identity and representation

WK23- IDENTITY AND REPRESENTATION

Dr. Carolina Matos

Government Department

University of Essex

Readings for week 23

Required texts:

Carruthers, S. (2004) “Tribalism and tribulation. The media’s construction of

‘African savagery’ and ‘Western humanitarianism’ in the 1990s” in S. Allan

and B. Zelizer, (Eds.), Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime. London:

Routeledge, pp 155-173.

• Chouliaraki, L. (2008) “The symbolic power of transnational media:

Managing the visiblity of suffering” in Global Media and Communication, 4

(3), 329-251.

• Cloud, D. L. (2004). “To veil the threat of terror”: Afghan women and the

‘Clash of Civilizations’ in the imagery of the US war on terrorism” in

Quarterly |Journal of Speech, 90 (3), 285-306

Additional:

• Said, E.(1981). Covering Islam: How the Media and Experts

Determine How We See the Rest of the World. New York: Pantheon.

•

Core points

• The power of images in war conflicts

• Susan Sontag, Frantz Fanon and Edward Said

• Managing the suffering of others

• Neo-colonialism: racism and eurocentrism and its role in

justifying or permitting conflicts and wars

• Identity, representation and the image of the Afghan woman

• The problem with the Western media’s reporting of the African

continent

• Conclusions

• Seminar activities and questions

• Readings for week 24 – guest lecturer (prof. Todd Landman)

Images of war and suffering

“Culture and Imperialism” (Said, 1993)

• “Domination and inequities of power and wealth are perennial facts of

human society. But in today’s global setting they are also interpretable

as having something to do with imperialism, its history, its new forms.

The nations of contemporary Asia, Latin America and Africa are

politically independent but in many ways are as dominated and

dependent as they were when ruled directly by European powers.

…blaming the Europeans for the misfortunes of the present is not

much of an alternative. What we need to do is to look at these matters

as a network of interdependent histories…

• …And so in the late 20th century the imperial cycle of the last century

in some ways replicates itself….We live in one global environment

with a huge number of ecological, economic, social and political

pressures….Anyone with even a vague consciousness of this whole

is alarmed at how such…selfish and narrow interests – patriotism,

chauvinism, ethnic, religious and racial hatreds – can in fact lead to

mass destructiveness.”

“Culture and Imperialism” (Said, 1993)

• “One should not pretend that models for a harmonious world order are ready

at hand, and it would be equally disingenuous to suppose that ideas of peace

and community have much of a chance when power is moved to action by

aggressive perceptions of ‘vital national interests’ or unlimited sovereignty.

The United States’ clash with Iraq and Iraq’s aggression against Kuwait

concerning oil are obvious examples.

• The wonder of it is that the schooling for such relatively provincial thought

and action is still prevalent, unchecked, uncritically accepted,…. replicated

in the education of generation after generation. We are all taught to venerate

our nations and admire our traditions: we are taught to pursue their interests

with toughness and in disregard for other societies. A new and in my opinion

appalling tribalism is fracturing societies, separating peoples, promoting

greed, bloody conflict, and uninteresting assertions of minor ethnic or group

particularities. Little time is spend not so much in ‘learning about other

cultures’…..as we look back into the 19th century, we see that the drive

toward empire in effect brought most of the earth under the domination of a

handful of powers.”

The power of the image in war conflicts

• Photographs help people come to terms with what happened; this contributed

to shape public response to the events of 9/11, building public support for

military actions

• “Governments the world over have recognised the power of the image in

helping them reach strategic aims (Zelizer, 2002, 50)

• What are the moral implications of looking at images of suffering?

• Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others stresses the problems of

looking at images of suffering, stating that perhaps the only people who can

look are the ones who can alleviate it, or else they are merely voyeurs

• Sontag thus emphasises the indecency of seeing others suffer, of being a co-

spectator in someone else’ suffering.

• “During the Vietnam era, war photography became a criticism of

war….Since then, censorship……has found a large and influential number

of apologists.” (2003, 58)

“Regarding the pain of others” (Sontag, 2003)

• “What the American military promoted during the Gulf War in

1991 were images of the techno-war: the sky above the dying,

filled with light-traces of missiles and shells – images that

illustrate America’s absolute military superiority over its enemy.

American television viewers weren’t allowed to see footage

acquired by NBC (which the network then declined to run) of

what that superiority could wreak: the fate of thousands of Iraqi

conscripts who, having fled Kuwait City at the end of the

war….were carpet bombed with explosives…..and cluster

bombs as they headed north, in convoys and on foot, on the

road to Basra, Iraq – a slaughter described by one American

officer as a ‘turkey shoot’.

