Rendering visible the invisible: Reflections on violent display

Dr. Lee Ann Fujii was my doctoral supervisor, mentor, and friend. In thinking through how I would approach this invitation to discuss Lee Ann’s work, my mind joyfully brought me back to our conversations at her massive kitchen table, drinking tea and devouring pastries. Our conversations were sparked by a reflection or an observation about something we experienced, read, or caught on the news. It was here that Lee Ann encouraged me to challenge the epistemological boundaries of the discipline of political science. As her research assistant, it was here that we had many conversations about the direction of Show Time. In many ways, I see this piece as a continuation of those conversations and it is in that spirit I want to offer my reflections on Lee Ann’s last theoretical contribution to the study of political violence.

Our biographies influence how we experience the world. They shape how we make sense of the world. They inform the way we think about and view our social world. As scholars, our biographies also shape the way we think about unpacking a puzzle. For Lee Ann, her previous career as a thespian is evident in how she masterfully invites us to see the performativity of violence and the ways in which scenes of violence transform the actors and the audience. In Show Time, Lee Ann proposes the concept of “violent display”—a collective staging of violence for people to see—to explain how particular displays of violence serve to reinforce political identities, social hierarchies, and power structures for participants, observers and society at large. As the pages unfold, Lee Ann provides a rich canopy of detailed description of three different violent displays: the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the execution of Muslim men in a Serb-controlled village in Bosnia during the Balkan Wars, and the lynching of George Armwood, a Black man, in the Jim Crow Eastern Shore of Maryland in 1933.

Attentive to setting the stage of the violent display, Lee Ann provides descriptions that capture the sounds, visuals, and smells of the scene of the violent display in her sites of study. Through the vividness of her writing she places the reader as close as possible to the scene. Were we at her kitchen table, I would undoubtedly ask her about her intentionality here. In many ways, we as the readers become cast as the unwitting spectator. The scenes depicted are so detailed and descriptive that I myself, both a researcher of political violence and a seasoned counselor working in the area of sexual and gender-based violence, at certain points needed to pause and ground myself after reading how the violent displays unfolded. For me, the vividness of her writing reveals how a violent display is spatially and temporally unbounded, resonating across time and space. So much so, that I felt the echo of the violent displays depicted in her text. And it is here that I propose that we take up Lee Ann’s invocation of the importance of embodiment and think about how this is an embodied experience. What Lee Ann’s work also brings to the fore is the way in which violent display can traverse the past and present through its retelling.

In this spirit, I found myself returning to Lee Ann’s description of the events leading up to the murder of George Armwood, in particular to the white mob’s actions outside the jail. The descriptiveness of Lee Ann’s writing captures the scene for the reader with precision. The white mob makes several efforts to enter the jail where George Armwood is being held. State Police form a thin line in front of the jail. White residents, including the family members of the woman Armwood allegedly raped, taunt and assault the police. The crowd makes several attempts to break through the line. At some point, the police throw tear gas to push back the crowd. Later, the crowd surges toward the police and rushes the police with a battering ram, injuring a police officer. In this scene, the inaction and restraint of the police in response to the white mob stood out. A similar scene would have been an impossibility had the accused been white and the mob Black. And certainly the response to a mob of Black people attacking a jail anywhere in the United States of America in the era of Jim Crow would have been met with an entirely different response.

I proffer that there is something important in the display of restraint by the police—and invite us to think about how the act of police restraint in the face of a white mob, set on executing violent terror on a Black person, is in itself a display. A display, as Lee Ann theorizes, can do the work of interrupting, maintaining, or reinforcing the socio-political and relational order. Further, if you were a Black resident in this town, you very likely experienced the police’s display of restraint against white supremacist violence as a particular kind of violence. A form of violence that is also embodied. I wonder how Lee Ann might situate a violent display in conversation with the countless videos of police brutality, taken by witnesses and circulated on social media. These moments have their own casting by which people take on roles and roles take on people. What might this examination afford us? What additional paths of inquiry might open when we are attentive to displays of violence that do not entail corporeal violence, but nonetheless inflict harm on a person? And here I am thinking of the vicarious trauma many Black people experience when they hear about reports of anti-Black police violence (Hawkins, 2021). Finally, what fertile work does that open up for us in terms of thinking about the performance of violent displays as not only moments of spectacle but also in everyday life?

I do not have answers to these questions but I think the strength of Lee Ann’s work is it encourages us to ask these questions. Show Time does the work that a theoretically innovative text should: it illuminates new pathways of thinking about public and extra-lethal violence (Fujii, 2013), it raises questions about the temporal breadth of violent displays and, for scholars of political violence, it invites us to think about how the theoretical propositions of violent displays relate to our own work and the political violence we see in our current socio-political context.