aid workers)
S5
S2
S6 S3
Situation
“Victims” S1
or event (Producers)
S4
S7
(Others: kin,
bystanders) Iconography
of suffering
Figure 1.1 The symbolic structure of the image (Kurasawa)

of Western visuality (e.g., La Pietà or the Holocaust) and recognized

visual conventions of a large-scale disaster (mounds of dead bodies,
destroyed buildings, an arid landscape, etc.). Such representations
depict subjects ascribed certain positions and playing distinct roles
that visually construct an emergency situation. Foremost among these
are “victims” (whether dead or surviving, and, more often than
not, symbolically racialized and gendered figures), who are indis-
pensable components of this visual economy; without them, such
a crisis is unrepresented because invisible in Euro-American public
spheres while becoming unrepresentable because lacking a conven-
tional iconographic structure. While not necessarily present in, and
thus less significant to, this iconographic structure—which is why
Figure 1.1 includes them in parentheses—other positions and roles
exist in images of distant suffering: perpetrators of situational or struc-
tural violence are sometimes portrayed, as are emergency aid workers
(especially in the case of photographs or video footage produced
and/or used by Western nongovernmental organizations), victims’
kin or friends, and “third-party” bystanders. I have also incorporated
eyewitnesses who produce images of distant suffering (such as pho-
tojournalists and documentary filmmakers) into the figure, for while
they are not necessarily visible in the frame, subjects cannot but be
reflexive about being filmed or photographed in an age where visual
recording devices have become ubiquitous globally. Perpetrators of
forms of mass violence, for instance, may want to avoid being caught
in the act or, alternatively, may view this possibility—and the attendant
publicizing of their cause globally—as a catalyst to carry out atrocities;
the camera’s presence is a major representational factor. Hence, we
should consider those who visually depict scenes of distant suffering
as integral to these images’ symbolic structure rather than outside of
or peripheral to it.
Continuing with Figure 1.1, the roles represented in the image are
linked to each other and to the situation or event via a vast field of sym-
bols, which take the form of visual metaphors or metonyms (figuration
and shape of bodies, facial expressions, clothing, objects, etc.). As pre-
viously suggested, two kinds of symbols exist: situational symbols
(S1–S4) construct meaning by indicating social actors’ contrasting
relationships to the humanitarian crisis being portrayed (including
the natural or human-built environment), whereas compositional
symbols (S5–S7) produce meaning by suggesting the contrasting posi-
tions and roles of these actors in relation to one another (so that
a particular position or role is attributed in opposition to all the
others in the image). The relations between situational and compo-

sitional symbols, as well as among those of the same kind, undergird
the symbolic structure of visual representations of distant suffering.
In addition, this structure is what explains how and why viewers of
images associate subjects with specific roles, as the situational and
compositional symbols relate these subjects to the situation or event
and the other actors portrayed in the visual frame. We can thus speak
of visual typifications for each role, which contains a set of con-
ventions that, given their centrality to the humanitarian imaginary,
tend to be consistently present: “victims” are depicted as powerless,
innocent, and afflicted by physical, mental, and/or emotional pain;
aid workers are depicted as compassionate or heroically assiduous in
their rescue efforts; and so on. What results, then, on the part of
producers and audiences alike, is a phenomenon akin to typecast-
ing for cinematic actors, given that particular symbols are exclusively
associated with certain roles and that representational clichés pro-
liferate. Visual subjects must conform to established types in order
to be recognized in specific roles, and going against type becomes
impossible.8
To qualify what might appear as the rigidly structuralist stance of
this iconographic model, I want to make three remarks about it. In
the first instance, the model is intended to be diachronic rather than
synchronic, since it integrates possible transformations in the image’s
symbolic structure over time as new components are added and exist-
ing ones are either modified or disappears. Second, the model is
based on a principle of similarity or general correspondence instead
of identity among cases. Not all elements of Figure 1.1 are present in
every image of distant suffering—which is why some components are
placed in parentheses—and some variations across cases occur. Nev-
ertheless, the core symbolic structure (which consists of the event or
situation, “victims,” the iconography of suffering, the sociocultural or
natural environment, and the situational and compositional symbols)
is found in virtually all visual representations of humanitarian crises.
Third, unlike structuralist strands of semiotics, I do not believe that
this symbolic structure reveals a single, buried code to be unearthed
and deciphered. Instead, the model proposed here is grounded in
hermeneutically based practices of visual sense-making and thereby
underline the multiplicity of possible interpretations of an image as
well as its inherently contested meaning.
Although less significant for this chapter, the institutional dimen-
sion of the visual economy of distant suffering can be explained via
Figure 1.2:
Levels Actors
Reception Informal Formal

audiences audiences
Representation Carrier
Media
groups
“Victims”
Event or Aid workers
Perpetrators
situation Producers
Others
Figure 1.2 The circulation of the image (Kurasawa)
From the outset, I want to note that the organizational networks

of circulation of the image are growing ever tighter and increasingly
intertwined, to the extent that the distinctions between the three levels
noted here are much more heuristic than temporal in nature. That is
to say that, in the era of live, instantaneous broadcasts of still or mov-
ing images via smartphones and webcams with wireless Internet, little
or no delay exists between the moment of occurrence of a humani-
tarian crisis, its representation by various parties, and its reception by
audiences around the world. If, for analytical purposes, we begin from
the bottom of the figure, the first level (that of the event or situa-
tion itself) requires little explanation in light of its correspondence to
the actors described in the previous figure. The institutional aspects
of the intermediate level of the image’s circulation, that of the repre-
sentation of the event or situation, warrant mention because of their
indispensable role in the diffusion of visual depictions of moments
of distant suffering beyond the place where they occurred. Whether
through print, televised, or electronic coverage of humanitarian crises,
media organizations are obvious actors in this respect. Yet, increas-
ingly, such depictions are also entering public spheres through the
work of carrier groups in global civil society, notably nongovernmen-
tal organizations lending assistance to survivors of a large-scale disaster
and social movements supporting these survivors and advocating on
their behalf. Carrier groups directly represent a humanitarian crisis
to audiences by broadcasting images of it via their own publications

and websites,9 and they do so indirectly, shaping media portrayals of
such a crisis by providing television reporters, documentary filmmak-
ers, and photojournalists with their own footage and photographs or
with access to the sites where the operate (such as refugee camps and
feeding centers). Finally, the reception of images completes the cir-
cuit of circulation, as representational actors aim to disseminate their
visual material to informal audiences (groups and persons in national
and global civil societies as well as citizens in public spheres) and their
formal, officially recognized counterparts (national governments and
international organizations).
According to the framework proposed here, reception cannot be
reduced to a process whereby these audiences passively view images of
distant suffering transmitted to them by the media or carrier groups,
nor is it akin to the task of deciphering whatever single semiotic code
these images are supposed to contain. Instead, seeing these images
consists of a complex, multilayered set of practices of visual interpre-
tation that audiences perform. As I have already noted, the latter give
an image meaning by working to make sense of, and being influenced
by, its formal symbolic structure—including the historical iconogra-
phy of suffering. At the same time, viewers’ perceptions of represented
situations and subjects are far from being determined by this sym-
bolic structure, since their interpretive practices are equally shaped
by their lifeworlds (notably their past experiences and value systems)
as well as by the sociocultural characteristics of the groups to which
they belong (gender, nationality, class, age, etc.). Moreover, funda-
mentally, visual material about an instance of distant suffering can
only have significance for audiences—and thus mean something to
them—if a process of “symbolic extension” (Alexander 2003, 59)
takes place, whereby they come to identify with the victims being
portrayed (through partial transposition) or, minimally, experience a
sense of empathy for them (through the triggering of the moral imag-
ination). In visual terms, this kind of extension is made possible by
the functioning of symbolic substitution, that is to say the extent to
which different audiences take the victims in an image to stand for
iconic representatives of human suffering as well as believe that the sit-
uational and compositional symbols it contains are metaphorically or
metonymically emblematic of relations of power and structural forces
deemed to be unjust. In other words, members of publics in vari-
ous societies become engaged by visual portrayals of humanitarian
crises if they place these portrayals and their formal elements within
the symbolic context of a general repertoire of politically or morally
abhorrent acts (sexual violence, structural injustices, crimes against

humanity, etc.).
Instead of being considered a uniform mass, viewers must be dif-
ferentiated by their widely varying degrees and kinds of engagement
with images of distant suffering. Some may act as visual passersby,
who merely see such images without responding to them to any sig-
nificant extent, while others may become concerned audiences, who
ethically and politically reflect upon these same images. The consti-
tution of engaged publics is itself dependent upon several factors.
Among the most significant social determinants would be the spa-
tial and temporal settings within which reception occurs (at home or
in a public venue, in the midst of workday or during a moment of
solitary contemplation, etc.), as well as the levels of intersubjectivity
implicated in viewership (e.g., is it taking place as part of a pub-
lic act, or is it accompanied by public discussion and debate?). Also
accounting for the creation of engaged audiences are subjective fac-
tors such as familiarity with and interest in global affairs, biographical
experiences (which can ease or obscure a sense of identification with
represented “victims”), and ethno-cultural background (with a greater
sense of responsibility for suffering by people of a shared national-
ity or ethnicity). At the same time, we need to consider how the
iconic power of certain images contributes to the constitution of their
own publics, for it asserts that all viewers are potentially interpellated
by these representations; still and moving images have emotional,
normative, or political “agency” in the sense that they can—under
given circumstances—provoke shock, outrage, or shame among view-
ers. Interpellation is only a possibility, yet one whose occurrence and
effects are unpredictable.
The Traps of Iconographic Power and the Catalyst

of Ambiguity
The iconographic and institutional structures of the visual economy of
distant suffering explained above do not determine images’ sociopo-
litical impact. Indeed, within visual studies, considerable debate exists
regarding the actual effectiveness of such images in mobilizing pub-
lic opinion and political decision-makers, notably with regard to two
phenomena that put into question the power of images: saturation
and spectacularization. Today, the sheer ubiquity and speed of circula-
tion of visual material about distant suffering in Euro-American public
spheres are such that the latter have, arguably, become saturated to the
point that ordinary citizens are bombarded with this visual material on
a daily basis. Hence, overexposure can be combined with the incessant

repetition of predictable representational patterns, which transforms
images of humanitarian crises into iconographic clichés sapped of nor-
mative or political force. Habitualization leads to banality of distant
suffering and, in turn, to “compassion fatigue” (Moeller 1999, 2),
audiences’ indifference, or callousness in the face of large-scale dis-
asters stemming from their encounters with recurrent and formulaic
images that fail to evoke any response, let alone sense of responsibility
(Kleinman and Kleinman 1997, 8–9).
Aside from saturation, the other frequently cited critique of the
effectiveness of the visual economy of distant suffering on audiences is
captured by the notion of spectacularization, that is to say the trans-
formation of the social into an ensemble of spectacles (Debord 1992
[1967]). More often than not, the media and carrier groups visu-
ally domesticate the uncanniness and horror of humanitarian crises by
converting them into a spectacle that is experientially thin (because
it gives little sense of the lifeworlds of represented subjects) and
contextually narrow (because it provides no account of the struc-
tural forces underpinning the events being depicted). Furthermore,
a spectacle of distant suffering is an aestheticized visual object, one
that viewers allegedly value or engage with strictly as a thing of
beauty whose formal qualities (composition, lighting, editing, etc.)
overshadow reflection on the need to react to the injustices cap-
tured on camera; audiences may only respond to the splendor of the
scenery in a shot or footage, or to its compositional balance (which
partly explains the reoccurrence of the Pietà motif). With a specta-
cle, the image’s purpose and effect is less to illuminate a reality being
represented—and even less to supply understanding of this reality—
than to seduce the lay viewer through “infotainment” (Kleinman and
Kleinman 1997, 1, 11).10
Furthermore, spectacularized images are reduced to the status of
commodities, abstracted from their original context and social cir-
cumstances, trivialized, and converted into pure means of capitalist
exchange by being inserted in a completely different context; visual
use value is completely subsumed under visual exchange value. Surely,
spectacularized commodification of the visual reached one of its high-
est moments of realization in the fall 2008 men’s collection by fashion
designer John Galliano, whose Paris runway show included models
wearing clothing, makeup, and accessories that evoked the now-
infamous and iconic photographs of torture of Iraqi prisoners at the
hands of US military personnel in the Abu Ghraib prison.11 What is
noteworthy in Galliano’s collection is less the fact that he liberally
draws creative inspiration from scenes of sadism and torture in order

to épater la bourgeoisie (shock the bourgeoisie)—which is, after all,
a well-established motif among artistic avant-gardes harkening back
to Sade and, after him, Bataille—than his reflexively amoral use of
images from Abu Ghraib as marketing and sales devices with nary a
political commentary attached to it; in order to gain and retain con-
sumers’ attention in a world replete with representational banalities,
one must visually provoke them. Hence, visual material portraying
suffering has become a commodity. As it spreads, spectacularization
can nurture a pornography of suffering, explicit depictions of victims’
circumstances that are consumed for the entertainment, or perhaps
even the titillation, of materially privileged and physically safe audi-
ences that can thereby vicariously experience situational and structural
violence without leaving the comforts of their own living rooms.
My own position on the effects of the visual economy of distant
suffering is more open ended than either scenarios of utter satura-
tion or spectacularization allow, for categorical portraits of viewers as
morally numb or passive spectators are overdrawn. Hence, at no point
should these critiques, however insightful, prompt us to adopt anti-
representational responses that question the very necessity of visually
depicting humanitarian crises. While the illusion of escaping from the
visual economy of distant suffering is tempting in its simplicity and
appeal to the creation of a representational caesura, it would surely
exacerbate one of the most troubling phenomena of our age: the
ongoing invisibility of many grave injustices and forms of situational
and structural violence in the global South, which remain ignored
or forgotten by the Euro-American media and public. The question,
then, is not whether distant suffering should be represented, but how
this should be done and what effects particular representational strate-
gies have. In other words, what critical modes of visual portrayal
and engagement are possible, modes that would address the perils
of saturation and spectacularization while understanding the signifi-
cance of representing humanitarian crises as a means to inform, alert,
remember, and bear witness?
This is where we should turn to visual ambiguity as a valuable
representational strategy as well as a starting point for a critical
hermeneutics of the image. If interpretive ambiguity is a feature of all
visual material—which always already contains a multiplicity of pos-
sible meanings—certain images greatly accentuate or even embrace
it by juxtaposing seemingly contradictory or incommensurable repre-
sentational realities within the same frame or footage. The outcome
is a disruption and complication of audiences’ customary modes of
seeing, for, when encountering ambiguous representations, viewers

experience a temporary sense of interpretive disorientation derived
from their inability to fall back upon familiar tropes or typified conven-
tions to make sense of what is being depicted on the screen or page.12
Since ambiguous images foster widely diverging understandings of
their content, recognizing their existence enables us to underscore
the extent to which interpretive practices constitute the visual field in
sociocultural terms—that is to say, the embeddedness of these images
in the social relations that undergird visuality, and their being given
meaning within and through specific historical, socioeconomic, and
political settings. While such images can explicitly portray “unfiltered”
scenes of suffering and extreme material deprivation, they differ from
more straightforward representations in their manner of layering and
multiplying iconographic content. They may well contain a visual
indictment of Euro-American responsibility for, or complicity with,
injustices, but not strictly or even principally at the level of literal
communication or primary meaning (Barthes 1982, 43); rather than
being a feature of the image itself (whose normative or political impli-
cations are not self-sufficient), the denunciation of situational and
structural suffering can be generated through practices that lie beyond
the image, through the interpretive labor that ambiguity invites (the
intensification and expansion of the image discussed below).
Returning to Figure 1.1, we can grasp ambiguity as the destabiliza-
tion of the conventional symbolic structure of visual representations
of distant suffering and the possible proliferation of what Barthes
(1982) terms “obtuse meaning.”13 Ambiguous images, then, put into
question or subvert the typified configuration of situational symbols
(S1–S4) by complicating the relationships between actors and the
humanitarian crisis being portrayed, while doing the same for com-
positional symbols (S5–S7) by complicating the relationships between
actors themselves and thus the roles that they occupy.14
To provide a more grounded discussion of visual ambiguity, I want
to introduce two exemplary photographs. These images are selected
not because they are quantitatively “representative” or symbolically
typical of all portrayals of distant suffering, but, instead, because their
very atypical character enables a reflection on alternative modes of
visual engagement—modes that may be relevant not only for strongly
ambiguous photographs, but for photographs of distant suffering in
general. The first one, which was taken by the US photojournalist
Spencer Platt during the Israeli bombing of Lebanon in July and
August 2006, was published in numerous newspapers and magazines
around the world, and selected as the 2006 World Press Photo of
the Year.15 The caption that originally accompanied the photograph

on the website of Getty Images (the supplier of stock images for
which Platt works) stated: “Affluent Lebanese drive down the street
to look at a destroyed neighborhood 15 August 2006 in southern
Beirut, Lebanon.” Platt’s image embodies the iconographic princi-
ples of visual ambiguity by virtue of its uncanny juxtaposition of
material wealth and consumerist glamour (signaled through the sub-
jects in the foreground and their convertible car, clothing, sunglasses,
and mobile telephone), on the one hand, with utter destruction (the
bombed-out buildings and piles of wreckage in the background),
on the other hand. Furthermore, the photograph is ambiguous—
and thereby shocking to many viewers—in that it appears to capture
“disaster tourists” at their worst and thus be a portrait of the kind
of voyeurism that cultivates our contemporary catastrophic imagi-
nary (Sontag 1966). Indeed, the car’s driver and passengers seem
fascinated, or at least intrigued, by what they are witnessing, yet simul-
taneously aloof and unaffected by it. Their curiosity in the face of
a calamity befalling others does not spill into a sense of emotional
involvement in the situation, let alone one of empathy toward the
victims of the bombing—an impression of callous tourism reinforced
by the fact that the physical appearance and affluence of the car’s
occupants mark them as outsiders to the affected neighborhood.
Another photographic exemplification of visual ambiguity should
be mentioned here, that of a scene captured by the photojournalist
Arturo Rodríguez on Spain’s Canary Islands in 2006. Set on a beach,
the image depicts a white woman in a bathing suit flanked by two
black men, one fully clothed and lying on the sand and the other
wrapped in a blanket sitting half upright.16 The picture is striking
because it seems, at first glance, to shamelessly personify the excesses
of spectacularization enumerated above. Like the notorious Benetton
advertising campaigns of the 1990s and the aforementioned Galliano
fashion collection, Rodríguez’ photograph appears to aestheticize suf-
fering by employing the two men’s apparent distress as a contrasting
backdrop against which to highlight the figure of the female beach-
goer, the ultimate contemporary emblem of youth and beauty in
the Euro-American world; in an age of intense commodification, it
could easily be part of a fashion shoot or an advertising campaign
for beachwear. Moreover, the image is remarkable in its blatant juxta-
position of symbols of immiseration and suffering (the blanket worn
by one man and the expressions etched on both men’s faces) with
those of leisure and pleasure (the woman’s bathing suit and the beach
itself).
Bringing to light the ambiguous features of these two photographs

is not, in and of itself, an adequate political response to the visual
economy of distant suffering. Indeed, the celebration of ambiguity for
its own sake risks quickly devolving into an apolitical, deconstructive
exercise that simply embraces the polysemic and slippery character of
meaning as an end in itself; such interpretive relativism is disarmed in
the face of the possibility of dubious yet common tropes of under-
standing of these images, such as the collective pathologization of
Lebanese society or the victimization of the men on the beach by
Euro-American audiences. Nonetheless, ambiguity is tremendously
valuable as a representational catalyst that can make viewers engage
with images differently, by exposing them to the constructed nature
of the latter’s symbolic structure. Ambiguity is most effective in this
catalytic role when coupled to a critique of the visual economy of dis-
tant suffering and an emancipatory politics, yet it can still function
in the absence of such conditions. Because they trouble self-evident
perceptions and habitualized sense-making frameworks, ambiguous
images can compel ordinary audience members—those without the
apparatus of visual critique or an explicit commitment to emancipa-
tory politics—to decelerate the process of viewing, in order to grasp
realities that can neither be understood immediately nor deciphered
by applying established iconographic systems.
The kind of interpretive work thereby fostered can counter the
cumulated effects of saturation by particularizing and amplifying the
affect of an image (which is no longer simply part of a generic flow of
visual data), as well as acting against spectacularization by highlighting
the very real circumstances of suffering being portrayed (thus sapping
an image’s seductive power and undermining its being converted into
an aesthetic object or commodity). Moreover, these viewing practices
offer a critique of reification of the visual realm through its experien-
tial thinning and structural narrowing, for they refuse to understand
images as abstracted, self-sufficient, or self-contained entities; on the
contrary, meaning can only be constructed by re-embedding the visual
field into the lifeworld experiences of subjects and the structural forces
that undergird their crisis situations. This is why we should now turn
to two strategies of a critical hermeneutics of visuality, phenomeno-
logical intensification of the image and structuralist expansion of it.
Toward Practices of Critical Visuality

By interrupting doxic forms of viewing that blind us to
images of distant suffering—because dynamics of saturation and
spectacularization sap their potential iconographic power and public

effectiveness—visual ambiguity can act as a trigger for critical modes
of engagement with the socio-visual realm and cultivate visually liter-
ate publics. As such, it can clear the terrain for a re-specification of
the particular circumstances experienced by suffering subjects, as well
as for a recontextualization of these circumstances within the wider
structures of inequality and relations of power that produce them.
The first interpretive strategy, that of phenomenological intensifica-
tion of the image, consists of an attempt on the part of viewers to
thicken the photographic frame by reconstructing the experiences of
subjects represented in situations of distant suffering. This work of
experiential reconstruction of the then and there of a humanitarian
crisis constitutes an exercise of the moral imagination, whereby audi-
ence members momentarily immerse themselves in the lifeworlds and
subjective circumstances of those portrayed through the lens of the
video or photographic camera.17 By phenomenologically thickening
and amplifying the affect of an image, such a practice of engagement
with the visual field aims to resist the latter’s experiential thinning
and flattening, which themselves facilitate its saturation of public
spheres and spectacularization. When images of distant suffering are
no longer affectless or experientially thin for audiences because decon-
textualized, they can begin to stand as more than generic portraits,
aestheticized objects, or commodities in the marketplace.18
But regardless of how thick this phenomenological intensification
is, the reconstitution of humanitarian crises through visual means is
intrinsically circumscribed and imperfect, for it cannot fully capture
or recreate the scale and intensity of the suffering being portrayed;
the latter always already exists in excess, beyond the frame and the
capacities of viewers’ moral imaginations to grasp it completely. Expe-
riential reconstruction is further limited by the temporal restrictions of
visual media, which can only record certain selected moments of dis-
tant suffering—generally, those that are most emotionally “dramatic”
or iconographically rich—and thus offer a necessarily partial repre-
sentation of events and subjects. That which chronologically precedes
or follows what is captured on camera remains invisible and thus
unknown to audiences, as do the lives of actors outside of the instants
visually depicted.
Put differently, exposure to ambiguous images can assist processes
of partial intersubjective transposition, of audiences empathetically
working to put themselves in the place of the distant strangers
whose portraits they see. Ethically speaking, this creates the con-
ditions for what Lévinas designates as an encounter with the face
of the Other, which summons the viewing subject’s infinite, per-

petual, and nonreciprocal responsibility to respond to this figure of
alterity’s unspoken appeal. However, contra Lévinas’ favoring of spa-
tial proximity and intersubjective presence because of his belief in the
face’s non-representable character and its irreducibility to the image
(Lévinas 1971, 79–80, 331–332, 1978, 129–155, 1995), I want to
defend the possibility of a visually mediated ethics of responsibil-
ity toward distant strangers. For most persons in the world, such a
sense of responsibility cannot but be developed through representa-
tional means, which enable the depiction of humanitarian crises to
faraway audiences and thereby serve as necessary preconditions for
the mobilization of political responses to them.
As noted above, perfect transposability can never be achieved
because of the phenomenological gap between most Euro-American
viewers and subjects in the global South; the former cannot relive
the latter’s experiences of severe deprivation or mass violence, nor
should they believe that this is possible through visual representation.
Empathy cannot be allowed to slip into a facile, superficial exercise
of appropriation of the experiences of these subjects that renders the
specificities of their existences irrelevant, while maintaining that to
imagine suffering borne out of a humanitarian crisis is an undemand-
ing and unproblematic process. How can most citizens in the North
Atlantic region, however well intentioned, fully understand what it
is like to live through famine or war? Furthermore, from a political
and normative perspective, it is imperative that the limits of trans-
position be recognized in order to avoid the symbolic violence of
an assumed experiential sameness that would obscure the asymmet-
rical positions occupied in the current world order between viewers
and subjects, or deny (or even suspend) socioeconomic, cultural, and
racialized hierarchies.
At the same time, recognition of the circumscribed nature of the
labor of transposition should not obscure its significance as a way
to counter representational saturation and the spectacularization of
the social, since ambiguous images stand out from the mass of visual
material about distant suffering and are not easily reducible to spec-
tacularized fare. When particularized and effectively framed by carrier
groups or media organizations, this imagery can act as a catalyst for
audience members to be interpellated by and attempt to immerse
themselves in the lives of distant strangers; the former may be able and
willing to reflect on the structural and situational violence being visu-
ally depicted, and narrow the experiential gap separating them from
those who are its victims. Phenomenological intensification, then, can
enable the cultivation of moral sentiments toward represented per-

sons and the desire to gain further information about the relevant
humanitarian crises, confronting viewers with questions about what
allows global injustices to exist, how they are implicated in the repro-
duction of these injustices, and why Western states and international
organizations are repeatedly failing to prevent them.
Supplementing efforts to intensify representations of distant suffer-
ing in a phenomenological direction is a second interpretive practice
facilitated by visual ambiguity, that of structuralist expansion aimed
less at thickening the meaning of an image than to widening it
beyond the visual frame. Because of their atypical symbolic structure,
ambiguous representations can provoke something akin to Brecht’s
estrangement effect (Verfremdungseffekt) in the visual realm: audi-
ences are prevented from investing in the illusion of an image as
a transparent reflection of reality (a representational mirror theory),
experiencing instead the disjuncture between visual signifiers (the
symbolic structure) and their referents (the “real” situation or event).
Accordingly, viewers can become aware of the socio-visually con-
structivist character of an image, the fact that it visually stages and
contributes to the creation of social reality as much as it is itself
shaped by social processes and institutional relations.19 In other words,
ambiguity breeds an acknowledgment that any re-presentation of a
humanitarian crisis is also a construct of it that, in turn, constructs
what and how audiences perceive this crisis. Given this visual estrange-
ment effect, audiences are more likely to inquire into and be exposed
to the mechanisms through which an image is produced and dissem-
inated, the aforementioned institutional networks of circulation that
contribute to its presence in public spheres. More specifically, the ini-
tial lack of clarity about the meaning of visual material can generate a
mode of critical engagement, according to which audiences shift from
being passive spectators or consumers of tropes of distant suffering
to interrogating the organizational provenance of what they see (by
which media outlet, NGO, or social movement is a particular image of
distant suffering created, and for what purposes?), as well as the ways
in which a given event or situation is visually rendered. As a result,
what can occur is an interrogation of the process of making visible—
and thereby informing the world about—certain humanitarian crises
while making others publicly invisible through their not being repre-
sented and, consequently, remaining largely unknown by formal and
informal audiences.
Searching to make sense of ambiguous images implies a form of
structuralist expansion designed to examine how a scene of situational
or structural violence is underpinned by systemic factors existing out-

side of the frame—factors that, precisely because of their systemic
nature, cannot necessarily be represented through symbolic devices.
Viewers can come to see a photograph or footage of an instance of
distant suffering as but a moment (or series of moments) where the
combined effects of local, national, and global relations of power coa-
lesce while remaining largely out of sight and difficult to effectively
capture through metaphoric or metonymic substitution. As a visual
force field, an image derives its meaning from such structural forces
that exceed its boundaries yet are constitutive of what it captures.
A prime instance of these systemic factors is neoliberal capitalism,
the global regime of market fundamentalism anchored by a totaliz-
ing logic of privatization and deregulation of mechanisms of flow and
accumulation of capital across territorial borders. As such, many of the
gravest humanitarian crises portrayed in the last few decades, rang-
ing from famine to pandemics, find at least some of their sources
in one of neoliberalism’s principal policy manifestations, the struc-
tural adjustment programs imposed on poor indebted countries by the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank since the 1970s.
Although they are literally and figuratively invisible, structural adjust-
ment programs stand as modes of structural violence that have created
the socioeconomic conditions for repeated humanitarian emergencies
in the global South, by compromising subsistence economies, wors-
ening the basic living standards of the most vulnerable segments of
national populations, and dismantling public health infrastructures.
Structurally expanding an image directs focus onto another invisi-
ble dynamic, the Realpolitik logic of leading states on the world stage.
Indeed, critical engagement with the visuality of distant suffering
enables a consideration of the role and consequences of strategi-
cally or instrumentally based foreign policy decisions humanitarian
crises in the global South. The pursuit of a narrowly defined sense of
national self-interest, understood narrowly in geopolitical or economic
terms, leads powerful governments to either covertly support certain
“friendly” regimes that are actively committing atrocities against their
own populations (e.g., US assistance to Pinochet in Chile, Chinese
support for El-Bashir in Sudan) or refuse to intervene and become
bystanders when large-scale disasters are occurring (Euro-American
states during the Rwandan genocide or with respect to famines in
sub-Saharan Africa, for instance). A practice of structural expansion
can tackle an additional systemic factor that remains beyond the frame:
the complex matrix of gender, racial, and class inequalities that sustain
a world order regularly generating modes of situational and structural
violence against vulnerable groups in the global South (the poor,

women, people of color, etc.), whose lives are deemed to be worth
less than those of Euro-American populations. If they cannot be visu-
ally depicted, these hierarchical structures lie at the root of many of
the humanitarian crises appearing in North Atlantic public spheres, for
gendered, racialized, and capitalist relations of power sustain the con-
ditions for the reproduction of grinding poverty, disease, and warfare
that themselves create the mass emergencies being photographed and
filmed. The final stage of this recontextualization of the image consists
of a reflection on that which lies outside or at the margins of the rep-
resentational machinery of the visual economy of distant suffering, the
conditions of many groups in the global South whose systemically pro-
duced domination is brought about by political and economic forces
considered to be outside of the purview of humanitarianism—groups
whose subordinate status in the global order renders their suffering
invisible.
Through practices of phenomenological intensification and struc-
turalist expansion, the work of critical interpretation of visual material
about distant suffering underscores the experiential and systemic inad-
equacies of symbolic representation itself, as well the importance
of a recontextualization of images provoked by the encounter with
visual ambiguity. How would such strategies of engagement transform
how we understand the two aforementioned ambiguous photographs?
In the case of the first one, intensifying and expanding it would con-
front audiences with a radical overturning of their own assumptions
about its meaning, which are fed by the seemingly self-evident sym-
bolic structure that it presents. Far from being an instance of crass
disaster tourism, Platt’s picture actually captures the scene of a group
of residents of the Haret Hreik suburb in southern Beirut in the pro-
cess of driving to and observing their neighborhood for the first time
in the aftermath of the Israeli bombing. Having had to flee their
homes and take refuge in central Beirut, they borrowed the car in
the photograph from the driver’s girlfriend in order to return to the
area; furthermore, the vehicle itself was used extensively by a Lebanese
grassroots NGO to transport medication to war refugees around the
city during the bombing.20
Hence, the processes of intensifying and expanding this image
exposes viewers to an unsettling, double hermeneutics of visuality:
the fundamental interpretive ambiguity of visual signifiers, which can
contain multiple denotations and connotations for audiences; and the
possible disjuncture or slippage between these signifiers and their
referents (their correspondence being out of joint). Such a double
hermeneutics is manifest in the fact that the photograph contains an

uncanny symbolic structure that violates many of the representational
conventions of the iconography of distant suffering, while putting
into question the adequacy and reliability of commonplace systems
of understanding of this iconography. In particular, first impressions
of the image’s situational symbols (notably the convertible car and the
fashionable appearance of its occupants) prompt a misidentification of
the roles of the actors in the foreground and their relations to the
scene of destruction, for they appear to be outsiders and unaffected
bystanders instead of local inhabitants and war refugees. In turn,
the attribution of the latter role to these actors utterly transforms
how viewers can make sense of the portrayed event, by destabilizing
the typical significations attached to these same situational symbols
and the mechanisms by which they visually construct the position of
victimhood. To put it simply, a war refugee may well be stylish and
physically attractive, without bearing any visible evidence of injury or
misery, as well as actively involved in responding to his or her situation.
Accordingly, phenomenological and structuralist practices of interpre-
tation may well foster a problematization of iconographic typecasting
and representational clichés, as well as foster critical reflection on how
the figure of the victim is constituted in the visual economy of dis-
tant suffering—perhaps even to invent modes of re-signification of
this role away from its reduction to an intrinsically passive actor,
deprived of agency (i.e., the capacity to resist or intervene to modify
the circumstances under which he or she lives).
A critical reexamination of the second photographic exemplar of
visual ambiguity is equally revealing, for Rodríguez’ shot actually cap-
tures the landing of African migrants on a beach in Tenerife in the
Canary Islands during the summer of 2006. Like tens of thousands
of others who attempt the perilous crossing from the African coast
in flimsily constructed and overcrowded wooden boats every year, the
two men were most likely exhausted, severely dehydrated, and nearing
starvation after barely surviving their journey; for her part, the woman
was a tourist at the beach.21 This image’s uncanny symbolic struc-
ture operates at two levels. First, its ambiguous situational symbols
have the effect of disorienting viewers, who may entirely misconstrue
the event being portrayed because of interpreting it through a non-
figurative iconographic framework that has become commonplace in
the age of the spectacle—a framework through which the meaning
of an image is only obliquely related to the scene contained in the
frame, so that suffering can be staged for corporate publicity cam-
paigns or serves as a backdrop for fashion shoots. Consequently, the
dominance of the representational logic of the spectacle can subsume

or displace more figurative and literalist iconographic models, to the
extent that an actual humanitarian emergency is assumed to signify
something else. Nevertheless, through phenomenological intensifica-
tion and structuralist expansion, the picture’s situational symbols can
be read differently: the two men are constituted as victims of a mass
disaster (signified by the red blanket in which one is wrapped, and
the emergency food rations that the other is holding), whereas the
female subject has been thrust into the role of improvised emergency
aid worker; the beach itself becomes a multilayered and contested
signifier, a simultaneous emblem of leisure and pleasure, on the one
hand, and of survival and refuge, on the other. Moreover, practices of
critical viewing facilitate a similar process with regard to the image’s
compositional symbols, resulting in an inversion of the subjects’ rela-
tions to one another: the men are not mere props vis-à-vis their female
counterpart, but primary actors thrust in the situational foreground,
whereas she is transformed into a supporting cast member whose main
purpose is to assist them (as indicated by her crouched position and
hand touching one of the men’s bodies) by supporting the efforts
of Red Cross workers (whose boots are visible in the top right-hand
corner of the photograph and in other pictures in the same series by
Rodríguez).
For viewers, the phenomenological labor of transposing themselves
into the positions of both parties can yield a realization of the incon-
gruity of these parties’ experiences, which is itself a product of the vast
material and symbolic disparities in the existing world order. Arriv-
ing on the beach, the men are greeted by a scene of holiday-goers
whose relative affluence and beach-going activities must appear jarring
when juxtaposed to their own hazardous journey and the grinding
poverty that provoked it. As for the female tourist, her vacation is
abruptly overshadowed by the urgency and gravity of the unfolding
of a humanitarian disaster, in which she becomes an involuntary par-
ticipant. What kind of responsibility does she have to come to the
rescue of the two men, and to what extent is she complicit in their
suffering? North Atlantic audiences may well experience a sense of
discomfort when seeing the image, for it punctures the willing denial
of or indifference toward the vast global inequalities, and forms of sit-
uational and structural violence exercised against populations in the
global South, that make Euro-American well-being possible. Further-
more, the picture illustrates a severe disruption of the self-evident
normality of such prosperity and safety through an instance where
suffering is proximate and immediately present rather than spatially
and experientially distant; the illusion that humanitarian crises occur

“over there” is punctured, as they are liable to erupt in the privileged
areas of the planet at any time. What the image intimates, then, is
that inhabitants of these regions cannot avoid witnessing firsthand the
consequences of global injustices, since no time or place is immune to
them—not even a beach on seemingly remote islands during summer
holidays.
For its part, the practice of structurally expanding the frame reveals
the systemic forces that generate the emergency situation captured
by Rodríguez’ camera. Among these is the aforementioned function-
ing of neoliberal capitalism, particularly through structural adjustment
programs that, by further immiserating the poor in many parts of
sub-Saharan Africa, all but coerce ever-increasing segments of the con-
tinent’s population to try to migrate to Europe by whatever means
necessary to escape conditions of perpetual socioeconomic scarcity
and the constant possibility of being unable to meet their own basic
needs. Hence, these structural inequalities compel migrants to subject
themselves to the exploitation and negligence of human traffickers,
who organize the former’s entry on European soil by transporting
them over long distances in poorly built, inadequately equipped, and
overcrowded vessels. Reduced to the status of human cargo, these
migrants have no other option than to put their lives at risk; entire
boats sink in the waters off Europe with all their passengers on board,
while the vessels arriving at their intended destinations originally con-
tained occupants who perished of dehydration or hunger (Keeley and
Hooper 2008, 3).
Without a doubt, the photograph’s structuralist expansion also
points to the racialized regulation of national and regional borders
(notably in the post-Schengen treaty era in the European Union), with
restrictive immigration laws, enhanced territorial enforcement, and
the putting into place of a vast apparatus of detention and deportation
that makes it all but impossible for Africans like those landing on the
beach to enter Europe through officially designated channels. Thus
virtually required to become undocumented migrants, these nonci-
tizens face racial discrimination and exist in a state of permanently
indeterminate legal status, their only opportunities to eke out a liv-
ing being found by joining the rising masses of lumpenproletarians of
color who occupy the most marginal rungs of the informal or under-
ground economies of European cities (unlicensed produce vending
in subway and train stations, itinerant flower selling, office and hotel
cleaning, construction and menial restaurant work, etc.). For the
majority of the survivors of these intercontinental crossings, migration
merely modifies the forms of severe deprivation and precarity that they
experience without substantially changing their circumstances or posi-
tions in the world order, let alone tackling global injustices in the
distribution of material resources and rights to citizenship.
Therefore, the photograph’s sociopolitical effectiveness lies in its
illustrating, or stimulating critical inquiry into, the institutional roots
of the disastrous situation it portrays and the relations of power
that it makes explicit. More generally, in its capturing a face-to-face
encounter under extreme conditions between subjects who stand as
racialized and symbolically loaded representatives of the contrast-
ing fates of their respective continents’ inhabitants in our age, the
image constitutes a powerful iconographic microcosm of the North-
South divide. In both literal and metaphorical terms, the three figures
embody the hierarchies that define such a divide and the relations
of inequality that derive from it. The woman, as an emblem of
whiteness, youthful beauty, and leisurely comfort with which most
Euro-American viewers can identify, is a social agent who possesses
the capacity to rescue her counterparts and transform their immediate
circumstances; conversely, as figures of blackness, bare life—that is to
say, the reduction of human beings to their biological state of basic
existence (Agamben 1998, 10)—and alterity for these same view-
ers, the two men cannot but be passive recipients of emergency aid
whose survival is placed in the hands of others. What can be put into
question is the doxic scenario of Western benevolence coupled to non-
Western victimhood, which informs the humanitarian imaginary but is
in fact merely an ideological manifestation of the dramatically unequal
distribution of material and symbolic resources in the contemporary
world. Through the shot is made visible a moment when the contra-
dictions and injustices of a planetary order characterized by extensive
socioeconomic and racial asymmetries cannot be held at bay, their bla-
tant effects invading the everyday lives of North Atlantic residents
while undermining attempts to remain aloof of these realities through
political complacency or moral indifference; the blowback from the
imposition of a global system is now hitting the Euro-American world,
and suffering is distant no longer (if it ever was).
Conclusion
I began the chapter by explaining the iconographic and institutional
functioning of the visual economy of distant suffering, in order to
grasp how images are symbolically structured in situational and com-
positional terms as well as how they circulate through networks of
organizational actors. But given the phenomena of visual saturation

and spectacularization of the social world, which foster audiences’
political and moral blindness toward representations of humanitarian
crises, I pondered the potential of ambiguity to disrupt the habitual
operation of this visual system. Hence, I employed ambiguous images
less because of their inherent merit than because of their iconographic
capacity to provoke alternative practices of reflection on the visual
field and what it represents. By phenomenologically amplifying and
structurally broadening images, viewers can critically interrogate what
situations they see (and do not see) in and through such images,
turn the mirror on themselves to examine how their own background
assumptions inform the constitution of visually mediated reality, and
identify the systemic forces that generate catastrophic living conditions
for populations in the global South. In particular, what is exposed are
the visual dynamics and signs through which victims are constructed,
as well as the typifications of victimhood in the iconography of distant
suffering.
Of course, what I have written in the above pages and the socio-
visual constructivist perspective from which the argument is contem-
plated reinscribe the subjection of the social world to the tyranny
of visuality, namely the fact that visual representation is a sine qua
non for any humanitarian crisis to publicly impact Euro-American
governments and civil societies. Yet, to my mind, this is but the
recognition of the need to engage with the iconography and circu-
lation of images, and a rejection of delusions about the discovery
of an outside to visuality. Instead of being seduced by iconoclas-
tic, anti-representational assertions that effectively leave this tyranny
untouched, we can work to radically democratize the socio-visual field
by inserting images onto the terrain of public debate and political
struggle—a terrain that may well be without guarantees, but one that
opens up possibilities for responding differently to the portrayal of
global injustices.
I want to end by briefly returning to the first part of Godard’s
Histoire(s) du cinéma, where he claims that the Second World War
marked the martyrdom and resurrection of documentary film (Godard
1998, 137). If this is the case, then we must ask ourselves whether
the current martyrdom of the image of distant suffering—sacrificed
not because of its recording of horror per se during the War, but,
on the contrary, because of the seeming banality of such horror—
may also enable the resurrection of critical practices of visuality, and
perhaps even the invention of new practices of this kind. The chapter
has attempted to demonstrate how this could be so analytically, and
how this must be so normatively and politically if the regular exercise

of situational and structural violence around the world is no longer to
be tolerated or abetted.
Notes
1. I will return to both of these dimensions in greater detail in the first
section of this chapter.
2. The concept of a visual economy stems from Poole (1997, 8–11), and
was introduced to me by Susan Buck-Morss. My rendition of it differs
from Poole’s in its greater emphasis on the iconographic structuring
of images (notably their conventional and typified character) and its
application to the visuality of distant suffering.
3. I use the notion of “typification” to signify a pattern or conven-
tional configuration of symbols that tends to be reproduced over
time (thus become typified), yet is not necessarily fixed because open
to destabilization or transformation. Hence, the analysis of typifi-
cations proposed here is diachronic rather than synchronic, since it
aims simultaneously to be attuned to continuities as well as gradual
changes within an existing symbolic configuration. For a more gen-
eral discussion of typification and typicality drawing on both Husserl’s
phenomenology and Weber’s notion of ideal types—albeit in intersub-
jective and phenomenological rather than symbolic terms—see Schutz
(1967, 181–201) and Schutz and Luckmann (1973, 1:229–241).
4. Two celebrated renditions of this scene are the Avignon Pietà
painted by Enguerrand Quarton (ca. 1455), held at the Louvre, and
Michelangelo’s Pietà (1498–1499 in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
5. The photograph was originally published in a 1990 issue of Life mag-
azine, yet following comments from the Benetton campaign’s art
director, Oliviero Toscani, became known as the Benetton Pietà.
6. I would like to thank Ratiba Hadj-Moussa for drawing my attention to
this image, the story of which is recounted here: http://www.grands-
reporters.com/Oum-Saad-la-Madone-diffamee.html (accessed March
23, 2009).
7. I do not intend to suggest an interpretive uniformity on the part of
audiences. Clearly, the sociocultural characteristics of different publics
(nationality, gender, race, class, religion, etc.) influence their inter-
pretations of specific images of distant suffering. For instance, social
groups (whether within the same society or not) may well have dif-
fering responses to present-day Pietà-like images, according to their
exposure to and familiarity with Judeo-Christian imagery. At the same
time, to avert a monistic position whereby one simply asserts that
each individual necessarily possesses a singular understanding of every
image, I want to claim that a general symbolic structure exists in the
North Atlantic socio-visual field. If it does not fix or determine how
audiences make sense of images of distant suffering, this structure

does supply a common range of meanings that frame most subjects’
interpretations.
8. For instance, a victim of a humanitarian crisis cannot be visually des-
ignated as such if shown to be somehow complicit in her or his own
suffering, or inflicting it on others.
9. More and more, such groups obtain these images by commissioning
photojournalists and filmmakers to travel to an affected area, or by ask-
ing their own staff on the ground to visually record what is unfolding
and what actions they are taking.
10. The body of work produced by Sebastião Salgado, arguably the
world’s most acclaimed photojournalist, has been the subject of some
controversy (Galeano 1990; Stallabrass 1997) along these lines, par-
ticularly with respect to his series of photographs of the 1983–1985
famine in the Sahel. Some have claimed that his images are portraits
of human dignity that refuse to victimize persons in the global South,
while others assert that they aestheticize the suffering of these same
persons. To my mind, Salgado’s images are ambivalent, in that they
contain and express the tensions between the need to convey dignity,
on the one hand, and the perils of aestheticizing limit experiences.
11. Galliano’s runway show took place on January 18, 2008, in
Paris. Photographs from the show can be viewed at the fol-
lowing website address: http://men.style.com/fashion/collections/
F2008MEN/complete/thumb/JGMEN?trend=&page=4 (accessed
July 21, 2008).
12. On the “atypical” (viz., that which exists outside of typification), see
Schutz and Luckmann (1973, 235–238; 1989, 204).
13. I would like to thank Ratiba Hadj-Moussa for reminding me of
Barthes’ (1982) concept of obtuse meaning, which he explains as
something “in excess, like a supplement that my cognition does not
manage to grasp well, simultaneously stubborn and evasive, slick and
escaping” (45).
14. As I employ it here, the notion of ambiguity is an analytical feature
embedded in the image as such, rather than a kind of normative
response to the latter. In other words, ambiguity refers not to the
kinds of moral or ethical reactions that such an image may provoke
among audiences, but to symbolic characteristics of this image itself.
While an ambiguous image may produce normatively based and socio-
culturally specific reactions among audiences (such as a sense of guilt
or culpability emerging out of a Judeo-Christian ethos), the sorts
of reactions neither are intrinsic to such an image nor can they be
determined a priori of a specific situation of viewership.
15. The photograph is available at the following website address: http://
www.worldpressphoto.org/index.php?option=com_photogallery&
task=view&id=899&Itemid=115&bandwidth=high (accessed July 22,
2008). Based in Amsterdam, World Press Photo is a nongovernmental

organization that runs the world’s largest and most prestigious annual
photojournalism competition. Each year, an exhibit of the winning
photographs in different categories tours cities in numerous coun-
tries. The World Press Photo of the Year, in particular, gains wide
circulation via the media.
16. The image is visible at the following website address: http://www.
arturorguez.com/index.php?opt=portfolio&category=1&page=0&
img=135 (accessed July 22, 2008). It won second prize in Stories
in the 2007 World Press Photo contest.
17. Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (France, 1985) stands as the most accom-
plished and exhaustive cinematic realization of this phenomenological
approach. Describing the film’s impact, Simone de Beauvoir (1985)
declared that “[f]or the first time, we lived [the Holocaust] in our
heads, our hearts, our flesh. It becomes ours” (9). The translation is
my own.
18. Although I do not subscribe to Jameson’s (1991) diagnosis of a “wan-
ing of affect in postmodern culture” (10), his contrast between the
affective depth of van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes and the flatness of
Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes is useful for this section (7–10).
19. Here, the notion of staging does not refer to an instance of a pho-
tographer or filmmaker deliberately planning and organizing a scene
prior to its occurrence for the camera’s benefit, but rather to the way
in which social reality is moulded by how it is visually represented.
20. This information is contained in an article by Kim Ghattas, a British
Broadcasting Corporation journalist who interviewed the subjects in
the photograph in Beirut to ask them about the circumstances sur-
rounding Platt’s photograph. The story was posted on the BBC News
website on March 8, 2007, and is available here: http://news.bbc.co.
uk/2/hi/middle_east/6385969.stm (accessed July 23, 2008). Addi-
tional details are found in the caption accompanying the photograph
in the World Press Photo 2007 exhibition catalogue (World Press
Photo 2007, 4).
21. This information was obtained from the caption accompanying
Rodríguez’ photograph in the World Press Photo 2007 exhibition
catalogue (Keeley and Hooper, 2008).
References
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1998.
Alexander, Jeffrey C. “On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: The
‘Holocaust’ from War Crime to Trauma Drama.” In The Meanings of Social
Life: A Cultural Sociology, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, 27–84. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003.
Barthes, Roland. “Le troisième sens.” In L’obvie et l’obtus: Essais critiques III,
edited by Roland Barthes, 43–61. Paris: Seuil, 1982.
Boltanski, Luc. La souffrance à distance: Morale humanitaire, médias et
politique. Paris: Métailié, 1993.
de Beauvoir, Simone. “La mémoire de l’horreur.” In Shoah: The Complete Text
of the Acclaimed Holocaust Film, edited by Claude Lanzmann, 9–14. Paris:
Fayard, 1985.
Debord, Guy. La société du spectacle. Paris: Gallimard, 1992 [1967].
Galeano, Eduardo. “Salgado, 17 Times.” In An Uncertain Grace, edited by
Sebastiă.o Salgado, 7–15. New York: Aperture, 1990.
Godard, Jean-Luc. Histoire(s) du cinéma. Paris: Gallimard-Gaumont, 1998.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.
Keeley, Graham and Hooper, John. “Flood of African Migrants Risking
Perilous Journey at New Heights.” Guardian Weekly July 18, 2008: 3.
Kleinman, Arthur and Kleinman, Joan. “The Appeal of Experience: The
Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times.”
In Social Suffering, edited by Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret
Lock, 1–23. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Lévinas, Emmanuel. Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’éxtériorité. The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1971.
Lévinas, Emmanuel. Autrement qu’être, ou au-delà de l’essence. The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1978.
Lévinas, Emmanuel. “Interdit de la représentation et droits de l’homme.”
In Altérité et Transcendance, edited by Emmanuel Lévinas, 127–135. Paris:
Fata Morgana, 1995.
Moeller, Susan D. Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine,
War and Death. London: Routledge, 1999.
Poole, Deborah. Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean
World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Schutz, Alfred. The Phenomenology of the Social World. London: Heinemann,
1967.
Schutz, Alfred and Luckmann, Thomas. The Structures of the Life-World,
Vol. I. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.
Schutz, Alfred and Luckmann, Thomas. The Structures of the Life-World,
Vol. II. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989.
Sontag, Susan. “The Imagination of Disaster.” In Against Interpretation,
209–225. New York: Anchor, 1966.
Stallabrass, Julian. “Sebastiao Salgado and Fine Art Photojournalism.” New
Left Review 223 (1997): 131–161.
World Press Photo. World Press Photo 07. London: Thames & Hudson, 2007.
Chapter 2
Denial and Challenge

of Modernity: Suffering,
Recognition, and Dignity in
P h oto g r a ph s by S a m m y Ba lo j i
Bogumil Jewsiewicki
On Suffering and Modernity1