Racism and Eurocentrism and “The Wretched of the Earth”

(Fanon, 1965, 2001)

• Distinctions made between self (European, etc) and the “Other” (often the

postcolonial Other)

• Racism and Eurocentrism forms of thinking have been pointed out as

underlining reasons for current conflicts throughout the world

• As Shohat and Stam ( have argued, “racist Eurocentrism manifests itself in

coded ways emphasising cultural differences rather than racial ones, thereby

masking its racism.” (in Cloud, 2004).

• In the context of the liberation movements in Algeria, Frantz Fanon (1965) in

The Wretched of the Earth dissected the psychological degradation inflicted

by imperialism

• “The Western bourgeoisie, though fundamentally racist, most often manages

to mask this racism by a multiplicity of nuances which allow it to preserve

intact its proclamation of mankind’s outstanding dignity…Western bourgeois

racial prejudice as regards the nigger and the Arab is a racism of contempt: it

is a racism which minimizes what it hates.”

Rethinking “the Other” in post-colonialism studies (in

Matos, 2012) • Many theorists working in the field of post-colonial studies (i.e. Hoogvelt,

1997; Gilroy, 2004)have discussed the West’s need to address issues of

cultural diversity.

• Hybridity is seen as a form of creating wider acceptance of diversity and

difference by breaking the rigid and static nature of the binary oppositions

between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’, or the ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ races

• “In his book Postcolonial Melancholia, Gilroy (2004: 5-16) argues that

humanism has not been comfortable with addressing the ‘destructive

impact…..of racial hierarchy upon their own ways of understanding history

and society,’ and that a direct confrontation with issues of cultural diversity is

more than necessary now.”

• Iris Marion Young in Justice and Difference has argued for the need to

“acknowledge our differences but also to highlight our similarities as human

beings who behave justly to members of all races.” (in Matos, 2012, 147)

“The symbolic power of transnational media – managing the

visibility of suffering” (Chouliaraki, 2008)

• The ways in which the media portray the suffering of far away others has

been controversial, raising issues about the “power relations between the

West and the ‘rest’, about stereotypes of the ‘poor South, and about

compassion fatigue among Western audiences” (Moeller, 1999; tester, 2001).

• Researcher studies examples of ordinary news bulletins and extraordinary

satellite reporting in national and international contexts

• Due to 24 hours news channels, the spectacle of world suffering has

reached centre stage:

• “…a consequence of the CNN effect, there is an increase in the broadcasting

of distant disasters and in audience awareness about suffering others

(Livingston and Bennett, 2003…); second, there is a heightened visibility of

war atrocities and new rituals of death and torture, such as the Iraq war,

internet beheadings and Abu Ghraib pictures, placing the spectacle of

suffering at the centre of a contemporary media ethics agenda (Mirzoeff,

2006; Silverstone, 2006)…..”

“The symbolic power of transnational media – managing

the visibility of suffering” (Chouliaraki, 2008)

• “…there is also an increase in citizen-generated footage, such as the

demonstrations by Buddhist monks in Myanmar in 2007, which bypasses

traditional gate-keeping mechanism and enables the world to watch

spectacles of violence otherwise inaccessible to the media (Gillmor, 2004).”

• With satellite networks, we are closer than before to suffering and cannot

afford anymore to say we did not know what was going on.

• The spectacle of suffering versus our moral agency towards others:

• “…indignant denunciation against the injustice inflicted upon the sufferers

by their persecutors, or tender-hearted empathy with the misfortune and pain

of the sufferers” (Boltanski, 1999).

• “Sceptical argument….insists that satellite broadcasting, far from facilitating

the globalization of civic dispositions, clusters transnational populations

around their already existing communities of belonging”.

• Fragmentation and marketization perspectives



• The fragmentation perspective argues that satellite media may be global in

technological scope but designed to be regional in cultural reach, serving the

interests and desires of specific media publics…

• News on suffering and violence sells and is subject to the demands of

infotainment:

• “There are three perspectives to the infotainment

perspective…..sensationalism, whereby suffering is presented in terms of its

dramatic details in order to grasp audiences’ attention (Seaton, 2005: 49-80):

sanitization, where suffering is ‘cleansed’ of its graphic dimensions in order

to protect the audiences’ emotions (i.e. Thussu, 2003) and, finally, de-

contextualization, where suffering is rarely explained as a complex event so

as not to appear demanding on the cognitive capacities of media audience”

(Moisy, 1997).

