Abstract
We live in a world saturated with images; a world in which the circulation of still shots and moving footage of conflict zones, editorial cartoons and even cinematic thrillers contribute, in various ways, to our understanding and perception of political events and processes. But, just how does the visual work over us to shape our perspectives? In what ways are images made political? And what kinds of methods are the most appropriate for capturing the effects and impacts of the visual in world politics? In this rich edited collection, part of the Routledge Interventions series, Roland Bleiker brings together valuable contributions from 51 emerging and established authors working at the intersections of visual and global politics. These concise and accessible chapters work synergistically to pose answers to the questions above. They also serve as a prompt for readers – both academics and those with a general interest – to ask their own questions about the role of the visual in everyday life and political practice.
The text begins with Bleiker’s introductory chapter, ‘Mapping Visual Global Politics’, which is itself a treasure trove of ideas, pathways and paradigms for thinking about the visual, drawn from decades of thinking and writing about aesthetic politics. In this chapter, Bleiker makes three claims that set out the broad conceptual parameters for the book. These are: (1) that technological advances have changed and, in some senses, democratized the ways that we interact with, access and consume images; (2) that images and visual artefacts – as documentary means – can tell us something useful about the world we inhabit; and (3) that images can themselves constitute political forces to be harnessed, weaponized and used to legitimize or discredit particular narratives, policies and actions. Indeed, the ubiquity, influence and complexity of images today all suggest the need for scholarly attention and specialized research. However, drawing on the work of WJT Mitchell, Bleiker takes the opportunity to remind readers that visual images and artefacts differ in their nature and function; that they are unique in the sense that they always, at least partially, elude easy definition via existing words and categories. For these reasons, no single method or theoretical lens provides a sufficient basis for understanding what images and visual artefacts are and what they do across different terrains of political activity and power. It is this insight and call for a plurality of methods and perspectives on the visual that underpins the collection of essays in Visual Global Politics and makes it such an interesting and eclectic volume.
Each of the 51 essays that make up this book is centred on or inspired by a particular word or phrase that finds circulation in the everyday parlance of world politics. The essays, from ‘Borders’ (Shine Choi), ‘Finance’ (James Brassett) and ‘Memory’ (Nayanika Mookherjee) to ‘State’ (Brent J Steele), and ‘Time’ (Michael J Shapiro) are arranged in simple alphabetical order. This is a noteworthy choice and one that seems to successfully avoid the normative hierarchies that are sometimes replicated in International Relations textbooks that organize issues into concerns of ‘High’ versus ‘Low’ politics and theories/methods into ‘Mainstream’ and ‘Critical’.
Consumed as a whole, the book provides a timely and kaleidoscopic view of the expressive, instrumental and symbolic uses (and abuses) of images, sensory encounters and visual artefacts that take place across the variegated landscape of world politics. However, conventional, linear reading of this text is not prescribed. Through this collection, Bleiker sets out to create a book whose chapters ‘intersect and intersperse’ in the manner of rhizomes – spreading upwards, outwards, pushing and pulling the reader in different possible directions, offering multiple paths of entry and exit – and he largely succeeds in doing so. This is the sort of book that you can dip into at intervals; you can consume the chapters in almost any order and in so doing discover different relationships, interactions and lines of connectivity between the texts. On one reading, it is possible to detect complementarities between the chapters on ‘Indigeneity’ (Sally Butler), ‘Roma’ (Anca M Pusca) and ‘Refugees’ (Heather L Johnson), each of which directs attention to the relationship between visual representation and the possibilities for (re)constructing the collective identities of particular social groups and political communities. Meanwhile, chapters on ‘Peace’ (Frank Möller) and ‘Invisibility’ (Elspeth Van Veeren) are unified by their interest on what remains missing or occluded from the sensory landscape of world politics.
One possible criticism of this collection relates to the length of the interventions which occasionally left me wanting to see the ideas and examples pushed a bit further. The virtue of the shorter chapters, however, is that they are easy to digest and allow us a glimpse into the many worlds of possibility for visual research in IR. The trouble with providing a 1,000-word review of such a densely packed volume is that it is impossible to provide coverage of all of the contributions. Nonetheless, for me there were some particular highlights, including the book’s final chapter, a contribution by the late Alex Danchev (to whom the volume is dedicated), which explores the politics of the artist/photographer ‘bearing witness’. Written in a characteristically fluid and poignant prose, this chapter navigates various examples to elaborate on the conflicted position of the ‘moral witness’ and the palimpsests of historical and communal traumas captured well by the term ‘post witness’. The act of witnessing, Danchev argues, is something that allows those no longer with us to reappear and to get ‘under our skin’. And, this is exactly what Danchev does, with his closing challenge, taken from Agee and Evans’ ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’ (1941): ‘Who are you who will read these words and study these photographs . . . and what will you do about it?’