Working for wages, for a person or an institution which controls not
only working conditions—particularly the time and space in which
work takes place—but also the impact of the work on society, was
for the great majority of colonized peoples the mandatory passage to
modernity. In Belgian Congo until the end of the 1950s, salaried work
was the sole means to accessing modernity because of the legislation
barring “natives” from owning individual property. The dispossession
of control over time and space while passing from agricultural or hand-
icraft activities to salaried work, especially industrial work, is typical of
the three historical phases of accumulation: primitive, capitalist, and
soviet or colonial socialism. Each time, in the figurative sense for the
majority, but in a literal sense for many, death (a “social” death in
most cases) precedes the “birth” of the new man, a “modern” being
and agent of a society shaped by its political actors that is radically
different from the former society that nevertheless remains host to
the new one. This transformation is violent in every way for people
and for the society, becoming a source of deep suffering that trauma-
tizes social memory, particularly during and at the end of socialist and
52 B o g u m i l Jew s i ew i c k i
colonialist transitions, because they are more abrupt than the capitalist
transition. Many researchers and philosophers have explored this issue
through major works, including monographs and general theories.
Compared to these works, my ambition is more modest in scope.
I am proposing an interpretation, as seen through the lens of a young
Congolese photographer, Sammy Baloji, of a form of modernization
achieved in the colonial context, and then lost in postcolonial society,
and which is now waiting to be reclaimed by a return to the source,
that is, the suffering of the original participants, the migrant workers.
For these individuals, the salaried workers and their families, indus-
trial modernization set in motion a chain of traumatic suffering that
would affect them physically, socially, and psychologically. In Congo,
the social memory of workers witnessed this process in terms of death
and loss of recognition that had to be overturned in order to claim
the modernity imposed by colonization.2 Drawings, popular urban
paintings, and, more recently, photography provide images of remem-
brance whose presence in the public space paves the way for a debate
on suffering as the price of access to modernity. Between 1920 and
1960, three generations of migrant workers built the Katanga mining
industry and its urban societies; images of remembrance from those
times revolve around three images, which, in hindsight, give meaning
to the suffering endured, and also represent the suffering claimed as a
rite of passage.
It is first of all, and very prosaically, the memory of work as a man-
machine and man-man relationship within new social and political
hierarchies. “Work is hard, death is near” (Kazi nguvu, lufu karibu),
proclaims the legend as depicted in the industrial universe in which the
kazi (Swahili word for salaried work that binds man to his employment
and provides food, health care, schooling, etc., for his family) orga-
nizes relationships between men, and between men and other things.
Kazi and death form a tandem, wherein work may endanger one’s
life, but it is also man’s mastery of work that provides him access to
modernity.
Second, when the colonial world—the political agent of
modernity—takes possession of a man, he becomes an object, a slave.
His body, appropriated by the agent of modernity, is submitted to
a double injury: physical humiliation and moral suffering. His status
as a possession of the colony and post-colony was literally inscribed
onto his body. The painting entitled Colonie belge (“Belgian Colony”)
(Figure 2.1) shows a soldier who is transforming the body of a vic-
tim into the reflection of the Belgian flag: the black and yellow lines
of the prisoner’s outfit become the red marks left by the whip on his
Denial and Challenge of Modernity 53
Figure 2.1 Colonie belge, B. Jewsiewicki collection
buttocks. In rural central African society, an adult man stripped in

public, exposed for women and children to see, loses all respect, all
status. For the village people, physical and psychological suffering,
accompanied by humiliation, lay on the path to the colonial and
postcolonial world. The radical nature of this rite of passage, which
marks the rebirth of a participant, through the death of the former
self, is engraved in collective memory to such an extent that Joseph
Désiré Kabila, the gravedigger of the Mobutu regime, had restored
public whipping to purify citizens’ bodies from Mobutism. Third, the
traditional recognition of an individual in his village was not com-
patible with the recognition he earned in the modern world. Their
respective sources were in essential conflict. The image of the mer-
maid goddess, known as mami wata or mamba muntu in the Congo,
presents this evidence for all to see and prompts debate. The primary
value of a man is represented by the number of his dependents (fam-
ily members as well as other dependents, etc.). Also, in a universe
of commodities, it is his ability to acquire material wealth. In both
cases, the man depends on the woman to gain recognition: first, by
controlling his wife(s)’s fertility, and second, through seduction of
mami wata, which makes him the beneficiary of the occult power
to which she has access. A mermaid is a feminine aquatic being that a
man must seduce before being able to do business with her, exchang-
ing the life of loved ones for merchandise and power. The suffering
of sacrificed loved ones and that of the one who performed these
sacrifices are the price paid in return for access to modernity and
recognition in this universe that literally consumes the wealth of times
past, that is, the dependents. Consequently, in visual representations
signifying the process of becoming and remaining modern, individual

and social suffering is an inescapable condition. In the colonial expe-
rience, salaried work is—paradoxically, with respect to the colonial
ideology—a new form of slavery. The worker loses control over the
manner in which time and space are used at work, and, very often in
the literal sense, he loses the very relatives who once would have guar-
anteed his status. Under the control of businesspeople, missionaries,
or state officers (bula matari), he is like a slave, because the social
bonds between him and his community are monopolized by another
individual or an institution. “Hired” by a recruiter with the approval
of a custodial parent, village chief, or clan chief, and taken far away
to be “given” to an entrepreneur, the worker cannot experience this
event any other way, especially considering that the slave trade is for
him a very recent social experience. This perception is often reinforced
by a change of proper name—a new name identifies him with the new
universe, whether his name is kapitula (shorts) or belegi (Belgian)—
and by the language of everyday communication, particularly at work.
Consequently, paid work, kazi, is the source of much suffering: the
individual can experience this as enslavement, from which only death
or escape can deliver him, or as a rite of passage. Going through
this suffering and surviving the ordeal demonstrates a great capacity
for resilience and an aptitude for leading men. In the village envi-
ronment, being exposed to the violence of nature was part of the
rite of passage. Kazi is also an ordeal; going through it successfully
shows an aptitude for controlling it and for extending kazi mastery
to others, family members in particular. “The work is hard, death is
near” . . . but the suffering of the ordeal brings about the birth of the
new man.
For the generation of industrial workers who went to work in
Katanga in the 1950s and 1960s, the memory of suffering as the price
to pay to access modernity is ambiguous. Evidently, it is the cultural
memory of their “fathers,” those who preceded them, having suffered
from hunger, cold, endless hours of dangerous work; from the con-
tempt of white people because they were black; from the contempt of
the townspeople because they came from elsewhere, like slaves. For
some of them, the Kasaiens and North Katangans favorable to the
Central Congolese government, it was the memory of being expelled
from modern life that had become their lifestyle. At the beginning
of the 1960s, the Katangan secessionist government had forced thou-
sands of people to return to their village of origin, usually that of their
fathers. This return to the village life was very traumatizing. Back
in Katanga, they shared a memory of modern life gained through

suffering, and their right to a domain was gained by submitting to
similar ordeals.
In the Katangan experience, modernity was a desirable condition
whose existence and maintenance were integral parts of the successive
ordeals of suffering. Collectively, for the locals who declared them-
selves to be Katangan, it was the suffering of being dispossessed from
the full benefits of modernity that had been taken away by migrants;
for the migrants and their descendants, identified as Kasaiens, it was
suffering a lack of recognition, exclusion, and expulsion. Individu-
ally, the experience of the ordeal varied according to gender and
generation. Until several years after independence, salaried work was
reserved for men; a woman could access modernity only through
the kazi that linked her husband to a business. The current genera-
tion of “fathers,” the majority of whom were raised in work camps,
entered into modernity and work without suffering. However, sev-
eral have since suffered from exclusion and expulsion because of their
ethnic origin and political allegiance. After the failed secession, the
return to Katanga and industrial work was perceived by them as
another conquest of the kazi; however, “ethnic” Katangans suffered
as much from the failed political ambitions as from long-standing dis-
crimination against them by the central state under Mobutu. The
dismantlement of this state and the deindustrialization that hit local
modernity head on created their own burdens of suffering. This was
the experience of Sammy Baloji and his generation. His photographic
work is the visual witness of both its immediate experience and social
memory.
Before proposing an interpretation in terms of connections
between suffering as an ordeal that leads to the right to access
modernity and enjoy its benefits, the reader needs a few histori-
cal landmarks. As a photographer witnessing absence, gazing over
an industrial landscape in ruins, Sammy Baloji was on the look-
out for traces of what should have been part of the “portrait” of
the landscape, but was nowhere to be seen. This absence, in tan-
gible form, takes us back to the notion of social memory. Baloji
proceeded as a portraitist who was able to capture the shadow of
the wrinkled face of the past and let its beauty shine through;
this beauty is only visible to those who remember the miracle of
(re)presentation (Figure 2.2). The historical foundations for this
memory obtained by proxy, a vicarious memory, are outlined in the
following paragraphs.
Figure 2.2 Series “Corps et masques,” by Sammy Baloji, with permission
Overview of Mining in Katanga

At the beginning of colonization, 150,000 tons of copper ore, the
equivalent of 34,000 tons of copper, was extracted by native “copper
eaters” in a single mine, the Kipushi mine. The country of the “cop-
per eaters” lost its sovereignty and its land and work regimes were
abolished. Half a century later, the industrial cities were populated by
workers. Although far from the center of the world, Katanga was nev-
ertheless not all that far away: uranium from the Shinkolobwe mine
was used to build the world’s first atomic bomb.
In 1902, Robert Williams announced that the “richest copper
deposits in the world” were located here. In 1927, an American expert
wrote: “The natural resources of the Belgian Congo will enable your
country (Belgium) to become one of the richest nations in Europe.”3
In 1921, Katanga was momentarily the world’s primary copper pro-
ducer and would remain a very important producer for the next 50
years. Cobalt, initially considered an impurity resulting from cop-
per extraction, became the flagship product of Katanga, which would
become the world’s primary producer of the mineral. These were all
strategic mineral resources, but it was due to uranium that Katanga
would come to have a significant impact on human history.
For 60 years, the mines of Katanga and the Union minière du haut
Katanga (UMHK, “Mining Union of Upper Katanga”) were inter-
twined. Founded in 1906, the company built its first thermal plant
in 1910, on the Lubumbashi River. Copper was first produced there
in 1911. The nearby city of Elisabethville, now called Lubumbashi,
was founded in 1910 when the railroad provided transportation from
the site to the southern Africa network. During the Second World
War, the metals of Katanga—in particular, uranium provisions for the
Manhattan Project—guaranteed a seat for Belgium at the (United
Nations) Peace Conference. The Belgian colony, the Katangan seces-
sion movement (1960–1963), and Mobutu’s Congo (Zaire) all lived
off the earnings of UMHK activities, which raked in between 50
percent and 70 percent of foreign currency input, and the state bud-
get. Belgium reaped the taxed amounts on profits and dividends from
the refining and transformation activities, but mainly benefited from
having political and economic control. In 1940, 1,000 tons of ura-
nium stored in Staten Island along with a ten-year exclusivity contract
on shipping made it possible for the United States to become the first
nuclear power.
The first decade of the company was difficult. At the time, Robert
Williams owned 40 percent of the shares, and the company was
co-owned by Belgian and English interests and called the Tanganyika
Concession Ltd. Starting in 1921, the UMHK, by then owned
mainly by Belgian interests, severed Katanga from southern Africa
and reduced operating costs by means of modernization. While the
South African mines went in the opposite direction after a long
strike by white workers in 1920, the UMHK offered black workers
mechanical equipment and underground mining. Congolese work-
ers replaced the Africans from southern Africa and Belgians replaced
the white workers. The UMHK made a show of Belgian patriotism,
but jealously protected the interests of Katanga and its people. Until
1962–1963, it was led by two “enlightened despots”: Jules Cousin
in Elisabethville and Edgar Sengier in Brussels and New York City.
The UMHK was an authoritarian chief for whom heritage and wealth
passed down through generations was equivalent to the foundation
of a family; it protected its deposits and black Katangans, but despised
and oppressed settlers and whites who were small entrepreneurs. It did
not trust the aspirations to a Katangan identity, but did not sup-
port the emergence of a Congolese nation either. Starting in 1928,
a long-term vision to ensure quality and stability governed its social
policy: healthy and well-nourished workers living in sanitary lodg-
ings would ensure productivity and future generations of workers and
employee training in cities. Assuming the role of a parent to the work-
ers, in 1957 it launched a magazine published in Swahili, entitled
Mwana Shaba (“Child of Copper”) and a Mwana Shaba Junior for
children.
In 1959, the reproduction rate in cities was among the highest in
the world: 40 percent of children under 6 years old went to kinder-
garten; all children went to primary school; 30 percent of boys went
on to trade schools and others were trained on the job. Girls, the
future wives and mothers of workers, attended a home economics
school. Medical services, pre- and postpartum care, food, family hous-
ing, and public access to running water were provided. In the cities,
civic instructions and an emerging urban music style were broadcast
over public speakers. Structured by the kazi, along with its ethics and
advantages, this society was authoritarian and paternalistic.4 The kazi
ensured a filial bond between the UMHK and its workers; transmitted
from father to son, it was as much part of the family heritage as the col-
lective good of the bana shaba (children of copper). Workers gained
access to the benefits of an industrial heritage, and became bana shaba
by virtue of the kazi rather than through an ethnic bond to the min-
ing territory. Adults who did not work for the UMHK were forced
to leave its cities if they lost their job or retired. From the manager
to the foreman, according to paternalistic ethics, the chief needed to
gain respect to win obedience; he also needed to care about others’
well-being in order to increase productivity. The modern society of
the UMHK was territorially distinct because the cities and mines were
under its control; the rhythms of the city were set by the bells and
speakers announcing work shifts in Swahili—the language of work,
school, and daily life.
When in 1960 Congo obtained its independence (in 1971 Congo
became Zaire for 26 years), the UMHK presided over the destiny
of a society numbering 100,000 people within its cities, 20,000
of which were workers. Seven years later, deposits and installations
were nationalized, and Gécamines, a Congolese company, replaced

the Belgian UMHK. However, the culture of the company did not
change. Gécamines subsequently neglected its social obligations: it
abandoned the cities of workers, delayed payment of salaries, and
fostered unemployment and ultimately layoffs. In the 1990s, during
the fall of Zaire, the company was also in decline. The bana shaba
were orphaned; the kazi and its heritage was in dispute. The original
Katangans (“owners,” ethnically speaking, of the territory) declared
themselves the sole beneficiaries of the mining deposits and of the
industrial heritage, to the detriment of those whose ethnic territory
was elsewhere in the country. For the second time in 30 years, ethnic
cleansing forced the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Katangans
of Kasaien origin. A few years later, they would return because they
were a modernized people, they spoke Swahili, and the local economy
needed them.
While the newly rebaptized Democratic Republic of the Congo
(DRC) faced uncertainty in 1997, one important question remained:
To whom did industrial Katanga belong? The natural resources, the
heritage of modernity, and the kazi provided access to a salary, schools
for children, and medical services. Variations of this question—such
as, to whom do the mines belong?—have been asked for more
than a century. The answers range far and wide: to the local ethnic
groups; to the colonizing power (Léopold II and Belgium); to the
company that possesses the technology (UMHK, then Gécamines);
to shareholders who provide the funds; to white workers or black
workers; to the colony; to the self-proclaimed autonomous state
of Katanga (from 1960 to 1963); to the Democratic Republic of
Congo that inherited the colony; to the Congolese/Zairian nation
or to its founding president Mobutu; to the “natives” only; or
to the direct descendants of the workers who built the modern
society?
Gécamines was surpassing its own production standards, but was
destabilized by the Shaba war in 1978 and drained of funds by
constant withdrawals of funds operated by the Congolese state and
president Mobutu. By the 1980s it was no longer able to main-
tain its machinery. After production ceased, its facilities were plun-
dered upon the initiative of the provincial government. Inspired
by Zairianization (in the early 1970s, confiscation of businesses
from foreign ownership and redistribution to citizens of the coun-
try then called Zaire), in the early 1990s, Kyungu wa Kumwanza
“Katangized” industrial heritage to create a Katangan middle class.
Metal mining permits made plundering legal (including cutting

electric cables and taking copper and cobalt from the industrial
equipment), and ethnic cleansing was initiated to free jobs and create
business opportunities.
In 1997, when Laurent Kabila rose to power in Kinshasa, Zaire
reclaimed its name of Congo while Katanga, known as “Shaba” under
Mobutu’s reign, reclaimed its own name too.5 Gécamines lost promis-
ing deposits, and copper production declined to 1920 levels. Reduced
to living in misery, thousands of children of the former bana shaba
began digging the soil of the Gécamines mining concessions, hoping
to extract small amounts of cobalt ore, which was purchased at out-
rageously low prices by traffickers. The DRC granted the slag heap
at the Gécamines thermal plant, rich in residual cobalt, to a company
founded by George Forrest, a local businessman of Belgian nationality
and son of a Katanga settler.
The business emblem under which the bana shaba had prospered
subsequently disappeared from the city’s landscape. In the 1930s, the
smokestack of the thermal plant rose to ever higher levels along with
the height of the slag heap.6 Shown on hundreds of pictures and
reproduced in thousands of popular paintings and on Congolese ban-
knotes, the two symbolized the city and the company. Their inclusion
in the urban landscape coincided with the construction of cities of
workers built in the shadow of the smokestack and organized under
the schedule of the bell calling the workers to the mines. An urban
legend that surfaced in 19617 explained that the smokestack, which
was then painted in black and white, represented black and white
Katangans. People in Lubumbashi used to say that if the smokestack
ever stopped releasing smoke, the Kasaiens would leave: in the 1990s,
their forced departure coincided with interruptions at the thermal
plant; the smokestack intermittently stopped producing smoke and
then stopped for good.
Soon after, devoured by the machinery of George Forrest’s com-
pany, the slag heap began to shrink. In 2000, Forest had the outline
of the Katangan map and image of the slag heap and smokestack
printed on a pagne. Bearing the name of his company along with
Gécamines, this pagne resembled the ones printed by Gécamines in
times past. Then, a new version of Forrest’s pagne appeared bearing
only the slag heap; the smokestack had disappeared.8 A descendant of
the settlers, once held at the mercy of the UMHK, had taken this
symbolic revenge. The bana shaba had been disinherited from the
kazi; Gécamines (a “giant”), their father and mother, was on its knees
(Figure 2.3).
Figure 2.3 “Travailleurs nus,” by Sammy Baloji, with permission
From Slave to Worker, from Ancestor to Ghost

In Katanga, the effects of industrialization were not equally dis-
tributed; the benefit of mining rights and the memory of local
sovereignties had remained alive. Still in 1928, villages that were
losing mining rights to the UMHK obtained an annual royalty of
12 tons of copper.9 Those who were “native” to the mining area
had long been able to avoid salaried work, or “wage slavery,” while
the railroad facilitated the recruitment of workers in neighboring
Kasai. In these neighborhoods, together with the women, they would
father many children; schooled by the company, they would ben-
efit from good jobs. When independence was declared, the bana
shaba, 60 percent of whom were natives of other regions, bene-
fited from industrialization even though the mines were not located
inside the territory of many of these ethnic groups. Being a descen-
dant of a “copper eater” was no longer an advantage unless the
province became a state. Moïse Tshombe’s brief reign lasted from
1960 to 1963 and received the financial support of the UMHK.
In 1967, the Congolese state declared itself the sole owner of the
soil and subsoil, but nothing was offered to the previous own-
ers of the land. In spite of the departure of the whites, who had
previously expropriated them, everyone—Mobutu and politicians,
fellow citizens from other regions—grew rich, except for the previous
owners.
Traumatic Memories—Suffering Due to Absent

Memories
Ethnic memories and memories of its citizens, institutional memo-
ries and private memories, memories of the conquest of modernity
and memories of exclusion (a true palimpsest) are rewritten with each
generation according to gender, to one’s relationship with salaried
work, and to the surrounding environment. In the 1990s, modernity
fell into ruins and deserted the Katanga of the mines. Deprived of
an active workforce, the industrial landscape is haunted by its ghost;
ancestral rights to the subsoil only allow manual extraction of a few
kilograms of cobalt ore by children (who put their life at risk on a
daily basis). This is enough to obtain something to eat once a day
at most.
Sammy Baloji’s camera and computer endowed this experience
with the power of tragedy, bringing a palimpsest of memories back
to life as the true chorus of this tragedy, translating past sufferings
into a present and palpable form. While his perspective is imbued
with the Katangan experience, the form was derived as much from
contact with the contemporary world as from the local imaginative
framework, which is prolifically represented through painting. Rep-
resenting the work that has deserted the industrial landscape, and
searching the ruins of modernity for what the future will bring, Sammy
Baloji accuses the fathers of neglecting to transmit modernity and
the memories of their ancestors’ suffering in building it. From the
father’s selfishness to the memories of the settler, he unearthed the
labor of the workers of the past and put into perspective today’s
suffering by illustrating the suffering of these forced migrants. Arriv-
ing as “slaves” of whites, they became workers. They watched over
the kazi and behaved like ancestors by passing it on. Rather than
the whites, it was them, their technology, and their capital that built
modernity for the benefit of their sons. Irresponsible, their sons not
only neglected to pass on modernity to their children, but had unrav-
eled society after severing its link to the kazi that connected ancestors
and descendants. Like cathedrals built to remember and serve as a
testimony of these forefathers, Sammy Baloji presents industrial facil-
ities that “suffer” from emptiness, from an absence created by the
ghost of the kazi. Unacknowledged suffering, fruit of the kazi squan-
dered by the fathers, has made it impossible for deceased grandfathers
to fulfill their role as ancestors. When Sammy Baloji discovered the

archived photos, he also acquired the means to reconstruct the expe-
rience of suffering and the presence of the kazi. He restored to the
grandfathers their existence as ancestors (Figure 2.3). His work has
contributed to the political questioning initiated by his generation
of Congolese and the diaspora from which echoes the songs of his
cousin, Baloji Tshiani, a “white with frizzy hair.”10 Admittedly, we
will not restore to them the country and the times of the past (“Tout
ceci ne vous rendra pas le Congo,” Hôtel Impala album), but they are
reclaiming their future at the cost of an acknowledgment of their own
suffering.
I received your letter in late June. It left me in bad shape, but nevertheless
I have not ceased to read every word, every sentence, every name, every detail,
every photo, and every face. Is this a mirage, an illusion, a hologram? Or has
reason passed away? Terror seen from here is like the earth seen from the
sky. It looks far away, it feels unreal. When I think you left Kin, and your
own people. That they chase our ethnic group like they do Christian names.
Your son, an assassin with embers in his gaze, now finds his confidence in
an M16.
At age 14, in quarantine, they took him for a witch because he got stoned on
kerosene. Arriving in the East, he accidentally killed one of his cousins, mistak-
ing him for a supporter. Fucking hell! Horror is human, and we exterminate
our own. He wanted to be a saviour, not an anonymous soldier.
Even if the West still has a strong back, it will not bring back the Congo,
the plundering of our minerals, our ingot. It will not bring back the Congo.
Reproducing colonial patterns, it will not bring back the Congo. For terror
seen from here is like the earth seen from the sky. It looks far away, it feels
unreal . . .
We are all fully Congolese, all related. Let’s leave our differences aside; we
have a country to rebuild. While viruses are exchanged like business cards, the
new missionaries use their Emmaus to build small and medium enterprises,
who do not know about the crisis. People’s beliefs instead of budgets, they
are investing where NGOs leave off. I admire your courage, your resource-
fulness. Your heart is dipped in zinc; it will not corrode; but stop believing
in their exorcisms, they have no cure against paludism. I am a giant among
the pygmies, since my green card expired, black is depressing. Skin that loses
its colour leaves scars and the shock is cultural. Our development has stopped
like the Gécamines.
Confused by our melanin levels, integration will depend on money, but
determination will determine our future.
Even if the West still has a strong back . . .
As Seen through the Details:11 A Closer Look at the

Shared Experience of Suffering
For a century, this society defined itself equally as Katangan and
Congolese, depending on the moment and the circumstances; it was
united by a common aspiration to modernize, by the ethics of the
kazi, and through the memory of shared suffering that had once been
necessary to achieve modernity. The Colonie belge painting brings the
suffering of the colonized people to life as described in a speech by
Patrice Lumumba on June 30, 1960, and this same suffering lives on
in fragmented memories (Figure 2.1). Without knowing it, Mobutu
made Lumumba into a consentaneous figure while the suffering of
the people was being carved into the memories of “indigenous” suf-
fering, subject of the colonial state. As suffering became the habitual
condition of the Congolese, everyone was trying to avoid it, to drag
themselves out of it at the expense of others, but mainly through
exile, by being torn away from the country, leaving the Congolese
condition.
On two occasions, once in 1991 and again in 1993, urban riots
led to raids that destroyed the tools of production; without work
and without a salary, survival had become a challenge and life itself
miserable. In Katanga, the sale of furniture, fridges, and televi-
sions on the Zambian trans-boundary market converted yesterday’s
“modernity” into a small income for survival: mothers became infor-
mal micro-business entrepreneurs. Since teachers, medical personnel,
and government workers were not receiving their salaries, school,
health, and public services had to be paid for by users. Women’s
resourcefulness made it possible for families to eat one meal a day.
Paternal authority was ruined: young people, while still children,
chose the streets in the hope of a better life. The expulsion of hundreds
of thousands of Kasaiens amplified the economic slump. Contrary
to other mining cities, such as Kolwezi and Likasi, the Kasaiens in
Lubumbashi stayed on even when facing the loss of their businesses,
jobs, and houses. Young Katangans, regimented by the Kyungu gov-
ernor, harassed them, broke up mixed families, and ensured the
disruption of social order. Factories turned into ruins, exposing an
unredeemed urban landscape. Socialized in a modern context since
birth, between Congolese music in Lingala, everyday life in Swahili,
and cartoons, music, and the Internet, youth fell prey to a special
kind of suffering and were denied a future. Many had to leave school
and jobs had become inexistent; it was impossible to start a family, as
fathers had no money to give as dowry or school bursary. The vast
majority of people were on the streets, where Kyungu’s policies were

successful in pitting them against each other.
Sammy Baloji was then a young teenager and went through this
experience. Both his parents were born in Kasai; his family was hit
hard by the crisis. The family house and other modern acquisitions
disappeared. Pastor Célestin Baloji, Sammy’s father, was closely related
to Fortunat Tshiani Mwadianwita; they were schoolmates.12 Fortunat
was the owner of the Impala Hotel, destroyed during the 1991 unrest,
and of the rice processing and marketing enterprises of Kasongo
(Maniema), which closed their doors in 1996. Fearing for his life,
he left Katanga and would not come back until 1999. Célestin Baloji,
head office director at Tshiani Magric SPRL, lost his job. An attempt
at saving the company resulted in the loss of his house as well. Member
of the Église Lumière du Christ (Light of Christ Church), Sammy’s
father decided not to join the diaspora; he was the school’s principal
and was waiting for political change to reopen Magric.
In 1998, as he was leaving school, one of Sammy Baloji’s brothers-
in-law gave him a camera so he could earn some money.13 He
apprenticed with Simon Mukundayi, a studio photographer known
for his desire to experiment. In 2003, following his university stud-
ies, Sammy received a Canon camera from an aunt. He had had
access to a computer since 2002. The path of experimentation opened
before him: “Light was becoming an important element in my artis-
tic endeavors. Photography would not exist without light. At that
point, I took up photography. It was important to find an expres-
sion, a narrative between drawing, photography and cinema,” he
explained in 2008.14 In 2004, the director of the Francophone cultural
centre in Lubumbashi, Hubert Maheux, invited Sammy Baloji to par-
ticipate in the making of an architectural guide of Katanga (Maheux
et al. 2008). For the first time, he took pictures of ex-UMHK instal-
lations, and in 2005, during Francophone Africa Heritage Days, he
found himself in Likasi, an industrial city built in the 1920s. His
perspective of this industrial city reflected his Kasaien experience in
Lubumbashi; details that would have gone unnoticed by someone
else’s eyes caught his attention: the suffering of deported workers,
invisible to the uninformed eye, haunted him. Memories began to
flow into his palimpsest. Assembled in long horizontal strips, the jux-
taposition of photos that he took spilled over. The frame was no
longer a limit preventing a photo from being added to another, from
invading its space. The soundtrack recorded by Baloji in Likasi would
become part of the exhibit he presented at the École d’Architecture à
la Cambre in Belgium. These sounds of life came to take their place
Figure 2.4 “Masque” by Sammy Baloji, with permission
in the city, making the absence of the workers who built it even more
palpable; their suffering is still present beyond the memories.
In Likasi, when Sammy Baloji photographed the buildings, his cam-
era acted as an archivist, revealing the traces of what had once been
(Figure 2.4). In doing this, he recorded what was left of the presence
of the white people who had erected the buildings, but his main focus
is on the fact of the absence of the working society that had once
brought life to the city.
When Gécamines was about to be sold off in July 2005, pho-
tographs from the archives of the old UMHK, previously unknown to
the people of Lubumbashi, could be found in the city. The imminent
demise of the father and mother of the bana shaba caused some to
steal the pictures. It was as if they were announcing the funeral pro-
cession, as if people feared that grief would be forbidden and that
its children would not be able to have a discussion about death and
responsibilities and to share in the inheritance. From these images
of the past, Sammy extracted human figures and let them stand as
a testimony to a previous existence. He sought to give meaning to
suffering in order to create a new awareness. From the archived pho-
tos, his memorial extracted the life of those whose absence haunted
the present ruins. He reestablished the continuity lost by the fathers
between the suffering of “grandfathers,” the creators of modernity,
and the suffering of “grandsons,” to whom it had been denied. For
the most part, he used the collage technique. The images of the people
he cut out of these pictures were applied onto the images of indus-
trial landscapes. Digital decoupage and collage respected the limits
between the people he called forth from the past and the present ruins
haunted by their absence. The spectator is thus faced not only with
the presence of two time frames in a confrontation created by Sammy
Baloji, but by the continuity denied by the whites and lost by the
“fathers.” The integration of the people of the past into the present-
day industrial landscape gives meaning to today’s suffering. However,
picking up the work of these pioneers remains a challenge for the gen-
eration whose only direct inheritance is their absence. Giving meaning
to suffering by writing it into the local history (now largely secular)
of the reconstruction of modernity, is this a call to political action
(Figure 2.3)?
The Presence of Suffering and Calling

Upon the Present
The comparison between the photos of abandoned machinery or
buildings (Figure 2.4) that have lost their purpose and the essays
by Sammy Baloji entitled “Corps et masques” (Figure 2.2) makes it
possible to understand his work as a portrait artist of life in its raw
form, literally of life laid bare. While a mask comes to life only if it
is worn by someone—even if participants pretend that the mask, a
(re)presentation of the absent spirit of an ancestor, acts on its own—
Baloji photographs what can be seen rather than what social reason
affirms. The body of the masked person dominates rather than fades
into the scene. When confronted with the nude body, the viewer’s
unease and embarrassment is amplified when he or she is faced with
the evidence that a mask only comes to life if it is worn by someone.
In this context, the “masked” portrait of a machine or building, both
rendered obsolete and far from working order, highlights the suffer-
ing that comes from the absence of life. The tool without the man
who brings it to life is only an abandoned mask, the anguished face of
suffering.
This experience helps to gain a perspective beyond the surface of
Sammy Baloji’s collages, thus helping the viewer to enter into the lay-
ers of the palimpsest. The meaning of these images with reference to
the aesthetics of the social awareness of the Katangan working class is
obvious to anyone who is familiar with its urban paintings. Admittedly,
Sammy Baloji is firmly anchored in the historical retelling of what has
come to be, of what is visibly factual. But the meaning of each scene
created with “real” characters, which he moves from their time to
his own, can only be understood by a double representation: that of
the restitution of the meaning of social experience within the frame-
work of collective awareness and the reading of what human façade
truly means in a social context. The memoir penetrates the frame-
work of collective awareness and seeks to reveal the meaning of the
human façade. Through the miracle of memory, this contemporary
representation is projected onto the screen of the present. This way,
the suffering of the past, as witnessed by predecessors brought into
the present to be with the viewer, exerts a powerful presence while
today’s suffering is disguised by the absence of life. The composition
of photographs of industrial landscapes in ruins forms a portrait of
these masks of modernity; that is, the machines and buildings are now
relics due to the absence of the people who gave them life. In these
collages, life comes from the past; it is lent to the present from history;
the present lies in the ruins of yesterday, an obsolete mask that suffers
from life abandoned (Figure 2.4).
The collage, shown in Figure 2.3, goes back in time, probably to
the end of the 1910s. The image depicts recruits undressed for the
medical exam they had to undergo upon their arrival at the mining
site. The legend told by this original photographic document has been
preserved so that these events give the collage a factual “authenticity.”
Their shocking nudity, offensive to the Congolese viewer, represents
both the humiliation of the prisoner undressed in public as a pun-
ishment (Figure 2.1) and that of the masked character in the “Corps
et masques” series (Figure 2.2). Behind them lies a desolate land-
scape composed of abandoned buildings, a grim mask of scrap metal,
a discontinued track that no longer leads anywhere, and ultimately
the absence of memories. Those migrant workers, brought as slaves
by the white people, stare at their descendants who have not been
able to hold on to the fruit of their labor. They are in the condition
illustrated by popular artists in their representations of the bearers
Figure 2.5 Slave Trade, B. Jewsiewicki Collection
of those colonial times in slave caravans (Figure 2.5) inspired by an

abolitionist engraving that dates back from the nineteenth century.
The physical and psychological suffering of the builders of
modernity is experienced by the viewer as a reproach. It brings back
the suffering of the prisoner on whose body the state has put its
mark of ownership (Figure 2.1). This unbearable ancestral nudity
admonishes today’s people for their mess, their self-centeredness, their
inability to transmit modernity. Behind them, to the right, sits the
skeletal ghost of the transporter that used to take the slag from the
thermal plant to the top of the slag heap, thus making it higher.
To the left lies the structure of an industrial building and a smokestack
without smoke. And finally, whether by chance or a significant detail,
the border of the platform below the transporter is black and yellow.
Is it an allusion to the outfit of the prisoner in Colonie belge? The
transporter is red and ochre, the color of dried blood.
Can Suffering Be a Source of Dignity

and a Reason for Recognition?
For modernity to belong not only to those who consider themselves its
legitimate children, but especially to the heirs of its future generations,
it must become a local “antiquity,” reclaiming the mysterious beauty
imparted by life. One must certainly explore how human life formed
it, but mostly ensure its transmission and declare its cost, the suf-
fering of its creators. In many parts of the world that have been
stricken by deindustrialization, the inability to portray oneself in a
local history that transmits modernity, not being able to demonstrate
its local origins, is a political reason for the suffering resulting from
nonrecognition. Added to the economic and social effects of deindus-
trialization, this suffering amplifies the desire to leave, the desire to
become a migrant in search of the modernity of others.
When they form a connecting thread of memory enabling them to
claim their ancestors’ decisive contribution to the modernity of oth-
ers, the African diasporas talk either about colonization or about the
slave trade that affected their ancestors. The contributions of colo-
nial Africans to national metropolitan capitalisms, the contributions
of African soldiers defending Western democracies against totalitari-
anism, or even the contribution of slaves to the American or Brazilian
modern landscape make it possible for members of these diasporas to
reclaim their legitimate right to their heritage. The effects of glob-
alization, with its trail of abandoned regions, expose the younger
generation in Africa to similar challenges. Sammy Baloji and Baloji
Tshiani seek to fill the void created by the absence of recognition from
which their people’s dignity suffers. Reestablishing the link between
the local past of modernity and its ascendance, with the ruins bearing
witness to the current suffering, empowers this suffering and restores
its redemptive value. In Congolese society, deeply but also diversely
Christian, suffering ceases to be degrading from the moment it is
experienced for a legitimate and worthy cause. A messianic represen-
tation of Patrice Lumumba gives meaning to the banal suffering of
the Congolese people because it is seen through the redemptive lens
of the oppressed of the world, the “world’s damned.” The suffering
of youth, who were not only abandoned by their “fathers,” but also
ignored by the world, gains in dignity and recognition when it is con-
nected to the suffering of ancestors, those local artisans of modernity.
It is a connection that gives modernity the mysterious beauty of life
and turns it into an artifact. In urban Congolese culture, suffering
does not have inherent aesthetic qualities; however, its redemptive
potential vests it with a strong moral and political charge. We owe
the ancestors for their suffering, for the heritage they left us. How-
ever, our own suffering must find a redemptive mission in order to
merit recognition. In keeping with this imperative of social awareness,
Sammy Baloji is explicit when he illustrates ancestral suffering and very
reserved when, in the absence of images, he renders the suffering of
his generation implicit. The suffering of the past belongs to history;

its signs are explicit, contrary to the meaning and mission of suffering
in the present, which remain to be defined.
Notes
1. It would be impossible to list the imposing quantity of recent litera-
ture devoted to modernity, particularly its dynamics and acceptance
outside of the Western world. Moreover, it would be inappropri-
ate to mention personal observations in this article. I will never-
theless single out Appadurai (1996), Chakrabarty (2002), Cooper
(2005), Himmelfarb (2004), and Mitchell (2000) along with Hannah
Arendt’s ideas, in particular Imperialism (Arendt 1968) to have pro-
vided me with information and guidance. Kiangu Sindani, historian
at the Université de Kinshasa, former student with the Compagnie
du Jésus training college in Kwango, where Pierre Mulele led the
first Congolese uprising, affirms that Congolese modernity is associ-
ated with “supra-ethnic, supra-religious, and supra-scholastic ideals”
(Sindani 2003). Graduates were “first and foremost modernists” who
adhered to “moral and social ideas from the outside, such as a society
based on monogamy, laws and regulations to ensure order and secu-
rity, moral law, working for wages, hygiene and cleanliness, personal
freedoms and its dependent, private property” (Sindani 2003, 17);
he also wrote that these men felt themselves to be “citizens of the
world rather than a region” (Guffens and Sindani 1992, 5). This ideal
is reflected in a personal account by Appadurai (1996, 3), who grew
up in Mumbai. Appadurai insists on the importance of “a work of
imagination as a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity” as does
Taylor (2004) in Modern Social Imaginaries and Calhoun (2008).The
relationship between the social imaginary and modernity is evidently
central in my interpretation of Sammy Baloji’s photography.
2. I have provided an analysis of this in Jewsiewicki (2003), chapter 1.
3. René Brion and Jean-Louis Moreau (2006, 26, 128).
4. See specifically the second chapter in Dia Mwembu (2001) and third
chapter in Chakrabarty (2000).
5. See Kennes (2009), chapter 5.
6. Throughout the Western world in the 1920s and 1930s, images of
the factory smokestack, with smoke spewing out, and metal structures
standing up straight, were modernity incarnated, in images such as
Petrol by Thomas Hart Benton at the New School for Social Research
in New York City. They are as much a part of modern fascism and
soviet communism as modern colonialism.
7. André Yav, “Vocabulaire de la ville d’Elisabethville,” photocopied text
from 1961 written on the initiative of an association of household
workers. See the English translation in Fabian, Mango, and Schicho

(1990).
8. It is estimated that in 2009, companies in Katanga employed 4,000
workers who ensured survival for 20,000 people.
9. In the 1910s, recruits were brought (to Katanga) with ropes around
their necks to prevent desertions; they were lined up nude (this was
deeply humiliating for adult men) and examined by a doctor. The
annual mortality rate varied between 10 percent and 20 percent at
that time: the Katanga mines were a country of death.
10. I’ve been so ’lone since I begin to roam I never shoulda left home,
thought I was grown. Now I see what it means to me I’m going
home to see my mother I’m going home to see my dear old dad
I’m going home to be with my brother I’m going home I’m going
home . . .
Nakuenda Kwa baba yangu Nakuenda Kwa mama yangu
“Humiliation for a Muluba, don’t speak tchiluba. Don’t know ‘bout
my tribe, it’s hard But I’m a white with frizzy hair I hold back,
hang low, work hard, search for a Breakdown Bounty primitive To a
dream never come true . . . ‘Nakuenda’ ” (NB: In Swahili, nakuenda
means “I’m about to leave.” In the context of the Hôtel Impala
song, it means “I’m leaving to visit my people, I’m coming back.”
(Honte pour un Muluba Parle pas le tchiluba Connais rien de ma
tribu, c’est ardu Mais je suis un blanc aux cheveux crépus Qui plane,
traîne, peine, cherche C’est la panne sèche Bounty abruti Au rêve
inabouti . . . Nakuenda . . . )
11. Details: the special (but undescribable) flavour of the cookie
dipped in tea for Marcel or the special conditions (also unde-
scribable) of the sociopolitical atmosphere that predicts a storm
in African currents for me? No, two dimensions are lacking:
the succession of terms in a list and/or how we can distinguish
the individual from the mass, the details from what’s essential, the
hidden meaning from the information that’s all too clear, the
superfluous and irrelevant . . . Today, I’m still waiting for more
details to rise up from the past and through them will finally be
revealed the secret image in the mat composed of black and white.
But in the novel by Henry James, didn’t Corvick die when he
thought he had found out the secret of this image?
(Bisanswa 2009, 3, 9)
12. Tshiani Estates, well known in Lubumbashi, are in the portrait Mea-
sures of November 30, 1973 of Tshibumba representing Zairianization
(Fabian 1996, 172–173).
13. The increasing mechanization of development and printing made it
easier to become a photographer. Without a job, many young people
had a “means of production” allowing them access to the information
economy.
14. This quote, along with the others, comes from an interview recorded
at Lubumbashi on January 26, 2007, and transcribed by Roger Djibu
Kitenge.
References
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesotta Press, 1996.
Arendt, Hannah. Imperialism: Part Two. Of the Origins of Totalitarianism.
New York: Mariner Books, 1968.
Bisanswa, Justin. “Discerner le détail de la mémoire.” In Témoignages, under
the direction of Muriel Gomez-Perez. Québec, 2009.
Brion, René and Moreau, Jean-Louis. De la mine à Mars. La genèse d’Umicore.
Tielt: Lannoo, 2006.
Calhoun, Craig. “Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Social Imag-
inary.”Daedalus 137, no. 3 (2008): 105–114. doi: 10.1162/
daed.2008.137.3.105.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Rethinking Working-Class History. Bengal 1890–1949.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern
Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Cooper, Frederick. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History.
Dia Mwembu, Donatien Dibwe. Bana Shaba abandonnés par leur père: Struc-
tures de l’autorité et histoire sociale de la famille ouvrière au Katanga
1910–1997. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001.
Fabian, Johannes. Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in
Zaire. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Fabian, Johannes, Mango, Kalundi, and Schicho, Walter. History from Below:
The “Vocabulary of Elisabethville” by André Yav: Texts, Translations, and
Interpretative Essay. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 1990.
Guffens, Joseph and Sindani, Kiangu. Préparer un peuple parfait: Mgr. Joseph
Guffens, 1895–1973. Kinshasa: Éditions Saint Paul Afrique, 1992.
Himmelfarb, Gertrude. The Roads to Modernity. The British, French, and
American Enlightenments. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.
Jewsiewicki, Bogumil. Mami Wata. La Peinture Urbaine Congolaise. Paris:
Gallimard, 2003.
Kennes, Erik. Fin du cycle post-colonial au Katanga, RD Congo. Rébellions,
sécession et leurs mémoires dans la dynamique des articulations entre l’etat
central et l’autonomie régionale 1960–2007. PhD thesis, Université Laval,
2009.
Maheux, Hubert, Pabois, Marc, SongaSonga, Serge, and Lagae, Johan
(dirs.). République démocratique du Congo. Lubumbashi. Capitale minière
du Katanga 1910–2010. L’architecture. Lubumbashi: Espace Culturel
Francophone de Lubumbashi, 2008.
Mitchell, Timothy. Questions of Modernity (Contradictions of Modernity).

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Sindani, Kiangu. Kikwit et son hinterland. Le modernisme à l’épreuve des iden-
tités sociales au Kwilu. 1948–1968. predoctoral dissertation, University of
Kinshasa, 2003.
Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2004.
Chapter 3
E v e n t, I m a g e , A f f e c t :
The Tsunami in the Folk Art
of Bengal
Roma Chatterji
As inhabitants of a low-lying riverside region prone to flooding, rural

Bengalis have an intimate association with the power of water—the
river as a beneficial source of life but equally as the purveyor of death
and destruction. The river is anthropomorphized either as the god-
dess Ganga who is seen riding on her vahana (vehicle) the makara, a
mythic beast, or is made manifest through its inhabitants such as the
serpents who are the denizens of the watery underworld and their
queen, the goddess Manasa. These divinities embody the qualities
of the river, appearing simultaneously as both wrathful and benevo-
lent. They are quick to anger, often killing with little provocation,
but are also easily appeased. In fact, the river in spate is thought to
be a manifestation of the goddess’ play—her lila. This particular view
of devastation as a form of divine play is different from the Judeo-
Christian idea of disaster as retribution visited on humanity as a form
of transgression (Dimock 1982). Instead, it is a sign of the goddess’
presence. Affliction is viewed as a form of grace manifest in historical
events such as floods, epidemics, and famines (Dimock 1982; Nicholas
and Sarkar 2003). Bengal has produced several literary genres that
explore the connection between historical events and divine play. One
of the best known is the mangalkavya—a “eulogistic type of middle-
Bangla text”—devoted to describing the lila of gods and goddesses
76 R o m a C h at t e r j i
who visit the realm of mortals leaving signs of their auspicious pres-
ence through specific events (Dimock 1982, 184). As Nicholas and
Sarkar (2003) show, these events may be “real”—that is, located in
historical time but made meaningful only in terms of mythic time
so that time as diachrony or succession gives way to synchrony or
cyclical time.1
In this chapter, I use the idea of affliction as a form of grace to
examine a set of “flood narratives”—narratives that are performed
in the mode of picture storytelling in Medinipur, West Bengal. The
Chitrakars, an itinerant caste of performers, paint and display narra-
tive paintings on a variety of themes inspired by the mangalkavyas.
The Chitrakars have a fairly long tradition of composing on themes
relating to floods and other natural disasters. Such events are of local
and regional significance. In recent years they have also started com-
posing stories about global events such as the 9/11 strike in the
United States and the 2004 tsunami (Chatterji 2012), even though
the bulk of the poems composed in the mangalkavya style was in the
medieval period. The stories themselves have been kept alive in folk
memory by being narrated as part of ritual activity or by being enacted
in the mode of folk theatre or storytelling. Even though the man-
galkavyas are religious and literary documents, several of the poems
also contain references to geographical places and historical events.
The “Manasamangal,” the story of the snake goddess Manasa and
her adventures on earth as she seeks to establish her worship among
humans, is a favorite theme for performance among the Chitrakars as
some of the goddess’ adventures are located in Tamluk, an area that
falls in the modern district of East Medinipur. The river—the means of
connecting the mundane earthly plane with the realm of the gods—is
common to all the mangalkavyas. It is the site on which the adventures
delineated in the stories are played out and where the gods manifest
themselves. It is precisely this aspect—the river as the locale for the
wondrous and the uncanny—that is repeated in the flood narratives
as well. But first a brief account about the Chitrakars and their art of
picture storytelling.
The Chitrakars of Medinipur

The Chitrakars or patuas 2 occupy an interstitial position in the caste
hierarchy, designating themselves as Muslim, following local “Hindu”
customs such as worshipping the snake goddess, Manasa, and display-
ing patas that have largely Hindu themes.3 Also, like many Bengali
Muslims, they commonly have two names—a Muslim name and a
Tsunami in Folk Art of Bengal 77
Bangla name, which is more frequently used.4 Their traditional desig-

nation of “patua” was derived from the long scroll paintings—pata,
from the Sanskrit word for cloth—that they used to tell or sing their
stories. The Chitrakars are not the only caste of painters in Bengal.
Other artisan castes such as the Kumhars (potters) or Shutradhars (car-
penters) also paint similar pictures, but it is only the Chitrakars who
display patas and sing the pata songs, thus making them multimedia
performers (Ray 1953). The Chitrakars first enter academic discourse
through the writings of GurusadayDutt (1882–1941), who described
them as shilpi (craftsmen) and traced their origin to an ancient tra-
dition of picture storytelling mentioned in sacred texts such as the
Brahma Vaivarta Purana. Popular representations tend to character-
ize them as alms seekers soliciting dana (gifts) by displaying patas
and singing pata songs (Hauser 2002). In the 1930s, when Dutt was
researching the art and craft traditions of Bengal, many Chitrakars had
given up their traditional occupation in an attempt to achieve a higher
status. In the early part of the twentieth century, some Hindu nation-
alist organizations tried to bring low-caste groups into the Hindu
mainstream. But “reconversion” did not have much of an impact on
their social status, and many Chitrakars returned to their former reli-
gion (Bhattacharjee 1980).5 Scholars have identified several different
styles of pata painting in Bengal, but apart from the inhabitants of a
few villages in Medinipur and some of the neighboring districts, one
finds very few active scroll painters and performers. Naya village in
West Medinipur is an exception in that it has a vibrant Chitrakar com-
munity with approximately 45 households actively producing patas.
However, very few households actually earn their livelihood by dis-
playing patas in the traditional way.6 Instead, their “craft” has been
“discovered” through both state patronage and new market opportu-
nities, so that patas are now sold in wider urban markets in India and
abroad.
Pata Performance and the Narrative Tradition

The scrolls (patas) that one sees in Medinipur today are usually from
six to 12 feet long and two and a half to three feet wide. Most story-
tellers tend to carry five or six scrolls to give their audience a choice
of stories. They usually begin with auspicious themes based on the
mangalakavyas or stories of pirs and then go on to display patas
about local, often sensational events (Singh 1995b). Even though a
pata performance today is not considered to be a sacred event, this
may not always have been the case. Archival survey reveals that the
display of patas may have had a sacred character in the past, as many
old scrolls on sacred themes had inscriptions written at the back with
names of donors who had given dana (offerings) to have the pata
displayed again and again. Such performances were often considered
to be rites of atonement for transgression, and the repeated display
of the sacred story to the accompaniment of the pata song acted as
a blessing spread to all the members of the audience (Singh 1995b).
Unlike the ritual narrations performed by bards elsewhere in India,
Chitrakars do not have an established network of patrons, nor are
their performances commissioned. They see themselves as entertain-
ers, experimenting with new themes and transforming old ones (Singh
1995a).
It is in this spirit that they have included in their repertoire a variety
of natural disasters such as the floods in Medinipur, the Gujarat earth-
quake, and the 2004 tsunami. In the following sections, I will try
to show how the structure of the mangalkavya allows secular events
to be articulated in the narrative vocabulary of the Chitrakars, such
that the transitory nature of events are subsumed within the symbolic
structure of myth.
The primary event taken up for discussion here is the tsunami of
2004, which affected large parts of South and Southeast Asia. The
Chitrakars of Medinipur started using the tsunami theme to compose
patas initially as participants in an international art auction to raise
money for the victims of this disaster, but this later became part of the
emerging international repertoire that they have developed through
their interaction with publics outside their district.7 A closer look at
the tsunami pata reveals a continuation of an older theme, the flood
that is part of the traditional repertoire of the Medinipur Chitrakars.
In fact an event in living memory, the great Medinipur flood of 1978,
inspired a whole generation of artists to paint patas commemorating
the event.
Tempests, Floods and the Devouring Goddess

Like other low-lying areas in West Bengal, Medinipur is prone to
flooding during monsoons. It has also, from time to time, been sub-
ject to cyclonic storms that have devastated large parts of the district.
The floods of 1978, however, stand out as having been the most severe
in living memory. The floods were a result of continuous rain for 12
days and the decision of the Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC), the
organization for flood control in West Bengal, to release water from
its reservoir after it discovered cracks in the dam on one of the major
rivers in this region. The floods were followed by epidemics. The

standing paddy crop was destroyed, and several areas in Medinipur
reported riots outside hospitals and relief centers.8 Aditi Nath Sarkar
was able to meet Dukhushyam Chitrakar, an artist from Medinipur
who was among the first to compose on the theme of the flood.9
Sarkar offers a detailed analysis of the song that Dukhushyam com-
posed to accompany his painted scroll. I begin by describing the song
that Dukhushyam sang for Sarkar.
The song suggests not only an awareness of circumstantial detail
such as the failure of the Damodar Valley Corporation, the primary
organization for the management of West Bengal’s river system, to
control the deluge, but also an understanding of the politics of relief
work. The chief minister, the prime minister, and several philan-
thropists and aid organizations are mentioned in successive phrases in
the song as are the local attempts at rescue and relief work. A note
of humor is introduced when Dukhushyam, the singer, comments
on the low price and easy availability of fish as the flood waters
swept away the familiar fishing spots of the local boatmen and fish
were found floating into people’s homes (see endnote 9). Sarkar
describes Dukhushyam’s flood pata in detail. Scenes of people float-
ing on the swollen rivers, some of them on rafts, are juxtaposed
with pictures of helicopters and photographers surveying the scene
from a distance. But we also get a radically different perspective
toward the end of the song as Dukhushyam breaks into the voice
of a boatman describing a miraculous occurrence in the middle of
the flood waters—a woman who proclaimed that she was Mother
Ganga herself and claimed to have eaten all three sides of the land
(Figures 3.1 and 3.2).10
We get two different perspectives of the flood—one from the point
of view of the people immersed in the waters and the other from
the observers who watch from afar. The scroll is organized themat-
ically into different registers so that like a film reel unrolling before
us we see successive moments as the event unfolds in time. Yet sud-
denly the song shifts to a completely different register and the goddess
Ganga appears as time itself—time the destroyer that devours life in
all its forms. This is even more clearly articulated in other variants
of the flood song. Thus Shyamsundar Chitrakar’s song ends with the
following stanza:
A fisherman saw a lady in the middle of the river.