• “Satellite broadcasting….maximizes the presence of distant suffering on

television screens, yet it does so in an ambivalent manner.”



• “…the discussion on the management of the visibility of suffering is also a

discussion on the civic sensibilities the media invite us to develop”

(Schudson, 2005: 104).

• Which spectacle of suffering does satellite news invite us to contemplate? Do

they connect us together in a global village or do they reproduce a Western

community easily ‘fatigued’ by distant others?

• Link between news stories and civic sensibilities:

• “…news stories do not only represent the world, they constitute our

dispositions to act in this world precisely at the moment that they claim to

simply represent it” (Scannell, 1989: 135-66).

• The management of visibility in ‘ordinary’ satellite and ‘extraordinary’

news

• Examines four case studies, focusing on the visual and verbal properties of

the spectacle of suffering and on the moral agency of the news



• Boat accident in India and floods in Bangladesh, and how the media

covered them:

• “…these two examples of ‘ordinary’ news share three key features: the

minimal narration of suffering, the refusal to humanize the sufferers and the

interruption of emotion, denunciation or empathy vis-à-vis the events of

suffering.”

• Conclusion: “…emotion is a scarce resource and that part of the capacity of

news to present the world is its capacity to reserve the potential for emotion

for some sufferers; to locate others outside our own community of belonging

and to place their suffering beyond the remit of action.”

• Examines three distinct sequences from the September 11 footage shown

on Danish television:

• Researcher concludes that, as a consequence of the footage of intense

proximity with the suffering of the American people, the media invited us to

engage in real-time with their tragic fate….

September 11 satellite footage versus bombardment of Baghdad

(in Chouliaraki, 2008)

• “….the September 11 satellite footage, characterized by a hectic alternation

of aesthetic registers, complicates the moral agency of a specific national

public, inviting the Danes to engage with this spectacle of suffering in

multiple ways: to empathize, to denounce and to reflect on it as a human

tragedy and as a political act. Importantly, the sufferers of September 11 are

presented as thoroughly humanized and historical beings: as people who feel,

reflect and act on their fate. They are…people like ‘us’ who happens to live

far away. We are united with them in denouncing the evil-doers (recall Le

Monde headline, ‘We are all Americans’, 12 September 2001) or in

supporting them in alleviating their misfortune…..”

• Very different from the type of emotions invited for the bombardment of

Baghdad:

• “The point of view is from afar and above…The visual effect is that of a

digital game, endowing the spectacle of war with a fictional rather than a

realist quality – a similar quality to the Gulf War visuals…..”

“To Veil the Threat of Terror: Afghan women and the Clash of

Civilizations” (Cloud, 2004)

• Examines the nature of the images of Afghan people in building support for the US war with Afghanistan, making reference to the discourse around the “clash of civilizations” between the West and the inferior “others”

• “Through the construction of binary oppositions of self and Other, the evocation of a paternalistic stance toward the women of Afghanistan, and the figuration of modernity as liberation, these images participate in a set of justifications for war that contradicts the actual motives for war.”

• The idea of the “white man’s burden” is an element in the belief in a clash between Western societies and the inferior Others, requiring policing and rescue

• “The discourse….between ‘civilized’ people and ‘savages’ is not the only dimension of the rhetoric of civilization clash. Images of the oppressed in an ‘inferior’ civilization can prompt a paternalistic response alongside am aggressive one.”

• Thus the images of Afghans constructed the viewer “as a paternalistic savior of women and posit images of modern civilization against depictions of Afghanistan as backward and pre-modern.”


Civilizations (Cloud, 2004)

• Role of the “clash of civilizations” in US political discourse is not new:

• “At least since the US incursions into the Caribbean in the 1890s, the

rhetoric of the ‘clash of civilizations’ has been a staple of the rhetoric of wars

and empire. Because of its historical longevity and because it encapsulates a

number of key social commitments (to democracy, to a vision of the

geographical role of the United States, to racial and national hierarchy, and

so on) the ‘clash of civilizations’ should be counted among the ideographs of

US political life.”

• Relationship between the “clash of civilizations” and the imagery of the

Others:

• “…In setting up visual binary oppositions between US citizens and enemy

Others, it literally constitutes the clash between them. Photographs of self

and Other enact the clash when they are set alongside one another.”

Oppression of Afghan women versus the oppression of American

women (in Cloud, 2004)

• “Women’s oppression is a marker of an inferior society”:

• “Racialized images of the savage Other and gendered images of women as

victims lurk in Western culture’s symbolic repertoire, taking shape as the

clash of civilizations in perennial justifications of war. As several theorists

have noted, gender, nation and race are closely intertwined in colonialist

discourses historically. Among the features of a gendered nationalism is the

idea of “saving the brown women from the brown men”. Although an

enemy nation’s men often represent “the enemy”, the women (and children)

of that same nation often are represented as victims needing rescue from the

men in their society…..”

