Book Chapters by Joscelyn Jurich
Performing Human Rights: Contested Amnesia and Aesthetic Practices in the Global South, Ed. Liliana Gómez, 2021
The Syrian conflict is now entering its ninth year and as of this writing, over 570,000 are dead ... more The Syrian conflict is now entering its ninth year and as of this writing, over 570,000 are dead and 10,000 missing (Syrian Observatory for Human Rights 2019). It thus may seem initially challenging if not wholly problematic to analyze the conflict in the context of transitional justice. The war is ongoing, and the country is neither embroiled in the shift in political orders and change in a liberalizing direction (Teitel 2000) nor is it a society reckoning solely with past human rights abuses (Bell 2008). Yet in Syria and in the Syrian diaspora there is increasing attention by individuals and groups to transitional justice processes in the absence of peace or regime transition (Tenove 2019) and sustained and organized efforts to document and archive human rights violations and mass atrocities (Haugbolle 2019). Diaspora communities worldwide solicited and continue to solicit digital video and other documentation of human rights abuses and regime violence from activists and citizen journalists and a central role of the diaspora has been to maintain databases of evidence of rights violations (Tenove 2019). Some of this material is collected expressly with post-war crimes prosecutions in mind, what Sune Haugbolle has termed Transitional Justice Evidence (TJE) as distinct from the documentation of ‘memory culture’ (Haugbolle 2019). As he argues, the role of imagination and futurity is key in these processes, as is the pursuit of rights-focused activism. In this context of the most socially mediated and digitally visually documented conflict in history (Lynch et al 2014), the work of the anonymous Syrian film collective Abounaddara is particularly relevant. Working both in the diaspora and within Syria and with members both within Syria and in the diaspora, the collective posted a new short film (described as ‘bullet films’ by the collective for their potential to shock) on Vimeo every Friday since the beginning of the uprisings in 2011 until 2017, calling their work ‘emergency cinema’ for the way in which it represents the emergency of the conflict and in homage Walter Benjamin’s envisioning of artistic collectives as potent responses to political violence. Their approach to filmmaking also draws from Benjamin’s writing on narrative and film and they privilege forms that emphasize storytelling and individual testimonials that contrast with what Lisa Wedeen (Wedeen 2019) has described as the temporality of ‘high speed eventfulness’ that defines the circulation of information and images from the Syrian conflict. Since 2015, the collective has put forth a campaign of ‘the right to the image’ that uses the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the International Covenant on Economic and Social Rights (ICESCR), to argue for the dignified representation of individuals and groups affected by wars and human rights atrocities. Arguing that the hyper-visualization and sensationalizing of violent images from the war constitutes a necropolitics (Sai 2015), the collective advocates both artistic and legal alternatives. This chapter contextualizes Abounaddara’s archive of bullet films, their feature films and their ‘right to the image’ campaign within the framework of transitional justice to argue for the collective’s vital role in problematizing the forensic, the documentary and the testimonial. It will further demonstrate how the collective’s ‘right to the image’ claim performs and imagines an as yet non-existent right and the ethical and political relevance of that performative imaginary in the contemporary global media landscape. Finally, the chapter will explain how the collective’s artistic cultural production and ‘right to the image’ create new narratives that work against both historical amnesia and an amnesia of a history of the present (Foucault 1977) in the context of the Syrian conflict.
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Savoirs de la Précarité/Knowledge from Precarity Ed. Joëlle Le Marec and Hester Du Plessis, 2020
This chapter is based on a conference the author co-organized at CELSA-Sorbonne in 2018 entitled,... more This chapter is based on a conference the author co-organized at CELSA-Sorbonne in 2018 entitled, “Médias indépendants et droits de l’homme: la tension entre ‘reporting’ et ‘reportage’? Enquête et démocratie” (“The Independent Media and Human Rights: Tension between “reporting” and “reportage”? Investigation and Democracy”). The conference featured presentations by independent photographers NnoMan Cadoret and Yann Levy and Le Monde reporter Rémi Barroux. It focused on how independent and “traditional” photographers and journalists represent human rights issues including police violence and discrimination based on race, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation and how they cover activist movements such as “Truth and Justice for Adama,” the movement formed after the suspicious death of Adama Traoré in 2016 while in police custody and the ZAD (zone à défendre), an autonomous zone in Northwestern France that has had a historically tense relationship to the French state. This article takes as its central questions those posed at the 2018 conference: How do independent photojournalists and journalists, those working for “traditional” outlets and independent cultural producers contribute to investigative and democratic practices? How do these groups represent and, in the case of independent photographers in France, sometimes themselves embody precarious and vulnerable lives? What complementary knowledge can they provide to the academy and to scholarship? Describing the ways in which Cadoret’s and Levy’s documentation of what they call “a permanent social emergency: the migrant crisis, institutional racism, the destruction of the environment, liberal reforms” (Levy 2017) is a form of social and political engagement, the article details their conceptualization of and commitment to representing under-represented and misrepresented vulnerable populations such as residents of the quartiers populaires (working class neighborhoods), migrants and residents of the ZAD. Explicating the distinct ways in which their interpretative community (Hymes 1980; Zelizer 1993; Nichols 1994) as committed independent photographers differs from that of Le Monde journalist Barroux, this article addresses both how these independent and “traditional” media producers conceptualize what Ryfe (Ryfe 2019) has called the single greatest challenge facing Western journalism today: its ontology (Ryfe 2019). Cadoret’s and Levy’s work is then analyzed in the context of the independent American documentary “Whose Streets” (2017), about the killing of Michael Brown and the Ferguson uprisings. To what extent independent photographers and cultural producers creating counter-hegemonic representations could be considered a sensus communis (Rancière 2009) is one of the concluding questions of this work as is the challenge to self-reflexivity and self-critique in the academy concerning questions of representation and precarity.