She said I am Mother Ganga
I have devoured the past, the present and the future11
Figure 3.1 Third register of a tsunami pata. Artist: Banku Chitrakar, village:
Habichak. (Notice that the woman is dressed in a frock to signify the global aspect
of the event. Earlier variants of this motif would have shown the woman in a sari. The
demon flying above represents the fury of the flood waters.)12
Figure 3.2 Fourth register of the same pata. Artist: Banku Chitrakar
As with Dukhushyam’s song, this song too juxtaposes a series

of discrete and unconnected moments, dramatic events that have
acquired a formulaic status such as the woman who gives birth on
a raft amidst the corpses of men and animals, mentioned in all the
different flood songs that I have heard, ritualistic visits by political
leaders, and news items culled from the media (represented by the
ubiquitous reporters and camerapersons depicted in all patas that por-
tray cataclysmic events). In themselves, these details do not cohere;
each is a discrete moment, lost perhaps in the jumble of events that
are portrayed in the song and in the picture. It is only in the last
stanza that the true meaning of the song is revealed. The world with
its manifold forms, its infinite variety, is revealed as maya (divine illu-
sion) to be swept away in the waters of the river Ganga, a goddess
in her own right, who in her manifestation as destructive water is
the personification of time itself. Thus a localized event is revealed
as a divine cataclysm (Kelly 2004). Shyamsundar’s painting high-
lights this aspect by framing the painted narrative with images of
the goddess Ganga in the first and last registers of the scroll. Other
flood patas substitute the goddess figure with those of a demon—
an anthropomorphic representation of the all-consuming flood. Some
use both images, the monstrous demon face on top and the beautiful
goddess seated on a lotus, a mark of her auspicious and benefi-
cial aspect, at the bottom, as if to suggest that the form of benign
goddess whose fertile waters nourish the people of Bengal also has
another face.
In the two pictures shown in Figures 3.3 and 3.4, there is a wealth
of unlocated detail—trees, motorcars, buildings, humans, fish, and
animals float on the surface of the water.
Even the goddess jostles for space with other figures within the
picture frame (see Figure 3.4). It is as if each figure is a fragment, “a
luminous detail,” indicating a slice of experience in a kind of poetic
shorthand (Burns 1990). The fragments in the picture wait to be
interpreted. They are illumined by the accompanying song that spins
a story around each fragment, highlighting some part of the picture
while leaving other parts in the shadow to await another performance
or another singer.
Scroll painters follow a synoptic mode of representation—using
figural types and standard motifs, which ask viewers to use their imag-
ination to fill in the story in their own way. Images are shorn of
individuated detail but are pregnant with possibility. The technique of
picture storytelling itself assumes a dissonance between verbal images
depicted in the pata songs and pictorial images on the scroll. The
displayer of the pata—the singer of the story that accompanies the
Figure 3.3 First register of a flood pata. Artist: Mantu Chitrakar, village: Naya
scroll—may not be the same as its painter, so the images must allow
for variation in interpretation. As s/he performs—singing while the
scroll is slowly unrolled—the index finger is used to point to images
within the picture frame. Since the depiction of the figures is gen-
eralized, the gesture of pointing is somewhat perfunctory and does
not really help us in following the details of the story. Instead, it con-
nects the song with the picture in a dynamic way, so that the rolling
and unrolling of the scroll and the singing seem to go together. The
scroll is unrolled one frame at a time so that the pictorial space is
revealed slowly—over time. As the story progresses, previous frames
are rolled up. The viewer sees only one frame at a time. Connections
with previous images are made only through the song and through
memory. The images in each frame, especially the human figures, are
shown making hand gestures that connect them with images in adja-
cent frames that are no longer visible. Such hand gestures function
as relays as does the finger of the performer, which moves over the
images connecting the different segments of the story. The modern
Figure 3.4 Last register of a flood pata. Artist: Moina Chitrakar, village: Naya
comic book comes closest to this mode of pictorial organization in

the sense that the pictures are organized as a series in which the text
has the function of relay (Carrier 2000). However, unlike comic books
where pictures have to tell a story or illustrated stories where they only
support the written text, these patas are not completely dependent
on the song. The same pata can be used to sing songs on different
subjects. Thus the demon head comes to stand for many different
kinds of cataclysmic events ranging from tempests to earthquakes and
even the 9/11 strike. In fact, I have heard Shyamsundar’s wife sing
about the 1998 tempest in Datun district, Medinipur, using the same
pata that her husband uses to sing about the flood.13
The Tsunami Pata

Unlike the Medinipur flood pata, whose composition was a response
to an event actually experienced, the first tsunami paintings, as I have
already said, were commissioned by an international organization in
aid of tsunami relief. The composition was not the work of a single
artist.14 Many artists started to paint on this theme at about the same
time, and unlike other patas on contemporary themes, the visual codes
of the tsunami narrative stabilized very quickly.15 Disaster narratives
are popular subjects for pata composition, and the tsunami narrative
had a ready-made vocabulary that it could use. However, the fact that
the impetus for this new narrative was from the international art mar-
ket rather than from a local demand for a new performance has led,
over time, to a far greater emphasis on the painted story often at the
expense of the song. Consider the song that was composed for the
tsunami narrative:
O this extraordinary event

On TV [we saw] several states
That cannot be calculated
In the year 2004 brother
On 26th December
At 7 in the morning the earth quivers
O how it quivers
O the extraordinary event
In the morning, on the wireless
The news floated in
In Sri Lanka, in the Andamans
There were so many earthquakes
So many lives were lost
The song goes on to describe the mother’s lament for her lost child,
the deserted village shrines, and so on. It is far shorter than the flood
song. One notices a lack of circumstantial detail and a far greater use
of the refrain, “O the extraordinary event,” as a filler. The use of the
international calendar instead of the local Bengali calendar is signifi-

cant as is the mention of the wireless and TV. The singer is distanced
from the event—s/he watches it on television. S/he is not a partici-
pant/witness as in the flood narrative, where the singer lends his voice
to the suffering people petitioning the chief minister for relief sup-
plies.16 In contrast to the songs, however, the painted narrative offers
a wealth of detail. Stylized fish, cows, human figures in different pos-
tures, buildings, boats, and helicopters all appear in one continuous
panel. One recognizes motifs from other scrolls such as the cow from
the Krishna lila—the incarnation of the god Vishnu, the preserver of
the world, who appears on earth as a member of a family of cowherds
in Vrindavan. Montu Chitrakar even adds an elaborate image of Siva,
the god of destruction, in the last register of his tsunami pata, an
image that has no accompanying reference in the song, simply because
he loves the flowing lines of the figure.
The new folk art market, and the shrinking of traditional per-
formative spaces as villagers increasingly become avid consumers of
cable television seem to have taken a toll on the poetic imagination
at least as far as pata songs are concerned. Songs lack texture. They
are not embedded in local experience, nor do they use the traditional
narrative structure that juxtaposes the mundane with the register of
the divine. Instead, global events such as the tsunami come to the
Chitrakars only at second hand, mediated by television, as the song
tells us. However, this loss is counterbalanced by the increasing com-
plexity of the pictorial image. Painters delight in rendering the images
as we saw. They are not thought to be merely illustrations of the song.
In the past the value of a patua’s performance lay in its emotional
appeal—an appeal evoked primarily by the combination of different
rasas or affects that his song was able to evoke. Since these rasas
were embodied in particular characters in a story or in the descrip-
tion of an event, it was the patua’s song that bore the weight of
the performance. This new focus on the painterly image seems to go
against the principles on which patua performance was traditionally
organized.
Rasa Theory and the Art of the Chitrakars

In her seminal work on painted narratives in Orissa, Joanna Williams
(1996) says that traditional Indian narratives are structured accord-
ing to a theory of the rasas (mood or emotion). It is the choice
of rasa—the “distilled emotion” that is sought to be evoked in the
audience—rather than plot that determines narrative structure. The
storyteller’s role is to present generalized depictions of affect that can

appeal to spectators’ own emotional states in sublimated form. Rasa
refers to the activity of pure savor, and the performance is a means of
savoring the different emotions. Since plot, action, and events are only
the vehicles for depicting generalized emotional states, stories do not
have to be dynamic. They do not have to take the narrative toward a
climactic end. Instead, it is in the selection and combination of differ-
ent rasas that the success of a performance is supposed to be judged.
The performance must allow the spectators to enter a virtual world
that may mirror their own reality and to take an aesthetic view of their
own experiences (Goodwin 1998).
Patua performances, like many other performative traditions in
India, tend to favor two of the rasas mentioned in the Natya Shastra,17
namely karuna (compassion) and adbhuta (wonder). In performances
based on the Puranas or epics such as the Ramayana, the hasya rasa
(comic mood) may also figure. A successful performance is determined
by the patua’s ability to juxtapose these contrasting rasas within
the space of one song. As Gurupada Chitrakar once told me, “we
have only 20 minutes to perform a complete pala [one episode].
In that time we have to convey information, drama, pathos, as well
as a moral message. The message is communicated by the rasas we
chose to display. If it is ‘pathetics’, then some kind of ‘comedy’
must also be included.18 It is rasa that determines the selection of
episodes, and a good performer will chose those that evoke complex
emotions.”
Consider the following example. Figure 3.5 shows the opening
frame of Gurupada’s tsunami scroll.
I first saw this scroll in the Crafts Museum in Delhi, where I had
gone to meet his younger brother Mantu Chitrakar. Mantu, apart
from telling me that the scroll depicted the international tsunami,
was not able to explain the significance of the opening scene. I met
Gurupada later on in the year in Naya village, and he told me that the
song would tell me what it meant.
On the day after Christmas
You wrought Pralaya O Meherbaan19
O God O Merciful One
Is this too a gift from you
How many lives you took
You wrought Pralaya O Meherbaan
26th December was a Sunday
In Indonesia you wrought destruction
Figure 3.5 First frame of Gurupada’s “international” tsunami pata. Village: Naya
Gurupada viewed the scenes of devastation on television. He was

moved by the story of one survivor, Rijan Shaho from Aceh province
in Indonesia. Rijan was sweeping the floor of the local mosque
when he heard the roar of tidal waves outside. He was swept away
into the ocean (mahasagar) but managed to keep afloat by cling-
ing to a coconut palm. He survived on coconut water for eight
days, Gurupada informed me, until a Malaysian freight ship picked
him up.
In the song Gurupada’s voice is added to that of Rijan Shaho, who
is witness to his own plight.
That frightful wave he saw with his eyes

In the blink of an eye all was full
I too watched helpless
With bursting heart.
The scroll depicts a bearded figure clinging to a tree scarcely taller than
him. He looks out at the spectators as if to involve them in the action.
Around the figure, we see the debris left behind by the tidal wave.
In a pathbreaking work on Bengal patas, the art historian Kavita
Singh (1995a) says that scrolls from Medinipur tend to depict figures
in conversational poses. The figures look out at the viewers, with hand
gestures that seem to engage them in the scene. Dramatic action is
described rather than portrayed in the image. Figures are still so that
“what they signify is constantly renewed or altered by the changing
words of the song” (ibid., 337). The protagonist “appears as an inter-
mediary, between the world of the image and of the viewer . . . [s/he]
seems not so much involved in the action as to be performing it for
us” (ibid., 374).
Pata images are synoptic; that is, they are not to be consumed
immediately in the act of viewing, but to be completed in the imag-
ination. The images point to the song. The patua points to figures
in the scroll as he sings but the image is not really an illustration
of the text of the song. The relationship is one of deferral so that
meaning dawns later—the narrative is completed in the imagination
as I have said.
Painting and Re-Presentation

In the frame story of the Chitralakshana, an early Indian treatise on
painting by Nagnajit, a wise and just king battles with Yama, the god
of death, for the life of one of his subjects, a young Brahmin boy.20
The king would not listen to Yama—that neither he nor even time
(kala) itself were responsible for the boy’s death. It was his destiny,
the balance of good and bad deeds in his previous lives (karma), that
determined his life span. Both sides are evenly matched, and it is only
when Brahma, the god of creation, intervenes that the battle comes
to an end. Brahma teaches the king the art of painting, so that the
boy comes to life once more through his portrait. Thus the birth
of painting is traced to a moment of loss, of death. It is a way of
re-presenting absence.
Does the Chitrakar’s scroll have the same significance? Is it a
substitute for an absent event? A Chitrakar origin myth seems to
suggest that it is so.21 However, the pata painting belongs to a

different tradition than the one suggested in the Chitralakshana.
Chitraankan, painting the image, is only one part of the pata art.
The other is song composition. If the painted scroll (pata) is the
form of re-presentation, then it is the song that enables the pro-
cess of making present. Most Chitrakars say that it is the song
that comes first, serving as a kind of script. It provides the nar-
rative within which the event is embedded. Yet none of the lyrics
presented here actually delineate a plot or work with an episodic
structure. One cannot actually learn a story from the lyrics. Instead,
the lyrics enframe the images and point to a narrative universe that
is known to the village audience. They do not recount stories, but
only indicate them by highlighting certain archetypal figures and
motifs. Also, as I have already mentioned, the painted images on the
scroll are fragments that are juxtaposed somewhat incoherently, that
is, without the overarching logic of a plot to make them intelligi-
ble. Instead, the lyrics, by turning the spotlight on one image after
the other, tell us which part of the narrative environment we should
focus on.22
The structure of the pata narrative is not determined by plot but
by the technique of parataxis, a grammatical device that allows for an
arrangement of propositions or clauses without connectives, so that it
is the listener who is supposed to make the connections between the
elements. In modern patas such as the tsunami pata, it also makes for
heightened self-reflexivity. The pata presents the patua’s activity to
him/her. Consider the last frame of Tagar’s tsunami pata.
The scene depicts the patua’s viewing the destructive effects of
the tsunami on television. The picture signals the global nature of
the event. Global events are always mediatized. They are not available
through direct experience. Just as the patuas bring experience to us
through their painted narratives, so also does the television screen,
telling us stories in the form of news bulletins.
A closer look at the scene tells us something more about the
viewers—they are weeping. As empathetic witnesses of this scene of
destruction, these spectators seem to evoke another image that the
viewers of this tsunami pata will remember—the first register that
shows a demoness from whose gaping mouth we see the tsunami
waters gushing forth. But unlike the demon of Figure 3.1, this figure
is distinctly feminine. As the anthropomorphic representation of the
terrible event, not only is she a figure of horror but she is a witness as
well. Tears flow from her eyes to mingle with the floodwaters and she
seems to be a helpless bystander.
It is through Tagar’s pata that we finally understand the signifi-

cance of the tsunami in the painterly vocabulary of the Chitrakars.
It points to a radically new interpretation of cataclysmic events. The
Medinipur flood pata followed tradition in rendering the event as a
form of divine affliction—as a form of grace bestowed by the goddess.
The medieval genre of mangalkavya that has shaped the patua tra-
dition tends to portray suffering as an act of divine grace (Nicholas
and Sarkar 2003). The mangal may portray an actual event but the
meaning of the event places it outside time. In the flood patas, the
goddess does not participate in the scene of devastation. As the divine
agent, she is distanced from the affliction that surrounds her, look-
ing out impassively at us, the viewers of the scene. Tagar’s tsunami
pata, on the other hand, self-consciously presents the pata image as
a mirror, reinforced by the image of television screen that repeats
the scene gone by. The patua displaying the scroll tells us that s/he
brings the tsunami to us—the audience—just as the television screen
brought it to him or her. Not only is the television depicted in the
picture above but the viewers as well—who weep as the tragic events
unfold before their eyes. The patua’s performance is a reenactment
of another performance—the one presented on television. The tearful
faces of the television audience in the last register of the pata replicate
in a sense the first register of Tagar’s pata (Figures 3.6 and 3.7), in
which we see the demoness of the flood waters, but unlike the earlier
demon figures of the Medinipur flood pata, this figure weeps (Figures
3.1 and 3.3). She is the image of tragedy manifesting pathos as well
as terror. Even though later tsunami patas such as the one under dis-
cussion borrow motifs from the earlier narratives of the flood, they
remold them to convey a different message. In patas such as the one
depicted in Figures 3.6 and 3.7, the frame becomes self-reflexive, turn-
ing the picture into its own object (Marin 1996). Unlike the portrayal
of divine affliction through the figure of the river goddess, the tsunami
demoness in Tagar’s pata is both an anthropomorphic representation
of the event itself as well as a witness to the devastation as a form of
lila. It is as if the figure of the demoness transforms the event into
a spectacle for us to view: not merely as a global event but also in
terms of the vicissitudes of our own experiences. Personal suffering as
a sign of divine grace individuates the person, marks her out as one
worthy of the goddesses’ attention, even against her will. Collective
disasters, on the other hand, reduce us all to anonymity. By turning
it into a world spectacle, we are also able to reflect on the vicissitudes
of our own life, take an aesthetic view of suffering itself by distanc-
ing ourselves from the actual experience and transforming it into an
Figure 3.6 Last register of Tagar’s tsunami pata
Figure 3.7 First register of Tagar’s tsunami pata
object that can be viewed and talked about. The pata performance, by
straddling the two registers of history and myth, attempts to achieve
this aesthetic distance—to entertain and to instruct.
History and myth both involve modes of representation—of events
that have occurred in the past, in real time. But the representations
presented by history are also usually reflexive. History frames its narra-
tives about past events by announcing the time and place of narration,
the point of view from which the event is grasped. The television
in Tagar’s pata has a deictic function. It tells us that the tsunami
is the object of viewing and narration—a point reinforced by the
iconic presence of reporters and photographers in other registers of

the scroll. But in the process of repeating the image of the flood
that was depicted in the registers above the television screen, the pic-
ture also seems to be pointing to the cyclical nature of the event—to
other tsunamis that have happened in previous times and may happen
again. The weeping figures then are more than empathetic observers
of scenes of present suffering. Rather, they are witnesses to a future
anterior, an event that is imminent and therefore a virtual presence in
our lives.23 In Bengal’s literary imagination, flood waters and oceans
are sites of otherness where gods manifest their presence through play.
The imagery of untamed water signifies the transcendent aspect of
the world—the world as spectacle. The demon and goddess figures
in the first and last registers of the tsunami pata seem to reflect this
idea. What of the television screen? It functions as a frame within a
frame. It draws the viewer into the picture, making the distant event
a part of the viewer’s life. It works with the idea of co-presence in
historical time and ties together occurrences in different places within
the same moment, addressing a larger public constituted through the
circulation of affect. How much of the message of the performance
will actually be accessible to this larger public? Will they understand
the narrative codes that it embodies? The fact that these questions
are moot is evident in the recent changes in the scrolls themselves.
New scrolls that depict global disasters tend to build the story into
the painting, presenting events and their contexts in far greater detail
than before (Chatterji 2012). It is as if artists who are aware that their
performance can no longer reach out to a global audience try and
build the song into the painting itself, creating the image of a com-
munity of a compassionate global community that bears witness to
itself.
Traditional pata songs play with the idea of cyclical time—
embedding successive frames into the narrative that problematize the
idea of the witness. In an insightful article on the Bhagavat Purana,
David Pocock (1986) demonstrates how philosophical ideas about
truth and reality are worked out through literary devices such as voice
and plot construction in sacred Hindu texts. The text describes the
play of Lord Krishna, one of the incarnations (avatars) of the god
Vishnu on earth, as I have mentioned earlier. It poses questions about
the nature of the world—whether the status of events that occur in
the world is illusory or real—not through didactic statements but by
juxtaposing different kinds of events in the act of narration itself. Sim-
ilarly, by playing with different frames within the painterly narrative,
the tsunami pata problematizes the event and our relationship to it.
What is the event outside our relationship to it? According to

Merleau Ponty (1962), “events are shapes cut out by a finite observer
from the spatio-temporal totality of the objective world” (ibid., 411).
While discussing the river as an analogy of time passing, in which every
drop of water is succeeded by another, he says that such an analogy
makes sense only if we posit a witness who is able to compare suc-
cessive perspectives. “Time presupposes a view of time” (ibid.). This
particular conception of time comes close to the idea of divine play
or lila in the present chapter. This play is a form of manifestation—of
the goddess, as the tsunami song tells us, but also of the phenomenal
world. This world is the world of becoming, of living, and of activity,
never of Life as being-for-itself. It exists only as manifestation and as
temporal activity (Beane 1973; Coomaraswamy 1933). The goddess
through her lila creates this world but as the creatrix she is outside
it. She transcends it and is present to it only as other. Acts of devasta-
tion like the tsunami, called pralaya in Gurupada’s song, remind us of
the goddess’ presence. Pralaya is the general dissolution that brings
the cosmos to an end. It ends time as we know it in the phenomenal
world. But this dissolution is part of a cyclical process of destruction
and rebirth that is repeated continuously. Stories of pralaya in Hindu
mythology also posit the figure of the witness who stands outside and
observes the cosmic dissolution (see Pocock 1986). By likening the
tsunami to pralaya, Gurupada puts himself as well as all other patuas
in the position of witness to the events that make up the phenome-
nal world and thus their narrators. As narrators, they are able to bring
distant events close to the experiences of their audience. As Veena
Das (1986) reminds us, one of the functions of narration is to bring
together events that are disjunct in time. It is precisely by narrating the
tsunami story, a historical event, as a kind of myth that the patuas are
able to transform it into a world event that speaks of the universality
of suffering.
Critics are justifiably suspicious of the aestheticization of suffering.
Sympathy is sometimes difficult to distinguish from sentimentality,
and representations of pain can become pornographic, especially in
the context of the global market. Images of suffering may create
a false sense of involvement. Art provides a certain distance and
therefore safety from the painful experience (Smuts 2007). Or it
evokes an “eroticized objectification of pain” removed from the
actual experience (Dean 2005, 91). However, in the Indian theory
of aesthetics—the theory of rasa—it is precisely this distance that is
valorized. The rasas are distilled emotions, generalized and removed
from the context of life so that they may be experienced as aesthetic
forms. The art of viewing, in this theory, involves a willingness to set

aside the specificity of the mundane—“a consent of the heart,” that is,
the ability to savor the rasa or the emotion embodied in the spectacle
(Gnoli 1985, 33). If we think of this form of viewing—the consent of
the heart—as a mode of witnessing, then aesthetic distance may also
be a way of experiencing the events of the phenomenal world—in the
mode of un-being perhaps. And art—by allowing us the opportunity
to pause—may be a way of representing Life rather than just the living
(Coomaraswamy 1933).
Notes
1. Nicholas and Sarkar (2003) and Curley (2008) have used particular
mangalkavyas to write the social history of medieval Bengal.
2. The traditional term for designating this community is “patua.” Since
independence this term has fallen into disfavor as designating low sta-
tus. Most members prefer to designate themselves as “Chitrakar” in
Medinipur at least. “Patua” is still used as a term of self-designation
in the district of Birbhum, which is adjacent to Medinipur. I use both
terms to refer to this community—“Chitrakar” when I refer to the
members of the community and “patua” when I speak of them in the
context of the performance.
3. Sacred shrines tend to transcend denominational divisions. The
shrines of pirs (Muslim holy men) are visited by Hindus and Muslims
alike. Naya, the village in which I have done fieldwork, houses an
important mazaar (grave) of a pir as well as shrines to Satya Pir
(a composite divinity who is worshipped as Satya Narayan by Hindus).
and Ola bibi, a cholera deity who is known as Olai Chandi by Hindus.
4. Some of these names are Hindu, such as Radha or Gouranga, but
others like Khandu or Roopshona do not signify membership in a
religious community.
5. The retention of “Chitrakar” as name to designate the community
shows that the effects of this mobilization were not inconsequential.
6. The display of patas has always been a seasonal occupation. Some of
the other occupations followed by the Chitrakars were icon- (murti)
making in clay and snake charming. Some subcastes of the Chitrakars
also performed magic tricks, were garland makers, and were makers of
clay dolls (especially the women), and women often acted as midwives.
Some Chitrakars have also taken to occupations such as tailoring, bus
driving, and so on (see Ray 1953; Singh 1995a).
7. The auction was organized for the Smithsonian Institute in
Washington by the Asian Heritage Foundation that has its office in
Delhi. According to Swarna Chitrakar, Rajeev Sethi, one of its founder
members, arranged a series of workshops in Delhi, in which Chitrakars
from different parts of Medinipur jointly composed the tsunami pata

song and painted scrolls on the theme. She said some of the motifs
that have become formulaic in the painting such as the television
screen in the last register of the scroll were first conceptualized at
the workshop.
Other international themes are the 9/11 strikes on the World
Trade Center in New York, the French Revolution, the bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Afghan War, and so on. These form a
subset of the social theme, which includes paintings that have a peda-
gogical function such as government health and literacy programs and
those that deal with the recent spate of riots after the demolition of
the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya in 1992 (Chatterji 2012, 62ff.).
8. I am indebted to Aditi Nath Sarkar’s (2013) essay for information
regarding the 1978 floods. “The Scroll of the Flood” offers a detailed
account of this event. This article is one of the few that discusses the
actual use of history in the folk art of the Chitrakars.
9. Composition is usually a collective activity in this tradition, and I have
heard other versions of these compositions. Dukhushyam is a pio-
neer of sorts because he was one of the first to start composing on a
range of historical and topical themes and there are several flood patas
painted by him in museum collections.
10. All important rivers get incorporated into the imagery of the sacred
river Ganga in the local rural cosmology of West Bengal and is
anthropormorphized as a goddess.
11. See Forbes, Geraldine. “Patas by Patuas of Medinipur.” 2002. http://
www.oswego.edu/-forbes/ ([site not accessible).
12. All pictures are from my collection unless otherwise specified.
13. Also see Medinipur Tempest by Rani Chitrakar in Patas by Patuas of
Medinipur in West Bengal, India. Rani received an award from the
state government for this painting. (provide details for Forbes 1998).
14. This fact would be true of many traditional themes. But new subjects
are usually conceived by an individual and then quickly transmitted
to others, who may modify the painting as they go along. Tradi-
tional modes of composition usually work in this way (Jakobson
1966).
15. Not all flood patas have elaborate framing devices such as demon
heads. Other patas such as the 9/11 pata developed a stable visual
code only after a period of time (Chatterji 2012, 101). However,
the first tsunami patas that were produced for the auction did dis-
play quite a lot of variation. One reason was that artists were trying to
fit the new “subject” into frames that were readily available. Thus, for
instance, one tsunami pata that appears on the Asia Heritage Founda-
tion website depicts Manasa, the snake goddess, in the tsunami waters.
Previous flood and disaster paintings also provided a ready-made
model.
16. As I have mentioned, this song was collectively composed at a work-

shop in Delhi. Swarna Chitrakar composed some of the initial stanzas,
and it was completed by some of the other participants later. The
workshop was held a few months after the tsunami disaster.
17. The Natya Shastra is an ancient Indian treatise on drama.
18. The English words in inverted commas were his own. Interview with
Gurupada in Naya in October 2007.
19. Gurupada made a point of telling me that he had used “Meherbaan”
instead of “Dauyal” as a term of address to God because the song was
about an event in a predominantly Muslim country.
20. It is difficult to give a precise date to this manuscript. It was first
“discovered” by Berthold Laufer in the Tibetan Tanjur. The Sanskrit
original was lost at an early point in time, and Laufer translated
the manuscript from a medieval Tibetan translation (Goswamy and
Dahmen-Dallapiccola 1976).
21. Dukhushyam narrates the story of a fakir (holy man), the ancestor of
the patuas, who was able to kill a demon who had been terrorizing
the local population by showing him his reflection in a mirror. The
image was so fierce that the demon died of shock. However, no one
believed the fakir until he painted the event on a scroll and went from
village to village, narrating the story of the adventure and displaying
the pata (Korom 2006; Singh 1995a).
22. Postmodern art criticism discusses the narrative potential of the frame
itself—as a device that allows for the linking or disruption between
different images (Ernst 1996).
23. A point reinforced in the song, which says that TV reporters tell us
that the tsunami will come again.
References
Beane, Wendell C. “The Cosmological Structure of Mythical Time. Kali—
Sakti.” History of Religions 13, no. 1 (1973): 54–83.
Bhattacharjee, Binoy. Cultural Oscillation. A Study on Patua Culture.
Calcutta: NayaProkash Press, 1980.
Burns, Gerald L. “Introduction: Towards a Random Theory of Prose.”
In Theory of Prose, edited by Viktor Shklovsky, ix–xiv. Elmwood Park, IL:
Dalkey Archive Press, 1990.
Carrier, David. The Aesthetics of Comics. Pennsylvania: The University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2000.
Chatterji, Roma. Speaking with Pictures. Folk Art and the Narrative Tradition.
Delhi: Routledge, 2012.
Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. “On Translation: Maya, Deva, Tapas.” Isis 19,
no. 1 (1933): 79–91.
Curley, David L. Poetry and History. Bengali Mangal-Kabya and Social
Change in Precolonial Bengal. Delhi: Chronicle Books, 2008.
Das, Veena (ed.). “Epilogue.” In The Word and the World. Fantasy, Symbol
and Record, 197–208. Delhi: Sage, 1986.
Dean, Carolyn J. “Empathy, Pornography, and Suffering.” Differences:
A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14, no. 1 (2005): 88–124.
Dimock, Edward C. “A Theology of the Repulsive: The Myth of the Goddess
Sitala.” In The Divine Consort: Radha and the Goddesses of India, edited
by John Stratton Hawley and Donna Maria Wulff, 184–203. Boston: The
Beacon Press, 1982.
Ernst, Wolfgang. “Framing the Fragment: Archeology, Art, Museum.”
In The Rhetoric of the Frame: Essays on the Boundaries of the Art Work,
edited by Paul Duro, 111–135. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996.
Gnoli, Raniero. The Aesthetic Experience according to Abhinavagupta.
Varanasi: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series, 1985.
Goodwin, Robert E. The Playworld of Sanskrit Drama. Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass, 1998.
Goswamy, B. N. and Dahmen-Dallapiccola, A. L. An Early Document of
Indian Art. The Citralaksana of Nagnajit. Delhi: Manohar, 1976.
Hauser, Beatrix. “From Oral Tradition to Folk Art.” Asian Folklore Studies
61, no. 1 (2002): 105–122.
Jakobson, Roman.“Russian Fairy Tales.” In his Selected Writings. Vol. IV.
Slavic Epic Studies, 82–101. The Hague: Mouton, 1966.
Kelly, Gavin. “Ammianus and the Great Tsunami.” Journal of Roman Studies
94 (2004): 141–167.
Korom, Frank. Village of Painters. Narrative Scrolls from West Bengal. Sante
Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2006.
Marin, Louis. “The Frame of Representation and Some of Its Figures.” In The
Rhetoric of the Frame: Essays on the Boundaries of the Art Work, edited by
Paul Duro, 79–95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Merleau Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1962.
Nicholas, Ralph W. and Sarkar, Aditi Nath. “The Fever Demon and the
Census Commissioner: Sitala Mythology in Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Century Bengal.” In Fruits of Worship. Practical Religion in Bengal, edited
by Ralph W. Nicholas, 105–165. New Delhi: Chronicle Books, 2003.
Pocock, David F. “Art and Theology in the Bhagavata Purana.” In Fantasy,
Symbol and Record. The Word and the World, edited by Veena Das, 9–40.
Delhi: Sage, 1986.
Ray, Sudhansu Kumar. “The Artisan Castes of West Bengal and Their Craft.”
In The Tribes and Castes of West Bengal, edited by A. Mitra, 293–349.
Calcutta: Census of India, West Bengal Government Press, 1953.
Sarkar, Aditi Nath. “The Scroll of the Flood.” n.d. http://learningobjects.
wesleyan.edu/naya/articles/scroll_of_flood.pdf (accessed December 15,
2013).
Singh, Kavita. “The Pictures of Showmen.” PhD dissertation, University of
Chandigarh, 1995a.
Singh, Kavita. “Stylistic Differences and Narrative Choices in Bengali Pata

Paintings.” Journal of Arts and Ideas 27–28 (1995b): 91–104.
Smuts, Aaron. “The Paradox of Painful Art.” Journal of Aesthetic Education
41, no. 3 (2007): 59–76.
Williams, Joanna. The Two-Headed Deer.Illustrations of the Ramayana in
Orissa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Chapter 4
V o c a l i z at i o n s o f S u f f e r i n g
Caterina Pasqualino
In this chapter I examine rituals that involve “chants of suffering,”

which not only hone singers’ voices within genre-specific forms of
expression, but which also require them to modulate their breathing
and respiratory rhythm to produce what I conceptualize as “throaty
sounds.” In my work I was particularly struck by the formal similar-
ity between human expressions of suffering at the end of two long
field studies among the Andalusian Gypsy singers and the Cuban pos-
sessed. In Andalusia, I was working on the flamenco repertory that
includes songs with particularly sad content dealing with imprison-
ment, famine, or unrequited love. In this cultural context, suffering
is associated with those painful words; the Gypsies make their voices
hoarse on purpose and in doing so approach an infrasound level
(Pasqualino 1998). That type of phonation nearing aphonia can be
found in Cuba too, in the Afro-Cuban rituals of Palo Monte,1 in
which the possessed, beset by internal suffering, articulate suffering
through quasi-animalistic guttural sounds, in the form of barking, for
example.2
In order to newly examine these cultural expressions in distinction
from a framework that would just look at them as “religious ritual,”
I turn to theories in contemporary art. In fact, there are some fasci-
nating experimentations with sound done by Schwitters, Dubuffet,
and Dufrêne, three famous visual artists of the twentieth century,
on a range of mortiferous and ultra-low-pitched vocalizations, which
clearly evoke experiences of pain and suffering. I seek to demonstrate
100 C at e r i n a Pa s q u a l i n o
in this chapter that despite the considerable differences between cul-

turally situated genres and practices in the contemporary world, we
can observe close relations between the ways in which artists and per-
formers use ultra-low-pitch sound effects, for instance, by letting out
screams and moans, emitting buzzing sounds, etc. This requires us
to look beyond the usual speaking or singing registers and theorize
a notion of voice that links it to the notion of the “soul of a body
suffering.”
Beyond the formal affinities between these out-of-the-ordinary
vocal performances, I propose to establish links between them in
terms of social and cultural significance. Voice is a cultural vehicle
of the community, yet it is also a sensible experience deeply felt by
the performers. Ever since Aristotle, the reflections on the topic of
voice dealt mainly with the meaning of the vehiculated language
(gramma). Accordingly, they neglected sound. A few exceptions exist,
however. The philosopher Michel de Certeau (1980) hypothesized
the existence of a relation between marginalized groups and their glos-
solalic practices. Later on, Giorgio Agamben (1997) observed that the
voice takes charge of the affects. He considered that the passage from
scream—simple production of sound—to speech—signifying sound
or the signifier—was at the core of the relations between individuals
and their social groups. Following up on this thesis, the psychoan-
alyst Michel Poizat (2001) explored in the field of musical activity
the unconscious mind and opposed the bare voice to the hymn, the
latter constituting an expression of political consensus. These gen-
eral considerations, which suggest a de-socialized dimension of sound,
have not received a lot of attention in anthropological research. Thus,
how would we problematize the relation between kinds of sound that
are distinct from clearly pronounced and signifying speech, and the
expression of “voicelessness,” in other words to the issue of social
marginalization? It could be argued that to the Gypsies of Andalusia,
to the possessed persons of Cuba, and to the three artists mentioned
above, to break one’s voice and to play with it to the limits of audibility
amounts to turning away from social conventions and from communi-
cation with others. It is also a way to adopt a type of radical otherness.
I shall also argue that this type of voice—which is both the expression
of minority groups and a critical vehicle of society—promotes a certain
kind of utopia.
My research was inspired by another source of reflection. Poizat,
who devoted many of his works to the opera, likened the pure,
high-pitched voices of the castrato and of the alto and tenor singers
to the divine ideal of the angel. By contrast, the deep and dark
V o c a l i z at i o n s o f S u f f e r i n g 101
voices—usually represented on the stage by the emblematic figures

of the devil and the father—would evoke a satanic and dangerous
world (Poizat 1991, 1998). And we shall see that the deep sounds
with which I am concerned here tend to be connected to the dark and
troubling universe of the dead.
Flamenco Song
Having lived for centuries in Andalusia among a Payo population
(non-Gypsy), the flamenco Gypsies are a minority that has succeeded
in preserving its culture. This remarkable longevity does not rely
on formal institutions, but on ephemeral and informal manifesta-
tions through which they resist the dominant ideology (Pasqualino
1998).The flamenco Gypsies view themselves as an elective com-
munity. Claiming that the non-Gypsies (the Payos) are incapable of
feeling “true” emotions, they build their otherness on a hypertro-
phied sense of suffering. A collectively felt emotion is released and put
on stage during singing and dance performances that re-actualize a
community of affects 3 (Pasqualino 2004, 2005).
Generally speaking, however, it must be emphasized that the sense
of suffering of the Gypsies has not been immune to the one found
in a certain type of European literature that developed from the late
nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. So, while it is true
that García Lorca was influenced by the Gypsy flamenco, the fact
that his Romancero gitano is now a reference and a source of inspi-
ration for Gypsy writers is not usually mentioned. The reciprocity of
influences is such that one may wonder whether the figure of the
Gypsy as a “tortured soul” represented in the flamenco might not
be linked, beyond Lorca’s writings, to the whole libertarian roman-
tic literature. From the nineteenth century, that literature—returning
to the obsession with the cristiano viejo—idealizes the marginal, the
vagrant, and the proletarian. Dissiminated not only through litera-
ture, but also through painting and later through cinema (Antonietto
1985; Pasqualino 2008) and advertising, that ideal turned the Gypsy
flamenco into an archetype. Furthermore, the Gypsies themselves
believe in that ideal.
In any case, the memories of the racist humiliations the Gypsies
suffered are flamenco’s sources of inspiration and serve as a pre-
text for singing. These recollections have a still stronger echo, as the
Gypsy community feels it is held in contempt and afflicted by endur-
ing material as well as psychological problems. Generally poorer than
the Payos (non-Gypsies), they are harder hit by unemployment, drug
trafficking, and ensuing jail terms. Even the youngest of them who
have not endured taunts feel affected by an “innate” suffering por
raza, inherent “to their race.” Consciousness of the suffering their
group has undergone is a major feature of their way of being and
thinking. Gypsies consider that it is a fundamental cultural feature dis-
tinguishing them from the Payos. Indeed, the fate of the Andalusian
Gypsies has been dramatic for centuries. They suffered under the
Inquisition proclaimed by the Spanish Catholic kings (1481–1483),
which imposed an authoritarian and intolerant religious order. Soon
after their arrival in the fifteenth century, the Spanish monarchy
repressed them, forced them to settle down, forbade their language
(calo) and their festivals, and on several occasions attempted to anni-
hilate them by separating men and women, jailing them for no reason
or sentencing them to the galleys. Nowadays, only an educated hand-
ful of Gypsies know the history of these attempted genocides: for
example, the great roundup perpetrated in 1749 during the reign
of Ferdinand VI, or the laws (prammaticas sanctiones) enacted over
the centuries to exterminate them. Although most Gypsies are unin-
terested in these dramatic episodes from the distant past, they are
aware of having “always” been persecuted and feel they are still being
mistreated to this day.4
A proclaimed suffering is the loss of liberty. Like the lark whose
eyes are put out so it will sing better, time spent in prison is said to
favor the development of talent. Antonio L. is a good example. He
was a drug addict, jailed for a knife assault on a taxi driver. Serving
a 16-year prison term, a sentence seen as exaggerated in relation to
the facts of the case, he became a prime example of the heroic Gypsy
martyr. In prison, he became one of the best interpreters of carceleras.
These prisoners’ songs express bitterness fueled by the impossibility of
seeing their near and dear ones again and are interpreted in a deep reg-
ister accompanied by the slow knocking of fist on a table (Pasqualino
2005).
In Andalusia, the most beautiful songs are rumored to have been
created in the wake of a violent torment, and Gypsies affirm that it
is impossible to perform material related to heartbreak, for example,
without having experienced it beforehand in their own flesh. There-
fore, to properly perform a song about love scorned, the singer must
have suffered the pain of a breakup. For example, when they refer to
the exceptional talent of a singer who has passed away, the Gypsies
do not put the emphasis on his musical gifts but on his sentimental
trials. Performers are supposed to give the best of themselves when
they are particularly touched. During a performance, the display of
suffering plunges a performer into a mystical state. By expressing

his bad luck in love or his decrepitude, he feels haloed by moral
superiority.
Generally speaking, since unhappiness is flamenco’s source of inspi-
ration, a good singer must not try to ease his pain, but rather
to exacerbate it, during his performance. When the song reaches
its paroxysm, the performer must “suffer” (chinara in calo). He is
supposed to give of himself “to death.” During a performance, a
well-executed song must “hurt,” and the singer must “vomit blood”
(escupir sangre). According to the Gypsies, at that moment the singer
faces death. Rumors have it that all the great singers have suffered
some form of lung disease, attributed to the practice of flamenco.
Payo and Gypsy flamenco differ in several aspects. In Payo flamenco,
the song is often more melodic and harmonious. Pronunciation is
more precise, adhering to the lyrics describing bucolic landscapes and
concrete situations. The lyrics of Gypsy songs, on the other hand,
contain few detailed descriptions and confine themselves to express-
ing emotional states. The rhythm can also ignore musical canons to
make room for improvisation. Some vocals are, then, inordinately
lengthened, while the words may be adorned with syllabic ornaments,
impromptu pauses, cuts, and unintelligible sounds. Another difference
is that the final verse, or macho, is sung in a choked voice. Out of
breath, the Gypsy singers create surprising effects by suddenly inter-
rupting their song. They favor above all the expression of emotion
and dramatic effects, preferring hoarse, even defective voices to the
harmonious voices of the Payos. Their performances are inspired by
despair and rage. While certain rumours claim that the Gypsies are
victims of genetic atavism (their vocal cords supposedly being harder
and more callous than those of the Payos), the Gypsies themselves
believe that their “disharmonious” singing expresses the suffering of
their people.
In the throes of despair, singers’ voices become hoarse and resem-
ble sobs: the voice is supposed to “become soiled.” High-pitched
voices are less appreciated than deeper ones. Older men, who more
readily sing in deeper registers, are seen as the best performers.
In addition to the mastery due to their experience, praise is bestowed
on their throaty voices described as “rancid” (rancia). Admiring their
elders, young men work on their timbre so it loses its clarity. They
force their voices to produce a rasping or broken timbre. During per-
formances, they have a glass of white wine (fino), which they drink
in small sips. Combined with the close, stifling environment, drinking
alcohol allows them to “dirty” their voices. To amplify the effects of
tobacco and drink, good singers claim they clear their throats until
they are sore. Resorting to these techniques is not seen as falsifying
one’s voice. According to Gypsies who view suffering as the core of
their being, it reveals their voice’s true nature. They claim that as their
voice becomes throatier and “more ancient” (mas antigua) with age,
it conveys more truth. The ancients tended to neglect their language
to express themselves through half-sung, half-spoken phrases, uttered
in a broken, throaty tone. Contrary to the pure sound sought in the
register of lyric song, their aim is to recreate the voice of an individual
who has truly lived.
These throaty voices, prematurely aged by cigarettes and alcoholic
beverages, seem ageless and ancestral. When Gypsies sit in a circle to
sing, they might evoke the memory of one or more deceased singers.
This act prepares for the coming of shared silences in the heart of
the night. The painful memory of lost singing relatives or friends cre-
ates an emotional climate. When singing resumes, like an incantatory
prayer, it reactivates the genealogical link uniting the singer with his
ancestors’ caste (cantera), thereby enabling the gathering of spectators
to commune with them.
Another aspect of the techniques used by the Gypsy singers reveals
the efforts they make to express their suffering. They claim that they
do not sing from the throat or chest, but bring the sound up from
their belly (their stomach and bowels). To produce the impression that
this voice comes from deep down, they work on developing abdomi-
nal breathing and conclude their phrasing by stifling their voice. They
move their arms in a steady fore-and-aft movement to make it eas-
ier to channel the sound. The idea is to breathe in and out without
needing to take in more air. The sound, coming from the belly, is
supposed to come up into the throat, then fall back into the guts.
They say “the song is launched and swallowed.” This technique is
not seen as a mere virtuoso effect. Like toreros, they must take as
many risks as they can. Comparisons between bullfighting and singing
are revealing. When a torero exposes himself dangerously, he is said
to “sing in the siguiriya fashion” (canta por siguiriya). This slow,
sad song involves “letting all your breath out” and running the risk
of losing your breath and not being able to vocalize the next verse.
As the singer runs through his songs, he is emptying out his lungs
and on the way to a minimal breath he compensates with abdomi-
nal work. Making air circulate in a closed circuit, he tends to perform
almost without breathing. This short deprival of exchanges with the
outside world equals no longer exposing himself to the vicissitudes
of the world and allows him to purify himself. Air and breath can be
home to mengues, errant and evil spirits that attempt to penetrate bod-
ies. By emptying out all air, singers remain off limits. Often in the last
couplet, called macho, the metamorphosed singer gives out a strangled
sound. This figure of song is explicitly compared with putting the bull
to death in the corrida arena by the final thrust of the sword. So, just
as the torero kills the bull, the singer “kills” his own voice. A cru-
cial point is reached when the performer seems to suffocate from a
lack of oxygen, claiming to feel a “strong pain” mixed with pride.
He seems dazed, and looks around blankly. He has reached a sort of
altered state. His chopped-up words become hard to understand; his
phrasing includes more and more meaningless sounds and turns into
speaking in tongues. Straining his voice, the interpreter produces a
death rattle. He provides an impression of uttering a sound that does
not belong to him, described as “the echo of his voice.” The audience
reacts by calling out to the singer and urging him on (jaleos). When
his voice strangles, he “vomits blood,” “vomits his guts.” Finally, the
apex of the song comes with the duende, a state of grace reached at
the moment when the singer gives the impression of suffocating from
a lack of oxygen. The participants are touched and shivers go up their
spines. The sound is supposed to penetrate their bowels (“¡El cante
cala muy bien!”). Then they feel the sensation of being possessed by a
force from beyond. The singer feels an intense sensual pleasure shared
with his audience. Then there is a tense silence. At that point the
participants have goose pimples and remain petrified, and sometimes
break down in tears. Silence takes hold and gives way to the “black
sound” of the dead late in the night (Pasqualino 1998).
The painful memory of lost relatives or friends creates an emo-
tional climate that augments the desire to sing. A feeling of shared
pain dominates the atmosphere. Those séances, which take the allure
of a communion, may throw a new light on the contested definition
of the flamenco Gypsies.
Afro-Cuban Rituals
In Santiago de Cuba, people are proud of their African origins. But
they remain haunted by the dramas of slavery in times past. The
city, whose first mayor was the conquistador Hernán Cortés, was
a port where African captives were unloaded for use as slaves on
sugarcane and coffee plantations. Transported in horrific conditions,
barely reaching their destination alive, they had to struggle to survive.
In addition to the 14–20 hours of daily work, they endured corpo-
ral punishment, which often proved fatal. In Cuba, this hell lasted
for three centuries and only ended in 1886. In light of this dramatic
fate, the revolution was a short, relatively happy parenthesis. In 1959,
Castro, Che Guevara, and a handful of barbudos (the revolutionary
comrades in arms) organized resistance against the Batista dictatorship
in the Sierra Maestra, the island’s main mountain range, right beside
Santiago. They received decisive support from the black population.
For one thing, the Palero priests claim to have contributed to cap-
turing several counterrevolutionaries. One of my interview subjects,
Enriquito, evokes the “magic circle” his uncles formed to capture
Yarey, an intimate of Batista who was hiding in a nearby cave. The-
ater of the Cuban Revolution launched by Fidel Castro during the
Moncada barracks attack in the thick of the Carnival (July 26, 1953),
the city of Santiago de Cuba is often referred to as a “capital of his-
tory” or a “heroic city.” This era of popular uprising is still present
in people’s minds. The photo of Camilo Cienfuegos, the martyr and
spiritual father of the revolution, is still placed on family altars next to
images of ancestors.
When the revolutionaries came to power, they wanted to thank
Santiago’s black population for its massive commitment by making
black people beneficiaries of the land reform and redistribution of
properties. This is why, despite criticisms made discreetly in the family
home, a portion of this city’s inhabitants retain their gratitude to the
regime. The beginning of the 1960s saw the exile of 10 percent of
the “light-skinned” population after Fidel Castro’s speech aiming to
“privilege” black people, and peasants (Argyriadis 1999, 650). They
were treated with more than fairness: some products were distributed
to them free of charge, they gained access to education, which had
been the preserve of whites, and some could enter university. So, after
the revolution, everything got off to a good start. But these improve-
ments soon lost their shine under the combined impact of generalized
political harassment and the Castro regime’s economic ups and downs
(worsened by the US embargo).
From the 1990s, the island’s economic and political situation
became even worse. The economic disaster added to the erosion of
the popularity of the Castro regime gave rise to an unprecedented
religious effervescence. Since the fall of the Soviet bloc, Russia no
longer provided the financial aid necessary for the island’s economic
survival. And as the United States toughened their embargo in an
attempt to bring down the shaky Castro regime, the latter’s reaction
was the imposition of a “special period” involving a dual currency
system (Cuban peso and convertible peso) as well as drastic financial
restrictions. The outcome was disastrous. Half a century after the

period of revolutionary enthusiasm, the people are on their knees.
With salaries no higher than 35 euros a month, Cubans find it hard to
live (a can of beer costs 1.50 euros, a pair of shoes 90 euros). Often,
people don’t have enough to eat. Surviving on government salary is a
huge challenge. “We aren’t living, we are surviving!” is often heard.
Eggs, a cheap source of protein, are called Zorro or “salvadida” (life-
savers). So people have no choice but to get involved in illicit business,
spending part of the day trying to make ends meet. Most often, peo-
ple live by their wits, from cash they can get from tourists or people
who have managed to flee to the United States or Europe.
Despite a communist dictatorship that has sought to ban any reli-
gious feelings for half a century, to impose a Marxist, materialist
ideology, Cubans have never stopped practicing their religion, first
underground and then openly as soon as the political powers tolerated
it beginning in the 1990s. It seems clear that in facing both the servi-
tude of yesteryear and the oppression experienced nowadays, Cubans
find an outlet through faith.
In Santiago de Cuba, it is said that religion “is more fluid” (fluie):
in other words, the people are more likely to have their own beliefs,
especially in neighborhoods with a black majority. The faithful say they
prefer to trust in priests with dark skin, whose gifts are particularly val-
ued. They are also convinced that black people have special links with
the dead, who show themselves to blacks often, whether in dreams or
in the form of daytime apparitions. This closeness is explained by the
fact that black people’s bodies (their materia) are “more receptive.”
Coming from Africa, Palo Monte is practiced fervently. It cen-
ters on devotion to the dead souls (nfumbi). The officiant—called
a Palero—is bound by a pact with a specific dead person (el muerto de
prenda).5 The latter is materialized by a “ritual cooking pot” (caldero
or nganga), which becomes more powerful as it is passed on from
generation to generation and in which are deposited human bones
and/or skull fragments, as well as an odd assortment of objects:
grasses and stones collected underground or from a riverbed, wood,
old iron, rope, nails, chains, seashells and broken knickknacks, a cross,
an old doll, a disturbing wooden figurine, an old shoe or a miniature
plane. The plane indicates that spirits cross (se trasladan) the oceans
by air, bringing together Cuban expatriates and people remaining in
the country to take part in a possession séance.
As is the case among Andalusian Gypsies, the singing and danc-
ing that accompany the possession rituals are seen as innate talents
and aim to create a privileged relationship with the dead.6 The dead
are oracles. They are seen as having utter freedom of speech. The
brutality with which they speak equals effectiveness. In particular,
African revenants have a reputation of being utterly tactless. They
are blunt, spare nobody’s feelings, and can be clumsy and vulgar.
Conversely, they are the most apt to unblock complex family dra-
mas during séances that take on the allure of collective psychodramas.
Their aim is to force everyone to look reality straight in the face, even
when it is unpleasant or unspeakable. This type of séance is dreaded
by the attendees: flouting any modesty, an individual in a trance can
publicly reveal intimate problems, or even the secrets of the members
present.
The most intense displays, accompanied by the rhythms of muffled
and throbbing drums liable to provoke a state of torpor and unleash
possession, take the form of repeated trance sessions.7 Possession
séances are moments of catharsis.8 To fully understand their mean-
ing, it is worthwhile to follow the full cycle. Each one has high points
of tension, building by waves, followed by moments of calm when
the yuka drums, the singing, and the dance halt. To a background of
throbbing, hypnotic rhythms, participants sketch out rumba or Palo
Monte dances while muttering a few inexpressive litanies. A climate of
anticipation takes shape. The officiant’s voice gets more intense. He
staggers around like a drunkard, falls on the ground, cries, breathes
in, snorts, and then addresses the audience with a deep, authoritar-
ian voice. This ceremony sets the stage for attentive and respectful
listening to the possessed.
As most of the participants move in place, a few isolated individ-
uals pace back and forth, with more theatrical gestures. Some crawl
up to the altar and prostrate themselves before it. The warning signs
of possession are clear. Spasms run up and down the body. Diction is
altered until incomprehensible words are uttered, resembling “speak-
ing in tongues.” Voices are strained, becoming rough and dramatic,
producing an effect of nonhuman sounds. At the beginning, these
performances help them let the spirit of the dead invade them, and at
the end, to free themselves from it. Childish babbling announces the
spirit’s arrival; its departure is accompanied by an aged, dying voice.
Between the two, the possessed person’s voice remains throaty but
becomes clearer to let the oracles be distinctly heard.
Here is the more specific sequence of a séance in a neighborhood
on the edge of Santiago de Cuba. The ceremony takes up an entire
day. Enrique, a “father of religion,” will let himself be possessed by
the dead one called Sieterayo in front of an audience of about 30
duly invited people, with men in the majority. Women stay in the
background.
Possessions begin with the sacrifice of a billy goat and several chick-
ens. The blinds are drawn, leaving the room in semidarkness so as to
protect those present from intrusive stares. Once the animals’ throats
have been cut, the blood spilled on the ground is carefully cleaned up
and the bodies (the meat of the animals . . . ) are taken to the women
to be cut up and cooked (they will be eaten at the end of the séance).
During this time, the music halts and people start talking with each
other. When the rhythm resumes, it is with a renewed liveliness. This
excites Enrique, the Palo Monte officiant who raises his hands to his
head as if he were hurting badly. He lets himself fall to the ground
shaken by spasms. His son makes sure his skull does not strike the
floor. Letting out cries and monosyllables such as “hey, hey . . . bey,
bey,” he seems to be suffering. Then, recovering his wits, he begins to
perform some dance steps and lets out a violent laugh while drooling.
He stops short in front of the musicians. Miming a baby waking up,
he yawns several times, crosses his arms over his chest, and caresses his
own shoulders and bust in a cartoonish manner. He throws himself
onto the floor and crawls to the altar. Sieterayo’s arrival is signaled by
sardonic laughter that turns into barking and guttural sounds. At that
time, the people present still do not know which dead one has come to
possess Enrique. Mirka, a young assistant who takes care of him in crit-
ical moments, asks him in song: “Who is there? I want to know who
is there. Who is knocking on my door?” In a throaty voice, Enrique
utters a few incomprehensible words. In their midst one can make out
the name, Sieterayo Acavacuento. Crowning the possessed with a red
scarf adorned with feathers, Mirka salutes the dead visitor’s arrival:
“May God be blessed. The blessing of Tata Sieterayo has arrived.”
Enrique, having become Sieterayo, begins to speak in tongues in a
deep voice as if attempting to recreate the different languages spoken
by African slaves. But as he mixes bits of Spanish and Congo language,
which is difficult to understand, the master of the house translate his
words for the gathering. The oracle consists in telling of the problems
Fran’s brother is going through. As his colleagues at the telephone
company do not accept that he “enriches himself” by showing tourists
around the town, they are trying to get him sacked. Such jealousy
must be taken seriously. A denunciation would entail merciless pun-
ishment from the authorities. The possessed turns to a grandmother,
with whom he usually maintains no intimate relationships. He speaks
to her and hugs her fraternally. Elderly people are seen as closer to
the dead and, by holding the old lady in his arms, Enrique-Sieterayo
recognizes her as an accomplice. Moved by that, she collapses in

tears.
Enrique-Sieterayo remains for about 20 minutes; then, with a sad
expression, he breaks into a song alluding to his departure: “Already
the friend of men is going away . . . ” This incantatory phrase is taken
up by the chorus to help him leave. The possessed man grows weaker.
Flat out in front of the altar, he mimes death throes; his voice is bro-
ken, slurred. He is shaken by spasms and curls up. Then suddenly,
he leaps out athletically. Fran and her son hold him firmly by the
arms. He tries to break free, drools, and utters vocalizations, “bay,
bay, bay,” like a babbling baby. Mirka covers his head with a red scarf
and spits rum out on his ears, shoulders, and belly. With his head still
covered by the scarf, Enrique flails out in all directions, continuing to
utter monosyllables. When Mirka uncovers his head, Sieterayo leaves.
Enrique comes back to his senses. People open the door so the dead
visitor can exit the room. Finally, as if nothing had happened, Enrique
takes his place again among the faithful while the assembly recites Our
Father and Hail Mary.
During this type of séance, the dead are called for a long time, by
a succession of Palo songs and mambos. In return, residing in a super-
natural world and/or floating in limbo, these dead penetrate bodies
when air enters the lungs. The dead then dwell in breath and speech,
which become a vehicle for their messages. To mark this transfor-
mation, the possessed person’s voice undergoes metamorphosis; the
possessed strains his voice until it becomes guttural, throaty, broken,
the expression of an ancient and faraway voice.
The faithful who officiate most frequently—in general, they
become priests or priestesses—strain their voices again and again,
which take on a naturally dark or throaty tinge. They eventually
become marked by these repeated vocal exercises to a point that
a state of trance contaminates their daily life. Some seem to live
between two worlds, passing imperceptibly from a wakeful state to
semiconsciousness, while their sleeps become divinatory dreams. As
they sleep, they continue to utter throaty and incomprehensible dark
sounds, which are interpreted as the continuation of their conver-
sations with the dead. The content of these conversations is passed
along to the appropriate persons during consultation sessions—thus,
not during possessions—during which the seers spontaneously revert
to a throatier tone of voice than usual, as if the dead still dwelled
in their words. Such individuals become affected by the repetition of
those vocal exercises. Their voices acquire a permanent dark timbre,
as if they were hoarse, from their constant deformation.
The Throaty Voice in Contemporary Art