• “The rhetoric disregards women’s oppression in the United States, which

takes the form of ideological constructions of a domesticated womanhood

and economic disparity between men and women. The condemnation on the

part of the US leaders of women’s oppression only in those countries that are

the targets of nation building is thus somewhat hypocritical.”



• Examines images from the Time.com website

• “In the naturalization of what are necessarily partial rhetorical fictions, an

image of an Afghan man with weapons…reduces the man to the image of the

terrorist when he, his life and his reasons for taking up arms are probably

more complex than the snapshot.”

• Binary oppositions:

• “The overarching strategy of these images is to construct a binary opposition

between an American self and enemy Others. Thus images do not state the

ideograph ‘clash of civilizations’ as much as they become the clash in visual

condensations of the meaning of “American” and “Other”.

• Conclusion:

• “Mass public support for the war in Afghanistan on the basis either of anger

and fear at terrorists as savages or of concern for the innocents in

Afghanistan is rooted in the common sense that is reproduced, in part, by

photographs circulated in these mass media.”

The clash of civilizations and the discourse of racism

(Cloud, 2004)

• Representations of Africa as the ‘dark continent’:

• “Despite Huntington’s claims to a non-racial theory of civilization clash,

these images of the ‘clash of civilizations’ are about race. The title of the

photo essay is notable: In ‘Shadow To Light’, darkness signifies the chaos

and violence of the ‘uncivilized’. The title echoes colonialist representations

of Africa as “the dark continent”, and the United States, its heroes and

leaders as the province of light. The metaphorical darkness is also literal and

racial: Peoples needing rescue from themselves are almost invariably darker-

skinned than their saviors”.

• “The coding of racial difference as cultural difference participates in what

Stuart Hall would call a discourse of inferential racism”.

• Theorists like Balibar, Wallerstein, Hardt and Negri have noted that racism

“often refers to moral, cultural and religious differences, omitting reference

to bodies or biology.”



• Argues that a “paternalistic rhetoric takes a position sympathetic to, but

standing above, Others. To occupy this stance of benevolent but superior

caretaker is to adopt the prerogative of telling others what they need and how

they should obtain it. As Linda Alcoff explains in “The Problem of Speaking

for Others”, there is a difference between an ethically legitimate standing in

solidarity with the oppressed and the opportunistic use of someone else’s

oppression as rationale for war.”

• “Kabul Unveiled” is the most prominent of the Time.com photo essays

demonstrating the paternalism of the clash of civilizations. For example, the

viewer of Image C literally looks down on the woman in the ruins…”

• “As the viewer moves through the photographs…., images of modern

liberation are interspersed between the images of women as victims….Taken

together, these images encourage viewers to lament the status of Afghan

women and support US intervention.”



• “Kabul Unveiled”

• (http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1947784,00.ht

ml)

“Tribalism and tribulation – media constructions of ‘African

savagery’” (Carruthers, 2004)

• Rwanda and Somalia stand out as sites of intense media coverage in the 1990s in a continent that in overall has been overlooked, and where bureaus have been closed in many countries

• Rwanda - an icon of indifference to human suffering on an epic scale

• Article is worried about two broad camps: one focused on the conditions under which the West “intervenes”, the other on the inadequacies of what the media offers as knowledge about Africa. Author proposes an alternative to view media representations of Africa and their wider significance for identity politics and practical policy alike

• Contrasts the discourses of “Western civilization” and “African barbarism” that are embedded in media representations of the continent and of local conflicts

• “…various commentators have probed whether the emergence of 24 hour global news channels has effected a revolution in foreign policy-making….and of a cosmopolitan consciousness across state boundaries (i.e. Gowing 1994; Shaw, 1994…)



• Africa provides proponents with their paradigmatic case of the CNN effect:

Somalia.

• “Elucidators of the “effect” postulate that TV’s mobilization of emotions is

short-lived and shallow…CNN may exert a near instantaneous ‘agenda

setting effect’ but since its ability to do so rests on manipulation of public

sentimentality, it fails to generate sustained support for prolonged and costly

interventions of the kind its coverage seems designed to elicit.”