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Articles by Joscelyn Jurich
Afterimage, 2023
The last paragraph of Ariella Azoulay’s essay, “The Ethic of the Spectator” (2005) argues that th... more The last paragraph of Ariella Azoulay’s essay, “The Ethic of the Spectator” (2005) argues that the spectator of a photograph can practice “prolonged observation, performed at the margins of a particular activity or event” (Azoulay 2005:44). The act is imbued with transformative power for the spectator, who becomes an actor and makes the photograph into “the beacon of an emergency, a signal of danger or warning...an emergency énoncé” (Azoulay 2005:44). As one who not only observes present violence but can foresee and foretell atrocities of the future, this prolonged observation (what Azoulay calls the “civil skill” of “ethical watching” in The Civil Contract of Photography (2008)) changes the temporality of the image, potentially transforming a photograph of a past or contemporary atrocity into the harbinger of one yet to come. The practice of “prolonged observation” is thus also part of the practice of what she calls “potential history,” the “restitution of the right to participate differently” (Azoulay 2019). Published a year after the “Inconvenient Evidence” exhibition of approximately twenty photographs of Abu Ghraib torture at the International Center of Photography, Azoulay’s essay gestures toward it and others like it that re-contextualized images of atrocity in the gallery setting. Her essay could also be read as in oppositional dialogue with Susan Sontag’s work on photography generally but with Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), published just two years earlier before Azoulay’s Afterimage contribution, and Sontag’s essay, “Regarding the Torture of Others” (2004). This response to “The Ethic of the Spectator” will discuss its importance for reconsidering Sontag’s work on images of atrocity and its relevance for visual artists and curators working in and responding to contexts of political violence.
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Studies in Documentary Film, 2019
Syrian documentary filmmaker, poet, playwright and translator Liwaa Yazji’s long-form documentary... more Syrian documentary filmmaker, poet, playwright and translator Liwaa Yazji’s long-form documentary ‘Haunted’ (2014) follows nine individuals’ experiences of home, including a couple in Damascus that remain trapped in their house surrounded by snipers, a Syrian of Palestinian descent who fled from Syria to Lebanon and a Syrian refugee family temporarily inhabiting a former prison. Similar to a multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, George. 1995. “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 95–117), Yazji guides viewers through multiple digital, geographical and affective spaces. This article demonstrates Yazji’s documentary as concerned with longstanding anthropological questions about possession, kinship, remains, the everyday and the temporal and as a work of ‘accented cinema’ (Naficy, Hamid. 2001. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press) that emerges from the filmmaker’s personal experience of displacement and migration, and focuses on journeying, home-seeking, homelessness, rootedness and dislocation. It argues her film’s ethnographic way of seeing and sensing problematizes categories of poetic documentary and visual and sensory ethnography. The article explains its importance for scholars of forced migration, conflict and the after-effects of violence and for problematizing the definition of ethnographic film and its power in conveying the plurality of the world (Hastrup, Kirsten. 1992. “Anthropological Visions: Some Notes on Visual and Textual Authority.” In Film as Ethnography, edited by Film as Ethnography. Manchester: Manchester University Press), one currently largely inaccessible to ethnographers, filmmakers and journalists.
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Journal of Visual Culture, 2019
The anonymous Syrian film collective Abounaddara has posted a new short video on Vimeo and distri... more The anonymous Syrian film collective Abounaddara has posted a new short video on Vimeo and distributed it via social media every Friday since April 2011, the beginning of the Syrian popular uprising. Working with limited equipment, no regular funding, and under very dangerous conditions, Abounaddara has termed its work 'emergency cinema', recalling one of the group's vital influences, Walter Benjamin, who envisioned artistic collectives as potentially effective responses to political violence. This article demonstrates how Abounaddara's work subverts international and national media coverage of the Syrian conflict by consciously employing what Benjamin described as an artisanal form of storytelling. The author illustrates how and why Abounaddara's concept of 'the right to the image' is politically vital and ethically complex, arguing for its relevance within the broader context of global digital images of state and police violence rousing debates about representation, media ethics, and the circulation of graphic images.