The experiments conducted by Western artists using a tremulous and
halting enunciation, supported by deep and raspy tones of voice, have
a troubling similitude to the babbling and the raspy voices of flamenco
singing sessions and possession séances of Palo Monte. When dealing
with sound creation, Kurt Schwitters, with the “Ursonate,” Dubuffet,
with “La fleur de barbe,” and Dufrêne, with the rhythm-cry, do not
emit a smooth and magnified voice pronouncing clearly articulated
words. Their works express a conception of art as disorder, chaos,
unpredictable phenomenon. Schwitters, Dubuffet, and Dufrêne pro-
duce a series of sounds marked by corporeality. To do so, their breaths
are artificialized while they try to make their vocal cords vibrate to the
limits of the possible. The similarities between the rough and distorted
vocal sounds emanating from practices like the flamenco or Palo
Monte and those twentieth-century sound creations are remarkable.
(Pasqualino 2012c, 2012d).
Under the influence of Raoul Hausmann’s phonetic essays, Kurt
Schwitters (1887–1948) created in 1922–1923 what he named
“Ursonate.” The prefix Ur—meaning original or primeval in
German—marked the will to create primitive, first music. The artist
transposed a process he had used in his visual compositions into his
vocal work. He had made use of collages of scraps of fabric, used
packaging, objects picked up on the beach after they were worn,
deformed, or soiled (pebbles, driftwood, etc.). Nicolas Surlapierre
(2005, 171) had already noted the parallels between Schwitters’
visual experimentations proceeding through collages of images, with
his sound experiments—the “Ursonate”—resorting to visual ono-
matopoeia made up of fragments of words:
The arrangement of words is not so random, wrote the author, taking frag-
ments of words from signs, expressions written in abbreviations or in written
advertisements, and political leaflets; the voice implies the conception of visual
patterns endowed with all virtues. These are graphic notations that seem to
refuse iconography and prefer semiosis to mimesis.
(our translation, emphases in original)
Photograms attesting to his sonic experiments show Schwitters emit-

ting sounds with his mouth open wide. This technique aimed to
pulverize language. Only the vocal inflection, rhythm, and assonance
counted. Its abstract sonorities made abundant use of babbling. The
interpreter worked on beginnings of sentences, or the an inarticulate
sound as an attempt to put into words.
Dubuffet (1901–1985) also created sound experimentations that

flowed from his pictorial research. In his Texturologies, as in the
Beards cycle, the substances are dense, agglomerated, and anthro-
pomorphic. In “Carte de barbe” (“Beard Map”), the artist seeks
to represent earth and man, the geological world and a mythol-
ogy. According to Max Loreau, certain beards evoke “great rock
formations or ancient bearded—barbue—barbarian civilisations. They
are an expression of ancestry” (Loreau 1966, 85). Starting from
these pictorial experiments, in 1959 Dubuffet composed a poem on
magnetic tapes titled “La fleur de barbe” (“The Beard Flower”).
Accompanied by a declaimed and vaguely sung sonic background,
Dubuffet improvised for six months with Asger Jorn. Knocking, ham-
mering, breathing, hitting, singing, they created concrete music made
up of mixes, assemblies, collages, and over-impressions. A sort of trib-
ute to all beards, “La fleur de barbe” was created on the basis of a series
of large-headed characters, emphasizing the hairiness of their chin,
nose, or buttocks. The monochord and theatrical voice used seems to
come straight out of the mouths of the haggard, hallucinating charac-
ters, conglomerates of rustic materials frozen in a hieratic pose. In his
creations, a distant sonic background is audible, composed of flutes,
bells, barking dogs, and a balafon, which convey an impression of dis-
order. But what is striking is the use of a deformed voice, which seems
slowed until it becomes dense, deep, and formless.
From another generation, François Dufrêne (1930–1982) was a
visual artist also seeking new forms of expressions. He was well known
in particular as an artist who reworked posters (affichiste). His cre-
ations were made from posters ripped from walls and lacerated, which
he then reworked until he obtained colors washed out by the rain,
and partly erased by glue or dust. In parallel, he devised audiotapes
in which he sought to juxtapose words in relation to one another by
sound rather than by meaning (Jouffroy 2005, 25–26). In 1946, the
writer Roger Caillois (1978) severely criticized these sound poems and
saw them as below the language to which only poetry can pretend.
In fact, through his “undersides of posters” and what he
called his “rhythm-cries,” Dufrêne explored a creation against the
current. Interviewed in 1975, he defined his attempts as an inverse
transcendence: not the search for a beyond as sought by the
spiritual aims of Kandinsky, the Suprematists, or Mondrian, but
for an “underneath.” The rhythm-cry is made up of breaths in
and out, tongue clicks, and incongruous sounds: spitting, kisses,
whistling . . . somewhere between language and wails, silence, suffoca-
tion, mumbling, or loss of breath. In this way, the artist explored the
very texture of breathing, sometimes reworking it on a tape recorder
to obtain slowdown or speedup effects, superpositions, or reverbera-

tions. To evoke the painful and distressing breathing of childbirth, for
example, he did not hesitate to play his recordings backward. Every-
thing was useful in exacerbating the sounds that seemed to come from
within: expressing corporality,9 the rhythm-cry was thus presented as
an organic research of an ontological type. By focusing his attention
on the sounds produced from within the body, exploring the acts of
spitting, belching, etc., Dufrêne challenges the norms of good man-
ners. To him, it is a way of expressing the transgression of a stifling
normativity.
These three sound creation ensembles—Schwitters’ “Ursonate,”
Dubuffet’s “La fleur de barbe,” and Dufrêne’s rhythm-cries—run
counter to the precepts of modernity as advocated from the beginning
of the twentieth century. The modern spirit as we think of it called for
a creation detached from any sentimentalism as well as a great sobri-
ety pushing to purification of lines, gestures, and intentions. From
the moderns’ standpoint, the new was the taste for newness. Facing
this dominant current, art history has played down creations resort-
ing to impure, secondhand, or timeworn materials. In New York,
modernism’s beacon city, Rudi Fuchs (1993) delivered a lecture in
1991, “Conflicts with modernism,” revealing Kurt Schwitters’ shock-
ing absence from the twentieth-century art panorama. His works—in
somber tones and often composed of secondhand material (papers,
rags, and pieces of repurposed objects)—represent an alternative to
the smooth and carefully ordered aesthetic of triumphant modernity:
they succeed in conceiving of art as disorder, chaos, and an unpre-
dictable phenomenon. Dubuffet and Dufrêne also broke with the
dogma of modernity. While Dubuffet’s visual productions made use
of a thick substance, full of protrusions, Dufrêne’s work, as we have
seen, was based on materials worked by time. In the same vein, when
they explored the field of sound creation, these three artists did not
emit a smooth voice magnified to spotlight clearly articulated words.
Schwitters, Dubuffet, and Dufrêne produced a series of meaningless
sounds marked by their bodily origins. Their breaths do not respect
the natural biological rhythm and they push their vocal cords to the
limit of their range.
Suffering Societies
In the three contexts examined—Andalusia, Cuba, and contemporary
Western art—the vocal preference for a deep register appears as the
expression of communities on the margins of the dominant system.
The Gypsies, veritable pariahs in their country, deliberately confound
understanding of the lyrics of their songs and roughen the timbre

of their voices until they lose them—as they take pleasure in scuttling
their own dance by interrupting it unexpectedly. They thus oppose the
Payos, who strive to perfect the execution of their songs (and their
dances) by taking care to pronounce the lyrics as clearly as possible.
In the same vein, with respect to the disciplined, indoctrinated Cuban
society, the followers of Palo Monte, poorest of the poor and usually
dark-skinned, differentiate themselves by adopting displays that seem
particularly savage: the possessed sprawl, move about, and vocalize like
beasts.
In addition to parallels in the behavior of the two outsider groups,
it is tempting to establish a comparison in terms of the motivations
leading them to produce a deep, distorted voice.
A careful examination of Palo Monte séances shows that the pos-
sessed person’s voice splits into two. Looking at the phenomenon
from a technical point of view, this impression is created by a “dishar-
monious” and distorted sound. It would certainly be useful to refer to
even more precise considerations. Doing so would require the use of
sophisticated scientific equipment capable of going beyond the limits
of our senses: phonograms, for example, that would provide quantifi-
able data, or an endoscopic camera installed in the throat to film the
physiological movements of the nasal sinuses, the vocal cords, and the
glottis. We can surmise that these laboratory experiments would show
that the performers’ vocal techniques bring them close to voicelessness
(aphonia). And yet, at that moment, the possessed seems to continue
to emit inaudible sounds . . .10
Concretely, the range of human hearing extends, approximately
and depending on age, to the first half of the first octaves, or 20 Hz.
Beneath, we no longer hear anything. However, neurology teaches us
that although we no longer recognize the sound with our ears, we
continue to perceive it through a remarkable phenomenon. Below
audible sounds, infrasound makes the thoracic cage vibrate, which
conveys the feeling that we are weighed down. In other words, we
feel the sensation of a presence. How can we fail to associate this
with the conviction of the Gypsies and the Cuban devotees, at the
precise moment when the atmosphere has heightened the senses and
deep sounds become infrasound, of being in the presence of invisi-
ble beings—the dead—penetrating the participants’ bodies? That is
the precise moment when the body is “affected,” perceived as being
“inhabited” by supernatural entities.
The Gypsies and the Afro-Cuban followers of Palo Monte share a
desire to flee a society seen as generating suffering. The two groups
are inspired by the same thirst to live in a free and just world. But the
chances of really reaching that goal are slim, reserved to a minority.
For Gypsies, this means constantly being on the move, so they can
temporarily escape the harassment local populations inflict on them.
For the Cubans, this means desperate attempts to escape the island.
But for most, the most effective means of escaping the suffering in
our vale of tears is not by physical flight, but by a spiritual escape
outside of socialized time and space.
It is tempting to assign a general meaning to different practices
of breath and voice modification, such as those we have exam-
ined. The meaningless sounds might express something imperceptible,
approaching Jankélévitch’s “almost nothing,” which, “on the bor-
derline between material and immaterial,” designates “the minimal
existence beyond which would lie non-existence, pure and simple
nothingness” (Jankélévitch 1957). For his part, Michel de Certeau
(1980, 36) has also studied speaking in tongues, the “arts of non-
sense” and “vocal utopias.” His interrogations touched on their
origins and the historical, sociocultural, and psychological contexts
in which they appear. Nonspeech, in de Certeau’s view, accompanies
phenomena of social decline:
These moments are identifiable and typical: devaluation of institutions (church

or social) of speech; de-territorialization of manners and customs; breakdown
of language conventions etc. Speaking in tongues then occurs as an auxiliary
process. It vocally takes charge of this art of nonsense which is in short the art
of starting or starting over to speak in saying.
(de Certeau 1980, 36)
The vocal games, including glossolalia, in which the Gypsies and the
followers of Palo Monte engage, show the rejection of an established
speech. They want to differentiate themselves from the dominant
groups.
By laying claim to voices seen as ancient and faraway, the voices
from below, these groups gain access to an underworld11 inhabited by
these Chthonian powers, the dead. They seek to encounter the dead to
escape the subjugating laws of the living. To escape suffering or relieve
it, the Gypsies commune with their Flamenco forebears, while the Palo
Monte devotees call upon the aid of their African ancestors. While the
world of the living is associated with suffering, on the other side, the
world of the dead is a key to emancipation. In Cuba, I have sometimes
seen the boundary dividing these two universes clearly materialized.
The altars of a palero were set apart from the rest of the room by a
symbolic boundary made of a heavy chain on the ground. This paid

poignant witness to slavery times: the chain separated the world of
the living—of servitude—from the world of the dead, a synonym for
freedom.
We have also seen that the deep, broken voices of the Gypsies and
the Palo Monte followers have something in common with avant-
garde artistic sound creations. Is it also possible to find similarities in
terms of meaning? The Gypsy and Cuban people seeking to free them-
selves from oppression seems to strike a chord with the commitment
of the three artists cited—Schwitters, Dubuffet, and Dufrêne—to free
themselves from conventions. In visual terms, Schwitters worked on
discarded objects, Dubuffet was interested in the output of mad or
outsider artists, and Dufrêne repurposed mass consumption by work-
ing on worn-out or lacerated advertising posters. In the same vein but
in the audio medium, Schwitters emitted babbling sounds, inarticu-
late and incomplete words, inventing a form of babble referring to the
coming of another world. Dubuffet’s sound creations made use of a
throaty tonality, spacing the words uttered, to a progressive slowing
down of flow, and echo. He evoked an ancient and faraway sound, as if
it had been dragged up from a deep well, from the night of time. The
title of his work “La fleur de barbe” evokes bearded ancestors and the
irresistible image of ancestrality among us. Finally Dufrêne, by invert-
ing the natural movement of breath and voice, by paying attention
to the sounds emitted from inside the body, by exploring the actions
of spitting, belching, etc., runs counter to the rules of good manners.
For these artists, it is not a matter of expressing transcendence through
art, but of transgressing a stifling normativity. In this sense they share
with the Gypsies and the Afro-Cubans the idea of reaching the beyond
through infra-sonority.
To the Gypsy and Cuban people seeking to free themselves from
oppression through voice metamorphosis responds the will of artists
pushing their voices to the brink of aphonia in expressing their will
to oppose themselves to a rationality deemed too significant and
perceived as alienating. In any case, the deconstruction of voice
and speech expresses the desire to free oneself from the shackles of
conventions.
Notes
1. Since 2007, I have been working in Cuba (Santiago de Cuba) on
an Afro-Cuban cult, the Palo Monte. While working on trance and
possession, I have concentrated on the “emotional” value of individual
actions, and on issues such as the role of physical endurance in the

rituals, voice training, gestures, and time perception.
2. It is usually said that the Gypsy community is not worth studying.
When, in the 1990, I started to study Andalusian’s Gypsies, they
suffered from a certain number of apriorisms. They were considered
acculturated, unstructured from an institutional point of view, lacking
a kinship system worthy of the term, too dependent on “Western”
society, and, finally, under the influence of a tourist-oriented folklore.
Despite those prejudices, I was soon driven to go beyond the analysis
of the institutions and look at ritual manifestations, societal facts that
I considered more open to innovative research.
3. This refocusing on emotional life seems so fundamental that
I proposed to invert the function traditionally attributed to rit-
ual performance: it must not be perceived simply as updat-
ing and strengthening a preexisting social model, but rather
as being a decisive act, the basis of a given group’s iden-
tity. In the 1980s, some writers had contemplated the idea that
emotions could be constitutive elements of social organizations.
Michelle Rosaldo, for example, considered that the fields of affec-
tivity must be integrated to the classical analyses of institutions, the
culture, and the history of a social group. In the course of my anal-
yses of the Gypsy singers of Andalusia, expanding on this hypothesis,
I considered that affects could be at the foundation of complex social
constructions and could legitimize, in the eyes of a given group, its
“ethnic” claims. (Cf. Rosaldo [1980].)
4. A similar situation exists in Eastern Europe. There are no great com-
memorations of the Holocaust, an event that struck the Roma very
hard. Michael Stewart (2004, 575) notes, however, that despite their
“presentist” rhetorics, the Roma from Harango (Hungary) recall a
painful past, associating it with a daily life punctuated by violent
conflicts with non-Roma.
5. The faithful take a more or less active part in three types of worship:
Espiritismo Cruzado, Santeria, and Palo Monte. They sometimes
seem so mixed with each other as to be three facets of the same
religion. The first, influenced by the European Kardec’s spiritism but
also by African cults whose practices center on the altar called a boveda
spiritual, expresses faith in the souls of the dead. The latter two are
of African origin. Santeria comes from the Yoruba people. In the
times of Spanish colonialism, slaves brought from Benin or south-
western Nigeria were forced to associate their divinities, the Orichas,
with Catholic Saints or Virgins. As in black Africa, the Santeros offer
animals as a sacrifice to their divinities, half-human, half-gods that
ensure that each mortal carries out his or her fate. Cubans are also
often followers of Palo Monte, a worship of “active” objects, liable
to exert influence on a given situation and comparable to Western
sorcery.
6. It is said that Paleros are capable of carrying out “life exchanges”

(cambios de vida). That means saving a person by taking another per-
son’s life. They are safekeepers of songs, called mambos, using the
conga language mixed with elements of Spanish and Yoruba vocabu-
lary. They can communicate with the dead (Sarabanda or Sieterayo)
in this language. The Africans are seen closer to the possessed.
7. From a profane standpoint, possession is a therapy that relieves moral
and economic suffering. A product of great piety or an expression
of collective psychology, a trance prepares participants for the visit
of the dead. A few days beforehand, the future possessed generally
suffers from a nagging headache. During the trance, he might hold his
skull between his hands as if he were protecting himself from a sharp
pain violently attacking him and taking him into the great beyond.
Whichever dead one takes him, the sensations are the same: “Your
head turns, you feel like vomiting. You start to lose consciousness
and rise up. Then the dead one enters you. You feel him coming.”
A devotee recounts being possessed from the age of 7:
It happened when I was dancing with my mother and my family.
They understood right away that I was possessed by Saint Lazarus.
Saint Lazarus makes you roll around on the ground. He pulls very
hard, the movement of your forearms speeds up, your head gets
heavy as if you were carrying a huge burden, your body rises up. All
of that in a flash. You lose yourself . . . you go. You have a very bad
pain in your skull and to relieve it, your head has to be cooled
down by pouring water on it. That is why everyone cries: “Water!
Water!”
8. They take place several times a year, especially between St. Barbara’s
Day (December 4) and St. Lazarus’ day (December 11). Several par-
ticipants are “carried off” by the Orichas (Santeria divinities) or by the
dead. During these periods, at times the possessed fall into a trance
simultaneously or they take turns at any time during the day. They go
into contortions, with their eyeballs turned up and in a seemingly
chaotic manner. The same person can be carried off in succession
by several dead spirits. A fainting sensation accompanies the plunge
into the unconscious. I was told of “currents” that carry people off
irresistibly. A devotee possessed by Yemaya, the sea goddess, told me
this:
I felt elsewhere, as if death was approaching, drowned, my head
carried down to the sea floor. I saw fish and people at the same
time. They warned me that I was no longer myself, what I have
been carried off by others. I feel the moments when that is coming
or setting off . . .
Most claim to have no precise memory of the moment of posses-
sion but do retain sensations of heaviness or stiffness immobilizing
their body. Once they are carried off, the possessed display a brusque
behavior, as if they were beasts. The dead do not all appear in the
same way: Saint Lazarus (seen as a revenant) shows himself violently
and throws the possessed person to the ground, while the Africano is
attracted by suave songs and makes himself present more gently. But
all the dead are called “dogs:” they can become violent and provoke
convulsive movements, irresistibly dragging “their master” to the altar
(prenda).
9. The most intense convulsions are unleashed after a series of individual
trances, at the end of the event. They resemble a powerful, empathic
current, linking people together in a sort of collective hysteria. The
Paleros try to master them so they become productive. Some trances
are surprisingly violent. Collapsing dramatically and repeatedly, the
possessed escapes from the assembly’s control by suddenly bursting
out of the room where the ritual is taking place to run out into the
street. Making irrational movements, like a doll in the hands of an
invisible puppeteer, his body remains untamed. The Palero attempts
to channel the possessed’s savage strength by guiding him to a “spirit
center,” where guardian angels will teach him to dialogue with the
dead. Between his uncontrolled movements that occur at the begin-
ning and at the end of a trance, one must succeed in getting the dead
to express themselves through him.
10. According to Guilhem Fabre (2005, 189, 191), for Dufrêne this
meant “singing until human viscerality was achieved, in a mode com-
parable to its practice at the opposite of posters, the recorder is the
site where the body becomes double.”
11. In flamenco performance as in Palo Monte possession, the audience’s
rationality is suspended, giving way to listening in the greatest silence.
References
Agamben, Giorgio. Le langage et la mort. Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1997.
Antonietto, Alain. “Le cinéma forain et . . . bohémien (Du ‘muet’ au début du
‘parlant’).” Études tsiganes 31, no. 3 (1985): 9–20.
Argyriadis, Kali. La religion à la Havane. Actualité des représentations et des
pratiques cultuelles havanaises. Paris : Éditions des Archives contempo-
raines, 1999.
Caillois, Roger. Babel. Paris: Gallimard, 1978.
De Certeau, Michel. “Utopies vocales: glossolalies.” Traverses 20 (1980):
26–37.
Dubuffet, Jean. Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet. As-tu cueilli la fleur
de barbe. Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert Editeur, 1964.
Fabre, Guilhem. “Poésie sonore. Voix éclatées.” In Éclats de voix, edited
by Pascal Lécroart and Frédérique Toudoire-Surlapierre, 183–191. Paris:
L’Improviste, 2005.
Fuchs, Rudi. Conflits avec le modernisme ou l’absence de Kurt Schwitters. Paris:

L’Échoppe, 1993.
Jankélévitch, Vladimir. Le je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien. Paris: PUF, 1957.
Jouffroy, Alain. “Les satellites.” In catalogue : François Dufrêne,
Ouestampage. Brest: Musée des Beaux Arts de Brest, 2005.
Loreau, Max. Dubuffet et le voyage du centre de la perception. Paris: La Jeune
Parque, 1966.
Pasqualino, Caterina. Dire le chant. Les Gitans flamencos d’Andalousie. Paris:
EHESS-CNRS, 1998.
Pasqualino, Caterina. “La souffrance des chanteurs gitans flamencos
(Andalousie, Espagne).” In Sentiments doux-amers dans les musiques du
monde, edited by Michel Demeuldre, 117–126. Paris: L’Harmattan,
2004.
Pasqualino, Caterina. “Ecorchés vif. Pour une anthropologie des affects.”
Système de pensée en Afrique noire 17 2005: 51–69, 2005.
Pasqualino, Caterina. “The Gypsies, Poor But Happy: A Cinematic Myth.”
Third Text 22 (2008): 337–347.
Pasqualino, Caterina. “Entre féerie et macabre, les cultes afro-cubains en
Espagne,” in La religion des orisha, edited by Stefania Capone et Kali
Argyriadis, 245–269, Paris : Hermann, 2012.
Pasqualino, Caterina. “ Métamorphoses des voix ”, in Bertrand Hell et Jean
de Loisy (dir), Les Maîtres du désordre, Paris : Musée du Quai Branly,
pp. 202–203, 2012 c.
Pasqualino, Caterina. “ Métamorphoses de la voix dans les rites de possession
cubains et dans l’art contemporain ”, Gruppen, n. 4, 2012, pp. 126–140,
Paris, 2012 d.
Pasqualino, Caterina. “ Visions parallèles, les aventures de la conscience mod-
ifiée ” in Experimental film and Anthropology, édité avec Arnd Schneider,
London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Poizat, Michel. La voix du diable. La jouisance lyrique sacrée. Paris: Métailé,
1991.
Poizat, Michel. Variations sur la voix. Paris: Anthropos, 1998.
Poizat, Michel. Vox populi, vox Dei. Vox et pouvoir. Paris: Métailé, 2001.
Rosaldo, Michelle Z. Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and Social
Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Stewart, Michael. “Remembering without Commemoration: The Mnemonics
and Politics of Holocaust Memories among European Roma.” Journal of
the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 10, no. 3
(2004): 561–584.
Surlapierre, Nicolas. “Le soliloque du ventriloque: l’Ursonate de Kurt
Schwitters.” In Éclats de voix, edited by Pascal Lécroart and Frédérique
Toudoire Surlapierre, 161–182. Paris: L’Improviste, 2005.
Vasse, Denis. L’ombilic et la voix. Deux enfants en analyse. Paris: Seuil, 1974.
Chapter 5
The Art of Suffering:

Po s tc o lo n i a l
(Mis)Apprehensions of
Nigerian Art
Conerly Casey
(Mis)apprehensions of African arts, and their relegation to distant

temporal, spatial, and relational realms, are part of violent structures
of power that continue to diminish our understanding of others.
European and American representations of African arts and aesthet-
ics, embedded in what James Clifford (1988, 225) refers to as the
“art-culture” system, tend to devalue them as “primitive,” signs of
stagnant, traditional, and unchanging culture, or to value “authentic”
forms, typically precolonial art, assumed to hold ritual power.1 With
Europeans and Americans, the primary buyers of “authentic” African
art, this double bind leaves contemporary African artists unable to
sell their work in global art markets, their creativity sidelined to
“fake” antiques, or to “copy” Western music, in mimetic processes
that entangle African and European artists and consumers. Within
the past two decades, however, the global marketing of African art
and aesthetics appears to have morphed; European and American
consumers continue to assume transcultural, cosmopolitan creativ-
ity the purview of Western artists and non-Western cosmopolitanism
a sign of “inauthentic” cultural expression, but this dynamic fos-
ters divergent trends—one, a corporate, commoditized branding of
122 C o n e r ly C a s e y
“ethnicity” and corporate authentications of ethnic arts (Comaroff

and Comaroff 2009), and two, the burgeoning of African and African
diasporic markets in which cosmopolitan creolization is a shared aes-
thetic of postcolonial experience (Hannerz 1997; Larkin 2008). These
two trends are critical to analyses of suffering in African arts, in that
they have unique capacities to evoke, channel, and amplify traumatic
memories.
Relying on the insights of Nigerian artists and long-term
ethnographic research in northern Nigeria, I would first like to suggest
some of the ways that Nigerian arts contribute to the expression and
experience of postcolonial violence, enabling apprehensions of realities
that may be easily (mis)apprehended.2 Second, I offer analyses of arts
of suffering, specifically watercolor paintings of spirit-human dynamic
forces—witchcraft, spirit possession, evil eye, and evil words—in
the predominately Muslim Hausa contexts of Kano City. In these
paintings, representations of violence communicate affective senso-
rial violence that, not tied to immediate referents, may be difficult to
apprehend. I conclude with the real-virtual interfaces of global cultural
relations and mediations of suffering that occur through engagements
with Bollywood and Kanywood Hausa video films, the latter produced
in Kano City. I tentatively offer two analytic perspectives; one cap-
tures the expressive aspects of art, and the other presumes a priori
realms of aesthetic experience and understanding that mediate suffer-
ing and the cultural and political forms Muslim Hausa draw upon to
make sense of suffering. By doing this, I hope to suggest some of
the real-virtual remappings of self-other relations, and newly form-
ing intersubjective assemblages of self-reference that evoke and alter
memories of violence, generating new experiences and expressions of
suffering, including artistic ones.
The postcolonial aesthetic I refer to as “danger and deliver-
ance” emerged in Nigeria during the 1990s, as a result of “vigilant
attunements” to the sensorial of (post)colonial violence, amplified
by the neocolonial aspects of global capitalism, new media access
and uses, and worldwide religious approaches to political problems.
Vigilant attunements in post-colonies such as Nigeria are perceptual
aesthetic filters, developed in specific relations of subjugation, uncer-
tainty, and danger. Vigilant attunements affect self-qualia-meaning,
the interlinking of our many senses of self as they emerge with qualia,
or the “raw feels” of consciousness—the painfulness of pain or the
fearfulness of fear—and the meanings we make of them for our-
selves. In many African post-colonies, vigilant attunements to colonial
rule and to postindependence military or autocratic governance led
The Art of Suffering 123
to aesthetics that Stoller (1984) refers to as “horrific comedy” and

Mbembe (2001, 102) terms the “aesthetics of vulgarity.” Though
differently engaged with human and spiritual realms, these aesthet-
ics vividly portray the connections of “good living” and death, the
politically seen and the unseen.
New technologies and mediated forms of “horrific comedy” and
the “aesthetics of vulgarity” appear to magnify and amplify felt danger
in Nigeria’s burgeoning Pentecostal and reformist Sunni communities
whose members place a heavy emphasis on locating evil within the
body and exorcising or expelling it. In Nigerian expressive cultures,
the aesthetic of “danger and deliverance” takes form in the mimicry of
autocratic political elites and Christians and Muslims who excessively
enjoy life at the expense of others. People in these groups, whom the
Nigerian poor associate with acts of violence and political and religious
corruption, are, through mimicry, in relations of similarity and mul-
tiplicity to spirits, witches, and vampires, other beings who have the
capacity to enhance life, or to drain the lifeblood and life force from
individuals and communities; they have similar qualia or “raw feels”
and potential meanings to Nigerians in the aftermath of violence, and
as these feels cluster, each may (de)amplify the other.
Nigerian arts that engage these experiential dimensions of
postcolonial violence express and mediate self-qualia-meaning, pro-
viding venues for the imaginative aspects of understanding oneself,
others, and objects, the symbolic and aesthetic realms that artists use
to express their experiences in and of the world, but also the inter-
subjective encounters of viewers and listeners with art forms and with
one another over time.3 Arts and aesthetics that express sensory mem-
ories of violence enter into significance when they are embodied,
interpreted, evaluated, and judged.
Daniel (1996, 135), drawing on Peirce’s category of “qualisign,”
a felt quality of experience that is present, immediate, uncategorized,
and pre-reflective, suggests that a qualisign is a pre-sign waiting for
its object and interpretant. Pain from violence is different from other
sensory experiences that have objects in the external world; we hear
the alarm, see the green of spring, taste the hot spice of pepper, and
smell the fumes of petroleum. Scarry (1985, 161–162) writes that the
pain of violence, in that it has no object outside the boundaries of the
body, “almost prevents it from being rendered in language: objectless,
it cannot easily be objectified in any form, material or verbal.” There
is a connection between the objectlessness of pain that gives rise to
imagining and to what Scarry (ibid., 162) refers to as the “dense sea of
artifacts and symbols that we make and move about in.” The feedback
loops of self-qualia-meaning in postcolonial Nigeria evoke diverse

(re)memberings of violence, in which the pain of violence seeks an
object outside of the body to externalize the pain. Sensory memories
of violence, through art, evoke (re)imaginings of self-qualia-meaning
in moral appraisals that shape the selection, use, and interpretation
of remembrances, collaborative and relational remembering, forms of
mediation that situate and inscribe violence, and amplifications of past
violence by subsequent events and interactions.4
Nigerian arts of suffering entertain and educate, inculcating crit-
ical perspectives on postcolonial violence and the pain it generates
in indeterminate zones of national and global cultural economies, of
governance and “citizenship,” and of “justice” in the aftermath of vio-
lence. Explorations of violence through Nigerian arts and aesthetics
may incite destructive and creative forms of violence and simultane-
ously cultivate nonviolent responses, all of which are grounded in an
“ethics of apprehension,” the fostering of perceptual capacities and
understandings of shared experiences of violence, reverberations of
affective sensorial memories that break into, and merge with, present
and future apprehensions. The use of new technologies and the
mechanical reproduction of affective sensorial dimensions of art and
aesthetics further heighten explorations and apprehensions of violence
as people have greater, and lesser, control over the affective sensations
that technologies evoke, channel, and repeat.
Nigerian arts do not fit neatly into historical European distinc-
tions of “folk/traditional arts” associated with representations of
culture and ethnicity, “popular arts” as expressions of class, nor the
“mass art” of electronic (re)production (Barber 1997, 3). The arts of
Nigeria, similar to the Nigerian nation, developed in what Hannerz
(1997, 12) refers to as “the world in creolization”; they devel-
oped in the “shifting, indeterminate zone between the ‘traditional’
and the ‘Europeanised/elite,’ drawing on ‘deep traditional’ cultural
forms and cosmopolitan forms, straddling cultural and ethnic origins,
class, and genres” (Haynes 1997, 22–23). Nigerian arts grew out of
historical, political relations with cultural others, engaging the cre-
ativity, violence, and morality of nearby and more distant others in
global colonial contexts of subjugation. In urban centers, colonial vio-
lence and subjugation existed alongside entertainment films from the
United Kingdom and the United States, with heavy doses of com-
edy and war. The Colonial Film Unit (CFU) mobile cinema vans
transported to rural populations “documentaries, newsreels, and peda-
gogical dramas, intended to instruct audiences about the achievements
of the state and educate them in modes of health, farming, and civic
participation” (Larkin 2008, 77). Colonial suppression of arts that
expressed non-Christian spirituality, sexuality or gender roles, or forms

of labor that subverted the colonial state and capitalism also shaped
Nigerian arts and aesthetics. Nigerian creolization in arts commu-
nicates multiple cultural perspectives about the changing relations,
under colonial rule, of locality and globality, humans and spirits, men
and women, those who live in urban and rural spaces, elites and
the masses, the visible and the invisible, the heard and the inaudi-
ble, movements to and from, and what is felt on the skin. Nigerian
arts present moral dilemmas that cultivate perceptions of, and com-
munications about, social-spiritual relations of power in the midst
of colonial occupation and militarization, religious evangelism, and
the neocolonial aspects of global capitalism. Yet, as Barber (1997, 8
suggests,
multiple media of communication—music, movement, voice, writing, the

plastic, the graphic, the verbal—intersect; rich and long-standing local con-
ventions interact with the latest media instruments to shape the utterance;
and local interpretative strategies—the models, criteria, and procedures by
which people understand and draw meaning from what they see, listen to or
read—may be as complex and specialized as the generative strategies by which
the popular genres are created.
Public “edutainment,” for instance, a term coined by Nollywood

directors to describe the educational and entertainment features of
their films, directly confronts colonial film “education” about health,
sexuality, and agricultural labor by underscoring the communicative
aspects of violence to transfer cultural codes. Larkin (2008, 215)
writes, “Nigerian films address a market-driven, liberalized, insecure
Nigerian subject and engage questions of value—moral, financial,
sexual—and the intangible and unknowable ways value seems to
appear and disappear outside of individual or social control.” But,
this elusiveness of value is tied to the historical immediacy and
indeterminacy of life and death—read through the uncertain, poten-
tially dangerous, potentially revolutionary relationships of colonial-
native, spirit-human, men-women, elite-laborer, virtuous-undesirable;
as such, Nollywood films are riddled with contradictory affirmations
of identity—of cultural nationalism at the expense of national unity,
or with national unity eroding support for feminism.
Related to these memory and technological dimensions of suffering
in the arts are (mis)apprehensions of what Taussig (1993, xiii), draw-
ing on Benjamin (1978), refers to as the “mimetic faculty” of art, or
“the nature that culture uses to create second nature, the faculty to
copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield into and become
Other,” and the resonance of mimetic faculties with “sympathetic
magic,” modes of affecting the “inwardness” of human suffering from

outside. My point here is not to reinscribe the association of Africans
with “magic” and Europeans and Americans with “reason,” but to
consider that the mimetic faculty of art, the act of so closely copy-
ing otherness that one may blur into it, or withdraw in shock or with
awe, cultivates perceptual capacities and an understanding of otherness
that may refigure power relations. Miming entails understanding oth-
ers, their sensory capacities and power, but also their human frailties
(Stoller 1995).
(Mis)apprehensions of Nigerian arts and aesthetics also occur with
the European and American emphasis on rational empiricism, the
visual measurable, and the textual that obscures other forms of logic
and sensorial modes of apprehension critical to social productions of
knowledge. It is impossible to think of suffering, and its alleviation
in Nigeria, without a range of sensorial arts—the power of speech and
listening, poetry performed, theater, praise singing, talking drums, the
dancing body that aids a musician’s rhythm, to connect the seen and
the unseen, the world of the living and the world of spirits. Rather than
simply replacing the visual with an aural, kinesthetic, or another mode
of apprehension, I want to consider additional logics—the metalogical
or paralogical, and the emplaced, social relations of the senses, the par-
ticular senses or combinations that seem to provide better and worse
“fits” between experiences of suffering and explanations for them;
such logics and emplaced senses impact experiences of local and global
media in channeling and intensifying affective states and meanings.
In Nigeria, there is a constant tension between creolization in arts
and aesthetics and the capacity, as sensory memories are embodied,
interpreted, and judged, to localize artistic expressions along ethnic,
religious, and regional lines. With this tension in mind, how might the
arts of suffering (de)amplify violence? If, as Hollan (2008) suggests,
empathic understanding of suffering is embedded in an intersubjective
encounter that requires ongoing dialogue for its accuracy, how might
arts mediate suffering in postcolonial contexts, enabling and disabling
expressions of suffering as well as empathy? Before moving to these
questions, I would like to briefly offer a sense of the arts and aesthetics
of self-qualia-meaning in West African and Muslim contexts.
Art and Self-Qualia-Meaning

As part of public culture, arts and aesthetics are not simply
acculturated or indoctrinated but require participatory bodily
discipline and critical debate over time. Sculptural power figures,
referred to as “colon art” in West Africa, took the form of European

colonial figures or of Africans wearing European clothes, marking
those they represented as occupiers and sympathizers. Igbo artists, in
southern Nigeria, placed colons at crossroads and other intersections
of space along the lines of British colonial advance (Stoller 1995).
While European collectors tend to reject colons as “inauthentic” car-
icatures, preferring precolonial arts assumed to hold ritual power,
colon art engaged colonial occupation and an emphasis on the visual
through surveillance, photography, and the measurements of bod-
ies, reworking the image of the body, the sign, into felt, kinesthetic
movements and the verbal. Surveillance reversed, colon art produced
a shock, a mirror held to colonial occupation, with diverse senso-
rial affects on Nigerians, British colonials, and their sympathizers, as
well as on spirits who, attention alerted, would come to the aid of
subjugated Igbo.5
Stoller’s (1995) work with Hauka spirit possession in Niger exem-
plifies how embodied memories of French colonial rule reverberate
a full range of sensorial experiences that play out in contemporary
spirit-human relations. The horrific-comedic embodiment of Hauka
colonial spirits galvanized support for anticolonial resistance, explicitly
depicting the people and events associated with suffering. But Stoller
(1995, 7) argues that the embodiment of colonial spirits is not pri-
marily textual: “Rather, the sentient body is culturally consumed by a
world filled with forces, smells, textures, sights, sounds and tastes, all
of which trigger social memories.” Sentient embodiment of Hauka,
and its mimetic connection to colonial memories evoke the past, and
enter the present and future in a particular aesthetic of the horrific and
comic in spirit-human relations, a sensorial bridging of self and other,
the visible and invisible.
West African gendered, generational, and occupational associa-
tions also draw upon and shape affective dispositions in the link-
ing of inner-outer embodied experiences. Geurts (2002, 180–181)
explains the Ewe concept of seselelame: “ . . . sensations caused by a
stimulus from external objects are epistemologically related to sensa-
tions that stem from internal somatic modes grouped with affective
states.” Geurts (ibid., 188) finds “sensation, emotion, disposition and
vocation as a continuous stream in a domain of bodily experience
rather than separate entities.” The integration of sensation, emo-
tion, disposition, and vocation may be seen as part of what Csordas
(1993, 138–139) refers to as “somatic modes of attention,” and the
“culturally elaborated attention to and with the body in the immediacy
of an intersubjective milieu.”
With increased global interconnectivity in the 1990s, affective

sensorial embodiments in face-to-face performances of art and aes-
thetics, mediated by, or in combination with, new technologies, began
to significantly alter interlinkings of self-qualia-meaning. Hirschkind
(2001, 13–14), working with young Muslims in Egypt who listen to
cassette sermons, found a well-crafted sermon “to evoke in the listener
the affective dispositions that underlie ethical conduct and reasoning,
and which through repeated listening, may become sedimented in the
listener’s character.” In northern Nigeria, cassette sermons, circulat-
ing outside of mosques and other prescribed places of ritual practice,
and Hausa video films created new contexts for public deliberation
about ethics, civic virtue, and spirituality that cut across gendered,
generational, and human-spirit lines of communication.6 Listeners
and viewers began to cultivate new perceptual capacities of the body
with their use of technologies that allowed mobility, replay, and dis-
continuous listening and viewing in reforming public and private
settings.
Renderings of suffering, in cassette sermons and Hausa video
films, signaled and cultivated an “ethics of apprehension” in which
uncertainty, potential danger, and deliverance transformed human and
spirit-human relations, linking external traumas—colonization, civil
war, militarization, and political, economic, and spiritual violence,
with internal somatic modes, such as hunger, excitement, sadness, and
ill health. But, does affective attunement to these linkages provide
emotional contexts that allow us to imagine the suffering of others?
Does imagining the suffering of others open and close possibilities
for affective understanding? How are emerging relations of affective
attunement and imagination changing with increased global intercon-
nectivity, and with suffering fractured or amplified in political rhetoric
or media portrayals? To engage these questions, I present Nigerian arts
of suffering that express and mediate the pain of postcolonial military
violence and metaphysical assaults within reforming religious contexts,
underpinned by the violence of global capitalism.
Postcolonial “Policing” and the Arts of Obscene

Violence
Increased surveillance and the “policing” of identities and expressive
arts is common during periods of political transition, and in Nigeria,
these periods help us to understand suffering in what I refer to as the
“arts of obscene violence.”7 The arts of obscene violence (re)entered
public memory during the 1999 transition from Nigerian military to
democratic rule and, a year later, with the implementation of Shari’a

criminal law in 12 states of northern Nigeria. The changes involved
the election of president Olus.e.gun O . basanjo., former military head
of state and a born-again Christian, and the reimposition of Shari’a
criminal codes that had been in place during the colonial period, but
had been excised at independence. Beyond non-Muslim fears of the
Islamization of Nigeria, widely reported in the media, the reimposi-
tion of Shari’a criminal codes and the clamor for its implementation
in southern areas of the country were part of widespread religious
movements’ efforts in Nigeria, and around the world, to reinsert reli-
gion into state politics. This religious “turn” in Nigeria came on the
heels of three decades of brutal military rule, and the predominance
of northern Muslim military heads of state. Given the histories of
colonial and postindependence military violence, at question for most
Nigerians was the issue of “justice,” and what form justice might take
under these new national and state regimes. Shared concepts of suf-
fering among Nigerians developed as affective sensorial apprehensions
of violence and injustice—whom to blame, who betrayed—during the
colonial and military periods.
The military takeover of state functions in Nigeria shortly after
independence led to what the Human Rights Violation Investigation
Commission Report referred to as the cult of the head of state, wherein
“the personal ambitions of the Head of State, his or her fears and
apprehensions; his or her enemies, real or imagined, become mat-
ters of State interest and concern, deserving State intervention and
State protection, and as borne out by the evidence before us necessi-
tating State-sponsored assassinations, murders and ‘disappearances’ ”
(HRVIC 2002, 12–13). According to the report, military heads of
state, in making no distinction between themselves and the state, vio-
lated the human rights of Nigerians to live under constitutional or
limited government, militarized the country, routinized militarized
fear, language, and command, and used their positions to coerce ordi-
nary citizens, to settle personal scores. In Nigeria, sensory forms of
knowing from pain emerged in direct experiences of pain, and in the
mimetic merging of the object of perception, the captured, tortured
body, with the body of the perceiver. Qualia, or the painfulness of
pain, the fearfulness of fear, interpreted as meaningful signs, move-
ments, sounds of danger, cut across Nigerian identities and regions.
The Nigerian public witnessed widespread arrests of critics of the
Nigerian military state—journalists, intellectuals, artists, and human
rights activists, among others—who were jailed without recourse to
due process in the interest of “state security,” and the use of the
military by oil industries as private security forces to protect “state

interests,” even if this meant torture, murder, or slaughtering whole
villages of people.8
At the start of the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970), head of state
General Yakubu Gowon had Wole Soyinka, Nobel laureate, play-
wright, poet, and essayist, an outspoken critic of Nigerian military
dictators and political tyrants worldwide, arrested, accusing him of
conspiring with Igbo Biafran secessionists. Soyinka wrote The Man
Died: Prison Notes (1972), about the social condition of tyranny,
and death as silence in the face of tyranny. His play Madmen and
Specialists (1971), set in the contexts of the aftermath of war, is a
horrific comedy about the domesticity and familiarity of torture, bod-
ily excesses, and the lust for power that normalizes dehumanization
and the most obscene forms of violence. It is not resistance or collab-
oration that Soyinka depicts, but what Mbembe (2001, 104) describes
as the conviviality of the postcolonial relationship. Soyinka’s Old Man
in Madmen and Specialists (1971, 71) relates the conviviality of the
torturer and tortured in the Nigerian military state:
As is, and the System is its mainstay though it wears a hundred masks and a
thousand outward forms. And because you are within the System, the cyst in
the System that irritates, the foul gurgle of the cistern, the expiring function
of a faulty cistern and are part of the material for re-formulating the mind of
a man into the necessity of the moment’s political As, the moment’s scientific
As, metaphysic As, sociologic As, economic, recreative ethical As, you cannot
escape!
Domesticity obscures the obscene violence of postcolonial relations

and makes it hyperreal in the banal details of daily survival and bod-
ily necessity—whom you can love or hate, who is dangerous or safe,
where you can eat, sleep, urinate. Mbembe (2001) suggests that the
familiarity and domesticity in the postcolonial relationship results in
mutual “zombification” of the dominant and those dominated, each
robbing the other of vitality, leaving the other impotent. Yet, popula-
tions also absorb public displays of state excess and power, embodied
in the bodily functions of the head of state, and this animates those
dominated, their “raw feelings” and interpretations of violent excess
producing further excess.
Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and pioneer
of Afrobeat music, released his album Zombie (1977), a scathing attack
on the Nigerian postcolonial state and military in which he used the
zombie metaphor to describe their methods of mindless, soulless vio-
lence. Soldiers attacked Fela’s Lagos compound, Kalakuta Republic,
threw Fela’s mother out of a second-floor window to her death, and

beat Fela severely. Fela responded by taking his mother’s coffin to the
army barracks in Lagos, and by writing the songs “Coffin for Head of
State” and “Unknown Soldier,” a response to the Nigerian govern-
ment’s official report that an unknown soldier was responsible for the
attack on his compound. Olaniyan (2004) describes the overarching
theme in Fela’s music as the “postcolonial incredible,” the improba-
ble, astonishing aspects of postcolonial life, that signal a break from
expected norms of sociality and governance.
Influenced by Kwame Nkrumah’s philosophy of Pan-Africanism,
the American Black Panther movement, and socialism, Fela called for
a united, democratic African republic, as a way to redress the vio-
lence of colonialism and postindependence militarism. His distinctive
style of Afrobeat music, a fusion of jazz, funk, psychedelic rock, and
West African chants and rhythms, has endless grooves, from base
rhythms of drums, shekere (dried gourds with beads woven into the
nets around them), and a muted guitar and base guitar, punctuated
by two baritone saxophones. Fela’s songs, up to 40 minutes long, cre-
ated a hypnotic state yet ones that reverberated direct attacks against
Nigerian dictators and elites.
Fela’s music performances at the Shrine in Lagos, and yabis
(Nigerian pidgin English for biting satire)9 sessions fused together
sacred, and sexually and politically charged consciousness-raising
word-sound rituals, in which he offered himself as chiefly priest,
an alternative fetish to the military heads of state, and to Christian
and Muslim religious leaders. This led to criticism from many
directions—from the Yoruba establishment who considered Fela
obscene, outside of Yoruba conventions of public life, and from
feminists, Christians, and Muslims, who focused on his excessive con-
sumption of marijuana and women (Waterman 1990). Fela, appearing
almost naked, with paint and masks of animals, lay bare his bodily
scars as symbols of colonial and military violence, scars of the Nigerian
nation, a simultaneous antithesis to the expensively clad bodies of
Nigerian elites, while his excessive consumption of women and mari-
juana mimicked the immoderation of political elites, undermining, in
some circles, his critiques of colonial and military violence.
By the 1990s, skyrocketing inflation and unemployment resulting
from the Structural Adjustment Program implemented by head of
state General Ibrahim Babangida ushered in greater poverty and eco-
nomic hardships in new sectors of the Nigerian population. General
Sani Abacha’s military regime that followed maintained Babangida’s
political course, even as generational divides and widening fissures in
ethnic, religious, and regional communities grew. Abacha reserved

the most extreme forms of violence for charismatic rivals such as Fela
Kuti and Wole Soyinka, who used their arts to reveal the weakness of
Nigeria as a nation-state and, by extension, to expose Abacha’s own
impotence.
Portraying himself as a fetish, with fetishistic power invested in all
of his agents—military, civilian elites, and religious leaders—Abacha
played out what Nigerians referred to as “gratification dramas,”
particularly in Kano City, his home base (Casey 1998). A 1995 head-
line article in Dateline, “Car gifts: Abacha ‘settles’ opponents and
medicine men” (Adebanjo and Director 1995), describes Abacha’s
mixing of money politics and magic:
At the centre of the “gratification” drama now the subject of animated discus-
sion in Kano City, is the Sani Abacha-led junta. The story has a déjà vu ring
around it. Sometime ago, some key friends of Aso Rock paid an unusual visit
to Kano City. By the time they left, a number of hand-picked politicians, elder
citizens and marabouts (religious diviners) of Kano extraction were between
N50,000 and N100,000 richer.
Religion, and the “Magic Art” of Suffering in