• Gives the example of Somalia of corpses of US soldiers being dragged

through the streets, and points out how one Congressmen during the Clinton

administration admitted that “pictures of starving children, not policy

objectives, got us into Somalia in 1992” and that “pictures of US casualties,

not the completion of our objectives, led us to exit Somalia.” (i.e. Gowing

1994: 67)

• Article also asks: why is media’s attention to distant distress so selective and

short-lived?



• Why was the devastation famine in Sudan during the 1992 largely ignored?

• What type of coverage can stimulate action?

• “Robinson (2001: 943) proposes that “empathy framed coverage” which

“tends to focus on the suffering of individuals, identifying them as victims in

need of ‘outside’ help, may be more likely to generate (inter)governmental

action than ‘distance framing’ that ‘tends to minimize pressure for

intervention’ by ‘emphasising the roots of catastrophe in ‘ancient ethnic

hatreds.’”

• Author argues that many “Africanists take issue with the Western’s media

understanding of conflicts in Somalia and genocide Rwanda in terms only of

“tribalism”.

• They argue that this is an Eurocentric view that disguises the West’s “own

implications in the roots of African state failure, economic collapse and

societal disintegration….”. This also has consequences for the types of action

or inaction that become thinkable in response.



• “The genocide of 1994 was reduced to a simple tale of Hutu slaughtering

their Tutsi neighbours….assigning clear-cut moral and ethnic identities to

Tutsi victims and Hutu perpetrators….”

• The coverage was thus represented in black and white terms: good Tutsis,

evil Hutus.

• Many Africanists have thus sought to dismantle the attribution of violence to

“ethnic hatreds” – whether with reference to Rwanda’s genocide or Somalia.

• Rwanda’s conflict was not considered tribal, but rather a modern tragedy, a

degenerated class conflict

• Why do Western journalists get the coverage of Africa wrong?:

• Because more and more news stations rely on ‘parachute journalism’: star

reporters are simply airlifted into and out of the location of humanitarian

disaster. They are wholly ignorant of local conditions, and thus have a

tendency to restore to worn out cliches and stereotypes, also being subject to

manipulation by local elites who are aware of their ignorance….

Towards new and more complex images of “the Other”

• Persepolis

• (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ22VyjJ6n8)

Some conclusions

• The “clash of civilizations” discourse is not knew to US political thinking

• The representation of the suffering of “Others” on 24 hours news and

satellite television reflects the inequalities between the West and the rest,

with coverage inviting sympathy and identification with some sufferers (i.e.

Americans), and distancing and indifference towards others (“the rest”)

• The media’s coverage of the suffering of distant offers, due to the pressures

of commercialization, is often presented as a spectacle, in a sensationalist

way and embedded in the infotainment genre aesthetic

• Articles argue (i.e. Carruthers, 2004) that the media’s coverage should attend

more to the complexities of the conflicts and the people involved, avoiding

succumbing to stereotyping and being manipulated by local elites due to

ignorance of the situation in question

• Towards the need of representation of more complex images of “Others” to

create wider understanding and empathy and to reduce conflict between

nations (i.e. “the clash of civilizations”)

Seminar questions

• 1. Examine Cloud’s argument concerning the impact of the ‘clash of

civilizations’ discourse in the representation of images of Afghan women,

and their use to justify war. Further examine the differences between the

“oppression of Afghan women and the women in the US” that she alludes to,

and think about some media examples here.

• 2. Discuss the management of the visibility of suffering in ‘ordinary’ and

‘extraordinary’ news and the four examples that Chouliaraki investigates in

her text. Do you agree with her analysis? Think of some other examples that

fit her argument.

• 3. Carruther’s text is critical of the media’s coverage of the African continent

and the tendency to reduce most conflicts to fights between different local

tribes in the country in question. What are some of the issues that she raises?

What are your own personal views of the media’s coverage of the major

conflicts in the continent (i.e. Rwanda and Somalia)?

Readings for week 24 Required texts:

• Breuer, A. , Landman, T. and Farquher, Dorothea (2012) “Social media and

protest mobilization: evidence from the Tunisian Revolution”, paper to be

presented for the 4th European Communication Conference for the European

Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA(, Istanbul,

24-27 October 2012

• Crook, J. (2011) “The Growing Contribution of Technology to Democracy

and Conflict Resolution”, briefing paper, Institute for Democracy and

Conflict Resolution (IDCR), University of Essex

• Diamond, L. (2010) “Liberation Technology” in the Journal of Democracy,

vol. 21, n. 3, 69-83

Additional:

Bennett, L. (2003) “Communicating global activism” in Information,

Communication, and Society, 6(2), pp 143-168.

identity and representation

Education

images of war

reporting war

power of images

images of suffering

us war

war photography

criticism of war

gulf war