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Afterimage, 2019
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American Communist History, 2017
African American Communist leader Pettis Perry (1897-1965) was a Smith Act Defendant, the African... more African American Communist leader Pettis Perry (1897-1965) was a Smith Act Defendant, the African American Secretary of the Negro Commission of the Communist Party, the Chairman of the Farm Commission of the Communist Party, and an Alternate Member of the Executive Committee of the Communist Party. His archives at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and NYU’s Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives reveal the “long muted evidence” of his importance to African American and American radical history and to the Long Civil Rights Movement. Perry’s role in the American Communist Party (CPUSA), his prosecution and jailing under the Smith Act and the public and private critical stance he took on racial justice and African American representation within and outside of the CPUSA contributes to a greater understanding of his role in the Party and his contribution to civil rights. Perry’s letters from the Danbury, Connecticut Federal Correctional Institution, which he wrote on an almost daily basis to his wife and three sons for the two and a half years he was imprisoned there (1955-1957), are teaching documents of Perry’s views on major historical events such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the murder of Emmett Till, and anti-colonial movements in North Africa and Latin America. This article argues that Perry is relevant to contextualize within the Long Civil Rights movement and that his role within the Communist Party is an important example of how a party member could remain loyal to Communism but constructively critical of the CPUSA throughout his life.
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Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology, 2016
This paper examines horror through works by three artists taking the sites and remains of extreme... more This paper examines horror through works by three artists taking the sites and remains of extreme violence as their subject matters: Australian actress Kym Vercoe's performance piece, " Seven Kilometres Northeast, " (2010) Bosnian director Jasmila Žbanić's film based on the same piece, " For Those Who Can Tell No Tales " (2013) and Bosnian photographer Ziyah Gafić's ongoing project, " Quest for Identity, " begun in 2011, a series of photographs of the material remains found in mass graves around Sre-brenica, several of which are displayed in the Srebrenica Memorial Room in the former Dutchbat headquarters in Potočari. Vercoe's and Žbanić's works focus on Višegrad and specifically upon the Vilina Vlas spa, which was used as a rape camp during the Bosnian war. Spaces such as these where acts of violence occurred carry more than traces; they are replete with the environments of past events that linger and animate them. They are what Avery Gordon (Gordon 1997) describes as haunted sites of social life that are not easily perceivable but make their presence felt. Through examining these artistic works, I argue that they reveal how the seemingly inanimate may become an animated site of horror yet are also engaged creative attempts to transform psychic and spatial abjection motivated by a productive haunting of "something-to-be-done ."
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Afterimage, 2016
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Afterimage, 2015
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Afterimage, 2011
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Online publication by Joscelyn Jurich
Laura Rival (Rival 1996, 1998) has argued that trees are visible and powerful sources of social p... more Laura Rival (Rival 1996, 1998) has argued that trees are visible and powerful sources of social processes and collective identity (Rival 1996) and can also be symbols of transgenerational unity (Rival 1998). Interrogating these arguments as well as Julian Steward’s concept of a “cultural core” (Steward 1955), our research centers around the question of whether and to what degree mulberry trees in Boboshtiçe, Albania, possess their own social and cultural life. Employing a primarily qualitative methodology in studying the village of Boboshtiçe, Albania, this analysis exposes how a unique mulberry tree has embedded itself within the daily life of inhabitants affecting a synergistic effect upon the tree itself. Fieldwork involving interviews, observation, and participation yielded insight into the identity, economic, cultural, symbolic, and medical use values villagers derive from the tree. This research underscores the enduring relevance that nature has to social life and the cultural and social life that nature itself may possess.
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Book Reviews by Joscelyn Jurich
Afterimage, 2021
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Papers by Joscelyn Jurich
This paper analyzes the different perceptions of cultural heritage; in particular, it is focused ... more This paper analyzes the different perceptions of cultural heritage; in particular, it is focused on the case of the old city of Gjirokaster, which was declared in 2005 a monument of cultural heritage by Unesco. The paper is divided into four different sections. In the first section, we are going to outline the main purpose and the basic directions of this essay. In the following section, we’re discussing the research methods and the research design; more specifically, we are focusing on issues of material culture related to the region, presenting the theoretical background of the research and, finally, positing the main hypothesis and the basic research questions. In the third section we’re presenting the research data; lastly, in the last section we’re putting forth our concluding remarks, which are related to our main research hypothesis.
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