Hausaland
While internationally acclaimed postindependence southern Nigerian
writers, playwrights, poets, and musicians, such as Wole Soyinka
and Fela Kuti, wrote in English, standard and Nigerian pidgin, to
appeal to Nigerian and international audiences, and dealt explic-
itly with the violence of military heads of state, in the north, the
conviviality of postcolonial relations and Muslim Hausa restraint in
expressing distress, particularly about northern Muslim heads of state
and their agents, created different forms of protest and complicity.
In the north, the familiarity and domesticity of obscene forms of
violence, and protections from it, were conceived artistically in less
explicit forms, in the Hausa language, and in relation to religious
and spiritual leaders and their metaphysical agents. In addition, Indian
Bollywood films had a strong influence on northern art forms such as
Kanywood Hausa video films and bandiri singing, and the aesthetics
and romantic content of these arts fueled debates about the effects
of passion on social and political security.10 In particular, these influ-
ences entered heated conversations in Kano City about embodiments
of non-Muslim or “marginally Muslim” affective sensorial experiences
and their potentially negative spiritual and communal affects.
In the late 1970s, a burgeoning media industry and increased

access to media coincided with a powerful Sunni reformist movement,
Jama’atu Izalat Al-Bidah Wa Iqamat Al-Sunnah (“The Society for the
Eradication of Innovation and the Establishment of the Sunna”), led
by Sheik Abubakar Gumi, former Grand Kadi (Paramount Islamic
Judge), and Mallam Isma’il Idris, former military imam. Popularly
known as Izala (eradication), this movement’s stated purpose was taj-
did (reform and rejuvenation), inspired by Shehu Usman ‘dan Fodio’s
nineteenth-century achievements and Salafism, yet realized through
the day-to-day struggle against what they perceived as the bid’a (inno-
vation) of bori and the Sufi brotherhoods. Conflicts emerged between
Sufis of the Tijaniyya and Qadariyya orders and ‘yan Izala over the rit-
ual use of music, dance, perfumes, and amulets, visiting the tombs of
Sufi saints, and excessive feasting and celebrations, practices that draw
spirits to humans. Reformist Sunni Muslims considered such practices
to be forms of shirk (associating partners with God), bid’a, or sab’o
(blasphemy), and to be economically excessive, causing high levels of
anxiety about communal security and salvation. The Qadariyya use
of the bandir drum in Friday mosque led to vehement condemna-
tion from Gumi, and fighting between ‘yan Izala and members of the
Qadariyya order (Larkin 2004).
The intellectualism of the Izala leadership, along with vast funding
from Salafi groups in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, contributed to a rapid
explosion of Izala publications, cassette tapes, and radio and television
programs. Izala gained strength in the 1990s, and they began to crit-
icize non-Muslim media and youthful participation in non-reformist
Muslim cultural life. Attacks on people who interacted with, or failed
to protect themselves from, “evil beings,” humans, witches, or spirits,
by engaging in practices ‘yan Izala considered shirk, bid’a, or sab’o
came all the more frequently. One young man, whom I will give the
pseudonym Musa, gave me a hundred pages of his diary in which he
recorded his struggles to remain religiously “pure:”
I have the Devil’s alter-nature in front of me now . . . I don’t think one can
reach spiritual alrightness in this world of today . . . I am going to listen to
the music I like, hoping that it will not be a source of my ruin. It seems to
be a paradox, but for the meantime, it seems, I can’t help it. Yes, I stopped
watching TV, reading some novels. But some of these things give one more
experience in life. There is no point in stopping these when the inner self
yearns for them. Yes, I will watch the TV to a reasonable extent. Because of
zuhudu gudun duniya [running from unnecessary materialism] by the false
self, I became apparently disconnected from my surroundings—externally.
I did not realize what was happening around me. I don’t care what is
happening in the country—who is who, or where is where . . . I must come

back to life. I must unveil my ignorance and open my eyes and learn things
about this world to some extent . . . I must overcome my identity problem.
I must not feel ashamed of my origin and language. It is going to be difficult,
but it has to be done. My relations with people have to be truthful and not
casual and deceptive. No one is an enemy. I should be generous with people
as best as I can.
Musa’s self-monitoring and intrapsychic imbalance was linked to inter-
personal, Islamic reformism and censorship, and to new, sensorial
apprehensions of otherness, the abundance of which Taussig (1993,
34) terms “mimetic excess,” when the “mimicking self, tempted by
space, spaces out,” in what Guattari (1992) called “zones of historical
fracture,” a scanning Sass (1992) linked to the processes of modernity
itself.
This mimetic excess in the “hyperreflexive turn” of young Muslim
Hausa such as Musa was not simply cognitive appraisal of fear and
desire, but vigilant attunement to a range of sensory apprehensions
and their effects on lafiya (health or wellness), a balance and rhythm
of life in all realms—psychical, social, spiritual, and corporeal. Vigi-
lance is self-protection in contexts of violence, and lafiya is not easy
to maintain in the face of mimetic excess, with profusions of incom-
mensurable physiological sensations such as fear and desire. Lafiya
cannot be understood without temporal, spatial references to moral-
ity, flows of people, money, and goods, rhythm as recurring cycles of
beats, heartbeats, intuition and shared experience, prayer, constructive
and destructive human endeavors, spiritual embodiments and disem-
bodiments, and interpersonal relations, especially relations with Allah
and the world of spirits. Though a sense of predestiny tends to guide
experiences and expressions of suffering, the Hausa proverb “Abin da
mutum zai samu, da wanda zai same shi tun ran halitta” (“What a
man gets and what ‘gets him’ has been determined since creation day)
tends to invoke hakuri (patience), not fatalistic inevitability. In social
situations, Muslim Hausa minimize expressions of suffering, but the
distressful sensations and perceptions that they have may differ from
those they express, so a belief in predestiny cannot be assumed, nor
can it be seen as an emotional shield that modulates suffering uni-
laterally, nor, necessarily, internally. Religious concepts such as fate,
confronted by novel or amplified sensations, whether colonial or mili-
tary violence or televised romance, generate new feelings and modes of
valuing by paradoxically insisting upon the limits of the imagination.
In these instances, creative forms of transformation occur, including
(un)conscious self- and other censorship and (un)conscious bodily
responses. This may account for some of the vigilant verbalizations of

affective sensorial apprehension along with perceptions not expressed
through Hausa language, but through the body, and for the use of
embodied emotion terms such as bak’in ciki (black stomach) or cin
basira (eating insight) when speaking of sorrows and other more
severe forms of suffering.
To help me understand some of the causes and experiences of
suffering in northern Nigeria, Abdulhamid Yusuf, my neighbor in
the Sabuwar Kofa area of Kano City, painted watercolors of hauka
(madness) and tabin hankali (touched reason or sense). Northern
Nigerians have cumulative sensory apprehensions of human-spirit rela-
tions that from birth have been embodied and interpreted, so that,
unlike the anthropologist, they may not require visual representa-
tions to understand the simultaneity and multiplicity of human-spirit
sensory experiences and their magnitudes in relative terms. These sub-
tle body experiences and their affective sensorial relativity, shaped by
intersubjective assessment, are difficult to express in words and in
the lineal progression of sentences. Abdulhamid’s paintings depict the
most common causes of hauka and tabin hankali, ranging from phys-
ical violence, head trauma from car accidents, and diseases such as
rabies, to the violence of witchcraft, spirit possession, evil eye, and evil
words. Abdulhamid, a devout Muslim, expressed concern about the
suffering of young Muslim Hausa, whose futures had been severely
damaged as a result of violence, chronic poverty, and other related
social, spiritual, and political ills. He considered a Salafi-oriented form
of Sunni Islam to be protection against these ills. Though I was famil-
iar with witchcraft, spirit possession, and evil eye (a strong envious
gaze), Abdulhamid’s paintings depict the “inwardness” of these expe-
riences through outside attack, the symbolism and signs of attack,
and the magnitude of their spirit-matter forces. They reveal the aural,
kinesthetic, and tactile, as well as the visual, in sensory apprehensions
of evil, and the magnitude or how much sensation people may feel, in,
for instance, the acute severity of his witchcraft attacks in comparison
to the chronicity of spirit possession, evil eye, and evil words.
Abdulhamid’s representations of spirit possession (Figure 5.1),
witchcraft (Figure 5.2), evil eye (Figure 5.3), and evil words
(Figure 5.4), of what is seen and unseen, the world of the living and
the world of spirits, are linked by relations of similarity in two ways.
One is by what Mbembe (2001, 145) terms “simultaneous multiplic-
ities” in which “the invisible was in the visible, and vice versa, not as
a matter of artiface, but as one and the same and as external reality
simultaneously—as the image of the thing and the imagined thing,
Figure 5.1 Spirit Possession by Abdulhamid Yusuf, Kano, Nigeria, 1995
at the same time” (emphasis in original). Mimesis in these paintings

of human-spirit forces may express the power of “sympathetic magic”
to affect the “inwardness” of human suffering from outside, and vice
versa, but these paintings also reveal realms of aesthetic experience
and understanding that mediate suffering and the cultural and polit-
ical forms Muslim Hausa draw upon to make sense of suffering. The
radicality of simultaneous life and death, and the multiplicity of life
in witchcraft, spirit possession, evil eye, and evil words are strength-
ened further in their associative sensorial references to life and death,
human and spirit, seen and unseen, across all of these forms, and in
the sensorial apprehensions that precede knowledge of them, to name
them, and to seek relief from the suffering they cause.
Figure 5.2 Witchcraft by Abdulhamid Yusuf, Kano, Nigeria, 1995
Words, as depicted in Abdulhamid’s paintings of evil words

(Figure 5.4), have physical force beyond their communicative and
persuasive functions, and show the inseparability of the worlds of
humans and spirits. Unlike textual accounts that focus on the meaning
of words, Abdulhamid’s painting emphasizes their sensorial magni-
tude and physical force or power. Blessings and cursings are taken
seriously because they affect (re)imaginings of self-qualia-meaning as
intersubjective processes. When a person speaks badly of another, the
speaker releases a soul that overtakes the victim’s soul, diminishing
Figure 5.3 Evil Eye by Abdulhamid Yusuf, Kano, Nigeria, 1995
it, weakening the psyche, spirit, and body, destroying the victim’s
life in its totality. The words of religious leaders, and the incanta-
tions of witches in Nigeria and in Niger are associated with greater
power to strengthen, weaken, or kill than those of laypersons, but
anyone may use an evil eye or evil words, placing great importance
on maintaining lafiya (health) in all relations. Suffering as a conse-
quence of reforming chains of human and human-spirit alliances in
Figure 5.4 Evil Words by Abdulhamid Yusuf, Kano, Nigeria, 1995
spirit possession or witchcraft affliction that operate outside of imme-

diate time or space make the sources of suffering difficult to locate.
Increased global flows create new, multiplying relations of similarity,
associative sensorial references, not bounded by space or time. In this
sense, the spiritual, affective, intuitive, and bodily aspects of the rela-
tional, and the ever-present interrelations of spirits and humans, shape
communal perception and the ways communities—religious, political,
economic, and social—come into being, in attempts to stabilize and
to identify otherness.
In Kano and Jigawa states of northern Nigeria, residents acknowl-
edge witchcraft and spirit possession as self-evident and real, with
energies and forces capable of bridging and blurring tangible and
intangible realms, yet there are different comfort zones with witch
and spirit contact. Witchcraft is inherited bilaterally, and the inherited
power is related to the number of souls one’s parent witch has con-
sumed. Muslim Hausa wear portable charms, from birth, as partial
immunities to witchcraft that take little, if any, conscious effort. Signs
of predatory witchcraft signal the need for increased conscious protec-
tions including additional prayers, new charms, or herbal medicines.
Muslim Hausa describe the work of witches as asiri (secrets), jifa
(throwing or casting), tura (pushing spirits), and sammu (poisons).

They may say, “ta yi aiki” (she did work) or “ya yi taimako” (he
got help) to describe the performances of witchcraft. As depicted
in Abdulhamid’s paintings, predatory witches may initiate a chain
of evil doing by placing spells upon people who then do the same
to others. They may be employed by people to carry out evildoing
directly by eliciting spirit attacks, using poisons, charms, or projec-
tiles, or eating the kurwa (souls) of intended victims, or they may
bewitch people at will, eating or drinking their souls for reasons
of love, retribution, jealousy, or power, or from desires for peo-
ple’s positive qualities such as generosity and kindness. Predatory
witches drain the souls of their victims, to capture the essences of
their lives, the powers of their inherited character strengths. Their
victims report a weakening and wasting away of the body, vigilance,
unusual sensory experiences such as seeing the face or hearing the
voice of the witch, pains that jump from one part of the body to
another, and sleeplessness. Witches gain power and prestige by ci
(eating) or sha (drinking) the souls of their victims, and continue to
lust after this power, until they have eaten 99 souls, an auspicious
number among Muslims. At this point, witches have maximum con-
trol over their desires and become sarakuna mayu (head witches),
or what Schmoll (1993), working with witches in Niger, refers to
as “savior soul-eaters.” Head witches, also ritual herbalists, turn to
“good works” by setting up clinics for people afflicted by witchcraft
or by providing expert testimony in court cases. New technolo-
gies bring virtual relations—human, material, and metaphysical—into
postcolonial assemblages of self-reference, further eliciting conden-
sations of help and harm, as the case in the following section
suggests.
The Real-Virtual Interfaces of Suffering in the

Arts
The use of new technologies and the mechanical reproduction of sen-
sorial dimensions of art and aesthetics heighten explorations of familiar
and strange, safe and dangerous, as physiological sensations channel
and repeat emotional information across bodies. These process effects
of new technologies tend to be conflated with the content of media
characters and storylines, but they are additional dimensions that alter
self-qualia-meaning feedback loops of individuals within communities.
Here the emplaced social relations of the senses, altered by technologi-
cal process and content, and the particular senses or combinations that
provide better and worse “fits” between experiences of suffering and

explanations for it, become apparent.
In December of 1995, five Muslim Hausa secondary school girls
at an isolated government college on the outskirts of Kano City held
a late-night party with loud music and dancing. They described see-
ing a haggardly old woman with disheveled red hair who complained
about their noise, asking them to end their party. The girls ignored
her and called her cus, a disrespectful name. In response, the woman
pointed at them, angrily telling them they would dance until the
end of their lives for Sumbuka, before she disappeared. The next
day these five girls began “foaming at the mouth and holding their
arms like Inna,” a spirit who causes paralysis. Within several weeks,
over 600 girls at two secondary schools, one in Kano and one two
hours away in Jigawa State, began complaining of similar symptoms:
paralysis, eyes rolling back, foaming at the mouth, crying, shouting,
and, most remarkably, spontaneous dancing “like they do in Indian
masala film” and “American break dancing,” descriptions offered to
me by witnesses—doctors, healers, and family members. Only self-
identified ethnic Hausa girls and girls from Kano City were affected,
even though the students of the federal government college in Jigawa
State were from varied ethnic, religious, and regional backgrounds.
Spontaneous dancing resembling either that performed in
Bollywood film or American break dancing was a new “symptom”
of possession, never before witnessed among Muslim Hausa. The
involuntary, contagious quality of the girls’ symptoms emerged along-
side a meningitis epidemic that swept through northern Nigeria from
November of 1995 to May of 1996, with more than 75,000 cases and
8,440 deaths recorded. Though Kano residents tended to describe
the girls’ symptoms as the result of communal stress, witchcraft, and
spirit possession, many Muslim Hausa spoke of witchcraft and spirit
possession as sources for both the girls’ symptoms and the menin-
gitis epidemic. Qur’anic scholar-healers, reformist and non-reformist
Sufi, and sarakuna bori considered Sumbuka, a local spirit, known
to admonish young women for immoral behavior, and spirits from
distant lands, like India, or new configurations of known spirits and
witches as likely causes of both devastating crises.11 This linking of
foreign culture, spirits, and biological pathogens had not emerged so
powerfully since the early colonial period, when surveillance, censor-
ship, violence, and epidemics were accompanied by so-called “mass
hysterias” (Casey 2005).
The concurrency of these crises, and the sensations and feel-
ings evoked by them, prompted a reevaluation among Qur’anic
scholar-healers of the spiritual, communal security of Muslim Hausa

in an era of increased global flows of people, spirits, images, ideas,
and things. The crises increased the numbers of people receiving
spirit exorcisms, and prompted new forms of exorcisms based upon
the fourteenth-century scholarship of Ibn Taymiyyah, a controver-
sial figure who, while Sufi, cautioned against relations with the spirits
(Philips 1988). The emergence of the symptom, either “dancing like
they do in Indian masala film” or “American break dancing,” drew
attention to the impact of non-Muslim cultural forms, fueling debates
about youthful participations in all non-Muslim popular cultures.
Questions about the girls’ agencies in their spirit contacts led to dis-
courses about their vulnerabilities and blame, and a redrawing of the
boundaries between humans and spirits.
Malams Amar and Aminu (pseudonyms), associated with the Salafi-
oriented reformism of Sheik Aminudeen Abubakar’s Da’awa group,
exorcised many of the secondary school girls, but said they were but a
small proportion of the people who were affected by changing spirit-
human relations:
During the time of the Prophet, there was no computer and nowadays every-
thing is changing. People are going away from the way of life of the Prophet.
So that is why we are getting problems. We interact with many problems that
don’t concern us. That is why we are destroying the demarcation Allah built
between the spirits and us.12
Malams Amar and Aminu considered participating in non-Muslim

cultures via the media to be threats to personal and communal bound-
aries and, thus, to security. Song-and-dance sequences in Bollywood
films depict lovers whose families oppose their relationships, but who,
through erotically charged music, dance themselves into waterfalls
or lush, green pastures, places far away from familial or religious
controls. American break dancing, with its sharp quick movements,
brought forth images of masculinity, of hauka, and of criminal-
ity, inversions of reformist codifications of femininity, health, and
sociality.
During the 1990s, the world of spirits was changing as rapidly as
the world of humans, and it became increasingly necessary for Malams
Amar and Aminu to telecommunicate with Muslim spirits from other
parts of the globe who had more intimate knowledge of a possessing
spirit and the spirit’s family:
When the jinn came, he said he came from Lebanon. The person is a Hausa,
but his tone changes. He speaks Hausa with the tone of the Lebanese. There
is a spirit in Lebanon we knew and we made contact with him through that
particular jinn . . . The person who was doing the Rukkiyya kept quiet and
listened to the conversation of the two spirits in Arabic.13 Then later the elder
spirit told us that this spirit will go out by the grace of God . . . whenever we
come across a black spirit who is not a Muslim, we advise him to embrace
Islam and direct him to one scholar among the spirits so that he will learn
Islamic teachings.
By converting spirits to Islam, Malams Amar and Aminu intended to

create an umma (community) of Muslim spirits that would respect the
boundaries between humans and spirits.
Malams Amar and Aminu advised young people to do the same
by reading the Qur’an, and by avoiding music or sound that was
“unauthorized”—difficult to comprehend and, therefore, dangerous:
They listened to music and some sounds and we heard that the source of their
illness, Sumbuka, was that the girls were celebrating their success on their
qualifying exams so they stayed late in the night beating drums and dancing.
These are all what attracts the attention of the spirits, so they came and joined
the girls.
Malams Amar and Aminu conceived of sound and kinesthetic experi-

ence as well as visual images of Bollywood to have eroded the sensory
experiential boundaries between humans and spirits. These bound-
aries were necessary, they suggested, to maintain lafiya and communal
security.
By contrast, Umar Sanda, a sarkin bori, or leader of bori adher-
ents, expressed concern that human-spirit relations were becoming
increasingly distant, the sensory-experiential boundaries too firm. The
‘Yan bori have, for centuries, played specific songs for each spirit
and spirit family who live familiar domestic lives to humans, cooking,
eating, falling in love, and fighting, yet who come from different back-
grounds, delineated by ethnicity and animal family. Incorporations of
foreign ethnic groups and animals into social-spiritual relations have
been common among the ‘yan bori, whose pantheon of spirits reflects
a veritable history of contact with them, but they have, within the
past decade, been under fire by reformist Sunnis, Salafi and Sufi, con-
cerned with “indecipherable sounds,” not only with the content of
musical language, but with its potentially negative spiritual force to,
for instance, call spirits or evoke sexually charged mixed gendered
dancing. Reformist fear of otherness, in this regard, is in sharp con-
trast to Umar Sanda’s concern that Hausa musicians were losing the
creative ability to play the songs of spirits, losing the musicianship,
lyrics, and, thus, the power of music, the artistry through which to
communicate suffering to spirits in a way that would capture their
attentions and affectionate care. For Umar Sanda, spirit possession was
a different way of experiencing and expressing, archiving, memorial-
izing, socializing, and community building with humans and spirits,
and the legitimacy of it was tied to the aesthetics and power of musi-
cal performance—the attentive way in which bori musicians drew out,
and responded to, the characters and families of spirits. Creativity
and health, for Umar Sanda, was the willingness to risk otherness,
to negotiate, rather than to expel, and to incorporate otherness in
a way that strengthened the psyche, spirit, body, and community.
While the majority of Kano residents fell somewhere in the middle of
reformist Sunni and bori affective sensorial apprehensions, these poles
framed the senses of possibility and doubt that fueled vigilance and
unconscious embodiments.
The Mimetic Excesses of Witchcraft and Spirit

Possession
During the 1990s, religious leaders, schoolmasters, doctors, and
nurses blamed youths who watched foreign films for increasing
criminality, sexuality, and drug and alcohol abuse. Young Muslim
Hausa experienced extreme self-consciousness and self-censorship in
response to ambivalence about their Islamic identities, about their
places in modern urban Kano. Youths spoke of confusion about for-
eign media as sources of knowledge and degradation, as ways to
connect with the global world and as paths to hell. Many youths
reported dissociative experiences, spirit possessions, and witchcraft
afflictions in response to extreme self-contradictions and doubt.14
In northern Nigeria, crossroads, busy marketplaces, and certain trees
are all sites of potential spirit intrusion, night is a time of vulnera-
bility, and contradiction and doubt may be considered liminal psychic
states that, through a lack of commitment, invite danger. Colonial
arts of obscene violence—colons to mark dangerous intersections,
drumming to warn of danger, possession by colonial Hauka, Indian,
or American spirits—map onto these sites, times, and states, with
postcolonial real-virtual interfaces of preexisting, present, and future
vulnerabilities.
Since the surge of increased global connectivity in the mid-1990s,
experiences of familiarity and strangeness, what is safe and dangerous,
have, in northern Nigeria, been filtered through disparate, religious
figures, sarakuna bori, and reformist and non-reformist Qur’anic
scholars, as well as through burgeoning media industries whose

competing modes of expressing and apprehending affective sensory
information, of presenting and perceiving reality, have increased anxi-
eties and ambivalence about otherness (Casey 2008, 2009). Reformist
Sunni censorship of Bollywood and its song-and-dance sequences
culminated with a Kano state government ban on Bollywood in
2001. Yet, less than a decade later, Kano video filmmakers, insist-
ing that song-and-dance sequences enhance their film’s marketabil-
ity, proclaimed the moral legitimacy of their films by depicting
them as works of fa’dakarwa (religious admonition) and wa’azi
(religious preaching) (Krings 2008). The uneasy juxtaposition of
spirit-attracting song-and-dance sequences and reformist teachings
exposes viewers to spirits, considered helpful by adherents of bori, yet
dangerous by reformist Sunni, in powerful word-sound rituals of evo-
cation and expulsion, embodiment and disembodiment, danger and
deliverance.
Liminality and vulnerability in human-spirit relations as they shift
over time are part of the remapping of subjective assemblages of self-
reference, or sediments, personal and collective, not only of colonial
and military violence, capitalist exploitation, changing human-spirit
relations, mass-mediated affective sensorial experiences, nor only of
eclectic foreign or material cultures, but also of self-conscious fears
and desires—the very acts of trying to apprehend new, contradictory,
synergetic, affective sensory experiences and newly available, expand-
ing subjectivities in the “postcolonial incredible” (Olaniyan 2004).
Nigerian arts and aesthetics envelope the suffering and violence of
times, places, and peoples into questions about humanity, defined not
merely as a result of human political or social conflicts, nor as “cultural
modes” of sensing and perceiving, but as the inseparability of life and
death, the world of the living and the world of spirits—the invisible
in the visible and vice versa. The radical simultaneity of life and death,
and the multiplicity of life in human-spirit relations create associative
sensorial references to violence, to suffering, to ethics, and to empathy,
which proliferate with global cultural relations, and newly emerging
and reforming webs of associative sensorial reference—new clusters, as
it were, of potentially dangerous, potentially revolutionary signs. The
mimetic excesses of witchcraft, spirit possession, evil eye, evil words,
consumption by political elites, the excesses of artists who challenge
excess with immoderation—the way they spill over into and multi-
ply the sensorial affects of excitement and danger—all scaffold the
arts and aesthetics of “danger and deliverance” in the “postcolonial
incredible.”
Notes
1. Please see the film In and Out of Africa (1993) by Ilisa Barbash,
Lucien Taylor, Christopher Steiner, and Gabai Baare. A number
of well-known anthropologists have written extensively about the
circulations and mediations of art in and out of Africa. See, for exam-
ple, Barber (1997), Erlmann (1999), Ulf Hannerz (1997), Mbembe
(2001), and Stoller (1995).
2. I use the phrasing “postcolonial” to mark entanglements of time
and subjectivity and their inseparability in memory processes that
reconfigure daily living.
3. There are burgeoning literatures about qualia or the “raw feels” of
conscious experience in numerous disciplines, including the cognitive
neurosciences, philosophy, and anthropology; see Damasio (2010)
and Ramachandra (1999) for neurological considerations of qualia.
4. On the issue of sensory memories, trauma, and suffering, see, for
example, Antze and Lambek (1996).
5. See Taussig’s (1993) analysis of colon art and mimesis.
6. See Adamu (forthcoming) for a discussion of Hausa video in the
context of broader cultural transfers and transnational media.
7. This idea is related to Mbembe’s (2001) concept of the “aesthetics
of vulgarity” in which postcolonial aesthetics reflect the sensorial of
bodily orifices in excessive consumption and elimination, representa-
tions of the immoderate living of political elites at the expense of the
masses, but which render elites human, frail, and laughable.
8. Sani Abacha executed Ken Saro-Wiwa, playwright, poet, and activist,
along with eight other Ogoni activists who protested against the
Royal Dutch Shell oil company and the social, cultural, and ecological
destruction that resulted. See Saro-Wiwa (1992) for the most notable
account of the genocide of the Ogoni.
9. Olatunji (2007, 27) defines yabis as “a biting satirical song that is
deliberately composed with the aim of correcting an atrocity, a misde-
meanor or sacrilege committed by either an individual or a corporate
body within a particular society.”
10. Bandiri musicians sing praises to the Prophet Mohammed, set to the
music of Bollywood films (Larkin 2004).
11. Bori is widely regarded as animism or a spirit possession cult that
predated Islam. Scholars, working in northern Nigeria, tend to
describe bori spirit possession rituals as religious opposition to Islam
and as alternative or oppositional gender experience (Besmer 1983;
Onwuegeogwu 1969). O’Brien (2013) traces the history of bori in
northern Nigeria through periods of British colonial and Islamic
censure to document its persistence in Hausa practices of healing,
memory, and entertainment. Masquelier (2001) has written exten-
sively about similar practices in Niger, and their impacts on the
contours of Islamic identities and practices. In Nigeria, the followers
of bori consider themselves Muslims, while Kano reformist Muslims

variably refer to them as “fallen Muslims,” “marginal Muslims,” or
“pagans.”
12. Interview with two malamai (Qur’anic scholars) associated with Sheik
Aminudeen Abubakar’s Da’awa movement, August 12, 1996, Kano,
Nigeria.
13. Rukkiyya is the Hausa term for the exorcism of spirits. Rukkiyya typ-
ically entails reading the Qur’an very loudly into the ears of afflicted
persons to “heat up” possessing spirits, making them more vulnerable
to preaching and expulsion.
14. Several authors writing about witchcraft and spirit possession in
southern Nigeria and other parts of Africa address related concerns—
colonization, globalization and immoral forms of consumption,
changing norms for gender and sexuality, reforming social and
spiritual relations, and ambivalence about modernity itself. See in
particular Comaroff and Comaroff (1993).
References
Adamu, Abdallah Uma. Passage from India: Transnational Media Flows and
African Cinema: The Video Film in Northern Nigeria. Athens, OH: Ohio
University Press, forthcoming.
Adebanjo, Adegbenro and Osa Director. “Car Gifts: Abacha ‘Settles’ Oppo-
nents and Medicine Men.” Dateline 1, (1995): 8–9.
Barbash, Ilisa, Lucien Taylor, Christopher Steiner, and Gabai Baare. In and
Out of Africa, DVD, 59 min. Berkeley Media LCC, 1993.
Barber, Karin (ed.). Readings in African Popular Culture. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1997.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken, 1978.
Besmer, Fremont. Horses, Musicians & Gods: The Hausa Cult of Possession-
Trance. South Hadley: Bergin & Garvey, 1983.
Casey, Conerly. “Suffering and the Identification of Enemies in Northern
Nigeria.” PoLAR 21, no. 1 (1998): 1–26.
Casey, Conerly. “Mediating Cultural Communities.” Journal
of Neuroaesthetic Theory (2005). http://www.artbrain.org/
mediating-cultural-communities/ (accessed December 16, 2013).
Casey, Conerly. “ ‘Marginal Muslims’: Authenticity and Perceptual Bounds
of Profiling in Northern Nigeria.” Africa Today (Theme issue, “African
Youths in the Age of Neoliberalism”) 54 (2008): 67–94.
Casey, Conerly. “Mediated Hostility: Media, ‘Affective Citizenship’, and
Genocide in Northern Nigeria.” In Genocide, Truth and Representation:
Anthropological Approaches, edited by Alexander Laban Hinton and Kevin
O’Neill, 247–278. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.
Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture. Twentieth Century Ethnography,
Literature, and Art. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John (eds.). Modernity and Its Malcontents.
Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1993.
Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2009.
Csordas, Thomas. “Somatic Modes of Attention.” Cultural Anthropology 8
(1993): 135–156.
Damasio, Antonio. Self Comes to Mind. Constructing the Conscious Brain.
New York: Random House, 2010.
Daniel, E. Valentine. Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropology of
Violence. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Erlmann, Veit. Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination. South Africa
and the West. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Geurts, Kathryn Linn. “On Rocks, Walks, and Talks in West Africa: Cultural
Categories and an Anthropology of the Senses.” Ethos 30, no. 3 (2002):
178–198.
Guattari, Felix. “Regimes, Pathways, Subjects.” In Incorporations, edited by
Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, 16–35. New York: Zone, 1992.
Hannerz, Ulf. “The World in Creolization.” In Readings in African Popular
Culture, edited by Karin Barber, 12–17. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1997.
Haynes, Jonathan (ed.). Nigerian Video Films. Ibadan: Kraft Books, 1997.
Hirschkind, Charles. “The Ethics of Listening: Cassette-Sermon Audi-
tion in Contemporary Egypt.” American Ethnologist 28, no. 3 (2001):
623–649.
Hollan, Douglas. “Being There: On the Imaginative Aspects of Understand-
ing Others and Being Understood.” Ethos 36, no. 4 (2008): 475–489.
Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission (HRVIC). HRVIC
Report: Conclusions and Recommendations. Abuja: Nigerian Federal Gov-
ernment, 2002.
Krings, Mattias. “Conversion on Screen: A Glimpse at Popular Islamic
Imaginations in Northern Nigeria.” Africa Today 54, no. 4 (2008): 44–68.
Larkin, Brian. “Bandiri Music, Global Art and Urban Experience in Nigeria.”
Social Text 81 (2004): 91–112.
Larkin, Brian. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and Urban Culture in
Nigeria. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
Masquelier, Adeline. Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power and
Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2001.
Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001.
O’Brien, Susan. Spirit Possession and Muslim Practice in Northern Nigeria.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.
Olaniyan, Tejumola. Arrest the Music! Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.
Olatunji, Michael. “Yabis: A Phenomenon in the Contemporary Nigerian

Music.” Journal of Pan African Studies 1 (2007): 26–46.
Onwuegeogwu, Michael. “The Cult of the Bori Spirits among the Hausa.”
In Man in Africa, edited by Mary Douglas and Philip Kaberry, 279–306.
New York: Tavistock Publications, 1969.
Paul, Antze and Lambek, Michael (eds.). Tense Past. Cultural Essays in
Trauma and Memory. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Philips, Abu. Ibn Taymeeyah’s Essay on the Jinn (Demons). Riyadh: Tawheed
Publications, 1988.
Ramachandra, V. S. Phantoms in the Brain. Probing the Mysteries of the Human
Mind. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.
Saro-Wiwa, Ken. Genocide in Nigeria: The Ogoni Tragedy. London, Lagos, &
Port Harcourt: Saros International, 1992.
Sass, Louis. Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art,
Literature, and Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Schmoll, Pamela G. “Black Stomachs, Beautiful Stones: Soul-Eating among
Hausa in Niger.” In Modernity and Its Malcontents. Ritual and Power in
Postcolonial Africa, edited by Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, 193–220.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Soyinka, Wole. Madmen and Specialists. Ibadan: University Press, 1971.
Soyinka, Wole. The Man Died: Prison Notes. Ibadan: Spectrum Books, 1972.
Stoller, Paul. “Horrific Comedy: Cultural Resistance and the Hauka Move-
ment in Niger.” Ethos 12, no. 2 (1984): 165–188.
Stoller, Paul. Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power and the
Hauka in West Africa. New York & London: Routledge, 1995.
Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A Peculiar History of the Senses.
New York: Routledge, 1993.
Waterman, Christopher. Juju: A Social History and Ethnography of an African
Popular Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Chapter 6
T h e Pa s t ’s S u f f e r i n g a n d t h e
B o dy ’s S u f f e r i n g : A l g e r i a n
Cinema and the Challenge of
Experience
Ratiba Hadj-Moussa
The Weight of History

It is surprising that Algeria, a country that suffered the worst atroci-
ties of a colonial war, has not yet produced films and debates directly
dealing with it. Some films have certainly shown characters that suf-
fered, either at the individual level or at the group level, but the focus
on colonial violence has paradoxically forgotten those who suffered it.
The recent debate within Algeria on torture committed by the French
army has mainly denounced it as a crime against a country, rather
than recognize it as harm and suffering experienced by individuals.
In Algeria, suffering has still to be problematized and acknowledged
as such.
One of the possible ways to understand the concealment of suf-
fering in Algeria consists in interrogating the complexity of the
modalities that connect the country to its past. The first modality
pertains to the endlessly reactivated historical discontinuity between
the present and the past, while the second one, which exists simul-
taneously, referred to the overpowering of the present by the past,
more precisely the conception of history that has dominated since the
beginning of the liberation war. One of the consequences of the first
152 R at i b a H a d j - M o u s s a
modality is that younger generations sweep aside, or even reject, war

memories as if choosing either the past or the present are mutually
exclusive alternatives.
I argue that the way in which the past is acted on and thought of,
as well as the way in which it acts on individuals constitute a “Gordian
knot” on the issue of suffering in Algeria. Whereas Algerian cinema
denounced colonial oppression at its beginnings, celebrated the tri-
umphs of the struggle for independence, and supported economic
reforms that challenged the national bourgeoisie, in the mid-1970s
a cinema of the everyday, with ordinary people and banal problems,
has quietly taken shape. It has freed itself from the revolutionary alle-
gory, a hallmark of previous film production. What was important for
this new cinema was not so much the inability to leave behind the
realist aesthetic decried by critics and public alike as the malaise of
allowing singular narratives to emerge, far from pathos but nonethe-
less intimately related to the “history” of Algeria. In other words, in
this cinema, what I call the “Idea” took hold more than the characters
and their experiences, relegating them to the shadows. At issue for
cinema in the first decades of Algerian independence was the problem
of how to deal with history and what I call its “Idea.” The question
still remains to be answered1 in the cinema of late 1990s and early
2000s. Whereas the revolutionary past used to monopolize Algerian
cinema, it now seems to have been abandoned altogether, as seems to
suggest B. Stora (2003, 8), for whom the images are without a past,
frenetically avoiding to be absorbed by the argument of the colonial
legacy and of the “archaic ancestors.”
But is it true that the excess of the past is replaced by the present
while many voices have been raised since the catastrophic failure of
the one-party state to put a stop to the “colonial legacy” and the
“archaic ancestors”? My response to this question can only be in the
negative, because the marginalization of the past in recent films is rel-
ative and indeterminate. This is one of the points I wish to develop in
this chapter. The making and the expression of history in Algeria have
formed the sensitive Algerian being,2 formed its senses and emotions.
This assertion would be banal if not for the fact that in the case of
Algerian society, history is not limited to celebrations but launched
Algerianness and subsequently constructed it within a rigid frame-
work. In the course of time, this hardened into a narrative of colonial
misery followed by triumph against it. While it constructed the invin-
cibility of the Algerian (especially the Algerian man), at the same
time it narrowed his horizons, and prevented him from seeing him-
self except in the images of the triumphant revolutionary that history
Algerian Cinema and Challenge of Experience 153
conveyed to him. He was fixed on these two images: that of the col-
onized peasant/proletariat and of the moudjahid/guerrilla liberator
(Carlier 2004).
History’s ideology thereby became a totalizing straitjacket, a
weighty past like that of a criminal, where escape is near impossi-
ble. Work on the imaginary of war (Carlier 1995; Martinez 1998;
Moussaoui 2006), both colonial and civil (1992–20023 ), shows the
resonance of the self-referentiality that has remained frozen in time
since November 1, 1954 (the beginning of the liberation war). The
all-knowing short history of war has shrunken the social fabric, leav-
ing it without complexity and incapable of expressing the past in
another way, or even of bypassing it. My own investigation would
lack perspective if it limited “historical ideology”4 to official history,
conceptualized and made by those in power, since it is this ideol-
ogy that mobilized the energy of those whom it later silenced and
who paradoxically became its most fervent defenders.5 It is difficult
to break out of the circle of either being for or against the war of
liberation, given its sacredness. This form of confinement is therefore
not only constituted from on high; it prefigures a division between
the political regime that organizes it and distributes it and those who
carry it in their bodies and thoughts, albeit unwillingly (à leur corps
défendant). I come back to the expression “against their wills” to
support the idea of a reification of individual experiences for the ben-
efit of the Idea, the all-powerful idea of history and of the truth of
the revolution and its “million and a half martyrs” always thought
of in this way in its immutable sanctity. The ideology of history is a
yoke that chokes everyday life, melds it with what remains, and yet,
so to speak, determines the being-in-the-world of Algerians. It is in
essence a contraction of life, a failure for which everyone is nonetheless
responsible.
The erasing of experiences, and the narratives that accompany
them, which some have referred to as memories rather than history,
reflects negatively on a way of life and the freedom that constitutes
it; it is a form of unnameable suffering, since it is dispersed and mul-
tidimensional. The Algerian expression “ ’achicha tebghi mi’icha” (a
small plant that only aspires to live) expresses how a plant will be sat-
isfied with the strict minimum necessary for life in a minuscule body.
It is a small entity that cannot and will not ask for more, and some-
times does not even ask to be acknowledged. The minuscule body is
only so because it is rendered banal to such a point that it is difficult,
even sometimes impossible, for it to react. This position is inscribed
in one of the expressions of suffering, namely suffering as it affects
the individual’s action and prevents her from narrating and develop-
ing her selfhood and subjectivity. The colonial past, the ideology of
history, and the “ancestors” nest are oppressive and stifling figures
that try to sever individuals from their present and empty them of
all their potential. It is hard to imagine flouting the “historical ideol-
ogy” in any reflection on modes of being and their representation in
Algeria. Furthermore, the relative non-reference to the past in these
films hardly prevents it from oozing out from everywhere. The reason
for this overflow is that the minimizing of colonization, as well as the
“ideology of history,” appears as repressed elements melded into the
pleats and folds of the present.
Dealing with Ordinary Suffering

According to the idea that cinema does not represent reality but con-
stitutes it and puts it on the screen, how can one reflect on suffering
without being banal? Does the way cinema tells suffering, the images
and imaginary it uses, risk making pain commonplace and banal by
showing it on film? Does the fictional status of these films not make the
suffering and challenges they show “unreal,” unbelievable? Authors
such as V. Das (2003) and R. Kaës (1989) maintain that suffering,
in order to be conveyed, should be fictionalized. Fictionalization here
consists in narrating imagined and fictitious events, or narrating real
events in such a way that they become narratable, understandable, and
potentially transmissible, to be heard.
The films discussed in this chapter are fictional works made in the
1990s and 2000s and whose subject is contemporary Algeria, specif-
ically Algeria during the civil war (1992–2002), which was between
Islamist armed groups and the government and its civil militia. The
films’ relation to the past, to the war of liberation, as well as their
treatment of these topics are part of a process of delegitimization, and
as such are costly to the existing regime and to the individuals; they
also contain perceptible changes in how the self is viewed and open
new historical perspectives.
These films do not try to dig up the traumatic past like
C. Lanzmann in Shoah (1985), nor do they reconstruct a forgotten
albeit decisive battle, as does C. Marker with Okinawa in his docu-
fiction Level 5 (1996), masterfully analyzed by J. Kear (2007). The
films examined in this chapter are close in intention, but not in how
they are made, to the films of M. H. Trinh, namely her Surname
Viet Given Name Nam (1982), where she films female Vietnamese
in exile in California who put themselves at risk by recounting their
war experiences, but whose words are barely intelligible (Marks 2000,
34). The stories of the films discussed in this chapter take place during
the civil war, but the war is not shown, nor central to the plot, with
one exception. It is in the background, placed in a sort of external
dimension that makes it an extra element, yet an unavoidable one at
the same time.
In “telling the suffering,” the films build a very strong relation
with the present, so as to better paint the places, events, and char-
acters, ripping them away from what makes monumental history,6
that is, “historical ideology.” For a long time, I have been intrigued
by a response given by filmmaker Y. Bachir-Chouikh, whose film
Rachida (2003) is about an elementary schoolteacher who miracu-
lously escapes death after refusing to let terrorists set a homemade
bomb in her school, and whose flight into the countryside exposes
her further to being attacked by them. She stated: “The audience was
aware that the story was not about terrorism” but about violence.
“Comments from the audience were interesting: after the massacre,
when the helicopter arrived, I heard ‘It’s now that you come!’ and
such type of comment . . . ” (Bachir-Chouikh 2003, 31). For Bachir-
Chouikh, the terrorist violence is only an aspect of the general
violence that is here associated with the “people” who are forgot-
ten by representatives of monumental history. Terrorist violence is an
extraordinary violence that is different from, but cannot be separated
from and cannot overshadow ordinary violence and suffering.
The films discussed in this chapter do not explicitly refer to this new
way of looking at oneself, as in the masterful Omar Gatlato (Allouache
1975), which portrays a contemporary character whose narrative is
mainly about his non-heroic existence, his being “a small plant that
only desires to live” even under le régime “de commandement,” to bor-
row the term from Achille Mbembe (2000, chapter 1). My intention
here is not to examine how memory undermines “historical ideology,”
which would potentially lead to a rethinking of the self, and of its lib-
eration, but rather to show how these films outline narratives that
problematize the resonances of this ideology by their references to the
history of the war, in the difficulties they encounter when trying to
extricate themselves from it, because the event forms an integral part
of them. On the second level of my analysis, I also wish to demonstrate
that the perspective these films bring to bear on the logic of “ances-
tors” causes the weighty construct of “historical ideology” to shift, by
making the unheard—or barely audible—word heard, and making an
invisible body appear, especially that of women. In a nutshell, how do
the films while basing their plots on specific characters, for the most
part interlopers, privilege their experience and, in doing so, question

the ground so firmly held by the “ancestors”?
At the heart of this paradox, in which absent “ancestors” are made
more present through the “historical ideology,” a struggle is played
out, and life itself as well. In fact, despite the difficulties characters have
in being heard or just simply being, a minimal form of life appears.
Taking into account the weight of history on the lives of individuals,
acknowledging distress or even sadness creates an undeniable opening.
However, it seems to me that it is very sensitive to refer to
ancestors, especially in the case of a postcolonial country such as
Algeria, which has incessantly been pulled by both modernity and
tradition, as well as been sliding (more often than necessary) into
the “tradition” . . . of the ancestors. The postcolonial adjective is here
chosen purposefully to signify colonialism as a thought pattern that
reduces the other to a “native” (Fabian 2007, 27), to a disabling
introversion as if the native has only the ancestors as his past and, more
importantly, as his horizon. To break free from this vision consists of
questioning the forms of rendering the past present and presenting it
in films.
What Do Gender Relations Reveal?

