Forum: "Torture and Truth: The Image as War" Thursday, October 2nd @ 6pm
Date & Time: October 2, 2008 - 6:00pm Project:
Engendering the Archive, Semester:
Fall 2008
Forum: "Torture & Truth: The Image as War,"sponsored by the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference and featuring Pardiss Kebriaei (Center for Constitutional Rights), Nicholas Mirzoeff (NYU), Rosalind Morris (Columbia), and Saidiya Hartman (Columbia). Thursday, October 2nd, 612 Schermerhorn, 6-8pmThe role of visual technologies in documenting and enacting terror has a long history. The televisual, the photographic, and the cinematic are no longer confined to documenting atrocity, but are active agents and instruments of terror and brutality. Lynching photographs, atrocity photos of extermination and starvation, and the techniques of torture and humiliation at military prisons all rely on visual technology.The forum will address the ways forms of terror introduce, modernize and transform visual technology, the transformation of the archive of war imagery by the development of new media and the role of digital and visual media in producing the enemy.
Speakers:
Pardiss Kebriaei joined the Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in July 2007. She provides direct representation to several of CCR’s clients at Guantánamo and helps coordinate CCR’s network of hundreds of pro bono counsel representing other prisoners. She also focuses on using international human rights mechanisms to bring international pressure to bear on the U.S. government and hold other governments accountable for their role in the violations at Guantánamo.
Nicholas Mirzoeff is the author of Watching Babylon: the War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture and An Introduction to Visual Culture and editor of The Visual Culture Reader. He is the Director of the Program in Visual Culture at New YorkUniversity and Professor of Art and Art Education.
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Rosalind Morris is Associate Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society. Morris'writings include monographs on spirit mediumship and the mass media in Northern Thailand, the archive of visual anthropology, and the afterlife of apartheid in South Africa’s mining towns. Other essays have addressed the history of fetishism, the violence of culture in anthropological theory, translation and radicalism, mediatic war, photography and its discontents, sex, gender and sexuality, and art in South Africa.
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Saidiya Hartman is the author of Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route and Scenes of Subjection: Slavery, Terror and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America.She is a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at ColumbiaUniversity.
