Abstract
This paper is driven by the following questions: What role did U.S. policy play in establishing the ground for the acts of torture at Abu Ghraib? What are the codes, conventions, technologies, aesthetics and visual archives that enable both acts of torture and their visual representation and consumption? How can one begin to describe those points of intersection between the genealogies of techno-politico- military power, race and visual regimes of subjugation, violence and torture? In order to address these questions, I propose to situate the racial category of whiteness along a number of intersecting axes: as instrumentalising technology; as mediating prosthetic within the field of vision; as shadow archive actively inflecting relations of power across contemporary media, subjects and institutions; and as racial category that is constitutive of geocorpographies of torture. In coining this term, my aim is to bring into focus the violent enmeshment of the flesh and blood of the body within the geopolitics of race, war and empire.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Number of pages | 18 |
| Journal | ACRAWSA E-journal |
| Volume | 3 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Publication status | Published - 2007 |
Bibliographical note
Copyright 2007 The Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Association. Reprinted from ACRAWSA e-journal. This material is posted here with the permission of The Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Association and the author. Use of this material is permitted for personal, research and non-commercial uses. Further information regarding the copyright applicable to this article can be obtained from The Association http://www.acrawsa.org.au.Keywords
- torture
- Iraq war
- violence
- colonialism
- imperialism
- state-sponsored terrorism