The present is prefigured by two issues, namely those associated with
French colonization and the anticolonial war over which historical
ideology emphatically and theatrically extends and spreads, as well as
those related to gender relations as they constitute one of the unavoid-
able strands of Algerian “culture.” When it fell on Algerian society,
colonial violence considerably weakened the relations that gave struc-
ture to the family as well as the authority of the fathers. On this point,
F. Fanon (2001, 19) describes in “L’Algérie se dévoile” how Algerian
women were drawn by the colonial goodwill to destroy “Algerian soci-
ety in its structure,” and P. Bourdieu and A. Sayad (1964) analyzed
the destructuring of the Algerian peasantry, at the time the largest
section of the Algerian population, and the point of no return in which
colonization left it. Furthermore, by distinguishing between the posi-
tive law and customary law, France established a regime of exception
that boxed the “natives” in their culture and took away the Algerians’
(mainly men) hold on the world.
The postcolonial state unraveled further the position of the fathers
by promoting development and progress but without identifying who
came out a winner: the state or the fathers (Grandguillaume 1995).
This indecisiveness (Hadj-Moussa 1997) has been reinvested since the
mid-1980s by the Islamists, who have tried to resolve it by imposing

their “return to the origins.” Gender relations are anchored by these
tensions and inform, from the bottom up, one may say, the polit-
ical discourse of monumental history (no matter if it refers to the
modernity of the state or to primordial Islam of the Islamists).
But why this avoidance of the fathers? Why the continued insistence
on the figure of the father, if it is so weakened? And why what it rep-
resents reappears on the sidelines, namely the law (of the fathers) that
the brothers want to apply at all costs? Why do these films continue to
represent the absent fathers, and how do they represent this absence?
And finally, how or why is the absence of the fathers an issue? This last
question alludes to the link that exists, in my opinion, between these
two figures (father and brother). The films that I have “selected”7 are
all contemporary films produced during the civil war (1990s) and in
the 2000s,8 and have this specific period as their framework. Despite
their internal differences, they form a group of films that address the
same general thematic. For example, contrary to films from the 1970s,
they are set in the present even if there are numerous references to
colonial France.
In Touchia (M. Rachid Benhadj, 1992), whose story starts at the
beginning of the civil war, Fella the protagonist, while locked up in
her room by the Islamist protests, relives her childhood in the Casbah
during the war of liberation. Her father, never shown, is imprisoned
by the French, whose presence is mainly auditory: the noise of the
parachutists’ helicopters offscreen which Fella and her friend Anissa
cover by screaming at the top of their voices. These instances of
screams and noise are structurally superimposed on the screams by the
young girls when they are raped by Algerians on the eve of indepen-
dence, and the final scream by Fella in response to the question asked
by the interviewer in the television talk show where she is asked to dis-
cuss her childhood. If France and its terrifying machines are inscribed
in a chain of associations, they are nevertheless incomparable with the
silence imposed by Fella’s brother and the Islamists, whose protests
modulated by the cries of “Allah is Great!” and “Islamic State” com-
pletely take over the space. In Le harem de Mme Osmane,9 France is
evoked by three figurative elements: young Yasmine, a young émigrée;
Mme Costa, an aged Pied-Noir lady who refuses to leave her apart-
ment; and the revolver, a reminder of Mme Osmane’s involvement
during the war. Moreover, Osmane’s husband left her to go live with a
French woman in France. In Bled Number One,10 the before and after
are blended together, insofar as it is a young Beur, ostensibly nick-
named “Kamel-la-France,” who was kicked out of France and whose
estranged vision offers an acute psychological cartography of a small

Algerian town in the 1990s.
But colonial France is seldom evoked and only verbally. In Les
suspects (Kamel Dahane, 2004), the fathers, former combatants Si
Mnaour and Si Tayib, are still at the mercy of their former leader,
who has become a local potentate. The storyline is told through an
alternating montage with images of war memories, namely the patrol
episode where they are unjustly accused of treason, and the present.
The alliance between Islamism and figures of power, represented by
their former leader, becomes evident in the present, particularly in
opposition to the project started by a young female psychiatrist to
bring to light the “injured memory” of Si Mnaour and his maquis
comrades in arms. In this story, colonial war occupies a marginal
position in comparison with the relation between the fighters and
their leader, and it is used to show how at present memories con-
tinue to be hidden and injustice continues to rule. Si Mnaour is
part of and represents here the “bon petit peuple,” submitted and
silenced, pushed to an atrophying paralysis (he spies from his win-
dow the comings and goings of others); the former maquisard suffers
because he cannot speak and knows that if he speaks he will die. The
forced suppression of speech, as well as a certain inability to speak, is
lethal.
The weakening of the figure of the father does not exist within
a cause-and-effect relation with the colonial past. Contrary to what
P. Crowley (2007) maintains, the issue in these films is no longer
France but rather Algeria after France. The issue is the relation of
Algeria to itself. The feeling of daily drifting and the loss of taste for
life, le dégoûtage (see later), do not have France as a point of refer-
ence but rather present-day Algeria. The marginalization of colonial
France and of Islamic violence, both carried out within excess, lead
to violence and ordinary suffering at present. This attachment to the
present is based on the (de)negation of the colonial past as the main
source of all of Algeria’s pains. Laplanche and Pontalis (1990, 115)
explain that for Freud denegation is an ambiguous process about the
knowledge of the repressed thing and its denial, within which (third
moment) “through the symbol of (de)negation, the thought process
gets liberated from the limitations of repression.” It is not denying
the colonial past but reformulating it by homeopathic dosages so that
the present “gets liberated.” It is the becoming present that is at issue
and not the bringing to the present of the images of the past during
the colonial war or even the reproduction of the close-by images from
the civil war under way, defined by various authors as a “war without
images.”11 In fact, images from the civil war were heavily censured and
their circulation highly controlled (Molinès 2002).
Algeria went from a “war without name” (Stora 1992), a war not
acknowledged as such by France until October 1999, to the “invisi-
ble war” in the 1990s and 2000s (Stora 2001). I argue that the films
definitely constitute the images of the period when this war was hap-
pening. They do not reconstitute the images of the war to make sense
of it; in a way they avoid it, with the exception of the film Rachida, for
which it is the trigger of the story. However, the civil war is the back-
drop for the stories, appearing at times in a piece of clothing, such
as the long dress (mansouria) worn by Yasmine (Le harem) to hide
her short dress and thus avoid certain death at one of the fake road-
blocks set up regularly by the Islamists; in certain inscriptions such as
the “Allah” that covers the dilapidated entrance wall of Mme Algéria’s
(Délice Paloma12 ; in the beating up of Kamel’s cousin by the Islamists
in Bled because he drinks alcohol; in the fear that Papicha, the former
cabaret dancer, has of being recognized (Viva Laldjérie,13 Moknèche,
2003); in terms used such as “bearded” to mean Islamist; or finally
in the marriage party organized in the afternoon to respect the time
constraints imposed by the state of emergency (Le harem). The list is
long, but the extra/ordinariness of civil war flows, so to speak, into the
ordinariness of life, which is highlighted by the films. This flattening of
extraordinary events (and wars are so indeed) imposes other events and
corresponds to the moment, mentioned earlier, where “the thought
process get liberated from the limitations of repression” (Laplanche
and Pontalis, 1990) and the present is rendered in moments, words,
and images. This “presentification,” this making present, which itself
is an issue for the films insofar as all revisiting of the past risks enclosing
the films in the official vision of history, is the Gordian knot where the
essential is at play. In other words, the absence of the father (the ances-
tors) or their weakening, and the relative marginalization of France
put the brothers and even brotherhood itself in an intolerable and
tragic duel.
In what follows, I will attempt to explain why these two repressed
elements are at the center of this face-off. I will base my remarks on the
psychoanalytic interpretations of authors such as G. Grandguillaume
(1995) and G. Meynier (2004), well as my own work on Algerian films
of the 1970s and 1980s. Grandguillaume asserts that the effects of the
language policy adopted in Algeria, which privileged modern Arabic
to the detriment of French and other languages spoken, weakened
the position of the fathers, whose languages became inept in passing
on knowledge and positioning oneself in the world. Fathers became
furtive shadows in relation to the state-building project, provoking

the loss of points of reference leading to self-hatred (Grandguillaume
1995). Meynier believes that the start of civil war, on the one hand,
and the choice of war by the National Liberation Front (FLN) from
its inception, on the other hand, creates a structural homology: the
“brothers” of that time and today’s “brothers.” The FLN militants
were called by others as and among themselves used el khaoua (broth-
ers, plural of ‘akh-), while Islamists are called Ikhouan (the brothers)
in reference to the Muslim Brotherhood. Meynier asserts that these
brothers constitute a close-knitted group by their obedience to the
same laws and the exclusion of those who do not share their choice of
war, and prefer other options namely the political. This choice would
explain the mass killings in the maquis. Meynier identifies two aspects
to this group: solidarity unites the brothers among themselves and
solidifies the conviction according to which fratricide is legitimate,
and it is almost impossibly difficult to kill the father and to access
modernity, and thus the cruelty of the acts committed during the
civil war. In getting liberated from the past, new figures emerge, and
fathers get replaced by their sons. Neither really dead nor really alive,
the fathers create an undecidability that leaves the sons/the broth-
ers outside of political rationalism and negotiation, thus perpetuating
chaos and fratricide (Meynier 2004).
Grandguillaume and Meynier posit the redoubtable problem of dis-
inherited identities, and the chaos that results from it, but they limit
their interpretation solely to the law of the fathers, ignoring the issue
of gender relations and the position of women in Algerian society.
It is as if the brothers only owed their existence to themselves, and
yet, to put it crudely, if there were no sisters, there would not be
any brothers, since the relation is not only one of sameness, as put
forth by the two authors, but also one of difference. We see here a
similar problem to the one noted by Mbembe (2000), according to
whom the error of postcolonial theory and subaltern studies consists
of focusing on the “father/son” relationship (inspired by the rela-
tion colonizer/colonized), and in so doing “hide the intensity of the
violence of brother towards brother” (Mbembe 2000, XI) and the
problematic status of the “sister” and the “mother” in the brother-
hood.14 But if under this pretext we cannot make the father figure
disappear, as Mbembe seems to suggest, it is important to understand
how central it is in regard to the relation of the brothers against the
“sisters” (more than the mothers) and the response of the latter, albeit
without any of them gaining autonomy from the structure. This vio-
lence against the sisters goes often unquestioned, as it is taken for
granted that women are the “total” and “eternal” victims of the patri-
archal and phallic law, caricatured by a machismo worn on the sleeve,
also ungluable.
It becomes then urgent to pause and reflect on the father’s dis-
appearance, a test of fratricide and a refusal to “form a community”
(Mbembe 2000, XVI), which is at the heart of the civil war and the
killing of brothers and sisters alike. The relative absence of the fathers
and the timid references to France are an attempt to dispose of the
father/FLN and the domination of the “historical ideology.” With
the exception of Rachida and Touchia, where Islamists clearly scare
people, in the other films (Bad el Oued City, Le harem, Viva Laldjérie,
Délice Paloma, Les suspects), the father/FLN merges either with the
“obscure forces” or the Islamists’ contemporary face; he/it is asso-
ciated with the military or the national security forces. In Le harem,
the former maquisard father is an incredulous man who refuses to
face the truth, namely that his daughter was killed by the military and
not the Islamists. Madame Osmane is the one who reestablishes the
truth, as other women will try: Samia the psychiatrist (Les suspects),
who tries to restore the until-then-inaudible “lost memories” of the
little people, and the fatherless Rachida, who confronts the horror of
the brothers. Women stir up memory, bring forth remembrance, and
make the present valuable, even in its most intolerable form.
However, exorcising history, uncovering its shadows (the assassina-
tions inside the FLN and torture perpetrated by the French), and the
use of memory could simply be ways of concealing women’s reality.
While Fella (Touchia) has the means to take back her story, does this
not turn against her and confine her to the tradition of the powerless
storyteller figure? She must act, even when her actions yield no tan-
gible results. Escaping the tradition of the storyteller, or juxtaposing
the image of the rape of a dreamy young girl by “Algerian brothers”
on the day of Algeria’s independence, and the pictorial and auditory
threat represented by the Islamist protesters as sound over it, all con-
fers an “obvious” (obvie) meaning to the image (Barthes 1982), an
inevitable meaning as well as the one that precedes it. France is no
longer at issue; the crux is now a dispute among siblings where Fella
confronts the others as an exceptional individual, and ultimately as
a body too.
Women’s Bodies
This remark leads me to touch upon the second topic mentioned
above, namely the absence of fathers/“ancestors” and the taboos that
take aim at women and their bodies. The brothers will take up the
task of keeping those bodies within limits by using verbal threats
(Touchia), physical violence, and confinement (Bled, Bab el Oued 15 )
so as to conserve what is left of the teetering building of the fathers.
But the separation of functions (of men and women) is not rigid in
the sense that there will be oppressors on one side and oppressed on
the other. Women take part in this logic, as exemplified by the case of
Mme Osmane, who shouts that “as long as I am alive, this house will
never be a brothel!,” that is, keeping and protecting women’s bodies
integrity: those bodies that are precisely the target of the brothers’
violence.
To the absence, the abandonment, the “treason,” and the “lies” of
the fathers (Viva Laldjérie, Le harem, Rachida) correspond the pres-
ence of female characters, as if they were inversed doubles of the absent
fathers and the sons as well. Furthermore, it is women who, against
their will, start to tell stories, to be the protagonists of the narratives
and to unveil the lines of everyday life. They create and repair the link
broken by the rabid hubbub of the “irrational” brothers. In Rachida,
the young teacher Rachida refuses obstinately to leave the village after
the massacre carried out by the Islamists, whereas in Délice Paloma, it
is the voice-over by Mme Algéria that tells the story, even if the main
character finds herself at the mercy of the “brothers” corrupted by
power. The same process of voice-over is used in Touchia and Bab el
Oued, where Mériem, alone after her brother’s death and the forced
departure of her lover, tells the latter the tragic chronicle of her neigh-
borhood, Bab el Oued. It is also her, despite the jealously controlled
confinement by her brother, who is the first one to see (and thus to
know) the event that triggers the plot (Boualem pulling down the
speaker). Female characters are either the protagonists or the witnesses
of the stories who uncover and find what constitutes the problem in
their society. But this uncovering happens at the same time as their
bodies are exposed, placing them in an unequal duel with all that
survives from the implacable law of the fathers/“ancestors” and the
father/FLN. Telling is also exposing oneself to danger.
The continuity, assured by the female characters, favors references
to daily life and lived experiences, with the effect, among others, of
“putting in its place” the civil war and the colonial war. In a land-
mark text, J. Scott (1991) criticizes the historical approach that favors
experience as a means to making a hidden reality visible and authentic.
However, she insists on experience as a political category (Scott 1991,
797) and its discursive aspect that opens productively the notion
of agency. Ordinary experience, finally judged valuable, is translated
into a series of tropes such as solitude, forbidden love, abandonment,

treason, fear, and marginality that all revolve around the body.
“And from That Come Our Misfortunes”

In fact, the tropes of abandonment and treason no longer flow from
great causes (revolution, building socialism, or treason by elites); they
are articulated by daily-life and men-women relations as well. In Viva
Laldjérie, the young protagonist, Goussam, is cheated by her lover, an
already married surgeon. Yasmine, the young émigrée (Le harem), is
also deceived by her husband. The treason suffered by Mme Osmane
unfolds on two levels, the personal and the political. As a woman,
she is cheated on by her husband; she is also betrayed by him who
“sleeps with the enemy” and passively accepts the official version of
their daughter’s death. Mme Osmane will reproach him for being
“afraid of the truth” and will remind him that his “honor is in deep
shit,” which parallels with his eloquent silence about their daughter’s
death, killed “without warning by our army,”16 and with the no less
eloquent lie by the authorities.
The final sequences of the film condense in the best way the con-
nection that exists between the two levels of treason. They are built
on a sequential montage, apparently linear (Sakina’s death, Mme
Osmane’s husband’s return, return of the coffin, and confronta-
tion between Mme Osmane, her husband, and army representatives),
except for an inserted sequence, almost like a “trailer sequence,”
which short-circuits the narrative level by making the act of stating
facts visible. This sequence corresponds to what Deleuze (1985) calls
the “optical image” or “optical situation,” which to him is unique
to cinematographic modernity (as opposed, among others, to image-
action justified by the action of the characters and sensory-motor
links). He contends that
[a] purely optical and sound situation does not persist in action, nor is it
induced by an action. It is seized; it is supposed to have something intol-
erably and unbearably seized. It is not a brutality as nervous aggression, a
violence magnified, that we can always extract from the sensory-motor rela-
tions within the action-image. This is no scene of terror, although sometimes
there are corpses and blood. This is something too powerful or too unfair, but
sometimes too good, and therefore exceeds our sensory-motor capacities.
(Deleuze 1985, 29)
This revealing sequence follows a short sequence where Yasmine,

seeming weak, dressed in a long dressing gown, is accompanied home
by her husband at dawn. Nothing as yet raises suspicions of Sakina’s

death. The sequence that follows shows Mériem, the somewhat dis-
turbed cleaning lady/nanny, an important member of the family,
filmed in a wide shot in full daylight outside the lobby of a building,
without previous identification of the space-time unit, in the presence
of Yasmine’s daughter, rolled up in a long white muslin veil with a red
radio against her ear. Mériem, dressed in a long red dress and wrapped
up in white and green boas symbolizing the colors of the Algerian flag,
sings a popular song dealing with corruption and treason, in which she
blames a man traitor (or community of men traitors). In this sequence
of the singing, a long shot is inserted, showing a gray BMW registered
in the willaya of Algiers, with two young men in gray suits and dark
sunglasses seated, leaning out of the windows on both sides of the
car and prominently holding rifles. The vehicle advances slowly, as if
sliding, and stops conspicuously in front of the camera before turning
and exiting the frame. The whole sequence can be interpreted as a
metaphor for contemporary Algeria (although the real noise of traffic
in the soundtrack gives it a certain realism), its armed men and their
power, how insignificant life is there, and the generalized mistrust.
This sequence stops and in its place there is a statement, requiring
viewers to “stop and think.” Deleuze explains that the optical situ-
ation leads to a seeing function meant to suggest fantasy and fact,
criticism and compassion (Deleuze 1985, 30).
Borderline Situations: Love and Marginalities

The borderline situations are those that best shed light on sensitive
points, the unsaid and the extreme violence engendered by difference.
If Sakina’s death shows the transitivity of the two levels of treason and
the price to pay, her dead body is nonetheless received and acknowl-
edged by her family and friends (her mother, Mériem, and all the
city residents17 ), whereas the other bodies, those of the fringe char-
acters and assorted dropouts, are borderline—bodies that slide into
oblivion or in no-man’s-land, site of the unsaid and lost bodies, in
the double sense of not found and the locus of vice. The prostitute,
the dancer and/or cabaret singer, the homosexuals, the bisexuals, and
even the female characters that show some sexual freedom are the
left-behind, the “less than nothing.” In Viva, almost all bodies are
in the borderline zone of what is acceptable. In Bled, Louisa is repu-
diated by her husband, separated from her son, and beaten by her
brother because her desire to sing jazz “brings shame upon the fam-
ily.” On the verge of suicide, she ends up in a psychiatric hospital with
other madwomen, where she shows her talent. Bled plays with cin-
ematic genres, constantly shifting between fiction and documentary.
It is in the hospital scenes that documentary furtively but resolutely
supplants fiction as the film explicitly quotes Malek Bensmail’s docu-
mentary film Aliénations (2004), filmed in Constantine in the same
hospital, with truly mentally ill people and the medical team who
treats them. As one female patient lucidly remarks, “If our parents
had been good to us, we would not be here.” Madwomen excluded
from life, from the point of view of society, they have become noth-
ings and useless bodies, repudiated and cast out from “real history.”
These characters without a future are either “unconscious” of the
codes of the group (the young bride kidnapped by the Islamist group
in Rachida), or have become clandestine (all the female characters in
the films who wear a veil to hide that they usually do not wear it; the
cabaret clients), or live in transit (at the boarding house, in the hotels),
or occupy places of enclosure (the prison, the hospital, the house, and
the village).
In the repertory of marginality, the prostitute is the one who defies
all social and political laws. Fifi, the prostitute in Viva, who dwells in
a room next to Papicha’s and Goussam’s in the boarding house, is
condemned by everyone including Papicha, herself a former cabaret
dancer (!). She accumulates within herself all the characteristics of
the other marginal characters. She is their (bad) double and dies as
a result,18 killed by her client, “him,” a military security officer who
unjustly suspects her of stealing his gun. Fifi’s body is a body “without
faith and law,” which does not deserve the group’s remembrance and
which only receives Goussam’s recognition, another “whore” herself.
The political sanctions on the corps-désordre are structurally built,
mainly through voices, by the singing of Papicha in the last sequence.
This song connects and relates, through images, the bodies of the
fringe characters, Fifi, Papicha, Goussam, and, to a certain point,
Goussam’s bisexual friend. Papicha’s song punctuates Fifi’s burial,
filmed in a long and high-angle shot as if it were falling from the
sky. It brings together all the bodies held in contempt by the law.
Although diegetically motivated (Papicha finds a cabaret and becomes
a singer in it), the shots of the cabaret where she sings, inter-
spersed with the cemetery shots, are in some way shots outside of
time. The parallel editing19 makes Papicha’s song float on, evok-
ing betrayed love, juxtaposed to the shots of Fifi’s dead body, the
cemetery, the highway, and Goussam’s silent face. In his reflection
on “acousmatic voice,” which essentially refers to a voice without a
corresponding body, Michel Chion (1982) maintains that this voice
represents the all-powerful, the omnipotent. For as long as a voice

is not ascribed to a body, it remains imbued with extraordinary
powers. But in this sequence, Papicha’s voice oscillates between the
all powerful and death/deception. It undergoes a “décousmatisation
which is a symbolic act, incarnation of the voice, dooming the acous-
mêtre to the destiny of the mortals, since it assigns her a place and
says: ‘here is your body, you will be here and not elsewhere . . . ’ ”
(Chion 1982, 32, emphases in original), which renders problematic
the all-powerful status of Papicha’s voice. The parallel editing and the
acousmatisation/décousmatisation of her voice indicate by proximity
the point where the social discourse stumbles: the marginality and
singularity of women and their bodies.
The frontiers of marginality do not stop at the extreme bodies of
the prostitute and the cabaret dancer; they include various degrees
of marginality and singularity, namely all the love relations not sanc-
tioned by marriage: divorced or abandoned women, single women
who head a household, women who find themselves out of their home
and who can always slide off-limits. In the films studied in this chapter,
the marginal characters are not the court jesters, exceptional charac-
ters (choir, child, and the fool) that “unveil” all the flaws of society
but are often the stories’ ordinary main characters.
The recurring point is love as a form par excellence of singular-
ity. Beyond the films central to this chapter, various other films have
made it its main theme (La Citadelle [1985] and L’arche du Désert by
Chouikh [1997]),20 since love is a “curse,” as says Algerian humorist
Fellag.21 The love curse is the metaphor of the connection that exists
between the suffering body and the group or nation. The presence
of female characters, “carriers of history” who comment on events or
who are its main characters despite all while risking their life, consti-
tutes the crosswise track of this connection. Many feminist works have
explored how the body speaks the nation (among others Das 2007;
Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989) and have shed light on the position of
women in the nation. Yet this light has focused on the instrumental-
ization of the body of women, as well as on the symbolic transitivity
between the nation (male for Das) and this body. These approaches
leave silent the impossibility or difficulty of saying the body, in partic-
ular when the body makes the nation or the group hiccup, when the
nation is no longer being built or is not in triumphant relation with the
body of women, even if it crushes them otherwise or simultaneously.
In these films, suffering gets within the non-transitive relation of the
body to the nation/the group, leading it thus to being ostracized and
rejected. Fifi’s body (Viva) is thrown into the sea, Goussam’s “finishes
its run” in an empty field where youth kill time by playing soccer and
boules, the young bride’s (Rachida), kidnapped and made pregnant
by the Islamists, is lost in the death zone, literally the cemetery, and
whose helpless father prefers to have dead since her body reminds
everyone of the violence suffered by the whole family. “The truth of
suffering,” writes Moussaoui (2006, 270),
seems to take root in the symbolic; it is always more monumental when it is

related to one’s mother, daughter, or sister, as if the attack on the feminine
provokes a more unbearable pain in a culture in which women are protected
objects, but of a protection most often expressed by their confinement.
These women represent the abject for the familial memory and are
not mentioned in any history, since rape as a crime was erased by
the amnesty decreed by the law of national reconciliation (1999).
These women are now alive but do not exist, if we follow the dis-
tinction between “to be” and “to exist” made by Mbembe (2000,
237), when he speaks about the figure of the colonized. He writes
that the colonized native
does not exist as a being. He is, but in the same sense that one would say a
rock is . . . The expulsion of the native from historical being occurs from the
moment the colonizer chooses—and he certainly has the means to do so—not
to look at him, not to see him, and not to hear him . . . From this point on,
the native only exists as a negated thing.
(Mbembe 2000, 238 our translation, emphases in original)
This annihilation is all the more true and powerful in death as these
women do not have a ritualized death, that is, one that recognizes them
as belonging to their group.
Marginality is also translated into other levels, particularly in
nicknames: the ones related to the honorable underground during
the war, “Mme Osmane,” and those related to the left-behind,
Fifi, Papicha, Mme Algéria, Shahrzad, Paloma, and finally Kamel-la-
France.22 “Papicha,” a cabaret dancer in the 1970s, has the nickname
given to girls in the working-class neighborhoods in Algiers during the
civil war who decided to defy the Islamists and their sympathizers by
wearing scandalous clothes, as well as going out with boys openly and
publicly. This nickname, which compresses two historical periods (the
1970s and 1990–2000), is anachronistic in that it was supposedly used
by the dancer in the 1970s. It also creates a link between the “true”
papichettes (plural) and Mme Papicha, while highlighting how out of
step with the law this character is. These pseudo/nyms reflect the
characters’ clandestine and parallel existence dealing with the world

of men. Their reason for being is that these names are “pleasing to
men.” Thus, in Délice Paloma, the first dialogue occurring between
pariahs, Madame Algéria and Shahrzad, takes place under the sign of
truth and fiction. Shahrzad first says, “My name is Zouina. I am called
Shahrzad; men like it; it makes them dreamy. And what about you?
What’s your real name?” Madame Algéria then responds, “Algéria is
also a name that everyone likes, whether man, woman, dog or cat,
eh? But my name is Zineb Agha.” A name is like a veil or the cloths
(mansouria, headscarf) that female characters wear. They put them on
and take them off according to circumstances and whether characters
feel safe or in danger.
A colorful, duplicitous trickster, Madame Algéria swings between
do-gooder, a sort of “national benefactor” as she likes to call herself,
and malefactor on the edge of the law, who sends her favorites to
set upon unwitting victims. Madame Algéria does not shy away from
drinking wine in the open when the muezzin calls to Friday prayer,
wearing the traditional Algerian veil according to what business cir-
cumstances demand, and, worst of all, being open about her previous
relationship with an Italian volunteer with whom she has had a son.
She goes so far as to defy viewers, always via the voice-over, by speak-
ing directly to them. “It is true that I know nothing of his father,
apart from the fact that he was a volunteer on the beach. So what’s
the problem?” In the same vein, she says to her son, “You think it is
easy to be a single woman, but it is also my strength!” Yet she does
not escape a prison sentence. Her apartment is burgled and turned
upside down as “God’s vengeance,” according to the inscription in
Arabic next to a classical Italian picture, the only piece in the home
that is spared in the raid.
Dégoûtage or the “Weight of the Real, the

Suffering”23
Dégoûtage is an Algerian word that expresses boredom and a form of
inertia that hits the body and the mind in an environment where there
is a sidereal void. It expresses disgust of and the loss of taste for liv-
ing: as if life lost its taste (goût) and one is moving noiselessly toward
death. Dégoûtage is an ordinary suffering that connects with the vacu-
ity of existence. Like marginality and treason, dégoûtage is a trope
that refers to the difficulty of life and the unbearable, but it is diffi-
cult to identify by analysis. It is not translated by a “crystallization”
or a “configuration,” where a series of elements would converge,
actualizing it. The films under study make reference to it by show-

ing characters living their life, and not allegorical figures representing
“the people or the Revolution.” Dégoûtage is symptomatically related
to the figure of love, “the curse” (Fellag), or rather the lack of it or its
ban. In Viva, this relation is built diegetically. Papicha, upon return-
ing from her weekly visit to her husband’s tomb, goes to the beach to
look at the sea, and there, a raï song coming from a small shop selling
drinks calls out. She goes in, consumes alcohol, and talks to a neigh-
bor about her husband. “Do you know what my husband died from?”
“You know ma’am,” he answers, “these days . . . ” “Worse,” Papicha
responds, “worse sir! He died of disgust! [dégoût]” And to the bar-
man she says: “Put Chaba Jenat back on for me.” Death by disgust
is more violent and more “fatal” than death caused by the Islamists.
Papicha, the only woman in the place, takes off the long black head-
scarf that covered her head, puts it around her hips, and starts dancing
to a love song with the beat of the raï, sung by a “chaba,” a woman,
whose name refers to paradise in Arabic. For a long time, raï music was
rejected by the official culture and still has the connotation in Algerian
society of debauchery, which, it is useful to remember, was ascribed to
feminine origins.
In Bled, the dégoûtage is “palpable,” not only due to the presence
of Kamel, the young Beur kicked out of France, in an unfamiliar and
encircled small town, but also and especially due to the long shots
(often still) where nothing happens, nothing is said. I would describe
this palpable imagery as a hypervisualization of the image, where the
concatenation of the shots tends to make us “touch upon something.”
However, it is not a “haptic situation/image” (Marks 2000) that refers
to the sense of touch, but a mix of sound and image that resem-
bles a scream. The last three sequences of the film are, in this sense,
extremely representative of the stillness of the small town life. Bled
juxtaposes the final sequence with a sequence of a jazz show given by
the female cousin to the mentally ill patients in the psychiatric hospi-
tal, where she found herself after her attempted suicide. The show’s
sequence ends with a shift to documentary style, where a couple of
“crazies” improvise, as a duo, a love song echoing the cousin’s jazzy
melody. The final sequence begins with a pan shot of the village, fol-
lowed by a series of long shots and a high-angle showing daily-life
activities, ending at Kamel and a friend sitting at a café table. The
friend asks him, as if asserting it, “You like her a lot?!” (referring to
the female cousin). Kamel looks at him and says nothing. He puts
on his sunglasses (to shield himself from the question). On that, the
friend tells him, “You want to chew some tobacco? It will get rid of
your disgust [dégoûtage].” And very quickly, there ensues a discus-

sion on the departure of the latter, with alternating shots of Kamel
and his friend, the villagers in conversation, etc. The close shots of the
two characters progressively become (through small movements of the
camera) a fixed close-up in which the character Kamel literally debates
with himself, as he is no longer able to talk. When he finally speaks,
he says, trying to avoid crying: “I’m going to break down. I can’t stay
here. I’ll go crazy [in Arabic]. I’ll go off the rails, damn!” As he moves,
he is at times in the shot, at others half cut out. Finally he gets up
and goes off-camera. And as he exits, an electric guitar piece of music
imperceptibly replaces the ambient noise. The following shots, almost
fantastic (in all senses of the word), show against the light (the viewer
sees almost nothing, other than black, shadows, and the orange rays
of sun) a guitar player with his sound system on the middle of a hill
playing a tune, peasant women walking far off in a low-angle shot, and
Kamel, who crouches, then crosses the shot, and leaves it as the guitar
sound takes over. Beyond the themes of madness and confinement,
the shot scheme, the positions of characters in the shots, the ambi-
ent noises, and the fantastic intrusion of the guitar sound render in
an exacerbated manner the indescribable suffering imposed by silence
and crossed by everyday gestures. All of these elements “translate” the
unbearable: forbidden love and the reconciliation of men and women.
Conclusion
Bled’s last sequence is undoubtedly a metaphor of the unsaid, an
unsaid that was held up for a long time by the grandiose speeches of
the nation. By following the female characters, both the rebels and the
others (Rachida and Mériem [Bab el Oued] are certainly no rebels),
the films plunge into day-to-day experiences so as to open uncertain
horizons, and thus life. In doing this, the films anchor these char-
acters at the core of political matters, which take into account their
experience and their existence, both fragile and central. Experience,
however, could not be understood as the end of history. The films
could not bypass it; they had to deal with it in a way that allows them
to refer and connect to the current, to the present of suffering, at
the heart of which the Algeria of today exists and is substantialized.
In a nutshell, to open the thinkable to new horizons including the
ones of the excluded or the marginalized—in which women are but
one important part—and enable the complexity of life to come into
existence.
Notes
1. The question remains unanswered to the extent that the issue of
language remains topical: Films such as Bab el Oued (1993) by
Merzak Allouache or Le harem de Mme Osmane (2000), Viva Laldjérie
(2003), and Délice Paloma (2007) by Nadir Moknèche are works in
which characters speak only in French. French in these films remains
an unquestioned excess (imagine characters of modest background
who speak like French men and women!), a denial of the language of
one’s father, of his distance, which has led to such a vast literary œuvre
(see A. Djebar’s [2003] and K. Yacine’s [1986] theatrical work).
2. For example, to express the idea that someone has taken advantage of
someone else or exploits him, one says “s/he colonizes her/him.”
3. While the beginning of the civil war is agreed upon, its “ending”
seems to correspond to the first election of President Bouteflika
(1999), who implemented a reconciliation law (Hadj-Moussa 2004).
While the Islamist Armed Group (GIA) was defeated in 2002, civilian
as well as government casualties are still daily reported by newspapers.
The number of casualties is estimated to be between 100,000 and
150,000, with large population slaughters (1997 and 1998).
4. I use this expression, for want of others, to communicate the logic and
dynamic of discourses about the war of liberation as a set of events,
which by definition are chosen, and of the imaginary. These ensembles
go beyond the temporal and spatial limits of war, and permeate the
whole social tissue, manifesting themselves in practices, thoughts, and
sensibilities.
5. For instance, I am making reference here to J.-P. Lledo’s documentary
film Algérie, histoires à ne pas dire (2007), which was censured by
the Algerian authorities. The long censorship was supported by many
Algerian intellectuals, who otherwise were very critical of the version
of history.
6. The army had an important place in Algerian history. It was at first
the popular National Liberation Army and had a whole aura that
accompanied it. The arrival to power of the colonels and generals
after independence transformed its popular image to one of an all-
powerful usurper of public goods (which belonged to the people). But
in Algeria, the figure of the djoundi (soldier) remains well anchored
in the imaginary of liberation.
7. These choices are somewhat random, as there are other films pro-
duced to which I have not had access, or only limited access, and
which I cannot thus discuss adequately.
8. Touchia (1992, Mohamed Rachid Benhadj); Bab el Oued City
(1994, Merzak Allouache); Le harem de Mme Osmane (2000, Nadir
Moknèche); Rachida (2002, Yamina Bachir-Chouikh); Viva Laldjérie
(2003, Nadir Moknèche); Les suspects (2003, Kamel Dahane); Bled
Number One (2006, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmache); and Délice Paloma
(2007, Nadir Moknèche). I will only provide a summary of these films

when necessary for my analysis.
9. Le harem de Mme Osmane (2000, Nadir Moknèche) depicts the life
of Mme Osmane, a former resistance fighter and her tenants. She
attempts to control the lives of others, primarily her daughter, whom
she stops from marrying a “backward” man because his origins are
from the countryside. Yasmine, a young émigrée tenant of Mme
Osmane, finds out that her husband has a second wife. The daugh-
ter and Yasmine, frustrated by the situation, decide to go out at night
despite the curfew ordered by the authorities during the civil war.
Mme Osmane’s daughter is killed at an army checkpoint. The author-
ities blame the Islamists but Mme Osmane refuses to believe their
version.
10. Bled Number One (2006, R. Ameur-Zaïmache) tells the story of
Kamel, a young Beur, who is deported during the civil war to a small
Algerian village, where he is stays with his uncle’s family. He finds out
that his cousin has been repudiated, beaten by her brother, and sepa-
rated from her young son, simply because she wishes to sing jazz. The
loss of her son almost makes her lose her mind, and, in a moment of
desperation, she tries to kill herself and ends up in a psychiatric hos-
pital. There, singing is used as part of her therapy. As for her cousin
Kamel, he tries to buy a passport and slip back into France.
11. See the distressing documentary Une guerre sans images. Algérie, je
sais que tu sais, by Soudani and Von Greffenried (2002).
12. Délice Paloma (2007, Nadir Moknèche) is the story of Madame
Algéria, who runs an agency where deadbeat husbands can be fol-
lowed and caught and marriages and divorces arranged, among
other services. Her protégées, beautiful young “independent” women
whom she has hired off the street or has found working elsewhere
(Rachida/“Paloma”), are only too willing. Mme Algéria, who has a
son out of wedlock from a brief encounter with an Italian volunteer,
works hard to realize a dream. She wants to acquire the Caracalla hot
springs, where she had spent part of her childhood as one of the maids’
daughter. The springs are about to be privatized, and she knows she
can only have them by bribing all the authorities along the way. As she
says, “All Algeria is thirsty, and I am watering it!” She has a free and
open lifestyle with her favorites: Shahrzad wants to start a family and
put an end to her life of bars and alcohol, whereas Paloma falls in
love with her son, who wants to find his father in Italy. The bribery
is discovered and Madame Algéria is the only one to pay the price.
She goes to prison whereas the officials, among them her own lawyer
and a former minister, get off scot-free. Her son and Paloma leave for
Italy clandestinely (as haraguas), while Shahrzad gets married and has
children with a young Islamist.
13. Viva tells the story of Mme Papicha, a former cabaret dancer, and her
daughter, Goussam, who fled their hometown for Algiers to escape
the Islamists. They rent a room in Pension Debussy and have Fifi,
a prostitute, as their neighbor. While Papicha searches for a famous
cabaret she performed in during the 1970s, Goussam consumes dan-
gerously her body with men while hoping to marry a man who already
cheats on his wife with her.
14. For a lack of reflecting on the abjection and the impossibility of the
African sign to signify, these two currents are incapable, according to
Mbembe (2000, XI), to problematize its assignment to an irreducible
exteriority in which it would be the outcast par excellence and espe-
cially “an impossible remainder of which the sense and identity cannot
be thought and said except from an original act of expropriation.”
15. Bab el Oued City (1994, Merzak Allouache) is told by Mériem, the
lover of Boualem, an apprentice baker, who, exhausted by nights of
sleepiness, throws into the sea a speaker broadcasting Islamic preaches.
Thinking that that was a sign of defiance to the moral order, a group
of Islamist sympathizers hunts the “outlaw.” Seeing his life in danger,
Boualem leaves Algeria when it enters into civil war.
16. The film takes place during the civil war in the center-north region of
Algeria, where a state of emergency was in effect.
17. An important point to note here: even dead, Sakina’s body leaves the
house as a sublimated one, the body the fantastic “bride.” It is this
that explains the you-yous in front of the Mériem casket or coffin.
18. On the idea of the double in film, see Vernet (1986).
19. The parallel editing is different from the alternating editing by the
lack of unity in the space-time of the events shown.
20. In L’Arche du désert (1997, M. Chouikh), love is the focus. Love
between two young people lead to war between their respective
groups. In La Citadelle (2002, M. Chouikh), a betrayed young gen-
tleman, who discovers that the bride is a silicone mannequin, throws
himself into the void under the eyes of the entire village and a little
girl screaming to “be let alone” to be the witness of the scene.
21. See “L’amour Berbère” by the humorist Fellag. One will remem-
ber the anecdote of the young woman who tells her father she
loves a young man. Upon which the father responds with an insult,
“Be damned the religion of your father!,” and a punch. “Tomorrow,”
says the father, “you will marry your cousin and . . . you must not love
him!” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bw_M2VrmjJ0
22. I cannot develop this aspect in the present chapter. Having been raised
in France and taking the side of his cousin (he fights her brother),
Kamel-la-France is a considered a female character in many respects.
The article used with his name is feminine (la France); he is also
the one who, as the villagers remark, does not “know our customs,”
and whom they are going to bring up in order “to make a man of
him,” just like his female cousin, who does not know that singing is
frowned upon. The two correspond; there is a structural resemblance
between the repudiated female cousin and the deported Kamel. Both
are homeless and lawless: she because she wants to sing, and he
because he “has been to prison and is a bandit.”
23. This is inspired by the title of the book by D. Vasse (1983).
References
Allouache, Merzak. Bab el Oued City, Production: Marzek Allouache, Jacques
Bisou and Jean-Pierre Gallepe, France, 1994.
Ameur-Zaïmache, Rabah. Bled Number One, Sarrazink Productions and Les
Films du Losange, France, 2006.
Bachir-Chouikh, Yamina. “Des gens viennent voir leur histoire, leur vie. Ce
n’est pas arrivé depuis longtemps.” Interview by Elisabeth Lequeret and
Charles Tesson. Cahiers du Cinéma (February–March 2003): 26–31.
Bachir-Chouikh, Yamina. Rachida, Canal Plus, Ciel Production, CAN Cin-
ema Production, Ministère de la culture, République française, Arte France,
France.
Barthes, Roland. L’obvie et l’obtus. Paris: Seuil, 1982.
Benhadj, Mohamed Rachid. Touchia, Production: Agence algérienne pour le
Rayonnement culturel, 1992.
Bourdieu, Pierre and Sayad, Abdelmalek. Le déracinement. Paris: Les Éditions
de Minuit, 1964.
Carlier, Omar. Entre nation et Jihad: Histoire des radicalisms algériens. Paris:
Presses de Sciences Po, 1995.
Carlier, Omar. “Le moudjahid, mort ou vif.” In Mémoires de la guerre
d’Algérie, edited by Annie Dayan Rosenman and Lucette Valensi, 51–86.
Paris: Bouchène, 2004.
Chion, Michel. La voix au cinéma. Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile, 1982.
Crowley, Patrick. “Images of Algeria: Turning and Turning in the Widing
Gyre.” Expressions maghrébines 6, no. 1 (Summer 2007): 79–92.
Dahane, Kamel. Les Suspect, Production: Saga, Algeria/Begium, 2004.
Das, Veena. “Traumatisme et témoignage: implications pour la commu-
nauté politique.” NAQD: Revue d’études et de Critique Sociale 18 (2003):
133–167.
Das, Veena. Life and Words. Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary.
Berkeley, Los Angeles, & London: University of California Press, 2007.
Deleuze, Gilles. L’Image Temps. Cinéma 2. Paris: Minuit, 1985.
Djebar, Assia. La disparition de la langue française. Paris: Albin Michel, 2003.
Fabian, Johanne. Memory against Culture. Arguments and Reminders.
Durham, NC, & London: Duke University Press, 2007.
Fanon, Franz. L’An V de la révolution algérienne. Paris: La Découverte, 2001
[1959].
Grandguillaume, Gilbert. “Comment a t-on pu en arriver là?” Esprit 208
(January 1995): 12–34.
Hadj-Moussa, Ratiba. “The Locus of Tension: Gender in Algerian Cinema.”
Matahu Journal for African Culture and Society (1997): 45–66.
Hadj-Moussa, Ratiba. “The Imaginary Concord and the Reality of Discord:

Dealing with the Algerian Civil War.” Arab World Geographer 7 (Fall), no. 3
(2004): 135–149.
Kear, Jonathan. “A Game That Must Be Lost: Chris Marker Replays Alain
Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour.” In The Images and the Witness. Trauma,
Memory and Visual Culture, edited by Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas,
129–142. London: Wallflower Press, 2007.
Kaës, René. “Ruptures catastrophiques et travail de mémoire. Notes pour une
recherche.” In Violence d’état et psychanalyse, edited by Janine Puget and
René Kaës, 168–204. Paris: Dunod, 1989.
Lanzmann, Claude. Shoah. France, 1985.
Laplanche, Jean and Pontalis, Jean-Baptiste. Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse.
Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1990 [1967].
Marker, Chris. Level 5. France, 1996.
Marks, Laura. The Skin of the Film. Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and
the Sense. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
Mbembe, Achille. De la postcolonie. Essai sur l’imagination politique dans
l’Afrique Contemporaine. Paris: Khartala, 2000.
Meynier, Gilbert. “Psychanalyse du F.L.N., ou les valeurs d’une fraternité de
guerriers.” In Migrations des identités et des textes. Entre l’Algérie et le France
dans la littératures des deux rives, edited by Charles Bonn, 217–228. Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2004.
Moknèche, Nadir. Délice Paloma, Sunday Morning Production, France,
2007.
Moknèche, Nadir. Le Harem de Mme Osman, Bloody Mary Production,
France, 2000.
Moknèche, Nadir. Viva Laldjérie, Sunday Morning Production, France,
2003.
Molinès, Chantal. Algérie: Les dérapages du journal télévisé en France
1988–1995. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002.
Moussaoui, Abderrahman. De la violence en Algérie. Les lois du chaos. Arles:
Actes Sud/MMSH, 2006.
Scott, Joan. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4
(summer 1991): 776–794.
Stora, Benjamin. La gangrène et l’oubli. La mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie.
Paris: La Découverte, 1992.
Stora, Benjamin. La guerre invisible. Algérie, les années 90. Paris: Les Presses
de Sciences Po, 2001.
Stora, Benjamin. “L’absence d’images déréalise l’Algérie. Elle construit un
pays fantasmé qui n’existe pas.” Interview by Juliette Cerf and Charles
Tesson. Cahiers du Cinéma (February–March, 2003): 7–13.
Vasse, Denis. Le poids du réel. La souffrance. Paris: Seuil, 1983.
Vernet, Marc. “Le personnage de film.” Iris 7, no. 2 (1986): 81–110.
Yacine, Kateb. Kateb Yacine: un homme, une œuvre, un pays. Entretien avec
Kateb Yacine. Alger: Laphomic, 1986.
Yuval-Davis, Nira and Anthias, Floya (eds.). Woman Nation-State. New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1989.
Chapter 7
The Diasporic Rasa of

S u f f e r i n g : N ot e s o n t h e
Aesthetics of Image and Sound
in Indo-Caribbean and Sikh
Popular Art
Michael Nijhawan and Anna C. Schultz
This chapter examines the critical nexus that exists between suffer-
ing, aesthetics, and the social formations of diaspora as articulated in
contemporary Indo-Caribbean and Sikh popular art. While we retain
a commitment to our ethnographic examples in the areas of South
Asian art, music, and performance throughout the text, we have
arranged our argument around two thematic fields: (1) the framing
of the relationship between art and suffering (including discourses
on trauma) in the contemporary theory of art and aesthetics and
(2) the conceptualization of diaspora as an aesthetic force with the
capacity to produce particular subjectivities. Despite the widely rec-
ognized historic specificities and the fluctuating cultural makeup of
diverse diaspora formations, scholarly research has for a considerable
time prioritized the various cultural, political, and social forces that
solidify social imaginations of places of origin (the ancestral home)
and the collective destinies binding a people to these places. Acknowl-
edging the possible range of diasporic junctures and the distinct forms
of collective social imagination resulting from them, typologies of
diaspora (e.g., Cohen 2008) have nonetheless often prioritized the
178 M i c h a e l N i j h awa n a n d A n n a C . S c h u lt z
significance of (post)traumatic loss and suffering as one of the key foci

for diasporic memories.1 It is in reference to such notions of collective
suffering, loss, and trauma, as Brian Axel notes, that the concept of
diaspora has acquired a profoundly homogenizing effect and has been
turned into “a totality with a particular kind of aesthetic force that
inspires the unification of particular segmented groups” (Axel 2001,
29). This tendency can be observed in the context of Sikh diaspora
art discussed below. At the same time, however, postcolonial scholar-
ship has destabilized the diaspora concept by drawing attention to the
cultural heterogeneity and the heterodox conditions of diasporic sub-
jectivity. This relates directly to how suffering, as a social experience,
is written into the broader public narratives of identity formation.
Artistic and academic contributions to the study of Caribbean
diasporas have been particularly instrumental in moving the conver-
sation away from the dominant focus on a Western metaphysics of
collective suffering in diaspora theorizing (e.g., Gilroy 1993; Hall
1990; Niranjana 2006), which is one of the reasons for us to jux-
tapose Sikh and Indo-Caribbean art works in this text. Indeed, in
the context of postcolonial critique, the Caribbean diaspora today
occupies a privileged position. For historical reasons, the Caribbean
has been identified as a complex site defined by multiple waves
of forced, semi-forced, and voluntary migration from Africa, India,
Syria, China, Europe, and many other locales. More importantly,
however, it occupies this place because migrants to the Caribbean
have generated new forms of arts and culture based on a process of
creolization.2 As Conerly Casey points out in Chapter 5, processes of
creolization have not only been defined by the shifting, intermedi-
ate zones emerging from the violent juxtaposition and imposition of
European social and political formations upon indigenous, enslaved,
and indentured people, but the term has also indexed the cultural
creativity of resistance, resilience, and other embodied practices asso-
ciated with (popular) art forms. This has been part of the appeal of
adopting “creolization” as a key metaphor and framework for analysis
by a number of postcolonial theorists (e.g., Hall 2003; Hannerz 1987;
Palmié 2006).3
If creolization has affected the understandings of diaspora in such
ways, it is only fitting that we view the universalization of trauma
discourses through the circuits of global humanitarian interventions
and media representations of global suffering with some skepticism.
In light of the global crises witnessed in recent decades, trauma dis-
course has expanded from psychoanalytical contexts to the broader
cultural field. Various social and political actors have called upon art
The Diasporic Rasa of Suffering 179
as a witness to traumatic suffering. Rendering suffering in the lan-

guage of trauma affects both social imaginations of the past and the
various constellations in which art registers the psychic imprints of spe-
cific events, which in turn are identified as constitutive moments for
diasporic groups, their memories of past experiences, and the kinds
of social and cultural identities defined by such relations to the past.
The broader implications of the academic and political reorientation
(around testimonies) of trauma have been addressed by a number of
recent anthropological studies on political violence and suffering (e.g.,
Das 2007, 205; Das and Kleinman 2000; Fassin and Rechtman 2009).
Beyond this specific engagement with violence, and the critique of
traumatism, trauma has also acquired a key role in contemporary art
theory, as for instance the work of Hal Foster or Jill Bennett illus-
trate. Indeed, as Bennett points out, trauma discourse in art has,
at least in an aphoristic sense, continued “the poststructuralist cri-
tique of the subject by other means” (Bennett 2005, 5), precisely
because of the ability of trauma art to render visible the contradic-
tory effects and affects of the traumatized subject, the simultaneously
being “evacuated and elevated” (ibid., 5).4
Trauma art is also where we can draw a link to the “diasporic sub-
lime,” which is similarly concerned with the paradoxical co-occurrence
of absence/distance and overwhelming affect. This point has been
taken up by Axel, who provides an important compass in making
sense of a connection that has defined the very idea of the diasporic
as a discursive and aesthetic category of signification. In his analysis
of Sikh diaspora representations found on the Internet, Axel (2007)
argues that the circulation of martyred bodies (photographs and other
imagery of male Sikhs, tortured and killed during the counterinsur-
gency operation in the 1980s and early 1990s) has had the paradoxical
effect of producing an image of the “homeland” precisely among
those who did not have a “firsthand” account of the violence and
suffering itself. It is through the reversed diasporic gaze, Axel argues,
that it becomes possible to see how “the marking out of the inexperi-
enceable and unimaginable” (absence) translates into reconfigurations
of the “homeland” in the sense of a mythic wholeness and emotive
force. The “diasporic sublime” that Axel identifies with this process
then implies that the diaspora (and diasporic subjectivities) comes to
be constituted “by means of an irruption of what has not been lived
into a moment that comes to be lived” (ibid., 128, emphasis added).
We employ the question of how suffering is translated “into a
moment that comes to be lived” by those not sharing an “immediate,”
firsthand witness account of diasporic loss as the main lens for our
analysis. However, we see the need to further scrutinize the different

temporalities and perspectival modalities of past-ness that are charac-
teristic of how memories of suffering are wedded to contemporary
diasporic art. This will require a shift from the notion of the sub-
lime to alternative aesthetics through which trauma discourse might
be either averted or subverted. Furthermore, if suffering and diaspora
become mutually constitutive through changing contexts of cultural
translation and genre mediations, we also need to ask how differently
the aesthetic of suffering is woven into the realms of the diasporic
imagination. If we take into consideration the moments of disjunc-
ture and conjuncture that have defined the diasporic as precisely not
the pure assimilation into Western categories, how are aesthetic sen-
sibilities articulated and shaped in virtual and embodied diasporic
contexts and in what manner have they become intertwined with cul-
tural and political concerns shaping the life of diasporic communities?
And, finally, what are the lines of consolidation and contestation of
respective ideas of “communities in suffering” that surface in relation
to popular art?
Sublime Suffering
As our first vantage point, we want to engage the 1984 artwork by the
Singh Twins, which is currently shown in an exhibition celebrating
the “Legacy of Punjab” at the Washington Smithsonian. British-Asian
artists Rabindra Kaur and Amrit Kaur Singh created the first version
of the painting, then titled The Storming of the Golden Temple (figure
7.1), in a response to the Indian army’s attack on the “Golden Tem-
ple” (for Sikhs it is the Darbar Sahib) in Amritsar, India, which today
is considered by Sikhs worldwide as the most important religious
and cultural heritage site. Readers not aware of the events around
this critical year of sweeping political transitions in India should note
that “1984” marks a context of heightened state and communal vio-
lence directed against, and partially enacted by, (militant) Sikhs, who
were perceived as a terrorist threat by the Congress government led
under then prime minister Indira Gandhi. The damage and loss of
life that occurred at the Darbar Sahib and the riots that followed
Indira Gandhi’s killing by her two Sikh bodyguards in the same year,
when according to official figures alone, 3,000 Sikh residents in Delhi
lost their lives in an orchestrated act of arson and mass murder, have
fundamentally transformed political constellations in India and the
diaspora context. The narrative on Sikh trauma and martyrdom that
has emerged in the years after 1984 has had a deep impact not only
Figure 7.1 1984 and the Storming of the Golden Temple by the Singh Twins
www.singhtwins.co.uk.
on those witnessing these events but also on sections of a younger

generation of Sikh youth in the diaspora (Arora & Nijhawan 2013).
The Storming of the Golden Temple is apparently ‘about’ the specific
event of ‘Operation Blue Star,’ which led to the partial demolition of
the Darbar Sahib complex and a high death toll among civilians. In the
artists’ own words, the first painting occurred less out of an intent
to commemorate, but rather as a spontaneous response to come to
terms with what the event indexed in the moment of its unfolding.5
Miniature artwork is based on a time-intensive detailed brushwork of
multiple layering. We can thus imagine each brushstroke to constitute
a form of witnessing, a way to encompass time in an attempt to make
sense out of the suffering of others.
This piece of art can certainly be seen to invest in a heavily gen-
dered, spectacular visibility of violence and suffering, which is not
untypical for other visual representations that one could find in Sikh
religious art, especially martyr art decorating the walls of diaspora
gurdwaras. One of the leading scholars in Sikh studies today, Arvind
Mandair (2009, 237), has termed this emphasis on martyrdom the
“necrophilic tendency of the modern Sikh imaginary,” which he
identifies as a key aspect of modernist-reformist Sikhism.
In the case of the Singh Twins’ artwork, however, these
“necrophilic aesthetics” define the frame exactly at the point when
their painting has been recommissioned 15 years later as a second,
‘revision’ of the earlier work, then titled 1984 (figure 7.2). This sec-
ond image has gained prominence as a cover of books, calendars,
and postcards. Most importantly, as a permanent exhibit in the Sikh
heritage exhibition in the Washington Smithsonian Institute, it has
been authorized as a representative piece of Sikh history. To some
extent the focus of its reception has thus been shifted from how
its iconicity and representational styles are culturally mediated by a
diasporic lens, to political framing of recognition claims. In that sense
the enhanced scale of the 1984 painting functions within a logic of
response to the complaint that ‘the Sikh trauma experience’ had found
no appropriate memorials or monuments in Sikh art and literature.
It is understandable that this argument resonated especially strong
in diaspora contexts where the “necrophilic aesthetics” might have
dominated the viewer’s perspective.6 Nonetheless, there is more to
say about what motivated the Singh Twins in making 1984. In fact,
if this painting has played a formative role in the public reframing of
Sikh suffering, it is also an expression of how making suffering visible
has recently evolved in the context of the proliferation of photographs
and popular images on trauma. Hence, by drawing attention to the
Figure 7.2 Nineteen Eighy-Four by the Singh Twins

www.singhtwins.co.uk.
new commissioning and remaking of 1984, we can also identify how

a new optics of suffering has had the potential to render this suffering
as sublime.
In the original small-scale work (figure 7.1), it is interesting that the
artists employ a perspectival lens that connects it to a modern optic
and temporality. The use of color and arrangement of bodies is not

untypical for traditional miniature paintings, but compared to other
artwork by the Singh Twins, there is an element of avant-garde or pop
art à la Andy Warhol, which must strike the onlooker as something
novel, particularly so in the mid-1980s, when a hybrid British-Asian
art scene was just emerging. The choice of the frame is also interest-
ing. From the specific angle in which the picture is drawn, we can
only see part of the architecture that has been ruined by the heavy
shelling. In offering a bird’s-eye view of the sacred center, the Darbar
Sahib complex surrounded by the pond and the religious architec-
tures built around it, an almost pure photographic perspective is given.
By capturing this particular historical moment, the painting is thus
unambiguously about a specific event, and though this about-ness
does not determine the way this work of art is perceived, it certainly
cannot be seen as completely separate from the political conditions in
which it has emerged. Artwork here, in its very style and the artists’
choices and omissions, produces a diasporic subjectivity of suffering
that is necessarily partial while generative of new and multiple inter-
pretations and ways of seeing. Its original moment is formative in the
sense of a particular orientation toward suffering expressed in the very
act of making art.
In the capture of the new commission that exhibited at the
Smithsonian (figure 7.2), the artists write that 1984 expresses their
own “mixed feelings” and the “personal sense of suffering and injus-
tice felt by Sikhs worldwide.”7 The bird’s-eye view is self-reflexively
chosen here to acknowledge the physical distance of the diasporic
onlooker, whereas close-up views on the atrocities are meant to con-
vey emotional proximity by the very same diasporic viewer—this is
self-reflexively realized in the young man with the Manchester United
sweatshirt at the bottom of the picture. Compared to the original
work, we can see that guns and tanks have multiplied, whereas indi-
cations of an active, militant Sikh resistance from within the site are
still omitted. The image is now populated by many more bodies and
atrocities.
But whereas the artists retain the overall stylistic frame of the
earlier painting by populating the same scene with a myriad of beau-
tifully drawn figures, there are some decisive alterations. First of
all, they seem to go back to an ornamental style in drawing the
outskirts of the religious architecture, which stands in some con-
trast to the three-dimensional center. This contrast has a captivating
effect. Furthermore, the geometric patterns reemphasize that which
for earlier miniature painting was indeed a characteristic feature,
especially so for illustrations of religious or courtly literature: the

