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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Bonding Images: Photography And Film As Acts Of Perpetration, Christophe Busch
Bonding Images: Photography And Film As Acts Of Perpetration, Christophe Busch
Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal
Historical and contemporary cases of collective violence show an incremental use of photography and film to capture and disseminate violent acts. Recording cruelty during conflict seems to be a highly ritualised practice that urges the question what communicative and psychological functions these acts have? Why and how does perpetrator photography shape a binding moral world that divides 'us' versus 'them'? These visualising acts are commonly seen as proof of power that desensitises the perpetrators and dehumanises the victims. This contribution focuses on the imagery of the Holocaust, looks into the functions that capturing and sharing cruelty has on the evolution …
The Unbribable Witness: Image, Word, And Testimony Of Crimes Against Humanity In Mark Twain’S King Leopold’S Soliloquy (1905), Nora Nunn
Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal
In the creation of King Leopold’s Soliloquy, a textured, visually irrefutable, and darkly satirical account of crimes against humanity in the Belgian Congo Free State, Mark Twain aimed to evoke his Euro-American audience’s empathy by activating their imaginations and inaugurating political reform. Informed by the work of cultural and literary critics such as Roland Barthes, this paper considers how the visual imagery in Twain’s text engender questions about fact, testimony, and witnessing in the realm of human rights and collective violence—both in the Congo Free State and, indirectly, in the United States. I ultimately argue that the relation (or …