symbolic depth of religious place and the apparent transcendence
of time indexed by that very place. Sikh bodies dressed in col-
orful garments, seen wounded and in agony, and, of course, the
tanks intruding into the sacred site then seem ever more disturb-
ing. The same contrast is achieved in the portrayal of actual figures.
In classical miniature style these would be drawn in great individ-
ual detail, but what changes is the stylistic conventions of emotional
expression, which traditionally would look rather detached or sublime
(in the case of portrayals of the gurus or saints). But the depic-
tion of pilgrims trapped inside the Darbar Sahib confronts us with
fear, distress, and great sorrow as highly individualized emotional
expressions.
What is further striking about 1984 is the appearance of historical
actors, whose significance can only be understood from the dominant
narrative of how the 1984 story is told in the Sikh context. There is
the archetypal figure of eighteenth-century saint-soldier Baba Deep
Singh, popularly venerated and shown in the favorite iconographic
rendition with his decapitated head placed on the palms of his hand.
Indira Gandhi, former Indian prime minister, who was responsible for
Operation Blue Star and was later assassinated by her two Sikh body-
guards, enters the scene on a tank and is portrayed like the demon
Ravana, as a five-headed monster showing the counterfeits of other
political leaders, including ‘iron lady’ Margaret Thatcher, who dom-
inated the political scene in Britain in which the Singh Twins were
coming of age in the 1980s. Indian soldiers are shown brutalizing
civilian pilgrims, such as in the scene in the lower left part, where
a grim-faced soldier pierces his bayonet into helpless bodies. This
scene alone resonates strongly with popularized accounts in Sikh sto-
rytelling genres, with the mourning of the innocent civilians killed at
the hands of eighteenth-century rulers being a common trope in Sikh
mythico-history.8
The time of suffering encompassed in the 1984 painting then has
significantly expanded, and this has been achieved at the level of artis-
tic technique and convention as well as at the level of representation,
where it seems the Singh Twins have succumbed to new demands
to translate Sikh suffering into universal suffering. The enthusiastic
welcome of their artwork by British and North American multicul-
tural liberalism and related interfaith platforms indicates a further and
successful entry into a translation regime through which particular-
ized Sikh suffering as defined by this specific event is written into
dominant Western frameworks of conceptualizing collective suffering.
We can briefly illustrate this with the Singh Twins’ contribution to

the “Via Dolorosa” project. This is a British Christian-based, inter-
faith art project in which artists from a variety of faiths were invited
to select and relate to one of the 15 Stations of the Cross, which
further testifies to the importance of the Judeo-Christian blueprint
of suffering and martyrdom in these regards. In their short docu-
mentary Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Via Dolorosa Project, the two
Sikh artists present two of the 15 Stations of the Cross that they
had chosen when asked to participate in the art project. These are
two videos that conflate a camera close-up moving and zooming
on details of the painting with their own poetic verses that frame
the 1984 events in metaphors of universal suffering hinging on the
sacrifice of Christ. Stations one (“Jesus is condemned to die,” the
scene where Pontius Pilates is seen symbolically washing his hands
of blood) and ten (“Jesus is stripped,” as the symbol for ultimate
humiliation), which the artists chose for their contribution, highlight
two key aspects that are identified as similar to the fate of Sikhs:
the ignorance and deliberate miscarriage of justice at the hand of
a central power (hence equated with the Indian government) and
the stripping of the symbolically charged body as a form of ultimate
humiliation and degradation. Both issues resonate with predominant
representations of Sikh victimization in the context of 1984. The
stripped body (in particular the forceful removal of turbans and cut-
ting hair in addition to the photographs of mutilated dead bodies)
has been a powerful image to evoke the alienation from the Indian
state felt by many even today in the Sikh diaspora. The two artists
clearly avoid any reference to the political struggle that contributed
to the standoff in Amritsar and what followed. The message is gener-
ally captured in the image of the ‘political manipulation of religion,’
against which Sikhs are positioned in a gesture of fearless defense
of the self and the religious neighbor (Hindu or Muslim). In the
poetic verses, Sikhism is translated as the “faith in one God” that
like other world religions has a “holy shrine” and membership of
innocent devotees, who are like “lambs” led to “slaughter.” Sikh suf-
fering then becomes sublime suffering in the sense of Axel’s diasporic
sublime, for clearly 1984 achieves this irruption of the distanced
viewer into the proximate witness. Yet, this sublime is a very spe-
cific diasporic sublime, for it rests on the temporality and ontology
of Judeo-Christian templates of suffering that are widely perceived as
normatively shaping the public sentiments on collective suffering as
universally translatable.
Prosthetic Suffering
As a counterpoint to the 1984 painting example, we introduce
an expressive medium that memorializes the suffering of a distant
Indo-Caribbean past through Internet slideshows of archival pho-
tographs and old postcards. The suffering encoded in the Caribbean
slideshows is veiled to such an extent that one might anticipate
universalist readings by a global Internet viewership. Instead, the
transcontinental slideshow audiences attach personal memories to the
anonymous photographs to construct specific narratives of diasporic
heritage, illustrating what Alison Landsberg (2004) has termed
“prosthetic memory,” or the suturing of individuals to narratives
of pasts they have never experienced through modern mass media.
Landsberg’s prosthesis metaphor theorizes memories that are trans-
portable and commodified, but also felt in deeply personal and
embodied ways, marking a difference from earlier sites of collec-
tive memory (i.e., monuments) that were directed toward nationally
or geographically bounded groups. Because of their transportabil-
ity, prosthetic memories are not confined to particular class, ethnic,
or other groups, but because they may be directed toward—and
embraced by—particular social groups, they also resist the homoge-
nizing gestures characteristic of national monuments that elide iden-
tities when they threaten to pull allegiance away from the nation
(Landsberg 2004, 2, 6–9). Like the slavery and Holocaust films
and novels analyzed by Landsberg, Indo-Caribbean indentureship
slideshows provide a connection beyond “living memory,” but while
she is most interested in the (liberal) politics of the consumption
of these films and novels outside of African-American and Jewish
communities, Internet ethnography suggests that Indo-Caribbean
indenture videos become prosthetic memories primarily for those
who identify as Caribbean, Indian, or Indo-Caribbean. Moreover,
Landsberg (2004, 19–20) explains that prosthetic memories “derive
from a person’s mass mediated experience of a traumatic event of the
past” and that, like an artificial limb, they mark trauma.
But how can we understand prosthetic memories of suffering in
which trauma is left “out of the picture”? While prosthetic limbs mark
traumatized bodies, they also have the potential to make those bod-
ies whole, transforming the memory of the trauma and sometimes
even shielding it from public view. In contrast to the Singh Twins’
irruption of violence into the lived experience of diasporic Sikhs,
Indo-Caribbean indenture slideshows hide the suffering that marked
the production of their photographic images, and diasporic viewers

acquire prosthetic memories that narrativize wholeness and benign
heritage.
The rural Indians who began arriving as indentured servants in
Guyana in 1838 and in Trinidad in 1845 were falsely told that their
labor would be light and conditions hospitable, only to find after the
long journey that the work was intense, wages were negligible, living
quarters were inhumane, floggings were frequent, and medical care
was inadequate9 (Ramnarine 2001, 6–8; Vertovec 2000, 43). Despite
this troubling history, Indian Arrival Day is celebrated in Guyana
(May 5), Trinidad and Tobago (May 30), and Suriname (June 5) as
an exuberant festival of Indian cultural heritage in which friends wish
one another “Happy Indian Arrival Day.” Though festival participa-
tion declined over several decades, it was revived in 1995 and made
an official national holiday in Trinidad, in large measure due to the
efforts of Indian political parties and organizations.10
During Indian Arrival Day celebrations, one hears tassa drum-
ming, sees slick, costumed Bollywood dance performances, or watches
Ram leela (enactments of Rama’s exploits), but performances of
indenture are rare. This trend is reflected online, with celebratory
artworks far outnumbering depictions of suffering. A YouTube.com
search on “Indian Arrival Day” and “Indian indenture” yields results
of two types: the most common are video clips of Indian Arrival
Day celebrations in the Caribbean and North America—and the
other includes video slideshows of archival photos of indenture-
ship combined with a soundtrack chosen by the slideshow creator.11
Three YouTube videos are of particular interest: In Memory of the
Jahagis by Barry Joel Desaine, 170th Anniversary of Indo-Caribbeans
by Jonathan Budhram, and East Indian Pioneers of the Caribbean
by “hisdreams.”12 Most of the black-and-white images used in the
videos were found on the Internet and many are shared by all three
videos. Budhram described his image search process: “I found them
on the Internet just by ‘Googling’. If you use tags like ‘Guyana’,
‘Guiana’ and ‘Coolie’ etc. you will find lots.” They include images
of clipper ship exteriors, interiors overcrowded with laborers, white
plantation owners with East Indian workers, East Indian people
in Caribbean villages, and postcards depicting women laden with
jewellery and men with turbans and dhotis, often accompanied by
the descriptor “Coolie type.” Some of the photographs record the
domination of Europeans overseeing laborers in fields or standing
next to neatly cued Indians at lunchtime, while the posed photos
of “coolie types” project a subjugated Other via a hidden “self”
of the European gaze. Most are colonial-era postcards that British

colonial agents would have sent to their homes across the Atlantic
Ocean.
In contrast to (or defiance of?) the colonizer’s perspective that
marks the original photographs, the YouTube videos composed of
these postcards are historical narratives of modernity from the per-
spective of those whose ancestors provided the labor upon which
modernity was built. The social networking aspects of YouTube enable
communication between people in the UK, India, Trinidad, Guyana,
Jamaica, the United States, and Fiji, creating ephemeral comings-
together within the Indian diaspora. The postcards and other images
compiled for indenture music slideshows are interpreted by many
diasporic viewers as “heritage,” ancestry, or family, transforming doc-
uments of colonial domination into something more akin to family
photo albums.
One reason for the difference between the benign heritage of the
Indo-Caribbean example and the jarring violence depicted in the
Singh sisters’ paintings is the temporal distance and perhaps less acute
trauma of Indo-Caribbean suffering. The Singh Twins heard firsthand
accounts of 1984 and saw photographic images of shattered bod-
ies, and it is not surprising that their art would depict this trauma
with such vivid detail. What is perhaps more vexing is the extent
to which suffering is veiled in the indenture slideshows, given the
contexts of abuse and violence in which the photographs were cre-
ated. The passage of time certainly affects individual and collective
memory, but just as important are the contemporary diasporic con-
ditions in which they are currently presented and performed. Until
Guyanese and Trinidadian independence from Britain in the 1960s,
people of African and Indian descent were in similarly disadvantaged
positions vis-à-vis the colonial regime. During the first 30–40 years
of independence, that is, until ethnic Indian political parties gained
prominence, national identities were constructed around signifiers of
black or creole culture, most prominently carnival and calypso music
in Trinidad (Dudley 2008). In response to their political and cultural
marginalization, Indo-Caribbeans have since the 1960s resisted hybrid
identities marked as black, but have also avoided a strong trauma nar-
rative that would suggest a shared history of suffering with the victims
of slavery. This contrasts to the Singh sisters’ work, where trauma dis-
course allows for a boundary-crossing idiom that aligns Sikh suffering
with Jewish or Armenian suffering, and hence a retrospective suffer-
ing which has had a similar significance for the shaping of diasporic
subjectivities.
The Rasa of Sonic Visuality

In further contemplating the entrenchment of the politics and aes-
thetics of suffering in popular art, we now suggest a move from image
to sound and from concepts drawn from Western art theory to a con-
ceptualization of rasa, which is an aesthetic idiom that informs a wide
range of South Asian art forms, including drama, music, and film.
It might of course seem counterintuitive to suggest a critique of the
“occularcentric” regime of modern aesthetics at a moment when lead-
ing art theorists evoke the “pictorial turn” (Mitchell 2005, 5) as a
response to the “linguistic turn.” And so our motivation here is not
to join the philosophical chorus of authors lamenting the modern dis-
enchantment with the image, but to further think about how other
sensory modalities and other modes of art production, in their capac-
ity to complement or disrupt images, shape subjectivities in suffering.
In fact, as our initial examples suggest, subjectivities in suffering com-
mingle and change as (aesthetic) sensibilities are reconfigured on the
basis of social histories of sensory practices and genre-specific modali-
ties of art production and their public reception. Despite the immense
influence of modern aesthetics, it is also not necessary to limit the
discourse on contemporary art as defined by the emphasis of a rup-
ture with mimesis. As Michael Taussig (2009, 264) points out, at the
bottom of much modernist conceptions of art as essentially defined
by a break with mimesis (e.g., Rancière 2004) lurks a colonial trap,
especially when art experts subscribe to the idea that whereas we, as
modern consumers of art, are emancipated enough to “walk the thin
crust” between image and reality, the non-modern or postcolonial
subject remains superstitiously thrown into the belief of some onto-
logical truth behind the image.13 In contrast, we would like to discuss
diasporic regimes of art as situated at a nexus of sight, sound, and
body that is contingent on the heterogeneity of how senses are cul-
turally honed and politically configured. The work of music scholars
would further suggest that the transportability of recordings offers
unique possibilities for “diasporic intimacy” (Gilroy 1993, 16; Lipsitz
1994, 44) in contexts of “capitalist chill” (Slobin 2003, 288), and a
comfort or discomfort with particular soundscapes can signal diasporic
belonging, making South Asians in Australia, the United States, or
the UK feel equally at home (or lost) at Bollywood-infused cultural
shows. The various ways in which the cultural past is restaged in such
contexts and in which moments of suspension are achieved in and
through the arts, all point to a more complex and complicated under-
standing of aesthetic sensibilities and the extent to which they can
become critically emancipated from powerful discursive framings. This

is something we now would like to discuss with a few further examples
from Indo-Carribean and Sikh YouTube clips.
A key to the transformation of YouTube indenture videos from
suffering to heritage can be found in the late-twentieth/early-twenty-
first-century music of the soundtracks, which include a Hindi popular
studio rendering of a Biblical text, a late 1970s popular song, and a
Hindustani classical performance. Given the similarity of the images,
the stylistic difference between the three soundtracks is striking.
Ethnographic scholarship on YouTube and other social networking
sites has almost exclusively looked at linguistic and visual aspects
of communication (e.g., Jones and Schieffelin 2009; Salvato 2009),
often leaving music and sound “out of the picture.” It would be
tempting to do the same for YouTube indenture slideshows given that
music is rarely a topic of discussion for viewer/listeners and the com-
piler is not the composer or performer, but we propose that the music
of YouTube slideshows provides an important interpretive lens and
emotional filter for images. Music in indenture videos facilitates the
transition from suffering to “heritage,” and the ongoing negotiation
of the politics of memory can be traced through the dialogic space of
the comments section (Jones and Schieffelin 2009). We are inspired
here by Matthew Sumera’s (2013) research on music’s importance for
the “feelingfulness” of YouTube war music videos even when music is
left out of viewers’ assessments of an image’s truth content. We argue
that music is key to the politics of visibility on the Internet, guiding
the attachment of viewer/listeners’ subjectivities and rendering some
images more visible than others.
Anil Kant’s arrangement of the 91st Psalm used as the soundtrack
for In Memory of the Jahagis employs a highly produced style remi-
niscent of popular ghazals by singers from India like Pankaj Udhas or
Jagjit Singh. A combination of Western, global, and Indian classical
instruments accompany Hindi vocals softly crooned into a reverb-
effected microphone. This soothing style and slow tempo aestheti-
cizes the potentially troubling indenture images and hides the seams
between those images and the postcards of people in Indian clothing
with captions including “East Indian Woman and Child, Trinidad,”
“Coolie Types,” and “Lower Caste Coolies, Port of Spain, Trinidad,”
with these two sets of images corresponding to the two-part north
Indian sthai (lower refrain)-antara (higher verse) form. B. J. Desaine
is a Christian minister and teacher from Trinidad and Tobago, and his
musical choice articulates a shared East Indian (Hindi language and
Indian popular style) and Christian (91st Psalm) identity.14 Despite
the English text slides describing hardship, a Hindi song text about
faith in troubling times, and images of Indian people doing grueling
labor for white bosses, the viewer comments are about pride in brave
ancestors, memories of sugarcane, and the mechanics of the video’s
construction. Servitude and suffering, as represented directly through
labor images, or indirectly through the touristic staging of exoticism
in postcards, are transformed into heritage and Christian courage by
music that tells listeners that these images from the past are about
being Indian today: the “timeless legacy.”
There are very few comments to Desaine’s In Memory of the Jahagis
video, which has been up for a shorter period of time than Budhram’s
170th Anniversary of Indo-Caribbeans and hisdream’s East Indian
Pioneers of the Caribbean. The latter two were posted one and two
years ago, respectively, and have had several thousand views and
numerous pages of comments. Many viewers of these videos invoke
their own heritage in relation to the “foreparents” depicted in the
slides: “This is a beautiful video. I’m Trinidadian born Indian. Thanks
for posting this footage, I am so proud to be a product of these peo-
ple.” This move is akin to what Marianne Hirsch describes as “familial
postmemory,” that is, the activation of “memories” of other people’s
(traumatic) experiences by attaching family narratives to nonfamily
photographs as an “affiliative act” (Hirsch 2012, 29–40).
Given that these slideshows are wordless music videos, it is surpris-
ing that the only comments on music reference the Boney M song
“I See a Boat on the River,” which accompanied 170th Anniversary.
The song was key to how Budhram conceptualized the video, since he
wrote that “I think the song matches the theme perfectly” and that
it is “quite apt for this video.” Only two viewer comments addressed
the music directly: “hello are u disrespectfull wat kind of song is that”
and the “touching song brings tears to my eyes.” Its catchy major
mode melody, danceable 1970s calypso beat, and lyrics of a loved one
sailing away to follow a dream are devoid of aural references to India
and are juxtaposed with weighty visual images of plantation suffer-
ing and women of a bygone era in lehenga choli. While at least one
viewer saw the contrast between images of suffering and sounds of
celebration as disrespectful, Budhram’s comments suggest that he was
attempting to write agency into the story of Indian Caribbean migra-
tion by framing it as the fulfillment of a universal migration “dream.”
Indeed, Budhram, son of an Irish mother and Indo-Caribbean father,
was born and raised in the UK and shares a transatlantic Caribbean
diaspora story with Boney M, a group of Afro-Caribbean singers set-
tled in the UK and Germany who were a huge disco and pop sensation
in the 1970s, producing Caribbean-flavored danceable songs such as

“I See a Boat on the River” (1980).
All three videos reference—in text and image—indenture and its
injustices, but viewers do not respond in direct ways to those images.
Likewise, the videos of colonial postcard images display captions of
colonial racist “types” that are neither referenced nor critiqued by
commentators from today’s diaspora. In the YouTube commentary,
the photographic subjects become representatives of heritage or ances-
try, and the photos of indentured labor are reframed as “hard work”
and “sacrifice.” The more painful aspects of these image narratives
are elided from the discourse about them, to be infused with positive
meanings and affective contents through music of the present. Sound,
in other words, is reconfiguring sight. Clear markers of recent stu-
dio recording technology such as reverb, close miking, and multitrack
recording characterize all three musical soundtracks, but the pieces
also reference India or the past (for Indo-Caribbeans, India some-
times stands in for the past) through genre, form, instrumentation,
or language. Desaine’s choice locates the images within a Christian
narrative of refuge, hisdreams’ photos are more firmly located in
the past and are accompanied by north Indian classical music, and
the Caribbean flavored, upbeat “Boat on the River” creates a late-
twentieth-century sonic context while reframing indenture journeys
as travels of choice that lead teleologically toward a happy future.
The ordering of the images and the accompanying text guide listeners
toward particular interpretations, and music further renders markers
of strength and hard work visible while suppressing visual signifiers of
subjugation.
The sonic reconfiguration of past suffering is something that we
can also observe in contemporary YouTube videos produced by Sikh
diaspora youth. Similar to the Indo-Caribbean indenture videos, some
viewers narrate their own memories or what they have heard in their
families about the chosen events, but for a majority this is a venue
in which they are able to emotionally relate narratives of collective
grief to the specific experiences with the regulative norms of social
incorporation in immigration contexts (Nijhawan and Arora 2013).
Thus, in recent years, we have seen the mobilization of a “postgener-
ation” (Hirsch 2012) to 1984 in the context of which a larger section
of Sikh diaspora youth has emerged as cultural performers such as
spoken word artists, musicians, and visual artists. Much of this art
production that comes out of youth-organized events has become
available on YouTube. We would like to just name one recently adver-
tised music/art YouTube video that announced a Sikh youth event
(When Lions Roar) to show how music and poetry work to com-
memorate the suffering associated with the 1984 victims (the event
was organized by the Sikh Activist Network in the Greater Toronto
Area). This video begins as five young Sikh university students read,
in English translation, bits from testimonies of the November 1984
anti-Sikh riots in Delhi.15
Introduced and accompanied by original Punjabi footage, the
young students are shown in black-and-white close-ups leaning
against a white wall, their voices poetically arranged and accompanied
by a D natural minor progression on synthesized strings that alternates
between the tonic and subdominant and is adorned by simple piano
motives. The pathos of the speakers’ expressions and the simplicity
of the black-and-white headshots are heightened by the spare, minor
ostinato without the tension of leading tones or dominant chords. The
incessant fluctuation between tonic and subdominant, and the melody
that floats quietly along with the images and voices, appears to com-
municate that the atrocities were not only severe but also extensive, as
this cyclical pattern could continue indefinitely.16
The video has a staggering number of more than 200,000 views
and well beyond 2,000 comments so far, which is truly astounding
considering that this was advertised as a local performance event in
the Toronto region. We have a situation here where the Sikh diaspora
youth enforces the identification with the 1984 victims by an online
restaging of the witness’ voice. A few commentators to the video have
rightly remarked that this is a balancing act that can easily lead to the
appropriation of the victim’s voice. The majority of comments would
not see this as an issue and instead sympathize with the producers of
the video, expressing how emotionally struck they were by watching it.
However—and bracketing here the issue of online shaming that runs
through many of the comments for a later analysis—substantial dis-
agreement exists regarding who is representing the 1984 voice. In the
first days when this video came online, there were a number of com-
ments by those self-identifying with the religious and political cause
of 1984 that noted the “inappropriate,” “disrespectful,” or “cool”
attitude of the video protagonists. One of the narrators in the video
was also known for his online slapstick videos and association with
hip-hop music producers and was one example where opinion was
split. The blending of the cool hip-hop and bhangra music scenes is of
course popular with the large majority of Punjabi (Sikh and non-Sikh)
diaspora youth. Traditional religious and political groups, especially so
in North America, have in the past managed to normatively define the
framework of Sikh remembrance of 1984. In recent years, however, we
have seen some significant shifts in this regard, which is also substan-
tiated by research conducted in the United Kingdom (Singh 2013).
In the new popular performances of Sikh youth, the sonic reconfig-
uration of Sikh suffering appears to be tied to the reconfiguration of
diasporic youth cultures and their characteristic musical styles and aes-
thetics. The impact of this culture is something that even supporters
of the Khalistan movement cannot avert; to the contrary, they have
found in modern drum ‘n’ bass- or hip-hop-style productions a new
aesthetic medium.
The sounds that are attracting Sikh youth (such as hip-hop, rap, or
drum ‘n’ bass) are increasingly recognized for their capacity to instill
emotions that lend themselves to conveying political messages to the
youth. This might occur through the blending in of more traditional
folk tunes and aesthetic idioms associated with martyr songs with the
new urban sound forms. Kalra and Nijhawan (2007) have argued
in a detailed analysis of these musical ventures that music producers
and consumers have been quite successful in creating new venues to
share in sonic pleasure or rasa among those who are already politically
involved or sympathetic. In fact, diasporic Sikh music productions
today allow those with sympathies for the political struggle safe access
to the sounds associated with hip-hop and bhangra. What is “cool”
about rasa in this context is that it allows subverting identificatory
politics as far as the association between sounds and particular youth
subcultures is concerned. Nonetheless, this is only half the story. For
the story of diasporic rasa is also the story of the displacement of
stigmatized social memories and the sacrifice of those social modes of
belonging that do not neatly fit anymore, especially when they subvert
the desire for purified identity by those on the track of social upward
mobility.
Coolitude Rasa
Rasa can be translated as the “juice” or aesthetic essence of Indian
aesthetic theory and was originally developed by Bharata Muni
in the ancient dramaturgical treatise Natya Shastra (Ram 2000,
266; Schechner 1981, 100; Wulff 1986, 675; see also Chapter 3).
As argued by Kalpana Ram (2000, 266) in an article on diasporic
Bharata Natyam dance performance, the Natya Shastra inverts a Pla-
tonic ideal that judges an artwork by its resemblance to an original,
instead offering an aesthetics in which art “surpass[es] the muddied
flux of everyday experience” to arrive at an essence that is mutually
savored by performers and spectators. As the more literal meaning
of rasa suggests, the senses are key to this theory, and, indeed, a
performance is successful only when it evokes an aesthetic response
in the listening, viewing, feeling, dancing rasika. We explored above
how rasa circulates on the Internet by enabling a sonic pleasure that
mediates affective engagement with images and subverts apparent
semiotic contradictions between image, text, and sound. Our final
examples address the remembering and forgetting of diasporic suf-
fering through performing bodies engaged in the live production of
rasa. As Scheper-Hughes and Lock have argued, affect is the thread
that brings together the individual body of embodied experience, the
social body that operates as a symbol, and the body politic of discipline
and identification (cf. Wolputte 2004, 254). Rasa is a theory of affect
enlivened through bodies and sensory experience but understood
through metaphor, making it a rich tool for exploring the social forma-
tion of subjectivity. Although it can be communicated in images and
through solitary encounters, the rasa ideal is an immediate interac-
tion between the performer and rasika. The discourse of rasa assumes
co-savoring, but in diasporas formed through colonialism, nationalist
violence, or slavery, conflict and trauma are painful ingredients in the
shared memories negotiated through art.
We bring Khal Torabully’s theory of “coolitude” (Bragard 2005;
Carter and Torabully 2002) in dialogue with rasa to think through
how social memories of labor migration trauma are negotiated in
performance. Torabully’s coolitude deliberately avoids the ethnicist
associations of the artistic movements of negritude and creolité that
had left diasporic Indians feeling somewhat “at sea.” “Coolie” was a
racial slur used in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to refer to
indentured laborers from Asia employed in European colonies, and
continues to be used derogatorily in reference to people of Asian
descent. Because there were also Portuguese, Chinese, and other
coolies, coolitude speaks more to the structural conditions of labor
migration than to ethnic identity.17 Torabully argued that the abo-
lition of slavery forever linked the histories of diasporic Africans and
Indians, positioning coolitude as a middle ground between the trauma
and hybridity models introduced at the beginning of this chapter.
Coolitude also engages with the non-dit, the unspoken speech, the
silence and loss that accompanied the Indian labor diaspora, both as a
strategy of self/social-defense and as an unwanted effect of the trauma
of harsh labor. This point resonates with Gilroy’s (1993, 201) discus-
sion of post-slavery cultural production that “seems to make a cultural
decision not to transmit details of the ordeal of slavery openly in story
and song.” In this section, we address what is not spoken as a response
to trauma, lingering on how vocal style stealthily generates rasas of

ambivalent belonging.
Our comments on the rasa of coolitude derive from fieldwork
with Indo-Caribbeans in Minneapolis, USA, a twice-migrant (Bhachu
1985) community for whom “home” has many associations and
whose histories of travel include multiple settlings. The 1960s and
1970s saw mass migration of Indo-Caribbeans to Canada, the United
States, and Britain in search of new economic opportunities and to
escape the violence accompanying the politicization of ethnic identi-
ties (Vertovec 2000, 110–111). As in the YouTube videos discussed
above, suffering and oppression are rarely invoked explicitly in Indo-
Caribbean American musical performances of today, though such
songs were still performed in the Caribbean in the 1960s.18 It would
be impossible to identify definite causes for the relative absence of
musics of suffering in a twice-diasporic community with a long history
of labor injustice, but discourses surrounding performance suggest
that delicate negotiations of class, ethnic identity, and relationship to
the homeland are at least part of the story.
Most Indo-Caribbean American music today is associated with
momentous or celebratory occasions, and indenture is mentioned only
obliquely through jokes during the services at the Indo-Caribbean
Hindu temples in Minneapolis, at the cultural shows organized by
these temples, and at local chutney concerts. These coolie-themed
comedy skits are based on stereotypic tropes of coolies as uneducated
country bumpkins who drink excessively, evoking uncomfortable
memories of prejudice while also using humor to cast the urban,
twice-migrant viewers as decidedly unlike the stereotypic “coolie.”
Though song lyrics rarely engage in serious ways with the traumatic
past of indenture, collective memories of suffering continue to be
negotiated through voice and song style, and discourses about voice
are at some level about being or not being a coolie. As Torabully
articulates, collective trauma is often met with silence, but in the
Indo-Caribbean community, while referential speech is rarely about
indenture, metaphorical speech and voice as sound and sensation are
far from quiet.
At several points during Sunday services at Minneapolis Indo-
Caribbean Hindu temples, the priest asks members of the congre-
gation known to sing to take the microphone to sing a devotional
song. On most Sundays, two song styles can be heard: the Bhojpuri
style19 and the filmi style. Except for some subtle differences in rhythm
and instrumentation, the Bhojpuri style is similar to what one might
hear in Bhojpuri-speaking regions of rural north India. Like north
Indian group song, this style is performed using a strident vocal tim-
bre and minimal melisma, and most songs employ a two-part sthai
(lower refrain) and antara (higher verse) form. The vocalist is accom-
panied by dholak, harmonium, and dhantal, a metal pole idiophone
that is ubiquitous only among East Indians in Trinidad and Guyana
(Manuel 2000, 38–39). The second style is inspired by the aesthetics
of Hindi film music, and, indeed, bhajans from films are a standard
part of the Sunday service repertoire. This style is characterized by
high tessituras (at least for women, who are the main performers of
this style at Minneapolis temples), a light, thin timbre, and ample use
of the melisma of north Indian solo vocal genres. Hindi film songs’
studio-produced, closed, linear forms provide a contrast to the open-
ended performances in the Bhojpuri style and most other north Indian
live vocal music. Some singers at Indo-Caribbean temples perform as
close to the film song original as possible, while others improvise their
own phrasing.
In various contexts, and for different reasons, the core temple
singers all expressed a preference for the filmi style over Indo-
Caribbean genres and styles, and, in some cases, made the claim that
the filmi style is inherently more pleasing to members of the mandir.20
One young singer who performs with the big chutney and soca acts
that travel through Minneapolis and New York said she prefers the
filmi bhajans she sings in the temple because of their devotional texts
and contexts. Another singer positioned the Bhojpuri style as a past
against which her own style represented an improvement, metaphor-
ically describing the older style as “unpolished” or “rough” and the
newer style as “sweet.” She never explicitly identified her own style as
filmi, though she cited Lata Mangeshkar, Anuradha Paudwal, and Alka
Yagnik (all playback singers) as her major influences. When I (Anna)
referred to the Bhojpuri style as “older,” a third singer gently cor-
rected me, referring to the filmi songs learned from cassettes as “more
authentic” because they are from India. When singers reminisced
about rural lives they remembered, they talked about mothers and
older female relatives who sang in a rural style, but for those who
were upwardly mobile, these memories aligned with a past in need
of improvement. Rural song in India is coded as “authentic” in the
nationalist and post-nationalist eras, but the opposite seems to be the
case for Indo-Caribbeans in the United States. Indenture and rural
life are so entangled with one another and with Indo-Caribbean polit-
ical marginalization that many temple singers choose to avoid singing
rural songs altogether, looking instead toward the “authentic” and
also urban sounds of Bollywood while avoiding the painful past of
indenture.
Several people at Minneapolis temples expressed pride in the com-

pliments they received from Indian immigrants on their singing or
pronunciation, which they had painstakingly learned from Hindi film
music recordings. To sing songs in a style shared with singers from
India is to bring India into one’s own body and into religious rituals
in which rasa is shared with co-participants. Indo-Caribbean tem-
ple singers employ Hindi film music as a ritual resource that serves
rather than replaces face-to-face interaction. In so doing, they are priv-
ileging identification with the global Indian diaspora rather than the
Indo-Caribbean branch and its traumatic memories. This reframing
is a strategy of the non-dit of coolitude, but at a different register
than that of the Bhojpuri style, which proudly embraces the creative
memories of song enabled by the unspeakable labor migration and
referenced obliquely through coolie humor. The laughter and song of
coolitude rasa activates memory, forgetting, and creative negotiations
of diasporic belonging.
Concluding Remarks
In this chapter, we have interpreted the existing conjunctions between
(popular) art and (representations of) suffering in Sikh and Indo-
Carribean diaspora contexts. In our interpretations we have been
guided by an inquiry into the paradoxes of modern aesthetic expe-
riences, which without doubt have reached diasporic people around
the globe. In doing so, but with an eye toward the more com-
plex cultural translations and modifications of aesthetic experience
in our current times, we have suggested that the clear-cut rupture
with mimesis as outlined in much of contemporary Western art the-
ory remains problematic. As a matter of fact, all of our examples
indicate that the aesthetics of suffering in the South Asian diaspora
is enlivened through a wide range of mimetic and generic conven-
tions that connect individuals with specific pasts and presents, and
that these narratives may or may not be translated through a Western
discourse of collective suffering. The spectrum of possibilities include
Indo-Caribbean slideshows of indenture that render collective memo-
ries specific while de-emphasizing hardship, which contrasts with the
Singh Twins’ British diasporic perspective on violent trauma that fur-
ther lends itself to translational contexts of universal suffering. Our
approach differs from classical diasporic theorization by shifting focus
from the traumatic past to the artistic renderings of that past in
current conditions that continue to reverberate with its aftershocks.
In some cases, these pasts are elided in community memory with more
recent hardships or less difficult migrations, and they always emerge in
contexts of dialogue, creolization, or conflict with other communities

and cultural discourses.
By comparing these examples we have intended to move beyond
the classical comparison of case studies, as we are not trying to iden-
tify specific causes for variation as much as we are using these cases
as a cautionary move against engaging in broad generalization from
a narrow regional or generic perspective. Instead, we have related
the various recorded, live, visual, and audio examples, which emerge
in different (yet at least remotely related) diasporic conditions, to
generate arguments about the aesthetics of suffering without overem-
phasizing the characteristics of one sensory modality over others. This
approach not only resonates with the aesthetic theory of rasa for-
mulated in the Indian subcontinent, but it also takes seriously the
intermodality characteristic of diasporic arts in the era of the Internet
and international air travel.
Notes
1. Floya Anthias (1998) has early on noticed the conceptual flaws of
concepts of diaspora that are entirely arranged according to types of
migration motivations. This often amounts to the silencing of gender-
and class-specific narratives and their intersection.
2. Stuart Hall (1990) famously described the three sets of traces avail-
able for Caribbean diasporic identity as “Présence Africaine,” “Présence
Européenne,” and “Présence Americaine,” in which the third trace rep-
resents the emergence of diasporic consciousness through the collision
and hybridization of multiple cultural forces.
3. However, a progressive term such as “creolization” can in its common
usage privilege Afro-Creole identity concepts that ignore or con-
sume Indian and other cultural constellations in the Caribbean (Khan
2004; Mehta 2004, 7–8; Stewart 2007, 4) that have been revitalized
in recent decades of cultural and religious transnationalism. Dougla
identity (mixed African and Indian), for instance, is neither accepted
in the Caribbean as a central part of creolization discourse nor is its
emancipatory liminality recognized by East Indian Hindus, despite
some theoretical attempts to claim the power of dougla aesthetics
(Mehta 2004, 14–17; Puri 2004; Stewart 2007, 4).
4. Art theorists such as Bennett stress the boundary-crossing work of
contemporary proponents of trauma art in their attempt to break the
distance of viewing suffering in a simultaneous attempt to foreclose
any possible appropriation of the victim for consumption purposes.
Yet it is interesting that this discussion is characterized by reference to
particular forms of (post-)avant-garde art and by a lack of reference
to the culturally embedded art forms and sensory practices that many
anthropological and sociological studies have prioritized.
5. Singh and Singh (2006).
6. Darshan Tatla (2005) recognizes a dearth of Punjabi vernacular
expression in art and literature on this particular issue. Tatla’s call for
a monumentalization of Sikh suffering emerges from his grassroots
understanding of the disparity between political rhetoric and everyday
life in Punjab. Yet, his analogies to Holocaust memorials in this regard
are clearly driven by a discourse that is firmly embedded in contem-
porary minority discourse in the Sikh diaspora, specifically in North
America.
7. See http://www.singhtwins.co.uk/1984.html (accessed Decem-
ber 16, 2013).
8. See, for instance, Fenech (2000).
9. John Scoble’s account of the injustices of Indian indenture was
published in London in 1840 as a pamphlet: see Scoble (1840).
10. Trinidad and Tobago National Library and Information System
Authority, “Indian Arrival Day.” http://www.nalis.gov.tt/Research/
SubjectGuide/IndianArrivalDay/tabid/162/Default.aspx (accessed
December 16, 2013).
11. Videos in the first category are made with handheld cameras from a
seat in the audience, a perspective and medium that has a long life out-
side of the YouTube.com context. The soundtracked slideshow, on the
other hand, is a home studio art form with pieces created specifically
for dissemination on YouTube though some YouTube slideshows were
first presented at a live venue before being posted to YouTube.com
from images and sounds found online.
12. Barry Desaine, “In Memory of the Jahagis” https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=Mfj_4Nj5w6g (accessed March 14, 2014); Jonathan
Budhram, 170th Anniversary of Indo-Caribbeans (No longer avail-
able on Youtube. Now available at http://www.dailymotion.com/
video/x3z7to_170th-anniversary-of-indo-caribbean_news (accessed
March 14, 2014); East Indian Pioneers of the Caribbean by
“hisdreams.” <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpxCZRIIJTI>
(accessed March 14, 2014).
13. We can assume that art theorists such as Jacques Rancière (2004) had
something broader in mind in theorizing “art” rather than a single art
form, and “sense” rather than any one sense, but the examples he for
instance provides in his widely read Distribution of the Senses are, like
in other contemporary treatises, of a particular art (usually visual) and
a particular sense (usually sight).
14. The text of the psalm, which would not have been understood by
children at his school, is given in the description accompanying the
video: “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall
abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the LORD, He
is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust.”
15. When Lions Roar II, YouTube video, 3:16, posted by AkakaAmazing.
http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=NVy_IRJYO5I (accessed June
16, 2010).
The statements read by the students are likely translations from the
official testimonies or first information reports (FIRs) that social
activists recorded in the aftermath of that event. For a more detailed
analysis, see Nijhawan (2014).
16. Thanks to Mark Nye for his analytical thoughts on this segment.
17. Transit, as Torabully says, was traumatic for Indian indentured labor-
ers not only physically, but also spiritually and socially, since crossing
the kala pani signaled ritual defilement and loss of social status (Carter
and Torabully 2002, 1–16). But the ocean space is also a metaphor
for the myriad changes that make the India that was abandoned never
again accessible, even as it speaks to the journeys of cultural exchange
between peoples forced together under colonial regimes.
18. In the 1960s, a substantial repertoire of Caribbean songs about
indenture in a north Indian style was still in circulation, and about
45 of them were recorded in the field by B. V. Lal and published
in the Journal of American Folklore (1964). These songs addressed
deceit of recruiters, the force used to get people on boats in India,
loss of caste, pain of separation, resentment at being called coolies,
harassment, whippings, harsh labor conditions, strikes and riots, and
the disruption of social norms (Vatuk 1964). We have not encoun-
tered this repertoire during our recent research, and if such songs are
still performed in the twenty-first century, they are certainly not per-
formed to the same extent as songs of celebration, devotion, or life
cycle ritual.
19. This is our own term. Indo-Caribbeans in Minneapolis used myriad
terms and descriptors to refer to this style.
20. The preference for filmi songs does not appear to be ubiquitous
in Indo-Caribbean temples, and singers at the other main Indo-
Caribbean temples in Minneapolis use the filmi style less often.
References
Anthias, Floya. “Evaluating Diaspora: Beyond Ethnicity.” Sociology 32, no. 3
(1998): 557–580.
Axel, Brian. The Nations Tortured Body. Durham, NC, & London: Duke
University Press, 2001.
Axel, Brian. “The Diasporic Sublime: Sikh Martyrs, Internet Mediations, and
the Question of the Unimaginable.” Sikh Formations 1, no. 1 (2007):
127–154.
Bennett, Jill. Empathic Vision. Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Bhachu, Parminder. Twice Migrants: East African Sikh Settlers in Britain.

London & New York: Tavistock Publications, 1985.
Bragard, Veronique. “Transoceanic Echoes: Coolitude and the Work of the
Mauritian Poet Khal Torabully.” International Journal of Francophone
Studies 8, no. 2 (2005): 219–233.
Carter, Marina and Torabully, Khal. Coolitude. London: Anthem Press, 2002.
Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas. An Introduction. New York: Routledge,
2008.
Das, Veena. Life and Words. Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary.
Dudley, Shannon. Music from Behind the Bridge: Steelband Aesthetics and
Politics in Trinidad and Tobago. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Fassin, Didier and Rechtman, Richard. The Empire of Trauma. An Inquiry
into the Conditions of Victimhood. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2009.
Fenech, Lou. Martyrdom in the Sikh Tradition. Playing the Game of Love.
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Boston:
Harvard University Press, 1993.
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Identity: Community,
Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, 222–237. London:
Lawrence and Wishart, 1990.
Hall, Stuart. “Creolization, Diaspora, and Hybridity in the Context of Glob-
alization.” In Créolité and Creolization Documenta 11P_llatform3, edited
by Okwui Enwezor, Carlos Basualdo, Ute Meta Bauer, Suzan Ghez, Sarat
Maharaj, et al., 185–198. Kassel: Documenta, 2003.
Hannerz, Ulf. “The World in Creolization.” Africa 57, no. 4 (1987):
546–559.
Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory. Writing and Culture after
the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
Jones, Graham M. and Schieffelin, Bambie. “Talking Text and Talking
Back: ‘My BFF Jill’ from Boob Tube to YouTube.” Journal of Computer-
Mediated Communication 14, no. 4 (2009): 1050–1079.
Kalra, Virinder and Nijhawan, Michael. “Cultural, Linguistic and Politi-
cal Translations: Dhadi Urban Music.” Sikh Formations 3, no. 1 (2007):
67–80.
Khan, Aisha. “Sacred Subversions? Syncretic Creoles, the Indo-Caribbean,
and ‘Culture’s In-Between’.” Radical History Review 89 (2004): 165–184.
Kleinman, Arthur, Das, Veena, and Lock, Margaret. Social Suffering.
Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory. The Transformation of American
Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2004.
Lipsitz, George. Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the
Poetics of Place. New York: Verso, 1994.
Mandair, Arvind. Religion and the Specter of the West. Sikhism, India,
Postcoloniality and the Politics of Translation. New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 2009.
Manuel, Peter. East Indian Music in the West Indies: Tan-Singing, Chutney,
and the Making of Indo-Caribbean Culture (Studies in Latin American and
Caribbean Music Series). Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.
Mehta, Brinda. Diasporic Dis(Locations): Indo-Caribbean Women Writers
Negotiate the “Kala Pani.” Kingston: University of West Indies Press, 2004.
Mitchell, W. J. T. What Do Pictures Want? The Life and Love of Images.
Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005.
Nijhawan, Michael. “1984 and the Diasporic Politics of Aesthetics: Reconfig-
urations and New Constellations among Toronto Sikh Youth.” Diaspora:
A Journal for Transnational Studies 17, no. 2 (2014): 196–220.
Nijhawan, Michael and Kamal, Arora. “Lullabies for Broken Children:
Diasporic Citizenship and the Dissenting Voices of Young Sikhs in Canada.”
Sikh Formations 9, no. 3 (2013): 299–321.
Niranjana, Tejaswini. Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between
India and Trinidad. Durham, NC, & London: Duke University Press,
2006.
Palmié, Stephan. “Creolization and Its Discontents.” Annual Review of
Anthropology 35 (2006): 433–456.
Puri, Shalini. The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism,
and Cultural Hybridity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Ram, Kalpana. “Dancing the Past into Life: The Rasa, Nrtta, and Raga
of Immigrant Existence.” Australian Journal of Anthropology 11, no. 3
(2000): 261–273.
Ramnarine, Tina. Creating Their Own Space: The Development of an Indian-
Caribbean Musical Tradition. Kingston: University of the West Indies
Press, 2001.
Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics, translated by Gabriel Rockhill.
New York: Continuum, 2004.
Salvato, Nicholas. “Out of Hand: YouTube Amateurs and Professionals.”
TDR: The Drama Review 53, no. 3 (2009): 67–83.
Schechner, Richard. “Performers and Spectators Transported and Trans-
formed.” Kenyon Review 3, no. 4 (1981): 83–113.
Scoble, John. “Hill Coolies: Brief Exposure of the Deplorable Condi-
tion of the Hill Coolies, in British Guiana and Mauritius, and of
the Nefarious Means by Which They Were Induced to Resort to
These Colonies” (1840). http://www.guyanaca.com/features/indianim_
toguyana.html (accessed September 12, 2010).
Singh, Amrit Kaur and Singh, Rabindra Kaur (dirs. and prods.). Nineteen
Eighty-Four and the Via Dolorosa Project. DVD, 23 min., 2006.
Singh, Jaspal Naveel. “ ‘How Many of Us Remember 1984?’ Narrating Mas-
culinity and Militancy in the Khalistani Rap Bricolage.” Sikh Formations 9,
no. 3 (2013): 339–360.
Slobin, Mark. “The Destiny of Diapora in Ethnomusicology.” In The Cultural

Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, edited by Martin Clayton, Trevor
Herbert, and Richard Middleton, 96–106. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Stewart, Charles. “Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory.”
In Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory, edited by Charles Stewart,
1–25. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007.
Sumera, Matthew. “War’s Audiovisions: Music, Affect, and the Repre-
sentation of Contemporary Conflict.” PhD dissertation, University of
Wisconsin-Madison, 2013.
Tatla, Darshan Singh. “The Morning After: Trauma, Memory and the Sikh
Predicament since 1984.” Sikh Formations 2 no. 1 (2006): 57–88.
Taussig, Michael. “What Do Drawings Want?” Culture, Theory and Critique
50, no. 2–3 (2009): 263–274.
Vatuk, Ved Prakash. “Protest Songs of East Indians in British Guiana.”
Journal of American Folklore 77, no. 305 (1964): 224–235.
Vertovec, Steven. The Hindu Diaspora: Comparative Patterns (Global
Diasporas). New York & London: Routledge, 2000.
Wolputte, Steven Van. “Hang On to Your Self: Of Bodies, Embodiment, and
Selves.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004): 251–269.
Wulff, Donna. “Religion in a New Mode: The Convergence of the Religious
and the Aesthetic in Medieval India.” Journal of the American Academy of
Religion 54, no. 4 (1986): 673–688.
Chapter 8
The Art of Inflicting

Suffering: Animals and
S p e c t at o r s i n t h e C r u c i b l e o f
Contemporary Art
Nathalie Heinich
The nature of contemporary art is to transgress the frontier, estab-

lished by tradition and common sense, between art and nonart. In this
context, “common sense” refers to the most common conceptions
of art, considered self-evident by most people, and “most people”
can be defined as anyone whose opinions are not published in paid
outlets, and if they are, it is only on an exceptional basis, such as in
letters to the editor. “Most people” therefore does not include special-
ists, experts, editorialists, or professional critics, who write columns in
newspapers and specialized magazines, or books that are published
and distributed through bookstores.
The limits of the usual categories in contemporary art were first
tested collectively at the aesthetic frontiers of good taste, expectations
of beauty, and even the very definition of what constitutes a work
of art. Next, the frontiers between art and the everyday world were
crossed, with objects taken directly from the street or from daily life;
then on to museums, where non-transportable or ephemeral objects
were put on display; and the frontiers of authenticity, with objects
that do not submit to any criteria of originality or an author’s sig-
nature; and finally on to the limits of legality, with proposed works
208 N at h a l i e H e i n i c h
that disregard the right to privacy, property laws, respect for persons
or copyrights. Inevitably, this series of transgressions has also met up
with moral frontiers.1
Moral Frontiers, Suffering, and Sensitivity

In the attempt to challenge moral frontiers, the artists’ first targets
were the norms of sexual morality, with works that could be described
as indecent or even pornographic. Along with sexuality, religion was a
favorite target, with artists producing work that could be considered
blasphemous or sacrilegious.2 In a slightly less spectacular fashion, the
moral interdiction against inflicting suffering is also being transgressed
with increasing frequency.
The scenario of inflicting suffering on a human person exists in con-
temporary art only with regard to the artist’s self-inflicted suffering,
“out of love for art.” These experiences of suffering involve pain, such
as in Gina Pane’s famous performance where she scales a ladder, bare-
foot and barehanded, with rungs of pointed steel studs; danger, such
as in Petr Štembera’s attempt to graft a rose to his arm; or degrada-
tion, such as in Paul McCarthy’s “Class Fool” performance, where
he publicly covers himself with bodily filth and self-humiliation, mak-
ing his own person an object of disgust.3 However, cases of suffering
inflicted on animals rather than on humans are increasingly common
(Heinich 2006b); in the hierarchy of beings, they appear to occupy a
position midway between “things,” which do not feel, and “persons,”
who are recognized as having a strong capacity for feeling.4
The nature of human feelings is that they are experienced not only
on behalf of the person feeling them, but also on behalf of others
who are suffering, through the ability to empathize: this is why the
“spectacle” of suffering is a trial in itself for observers, whose level
of distress varies depending on the identity of the sufferer. This is
also the reason behind strong axiological constraints and for standards
(legal or moral) that forbid or at least strongly regulate both the act
of causing suffering to another living being, as well as the right to
turn suffering into a show.5 The video Don’t Trust Me (2007) by the
French artist Adel Abdessemed, showing various quadrupeds (goat,
ewe, fawn, cow, horse) being killed with a sledgehammer, was thus
prohibited or threatened with censorship in several countries due to
the legal prohibition against showing animal slaughter.6
Even if we are unable to fully investigate the reality of physi-
cal and/or moral suffering experienced by animals when they are
used as materials of artistic creation, there are nevertheless abundant
A n i m a l s & S p e c t at o r s i n C o n t e m p o r a r y A r t 209
testimonies of moral suffering endured by some humans who have

witnessed these spectacles. These human witnesses have expressed
indignation, which is an expression of suffering related to the trans-
gression of a cherished value. These testimonies of indignation will be
analyzed here with regard to the use of living animals in contemporary
art: they are remarkable empirical materials for developing a sociology
of values.
Developing a Sociology of Values

The “values sociology” that we envision is descriptive and empirical,
and fundamentally based on a comprehensive and qualitative anal-
ysis of value judgments made in real situations, or reflections on
an experience.7 Therefore, the values are not considered as entities
requiring discovery through speculation, but as belonging to the par-
ticipants’ social constructs, and as such, they can be described through
investigation.
Values sociology is far removed from what is sometimes referred
to as “moral sociology,” a normative sociology that prescribes what
the values must be, and dictates the “moral common sense” that a
society needs. In our view, this type of sociology is at a retrograde
stage and should no longer be called “sociology”; rather, it should
be called “moral philosophy.”8 In our view, empirical investigations of
values are the only ones that correspond to a study that is specifically
sociological, once we have done away with normativity and theoretical
speculation; it is also pragmatic, since it is designed to be based on
actions in real-world situations.
Even in the origins of our field, the many obstacles encountered
when stating this aim are the symptom of sociology’s obsession with
normativity. Sociology does not have a plethora of models allowing us
to treat values as a subject of empirical research. Nonetheless, the issue
of values is discussed by a few of the great authors in the sociological
tradition, such as Weber or Durkheim on religion,9 or Elias when dis-
cussing attitudes and the idea of commitment,10 and Goffman on the
presentation of self.11 But it is seldom dealt with as a specific theme of
reflection, and even more rarely as a subject to investigate, as shown
in the cases of Simmel12 and Parsons,13 who approach the question of
values from an abstract point of view, as it fits into a general theory
of socialization or action. But nothing is mentioned about the pre-
cise nature of the different values that are referred to according to the
contexts, the categories of the participants, and the objects on which
judgments are rendered.
In the most recent generation in particular, the attempt to take

this issue seriously has been largely eclipsed by the dominance of neo-
Marxist approaches, which immediately reduce values to “interests,”
so that any time a general value is raised, it is immediately brought
down to an ideological level, meaning that it is considered to be
an illusion at best, and at worst as a disguise for private interests.
This is what emerges from the sociological paradigm that has become
dominant in France: Pierre Bourdieu’s paradigm discredits values—
aesthetic, ethical, civic, and others—and reduces them to interests,
which then become the foundation for analysis.14 The critique of
commonsense conceptions and the values invoked by participants in
particular—especially when they are considered to be “dominant”—
is such an important plank of analysis for Bourdieu that apparently it
does not even need to be fully elucidated and justified.15 This critical
plank is supported by an aim that is exclusively explanatory, seeking
to reveal the external causalities in the operations of evaluation, but
thereby undermining the aim to understand and elucidate the reasons
used by the participants themselves in justifying their arguments.
To counter this explanatory reductionism, the sociology of values
we are putting forward aims to restore the importance that partici-
pants attribute to the question of values, and to elucidate the implicit
logic it obeys without requiring that the participants necessarily be
conscious of the axiological model they use when forming their opin-
ions. Empirical analysis of these judgments is necessary in this type of
program through various levels of modeling that bring different cat-
egories of resources to the evaluation process. By moving from the
specific to the general, we first of all determine the “possibilities”—
affordances, in Gibson’s vocabulary16 —offered to the perception, such
as symmetric composition; then we move on to evaluation criteria used
by the participants—such as symmetry, balance, harmony; followed by
the values themselves, for example, beauty; and then by values regis-
ters (in this case we are referring to an aesthetic values register); and
finally on to values systems (for example, an individual values system
as opposed to a community values system). This chapter will focus on
the interface between values and values registers.
Moving from Values to Values Registers

Participants’ evaluations (“it’s beautiful”) operate at the level of values
(e.g., beauty), which themselves emerge from more general categories
that we suggest be called “values registers” (the aesthetic register).
Values registers are the frameworks that enable participants to agree
on which criteria are relevant in appreciating an object: for example,

the criterion of symmetry will easily be accepted in the aesthetic regis-
ter when judging a building façade in an architectural contest, whereas
the criterion of the socioeconomic background of the architect, or the
culinary talents of his wife, are not considered to be relevant.17 How-
ever, socioeconomic background would be an appropriate criterion
in the “civic” values register of an affirmative action program, and
culinary expertise would be relevant in the “aesthesics” values reg-
ister when evaluating the success of a dinner party. This division of
criteria and registers may appear self-evident, but self-evidence is pre-
cisely what makes the “moral common sense” or, more specifically,
the axiological grammar agreed upon by participants in a common
culture; complexity is not perceived unless it is disturbed and ceases
to be consensual. This is typically the case with people’s reactions to
contemporary art.
To reach this level of analysis we are not led by the objects them-
selves anymore (e.g., popular music instead of academic painting,
regional literature instead of contemporary dance) or by the countless
quarrels over taste that punctuate cultural history; instead, we need to
be guided by the controversies on the nature of the objects and con-
sequently on the attitude we should adopt toward them. Besides the
fact that these controversies publicly expose issues that normally are
kept under the cover of self-evidence, they rapidly reach a high level
of publicity that guarantees researchers are not simply dealing with
subjective disagreements, that is, individuals “appreciating” or “not
enjoying” a given work of art; rather, this concerns objective tensions
between the representational and axiological frameworks emerging
from a common culture and a collective consensus.
Whereas values-related conflicts enable discussion and debate (e.g.,
between those who find a given object beautiful or ugly), the conflicts
regarding values registers only result in more conflict, or disagree-
ment18 (e.g., between the person who finds the object “beautiful”
and the one who finds it “immoral”): this indicates an inability to
agree not only on the qualities of the object, but, at a higher level, on
its axiological nature—indicating that there is conflict over which eval-
uations are relevant in analyzing the object. Under certain conditions,
participants are able to explain the values they are using, but when it
comes to conflict involving values registers, the categories are more
abstract and can be reconstructed by way of a targeted analysis of the
arguments produced in controversial situations that are impossible to
resolve. A good example of this is the corrida: the endless conflicts of
values registers around this activity are illustrated by the fact that the
different camps do not disagree either on the criteria or on the values.

Those who find it immoral (on the ethical register) do not call it ugly
(on the aesthetic register); instead, they claim that beauty is not a rele-
vant criterion in this context. Similarly, those who find it beautiful or a
vehicle of culture do not defend it for its morality; rather, they defend
it on behalf of its symbolic value for humanity (hermeneutic register),
which is more important in their view than the suffering inflicted on
an animal.19
To date, we have identified the following 12 values registers:
aesthetic (referring to art or beauty), ethical (referring to moral-
ity, or consideration for others), aesthesic (referring to pleasurable
feelings or sensations), hermeneutic (meaning or signification), rep-
utational (renown or honor), authenticity (referring to integrity or
purity), economic (monetary value), civic (referring to general pub-
lic interest), domestic (referring to familiarity or close relations),
functional (referring to utility or convenience), legal (referring to
legality or conformity to rules), and epistemic (referring to knowledge
and truth).20 These categories are provisional: the field of research
on values registers is in progression, and categories are updated
pending study and testing in other fields. The categories are there-
fore open and other registers may be added; this is even more
likely since they are not produced from theoretical models based
on hypothesis and deductive methods. On the contrary, the cate-
gories are constructed using an inductive process based on empirical
evidence.21
Evidently, the goal of exposing these argumentative strategies is
not to take sides on behalf of any one of the registers in particular:
our objective is simply to reveal all of the axiological resources that are
available to participants, and to understand the logic involved. Using
this perspective, we will examine the question of animal suffering in
contemporary art.
Animals, Dead and Alive

There is a long-standing tradition of using dead animals in con-
temporary art: for example, in a famous 1965 performance at the
Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf, Joseph Beuys explained painting to
the corpse of a hare22 ; in 1987, Jana Sterbak sewed beefsteaks into the
shape of a dress23 ; during the 1990s, Damien Hirst displayed the bod-
ies of a sheep, a shark, and a calf in transparent containers filled with
formaldehyde; in the 1995 biennial celebration of contemporary art in
Lyon, Annette Messager’s installation featured stuffed birds mounted

on pikes; and Maurizio Cattelan once exhibited a stuffed and mounted
squirrel.24
In addition to dead animals, live animals have also been used in
contemporary art. A partial list of these exhibits includes the follow-
ing: the Greek artist Jannis Kounellis using horses at an art gallery in
Rome; a parrot exhibited in 1967 in another gallery by Kounellis;
Vostell’s geese at the Paris Musée d’Art Moderne in 1978; Klaus
Rinke’s installation of carp fish in tables that had been transformed
into aquariums; Nam June Paik’s fish as part of a video installation;
the Chinese artist Xu Bing’s 1994 installation featuring pigs with let-
ters printed over their bodies mating in a sty filled with books; and
Wim Delvoye’s installations with tattooed pigs.25
Even more radically, there are very exceptional cases of animals
being killed in the process of creating an installation or a performance:
as an example, poultry were slaughtered during a public performance
in the early 1960s by Viennese actionists Hermann Nitsch and Otto
Mühl, who mixed the blood from the poultry with fecal matter
and spread it over the nude bodies of several assistants.26 A gen-
eration later, a similar scenario was proposed—but ultimately not
exhibited—by the artist Huang Yong Ping at the Centre Pompidou
in Paris. This case invites us to take a closer look (see Heinich 1998).
The Huang Yong Ping Affair

On November 8, 1994, at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris,
the “Hors limites” exhibition was inaugurated, albeit amputated by
one piece: Huang Yong Ping had planned to install a turtle-shaped
vivarium entitled “Le Théâtre du Monde” (“Theater of the world”),
containing snakes, spiders, lizards, scorpions, millipedes, centipedes,
and cockroaches, along with water for them to drink. The decision to
remove this work from the installation was made the day before the
vernissage, after a rapidly mounted and intensely waged campaign by
animal rights activists (Heinich 1995a).
The campaign began on September 27, 1994, less than six weeks
prior to the planned inauguration date, with a petition created on
an initiative by security agents in Beaubourg who were “very firmly
opposed to a project which is a throwback to past days; at best it
reminds us of colonial exhibits and other popular ‘scientific’ exhi-
bitions which purported to be educational, and at worst it evokes
a Roman circus.” In response, the exhibition commissioner, upon
the request of administration, wrote a message, dated October 11,

explaining the project:
The aim of the work by Huang Yong Ping entitled Le Théâtre du Monde is to
philosophically symbolize the harmony necessary for the coexistence of races,
cultures and religions in spite of the violence, natures and cruelties typical
of life on earth. During the exhibition, the insects presented in the vivarium
organized by the Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping learn to live in the presence
of each other and organize a social life in spite of their contradictory natures:
the scorpions, millipedes, centipedes all learn to tolerate each others’ exis-
tence. They are fed using other insects such as cockroaches and beetles. The
vivarium is set up in a turtle-shaped table. The turtle is the Chinese symbol of
peace. Therefore, this is an activist artwork that encourages harmony among
races and cultures.
Alerted to the installation by the petition, several animal rights orga-

nizations mobilized their members to demonstrate, sign petitions,
and initiate legal action to block the installation. On the eve of the
vernissage, the French superior court (tribunal de grande instance)
was notified by one of the main animal rights associations in France,
the Société Nationale pour la Défense des Animaux, requesting that
it forbid the installation, on the basis that it would contravene French
law regarding cruelty inflicted on animals, voluntary attempts on ani-
mals’ lives, and games and attractions that could lead to cruelty to
animals. The court recused itself from the matter, declaring itself to
be administratively incompetent. However, that very day, the Centre
Pompidou’s authorization to show the exhibit was refused by the
Paris Prefecture, “in accordance with current laws on the presentation
of animals in a publicly accessible establishment”; in particular, the
refusal highlighted that the “species-specific environment was inade-
quate, displaying [the animals] in such a limited space would mean
that none of the species would be assured of having its own territory,”
and it also cited “the requirement of separating the species in this
exhibit set up with open compartments.”
The exhibition’s vernissage went ahead on November 8, but the
installation was reduced to an empty glass cage, accompanied by a dis-
play stand containing the letters of protest and the Centre Pompidou’s
response. The message, signed by the Centre’s president, the museum
director and the exhibition commissioner, specified that
. . . the Centre Georges Pompidou, in consideration of the legal edict, notes

the contradictions that exist between legitimate submission to the law and its
mission of presenting [artistic] creation. It regrets that in the ensuing debate,
the passion to protect certain animal species was greater than the passion to
defend the freedom of artistic creation. Art is not a feel-good enterprise. The
piece has therefore been withdrawn from the exhibition, but the structure has
been preserved. In light of the questions it raises on the nature of a work of
art, the artist’s freedom and the role of the museum, we believed it necessary
to present the public with the documents relating to the content of the work
and the debates it stimulated.
The phantom piece would go on to stimulate individuals to stake out

their positions in the exhibition’s guest book: it records protests echo-
ing the arguments of animal rights activists, as well as protests against
the protests. The anti-protest arguments were made either in sup-
port of the precedence of reality (should we also “forbid museums
of natural history, surgery or movies where animals die?”), to protest
censorship (“In the wake of Taslima Nasreen, enough of this!”), or
out of respect for the principle of considering humans to be more
important than animals. However, these opinions were systematically
contradicted by angry opponents. One woman visitor wrote:
the expression “freedom of expression” no longer has any meaning . . . so let’s

say we have the freedom to show, shout, put on a play about what we feel—
even if a few insects and other spiders lose a few feathers, they’re only inferior
beings, very low on the hierarchy of animal life, etc . . . [This is a] short petition
against the self-righteous and sanitizing totalitarianism of the SPA27 and other
animal handlers
to which someone else responded with: “inferior, eh!—your mother’s

a bitch!” Another visitor, arguing in defense of the forbidden artwork,
demonstrated a significant misunderstanding of the written descrip-
tion of the work: “Forbidding the exhibition of live insects by the
museum regulation is one thing . . . but dead insects? Why should Ping
be attacked for this?” To which a later visitor hurriedly replied: “They
are not dead insects!”
In an interview he gave following the dustup, the artist immedi-
ately dismissed the issue of sensitivity to suffering, by denying any
relevance to animals: “These principles of protection are applicable to
human beings and don’t have any meaning beyond the existence of
human beings.” Once it is assumed that the arguments used by oppo-
nents of the installation are without merit, he was able to hypothesize
about a hidden agenda, either a political one: “In this case, sanitary
reasons or animal protection issues were raised, but in the end, in a
more or less disguised fashion, this can be linked to political issues,
specifically the abuse of power”; or an aesthetic one: “Furthermore,
in my opinion the problem does not lie there, I think it relates more
to artistic creation itself.” Finally, he insists, rather classically, on the
critical virtues of contemporary art, so as to spin the conflict into a
positive experience: “The purpose of art is to disturb whenever possi-
ble, knowing that in any case, everything leaves a mark, with different
strengths of impact.”
In the triangle of interactions underlying contemporary art—the
artists’ proposals, the public’s reactions, and the institutions’ endorse-
ment of the artists and their works—only the two latter interactions
are evident in this polemical debate. On the issue of works of contem-
porary art that are contested, the problems of acceptability are less in
the works themselves than in their endorsement by artistic authorities,
which means that the artists are rarely confronted (if even they are
not explicitly exonerated from all wrongdoing) while the institutions
become the principal target of protest.
The Yukinori Yanagi Affair

Let us take a close look at another incident, this time in a North
American setting. The Yukinori Yanagi affair was examined in a com-
parative investigation of rejected works of contemporary art in France
and the United States, by a Franco-American study group.28 In the
Yukinori Yanagi affair, it would appear that the very idea of placing
insects on display caused a reaction of repulsion, situated somewhere
between disgust and awakened sensitivity to animal suffering.
“I hadn’t realized just how involved I felt in the animal rights move-
ment before seeing Campopiano’s installation. The ants look happy
enough, but the fish needs more room and the mice smell bad.” This
was the message left in the guest book in 1989 at the exhibition of
the List Visual Arts gallery in Boston, which featured live ants. Three
years later, at the Venice biennial in 1992, the Japanese artist Yukinori
Yanagi proposed an installation based on live ants, entitled the “World
Flag Ant Farm.” In this piece, the artist used 200 sand-filled, thin
Plexiglas boxes that contained colored sand, which represented the
world’s national flags. All of the transparent boxes that were installed
on a huge wall were connected by tubes, so that the ants could build
tunnels through the vast labyrinth and cut paths through the design
of the flags, thus suggesting a porousness of the system of national
borders and symbols.29
The installation was subjected to an investigation by the Italian
justice system to find out if the ants had “suffered in the name of
conceptual art,” at the instigation of an association of vegetarians
alerted by a visitor who had observed the presence of dead ants. They
accused the piece of being “totally anti-educational, because it did not

observe the required respect for nature and living creatures. The ants
died because their highly organized life system was disrupted.” The
same installation, presented in 1995 at the Wadsworth Atheneum in
Hartford, Connecticut, was subjected to severe criticism in a letter to
the editor of the local newspaper, entitled “FREE THE ANTS!”30
“Free the Ants!”
I sincerely wonder: how can so many supposedly intelligent people be so

insensitive to living creatures? What joy can there be in capturing ants in
Washington Square, taking them away from their natural habitat, and hav-
ing them run around on a piece of paper surrounded by metal barriers? Since
we have no way of communicating with the “Lord of the Ants,” or the slight-
est idea of the distress they endure, can we really justify using them in this
way? I have to remind you, artist Yukinori Yanagi, if you say the ants are your
best friends: nobody captures, torments and imprisons his friends. If the peo-
ple we consider to be enlightened on many issues cannot or will not stand up
against the exploitation of living creatures, then it’s because we have become
very shallow, insensitive and artificial. I don’t care about the intellectual back-
ground or the so-called deep artistic or political thinking that the artists,
commissioners, galleries or critics would like to project onto this piece. And
in taking this position, I don’t need to mention meat-eating, wearing leather
shoes, opening windows to let the flies out, squashing hornets for the ben-
efit of cats, going to the zoo, wearing fur or being anti-war. In my love for
contemporary art, I appreciate all systems that are free, undomesticated and
independent of human systems. This is why I join with everyone around the
world who says: “Free the ants!”
The Relevant Value Registers in the Protests

In both the French and American situations, opponents of the works
of art listed the real or imagined suffering of the animals, and the neg-
ative feelings they stirred up—compassion, disgust, and indignation.
Human suffering in response to animal suffering is transformed into
a denunciation of those who inflict cruelty, or who are complicit in
these deeds. Denunciation is further supported by claiming the values
that are considered as being undermined by these deeds.
If the issue is cruel treatment of another living being, we should
not be surprised that the principal value claimed in this situation is
a moral one: the refusal to sit back when it comes to sadistic or
voyeuristic impulses of authors or spectators, and sensitivity to the
suffering of those who oppose these deeds. Note that the dividing
line as set by the threshold of sensitivity does not separate the parti-
sans of “good” or “morality” on one side and the partisans of “evil”
or “immorality” on the other; rather, it separates partisans of two def-
initions of what is “good”: those who extend this moral law beyond
the frontiers of human beings, and those who refuse to do so. Extend-
ing sensitivity, which is foremost a subjective quality, is the aim of the
opponents of these works of art. They are not accusing the partici-
pants of being absolutely indifferent to moral law, but of not allowing
its field of application to be sufficiently broad, out of a lack of com-
passion for suffering beings that happen to be animals. Faced with
this ethical requirement considered as primordial—combining moral
preoccupation with respect for the other, valuing sensitivity, and con-
cern for a code of behavior toward the subject—any other value
appears secondary, especially aesthetic values, even ones regarding art
or beauty.
In the opposite camp—those who support the artwork—the argu-
ments for aesthetics are nevertheless far from a majority position,
contrary to what we might expect in the context of a museum and
a contemporary art exhibition: the principal issue is simply to protect
the “freedom to create,” and to affirm that “art is not a feel-good
enterprise.” But no proponent of the artwork put forward the purely
aesthetic argument consisting of the affirmation that it was beautiful,
or to explain exactly how it was momentous in the history of con-
temporary art. It is clear that the aesthetic argument is weaker than
the ethical argument: the defenders of contemporary art do not really
take the risk of countering their adversaries with an aesthetic argument
that could easily be turned against them and interpreted as evidence
of insensitivity, inhumanity, or cynicism.
Faced with a nonviable strategy of falling back on an aesthetic values
register, defenders of the artwork must instead use different argu-
ments to support their position. There are two of these arguments:
the first is to counter their adversaries in their own field—the ethi-
cal register of values—by explaining that the animals are not being
mistreated (however, French law does not accept this argument, and
seeks to penalize any act whose aim is to make a show out of suf-
fering). The second option does dismiss the ethical arguments, but
opposes them using another register of values: the hermeneutical reg-
ister, which refers to the interpretation of meaning, symbolism of
an act or an objective—such as the peace symbol or a mixing of
cultures.
As a result, there are two values principles standing in opposition
on each side of the work of art: an ethical principle of sensitivity
to others’ suffering that enables people to denounce evil and injus-

tice perpetrated against living beings, and a hermeneutical principle
that transforms experience into a symbol of something else, allowing
certain actions to be justified in the name of what they stand for.
It is nonetheless remarkable that the aesthetic register—from which
a work of art should emerge—is practically absent from each of the
arguments: it is as if, faced with ethics and hermeneutics, in light of
respect for others and the intelligence of the messages, the issue of aes-
thetic quality or the nature of art becomes secondary. This axiological
duplication between aesthetics and hermeneutics is also an essential
element in contemporary art, which does not operate so much on the
level of beauty as on a deconstruction of values—targeting aesthetic
values in particular.
Ultimately, we can see that the three registers used by participants
in reacting to the show of others’ suffering—aesthetic, hermeneutic,
and ethical—only make sense when they come together to neutralize
a fourth register: the aesthesic register, expressed in terms of “good
vs. evil” or “exciting vs. uninteresting”; in fact, when confronted with
the suffering of others, this register is immediately discredited as a
perverse pleasure. But it is the one which, in our opinion, underlies all
the others in a negative sense.
Conclusion
The aesthesic register, appealing to consumption or pleasure; the aes-
thetic register, appealing to a passive form of contemplation that
involves taking delight in a work of art; the hermeneutical register,
appealing to an active form of contemplation that involves interpre-
tation; and the ethical register, appealing to either indignation or
compassion: these are the four registers necessary to understanding
the emotions and arguments raised by a show that presents animal
suffering.
In addition to the disagreement regarding values, there is a total
lack of comprehension between detractors and defenders, because
they do not perceive the same reality, and are using different val-
ues registers. Between aesthetics, symbolism, and sensitivity, it is less
a conflict of values (in which case we would only want to establish
that the work of art is moral or immoral, beautiful or ugly, signifi-
cant or insignificant) than a conflict of values registers, which moves
the disagreement upstream toward the question of whether or not the
litigious work of art appeals to morals, art, or symbolism.
In these conflicts of values registers, the disagreement appears much

more profound, more inextricable, and more likely to generate seri-
ous problems than do simple conflicts of values. In conflicts over
values, we are debating an object’s rank in a hierarchy (e.g., from
least to most moral, or from least to most beautiful) without ques-
tioning the relevance of the hierarchical register that we are appealing
to (morality, beauty): the disagreement remains at the level of a dis-
pute over opinions, or even a simple disagreement between persons.
But a conflict of values registers presents opposing opinions as well
as opposing axiological frameworks in which these opinions take on
their meaning. This is why they are so difficult to resolve: they often
result in participants talking past each other; moreover, these situa-
tions can even descend into “scandals” that can range from public
denunciation through press coverage to legal trials, and even physical
assault.31
The suffering inflicted on animals in the name of art also inflicts
suffering on humans, by exposing them to inextricable controver-
sies. These can sometimes evolve into intercultural controversy, such
as European versus North American sensibilities, or Oriental versus
Western culture. But in reality, these conflicts are mainly intra-cultural
ones, opposing participants who belong to the same culture. Sharing
the same “axiological grammar,” the two sides use it in different ways
depending on the subject and context.
In these controversies, the complexity of axiological purviews is
revealed, enabling us to move from emotion toward argument, which
is more likely to be read and discussed, even if it is not ultimately
approved. An elucidation of these purviews, through observation of
concrete situations where they are used, outlines the basis for a rich
program in the research of an empirical, pragmatic, and especially
nonnormative sociology of values: one whose purpose is not to tell
participants what they are supposed to think, but which attempts to
understand why they think the way they do, and how they are able to
think that way in the company of others.
Notes
1. This analytical framework was developed in Heinich (1998) and
Heinich (2000a).
2. For a comparison of the types of frontiers transgressed by contempo-
rary art in France and the United States, and the reactions stimulated
by these transgressions, see Heinich (2000b).
3. Paul McCarthy’s “Class Fool” is included in the online catalog Hors

Limites. L’art et la vie 1952–1994, p. 12.
4. On the legal status of animals in European law, see Despret and
Gutwirth (2009).
5. Boltanski (1993).
6. Le Monde, March 18, 2009; Le Journal des arts, March 20–April 2,
2009.
7. This program was introduced in Heinich (2006a).
8. Merllié (2004).
9. Weber (2003); Durkheim (1967).
10. Elias (1973); Elias (1993).
11. Goffman (1973).
12. Simmel (1987).
13. Parsons (1949).
14. “Bourdieusian” criticism of beliefs in aesthetic values is especially clear
in Bourdieu (1966) and Bourdieu (1979); on the criticism of belief
in the sphere of general interest, cf. Bourdieu (1989); and on the
criticism of beliefs in scientific values, see Bourdieu (2001).
15. This point has been developed in Heinich (2007) and Heinich
(2009).
16. Gibson (1977).
17. Resorting to the notion of a “framework” owes much to Goffman’s
work in Frame Analysis (1974); for an introduction to this work
and a comparison between “frameworks” and “registers,” see Heinich
(1991).
18. The meaning given by Jean-François Lyotard, to designate a disagree-
ment not only on the terms used but also on the frames of reference of
a conflict; see Lyotard (1983). Note that this useful semantic precision
is not related in this context to the “postmodern” theory developed
by Lyotard.
19. Heinich (1993).
20. Borrowing somewhat from the “worlds” of justification revealed
by Boltanski and Thévenot (1991), our model is more open and
less rigid, because instead of applying to tightly controlled pro-
cesses of justifying actions, it applies to a much more spontaneous
framework of evaluation processes used by the actors when reacting
to beings and objects (this point was developed in Heinich [1999]).
21. To test this typology in different fields, see Heinich (1995b), Heinich
(2003), and Heinich (2005a).
22. Lageira (2001, 51–52).
23. Castelo (2000, 16).
24. Ibid., 19–20.
25. See Michèle Kleffer’s blog entry, “Wim Delvoye: Tattooing Pigs or
the Art of Provocation” (2013). http://theculturetrip.com/europe/
belgium/articles/wim-delvoye-tattooing-pigs-or-the-art-of-provoca
tion/ (accessed December 19, 2013).
26. Lussac (2001, 124).

27. Société Protectrice des Animaux (the most well-known organization
in this field).
28. Heinich (2000b).
29. A description and image of the artwork can be found at http://www.
yanagistudio.net/works/antfarmproject01_view_eng.html (accessed
December 20, 2013).
30. Bolton (1992).
31. On the definition of “affairs” and “scandals” in contemporary art, see
Heinich (2005b).
References
Boltanski, Luc. La souffrance à distance. Morale humanitaire, médias et
politique. Paris: Métailié, 1993.
Boltanski, Luc and Thévenot, Laurent. De la Justification. Les économies de la
grandeur. Paris: Gallimard, 1991.
Bolton, Richard. Culture Wars. Documents from the Recent Controversies in
the Arts. New York: New Press, 1992.
Bourdieu, Pierre. L’amour de l’art. Les musées d’art européens et leur public.
Paris: Minuit, 1966.
Bourdieu, Pierre. La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Minuit,
1979.
Bourdieu, Pierre. La noblesse d’état. Grandes écoles et ésprit de corps. Paris:
Minuit, 1989.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Science de la science et réflexivité. Paris: Seuil, 2001.
Despret, Vinciane and Gutwirth, Serge. “L’affaire Harry. Petite scientific-
tion.” Terrain. Revue d’ethnologie européenne 52 (March 2009): 142–151.
Durkheim, Émile. Sociologie et philosophie. Paris: PUF, 1967.
Elias, Norbert. La civilisation des mœurs. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1973.
Elias, Norbert. Engagement et distanciation. Contributions à la sociologie de la
connaissance. Paris: Fayard, 1993.
Gibson, James J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1977.
Goffman, Erving. La mise en scène de la vie quotidienne, Tome 1. La présenta-
tion de soi. Paris: Minuit, 1973.
Goffmann, Erving. Frame Analysis. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.
Heinich, Nathalie. “Pour introduire à la cadre-analyse.” Critique 535 (1991):
936–953.
Heinich, Nathalie. “Framing the Bullfight: Aesthetics versus Ethics.” The
British Journal of Aesthetics 33, no. 1 (1993): 52–58.
Heinich, Nathalie. “Esthétique, symbolique et sensibilité.” Agone 13 (1995a):
15–56.
Heinich, Nathalie. “Les colonnes de Buren au Palais-Royal: Ethnographie
d’une affaire.” Ethnologie Française 25, no. 4 (1995b): 525–540.
Heinich, Nathalie. Le triple jeu de l’art contemporain. Sociologie des arts

plastiques. Paris: Minuit, 1998.
Heinich, Nathalie. L’épreuve de la grandeur. Prix littéraires et reconnaissance.
Paris: La Découverte, 1999.
Heinich, Nathalie. Pour en finir avec la querelle de l’art contemporain. Paris:
L’Echoppe, 2000a.
Heinich, Nathalie. “From Rejection of Contemporary Art to Culture War.”
In Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology. Repertoires of Evaluation
in France and the United States, edited by Michèle Lamont and Laurent
Thévenot, 170–210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000b.
Heinich, Nathalie. “La querelle des arts premiers: un conflit de registres
de valeurs.” In L’ésthétique: Europe, Chine et ailleurs, edited by Yolaine
Escande and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, 61–70. Paris: Librairie You-Feng, 2003.
Heinich, Nathalie. “Des objets d’art aux registres de valeurs: la sociologie
aux limites de l’anthropologie.” In Les cultures à l’œuvre. Rencontres en art,
edited by Michèle Coquet, Brigitte Derlon, and Monique Jeudy-Ballini,
353–364. Paris: Biro éditeur & Éditions de la MSH, 2005a.
Heinich, Nathalie. “L’art du scandale. Indignation ésthétique et sociologie
des valeurs.” Politix 71 (2005b): 121–136.
Heinich, Nathalie. “La sociologie à l’épreuve des valeurs.” Cahiers interna-
tionaux de sociologie CXXI (2006a): 287–315.
Heinich, Nathalie. “Between Ethics and Aesthetics: Art and Animality.”
Universitas, Monthly Review on Philosophy and Culture 386 (2006b):
46–57.
Heinich, Nathalie. Pourquoi Bourdieu. Paris: Gallimard, 2007.
Heinich, Nathalie. “The Sociology of Vocational Prizes: Vocation as Esteem.”
Theory, Culture and Society 26, no. 5 (2009): 85–107.
Hors Limites. L’art et la vie 1952–1994. Press pack. Paris: Centre Georges
Pompidou, 1994.
Lageira, Jacinto. “Le lièvre, le cheval et le coyote. Une fable de Joseph Beuys.”
Revue d’Esthétique 40 (2001): 49–56.
Lussac, Olivier. “Le sang animal. Rites et sacrifices dans l’actionnisme
viennois.” Revue d’esthétique 40 (2001), 76–85.
Lyotard, Jean-François. Le Différend. Paris: Minuit, 1983.
Merllié, Dominique. “La sociologie de la morale est-elle soluble dans la
philosophie? La réception de la morale et la science des Mœurs.” Revue
Française de Sociologie 45, no. 3 (2004): 415–440.
Parsons, Talcott. Essays in Sociological Theory. Glencoe: The Free Press, 1949.
Simmel, Georg. Philosophie de l’argent. Paris: PUF, 1987.
Velayos Castelo, Carmen. “La présence des animaux dans l’art contempo-
rain. Ses implications éthiques.” Recherches Poïétiques (“L’animal vivant
dans l’art contemporain”) 9 (2000): 7–27.
Weber, Max. Le savant et le politique. Paris: La Découverte, 2003.
N ot e s o n C o n t r i bu to r s
Conerly Casey is an associate professor of anthropology at the

Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York. She is the
coeditor of A Companion to Psychological Anthropology: Modernity and
Psychocultural Change (2005). Her many published articles include
“Mediated Hostility: Media, ‘Affective Citizenship’, and Genocide in
Northern Nigeria,” in Genocide, Truth and Representation: Anthro-
pological Approaches (edited by Alexander Laban Hinton and Kevin
O’Neill, 2009) and “Marginal Muslims: Authenticity and Perceptual
Bounds of Profiling in Northern Nigeria,” Africa Today (2008).
Roma Chatterji is professor of sociology at Delhi University. Apart

from having an abiding interest in folklore and folk culture, she has
worked on collective violence and illness narratives. She is the author
of Writing Identities. Folklore and the Performing Arts of Purulia,
West Bengal (2009) and of Speaking with Pictures. Folk Art and the
Narrative Tradition (Delhi, 2012). She is also the co-author of Living
with Violence. An Anthropology of Events and Everyday Life (2007).
Ratiba Hadj-Moussa is associate professor of sociology at York

University in Toronto. Her publications include “Émeutes dans le
Maghreb. La web ou la révolte sans qualité,” L’Homme et la société
(2013) and “Sur un concept contesté: la sphère publique arabe est-elle
solide sur terre?,” Anthropologie et Sociétés (2012). She is the coedi-
tor of Mondes méditerranéens. L’émeute au coeur du politique (Paris,
2013).
Nathalie Heinich is research director of sociology at the Centre

National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris. Among her many pub-
lications are Guerre culturelle et art contemporain. Une comparaison
franco-américaine (Paris, 2010); La Fabrique du patrimoine. De la
cathédrale à la petite cuillère (Paris, 2009); and De la visibilité (Paris,
2012).
Bogumil Jewsiewicki held a position as research professor, Direc-

tor/Chaire de recherche du Canada en histoire comparée de la mémoire,
226 N ot e s o n C o n t r i bu to r s
Université Laval, Québec. His most recent publications include The

Beautiful Time. Photography by Sammy Balojy (New York, 2010). He is
the coeditor of Expériences et mémoire. Partager en français la diversité
du monde (Paris, 2008) and of Traumatisme collectif pour patrimoine:
regards sur un mouvement transnational (Québec, 2008).
Fuyuki Kurasawa is associate professor of sociology at York Univer-

sity in Toronto. His publications include The Ethnological Imagina-
tion: A Cross-Cultural Critique of Modernity (Minnesota, 2004) and
The Work of Global Justice: Human Rights as Practices (Cambridge,
2007). He is currently completing a book entitled “Intersec-
tions and Interventions: Canadian Essays in Cultural Materialism”
(forthcoming).
Michael Nijhawan is associate professor of sociology at York Univer-

sity in Toronto. He has published Dhadi Darbar. Religion, Violence,
and the Performance of Sikh History (2006) and Shared Idioms, Sacred
Symbols, and the Articulation of Identities in South Asia (coedited with
Kelly Pemberton, 2009). He is currently working on his forthcoming
monograph “Heretic Subjects: Violence, Memory, and Youth in Sikh
and Ahmadiyya Diasporas.”
Caterina Pasqualino is a researcher at the Centre National de la

Recherche Scientifique, Paris. Her most recent publications include
Le flamenco gitan (Paris, 2008) and The Gypsies, Poor But Happy:
A Cinematic Myth (2008). She is the author of “Filming Emotion:
The Place of Video in Anthropology”, Visual Anthropology Review
(2007). She also shot the documentaries Des chants pour le ciel. Les
saetas des Gitans d’Andalousie, Espagne (CNRS, 52 min., 2003) and
Petit théâtre napolitain (CNRS, 56 min., 2006).
Anna C. Schultz is assistant professor of music at Stanford Univer-

sity, having received PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of
Illinois in 2004. Schultz’ publications on South Asian popular music,
Marathi and Indo-Caribbean devotional songs, and Indian Jewish
music have appeared in Ethnomusicology, The Oxford Handbook of
Mobile Music Studies, More Than Bollywood: Studies in Indian Popu-
lar Music, and in other journals and edited volumes. Her recent book
is titled Singing a Hindu Nation (2013).
Index
Abramovic, Marina, 13 republic, 133

Adorno, Theodor, 2, 3 revenants, 108; see also Gypsies
aesthetic(s), 2, 212–14, 220–1 slaves, 110
and image, 184 society, 53
Indian, 93; see also rasa West, 128, 129, 133
Kant and Adorno, 2 Afro-Cuban rituals, 106–9
and music, 197, 200; see also rasa Agamben, Giorgio, 45, 100
and necrophilic, 184 Algeria, 153, 158, 160, 166
postcolonial, 124 and suffering, 7, 25, 153, 172; see
and sonic pleasure, 198 also civil war, Algerian
and suffering, 201, 210, 221–2 Algerian films, 154, 157, 159, 161,
theory, 2 168, 171
of vulgarity, 125 alienation, 6, 117, 188
affect, 12–14, 37, 49 ambiguity, visual, 33–7
charge of, 100 ancestors
community of, 101 absent, 158
and sensorial, 147 and African, 116
and trauma, 181 and “archaic”, 154
affliction, as a sign of grace, and diasporic, 19
75–6, 90 and image, 106
affordances, 212 and suffering, 62, 63, 104
African Anikulapo-Kuti, Fela, 132–4
American, 189 animals
ancestors, 116 and abuse, 18
artists, 123 sacrifice of, 109
arts, 123, 124 suffering of, 18, 81, 210,
captives, 106 214–15, 219
cults, 118 art
descent, 191 anthropology of, 7
diaspora, 70, 124 colon, 129
forms of creative expression, 5 conflicts, 218
language, 109 contemporary, 218, 221
migrants, 42; see also migration and culture, 16
origin, 106, 118 European canon, 3
positioning, 198 Indo-Caribbean, 180
postcolonies, 124 non-Western, 14
228 Index
art—continued Carte de barbe, 112

and obscene violence, 130 Castro, Fidel, 106
Sociology of, 6 Chitraankan, 89
theory, 3, 7 see also pata (patua)
and trauma, 3, 12; see also Chitrakar, 76–7, 78–9, 85, 88, 89
suffering civil war
attunement, 11 Algerian, 7, 16, 17, 156, 157,
affective, 130 159, 160–4
vigilant, 124, 126 Nigerian, 130, 132
Axel, Brian, 181 Clifford, James, 123
see also diaspora, diasporic sublime colonialism, 71, 133, 158, 198
axiological, 210, 212–13, 221–2 Spanish, 118
suppression of, 127; see also
Baloji, Sammy, 52, 55, 62, 65,
indenture
68, 70
Photography, 55, 65–6 comedy, and the grotesque, 125
Barbudos, 106 commodification, 3, 32, 35
Belgium, 57, 59, 65, 224 community, of affects, 101
see also Congo and Belgium see also affect
Benjamin, Walter, 127 conflict, over art, 213–14, 221–2
see also mimesis, art see also value registers
body, 10, 125, 129–30, 165, 192 Congo, 10, 52, 57–60, 63, 64
black, 106 Belgium and, 51
and dancing, 128 consumers, and marketing of
dead, 25, 166, 167, 169; see also art, 123
suffering controversies, 213, 217, 219, 222
image of, 219 and collective consensus, 213
invisible, 157, 167 coolitude, 198–9, 201
minuscule, 155 Crary, Jonathan, 9
social/individual, 198 creolization, 124, 126–8, 180, 202
and spirit possession, 145–6 criteria, 213
stripped, 188 see also aesthetic(s)
of suffering, 52, 69, 100, 168 cruelty, 28, 216, 219
of women, 164, 166–8 Cuba, 106
Boltanski, Luc, 6, 18, 25
boundaries, 144
of body, 125 Das, Veena, 2, 16, 93, 156, 157,
moral, 210 168, 181
Bourdieu, Pierre, 6, 20, 176, de Certeau, Michel, 15–16,
212, 223 100, 115
brothers, 159, 161–2, 164 Deleuze, Gilles, 165, 166
deterritoralization, 115
Caillois, Roger, 113 diaspora, 179–82, 184, 195
Caldero, 107 aesthetic force, 179
Calo, 102 Caribbean, 180, 194, 201
Carceleras, 102 Concept of, 180
Index 229
diasporic sublime, 181, 188; see film, 26, 114, 146, 147
also Axel, Brian Algerian, 16–17, 153, 154, 156
Indian, 191, 201 Bollywood, 127, 134, 143, 144
Indo- Caribbean, 194 colonial, 126–7
intimacy, 192 Hindi, 200–1
Sikh, 180–1, 186, 195, 196, 198 Indian Masala, see film,
disaster, natural, 75, 78, 84, 90 Bollywood; Indian
see also tsunami Kanywood Hausa video, 124,
disgust, 170–2, 218, 219 130, 134
Dubuffet, Jean, 99, 111–13, 116 Nigerian, 127
Duende, 105 postwar, 1
Dufrêne, François, 99, 111–13, 116 Flamenco, 101, 103
folk, artist, 82, 85
economy, visual, 24, 26, 33 song, 76, 89
edutainment, 127 Fuchs, Rudi, 113
emotion, 12, 15, 19, 129, 137, 197
Algerian, 154 Gell, Alfred, 6–7
and art, 13 Glossolalia, 100, 115
and Gypsies, 101, 103 Grandguillaume, 162
and rasa, 93–4 Gypsies (Gitan), 100–2, 104,
106, 116
role of, 8
ethics, 6, 58, 64, 130, 147, 213, 221
Hauka, 129
“of apprehension”, 126, 130
Hausmann, Raoul, 111
of image, 8
hermeneutics, 213, 220–1
mediated, 38
history, 10, 19, 71, 91, 102,
paternalistic, 58
145, 190
evaluation, 6, 212, 213, 223 Algerian, 153–5; see also liberation
everyday, 1, 18, 54, 154, 172, 209 war
aesthetics, 14 colonial, 8
experience, 15, 197 of contemporary art, 220
life, 13, 15, 19, 45, 64, 155, 164 cultural, 213
expansion, structuralist, 39, 41, ideology, 153
43, 47 local, 67–8, 70
experience, as a category, 164 monumental, 16, 157, 159
embodied, 198 natural, 217
erasure of, 155 shared, 191
lived, 164, 169 Sikh, 187
humanitarianism, 25–6, 39, 43
father(s), 55, 58, 60–7, 70, 158–64
absent, 164 image
“ancestors”, 10, 163 ambiguous, 34, 36, 38,
FLN, 163 39, 46
of “religion”, 109 circulation, 26, 29, 46
of revolution, 106 of distant suffering, 9, 25, 27,
Suffering of, 11, 54 31, 46
230 Index
image—continued intensification, phenomenological,

ethics and politics, 8 37, 38–9
hermeneutics, 33 Internet, 181, 193–6, 198
humanitarian crises, 25, 32 see also YouTube
of industrial landscapes, 67
media produced, 3 Jaleos, 105
reception, 10
of remembrance, 52 Katanga, 52, 54, 56–7, 59, 60, 64
saturation of, 31–2
and sound, 195 La fleur de barbe, 112
of suffering, 93 Landsberg, Alison, 189
imaginary, of war, 155 see also memory, prosthetic
indenture, 193, 199 language, 104, 110
Indo-Caribbean, 189, 191, 195 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 37
Indian liberation war, 155
aesthetic, 197; see also aesthetic(s) Lila, 90
Caribbean migration, 194 Loreau, Max, 112
classical music, instruments,
193, 195 Macho, 103, 105
cultural heritage, 190 mangal, 90
descent, 191 Materia, 107
Mbembe, Achille, 157, 162, 169
diaspora, 191; labor, 198;
Medinipur, 76, 78, 90
global, 201
Meek, Allan, 5
films: masala films, 143, 144; see
memory, 104–5, 157, 160, 163, 169
also film, Bollywood
and post generation, 194, 195
government, 188
prosthetic, 189–90
immigrants, 201
social, 51–2, 55
Indian arrival day, 190
of work, 52
miniature style, see painting
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 93
narratives, 85
Meynier, Gilbert, 162
ocean, 5 migration
people, 190, 194 to the Caribbean, 180, 194; see
political parties, 190, 191 also indenture
rural, 190 labour, 198, 201; see also African,
Song, 200; see also music, migrants; workers
Bollywood undocumented and immigration
spirit, 146 to Europe, 43–4
state, 188 mimesis, 192, 201
subcontinent, 202 and art, 127–8, 131, 136, 138
individual experience, 155 misapprehension, 124, 127
industrial, see work modernity, 51–2, 55, 62, 69–70
inequalities, structural, 44, 45 morals, sexual, 210
inflection, vocal, 112 Muerto de prenda, 107
infrasound, 99, 115–16 museums, 209, 217, 220
Index 231
music, 190 Payos, 103

Bollywood, 190, 192, 200 performance, 77, 78, 84, 85–6,
Indo-Caribbean American, 195, 90–2
199–201 artistic, 101, 108
and religion, 135 ritual, 101
perpetrators, 27
narrative, and flood, 76, 79, 85 photography, 67
see also pata (patua) Poizat, Giorgio, 100–1
neutrality, axiological, 211 political, 15, 162, 165
Nfumbi, 107
actors and agency, 51, 52, 57,
Nganga, 108
67, 180
9/11, event and representation, 4,
articulations, 37–8, 130
76, 84, 95
categories, 164
normativity, 211
change, 18, 65, 130, 182
opinion, 18, 196, 212, 217, claims, 17
218, 222 corruption, 125
public, 23, 31 discourse, 159
ordinary elites, 125, 133, 147
concept of the, 11 force, 32, 141, 179
and experience, 172 forms, 124, 138
people, 168 hierarchies, 52
sociology of the, 15, 17–18 leaders, 81, 187
suffering, 157, 160, 170; see also marginalization, 191, 200
Das, Veena rationalism and negotiation, 162
violence, 57, 162 regime, 155
relations, 126
pain, 28, 103, 105, 124, security, 134
130–1, 210 struggle, 46, 188, 197
of fathers, 10 subjectivities, 8
and voice, 13; see also violence, violence, 181
and pain visibility, 11
painting, 19, 52, 60, 62, 64 possession, 143, 145
Indian miniature style,
postcolonialism, 5, 180
186–7
Pralaya, 93
Palero, 107
Palo Monte, 99, 107–9, 111,
114–16 Rancière, Jacques, 3, 4, 6,
past 11, 192
narratives of, 189 rasa, concept and theory, 85–6, 93,
representation of Sikh, 186–7; see 192, 197–8
also history see also aesthetic(s)
sonic reconfiguration, 195 rationality, 117
see also suffering reception, 10, 13, 24, 29, 31,
pata (patua), 77, 81, 83–4, 85–6, 184, 192
88–9, 90–2, 93 see also image
232 Index
representation, 2, 12, 24, 27, 29, aesthetics of, 11, 14, 17, 210,
37, 123–4 221–2
of suffering, 3, 4 ancestors’, 52, 62, 67
visual, 23, 28, 34, 54 anthropology of, 1–2
see also Sikh, art and art, 3–4, 7, 16, 126, 128
rhythm, 99, 103, 108–9, 111–14 banal, 70; see also ordinary
river, motif of, 75, 76 and body, 52, 166, 168
Rumba, 108 collective, 186–8, 195, 199
distant, 23, 24, 26, 33
experience, 53, 63, 153, 155
Santiago de Cuba, 106–7
expressions of, 155
Schwitters, Kurt, 99 memories of indigenous
and Ursonate, 111–13, 116 suffering, 64
scream, 100 past, 54, 62, 68, 71
see also rhythm prosthetic, 189
Self-qualia meaning, 126, 130, 139 social suffering, concept, 1–2,
senses, 9 17–18
sensible, distribution of the, 5–6 sublime, 185
see also Rancière, Jacques traumatic, 181
sensitiveness, 217, 219 unacknowledged, 62
Sieterayo, 109–10 unnamable, 155
Siguiriya , 105 Surlapierre, Nicolas, 111
Sikh surveillance, 143, 147
art, 184
diaspora, 182, 184, 188, 195, Taussig, Michael, 192
196–7 technology, 142
historical representations (1984), Texturologies, 112
184, 187–8 transgression, 210–11
youth, 184, 196–7 trauma, language of, 180–1
Singh, Kavita, 88 see also aesthetic(s) and suffering
Singh Twins, artists, 182, 184, tropes, 25, 26
186, 188 tsunami, 76, 84–6, 89, 91
see also narrative and pata
sociology, 10–19, 211
moral, 211
utopias, vocal, 115
normative, 211
visual, 8, 10 value registers, 212–14, 220, 222
somatic, 129 values, 220–1
Sonyinka, Wole, 132, 134 sociology of, 211–12
spectacle, 210 violence, 38, 130, 131–2, 146,
spectacularization, 32, 33 157, 160
spirit, 145, 147 anthropology of, 1–2; see also
structure, symbolic, 24, 26, 28, suffering, anthropology of,
30, 39 colonial, 4, 133, 136, 153, 158
suffering, 101, 103, 117, 138, and pain, 125–6
140, 147 postcolonial, 124, 126
Index 233
structural, 24, 27, 33, 40, 41 West Bengal, 76–8

and suffering, 9, 181, 184 Wilkinson, Ian, 1
visuality, iconographic dimension, 24 Williams, Joanna, 85
institutional dimension, 24, 29 Witchcraft, 141–2
sonic, 192 witness, 87, 89, 90, 92–3
theory, 8, 10 work
vocalist, 103, 105 camp, 55
voice, 100–1, 104–5, 114 danger, 54
metamorphosis, 105, 110 paid/salaried work (kazi), 51–5,
and register, 102, 114 58, 61–2
and suffering, 99, 105, 114 workers
throaty, 104, 109, 111 the cities of, 59
Congelese, 57
war, anti-colonial, 158 migrant (Kasaeins), 52, 55,
experiences of, 157 64, 68
west and race, 54, 57, 59
concept of, 1–2, 4 recruitment of, 54, 68
displacement of Western
categories, 8 Youtube, videos and music, 190–1,
hegemonic political order of 193–5
the, 4 Yusuf, Abdulhamid, 137
and modernity, alternative
approaches, 5 zombification, 132

Suffering Art and Aesthetics PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Suffering Art and Aesthetics PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Suffering, Art, and Aesthetics

This page intentionally left blank

Edited by Ratiba Hadj-Moussa and Michael Nijhawan

All rights reserved.

First published in 2014 by

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United

Suffering, art, and aesthetics/edited by Ratiba Hadj-Moussa &

1. Suffering in art. 2. Arts and society. 3. Aesthetics, Modern.

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Integra Software Services

First edition: July 2014

List of Figures vii

Introduction: Suffering in Arts: Rethinking the Boundaries 1

1 In Praise of Ambiguity: On the Visual Economy of

2 Denial and Challenge of Modernity: Suffering,

3 Event, Image, Affect: The Tsunami in the Folk Art

5 The Art of Suffering: Postcolonial (Mis)Apprehensions

6 The Past’s Suffering and the Body’s Suffering: Algerian

7 The Diasporic Rasa of Suffering: Notes on the

8 The Art of Inﬂicting Suffering: Animals and Spectators

1.1 The symbolic structure of the image (Kurasawa) 26

Ratiba Hadj-Moussa and Michael

This book is about the relationship between suffering, arts, and

with regard to the present forms of politically motivated violence by

Jimenez 1986). He famously regarded the disintegration of language

is not looked at here primarily in its “pleasure-producing or redemp-

These and other examples have further convinced us that we need

experiences, and the time/space frame offered by an artwork, deﬁne

posthumous work Art and Agency features as a yardstick against

actors to move between various dimensions of the social, and vari-

second to countervisuality.5 Whereas Mirzoeff afﬁrms the authority of

addressed in the section above. Art often draws on culturally shaped

the immediate frame of the highly visible reality of social marginal-

latter is strongly articulated with spirituality, the political, and the

Unfoldings of the Ordinary

men from the heydays of monumentality (1962 to the 1980s) to the

In his recent book on critique, Boltanski (2009) suggests that soci-

art—hinting surreptitiously to a novel sensibility and the new domain

Chow, Rey. Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture. Durham,

Layton, Robert. “Art and Agency: A Reassessment.” Journal of the Royal

In Praise of Ambiguity: On the

In the ﬁrst part of his remarkable Histoire(s) du cinéma, Jean-Luc

In order to try to respond to this problem, this chapter is orga-

via the media; it includes various humanitarian crises in the global

Unpacking the Visual Economy of Distant

was published on the cover of the October 4, 2004, issue of Time

Figure 1.1 The symbolic structure of the image (Kurasawa)

of Western visuality (e.g., La Pietà or the Holocaust) and recognized

others in the image). The relations between situational and compo-

Reception Informal Formal

Figure 1.2 The circulation of the image (Kurasawa)

From the outset, I want to note that the organizational networks

to audiences by broadcasting images of it via their own publications

abhorrent acts (sexual violence, structural injustices, crimes against

The Traps of Iconographic Power and the Catalyst

a daily basis. Hence, overexposure can be combined with the incessant

draws creative inspiration from scenes of sadism and torture in order

seeing, for, when encountering ambiguous representations, viewers

the Year.15 The caption that originally accompanied the photograph

Bringing to light the ambiguous features of these two photographs

Toward Practices of Critical Visuality

spectacularization sap their potential iconographic power and public