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Contribution short abstract

This contribution discusses the curatorial politics of atrocity media, exploring how the visual archives of political violence produced by perpetrators fractures the myth of a humanist viewing public, and gestures to the consumption of violence as a politically polyvalent practice.

Contribution long abstract

From Israeli soldiers dancing gleefully on TikTok as Palestinian homes are demolished in the background, to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement posting ASMR videos of deportation raids, there is no dearth of media these days that not only reveals violence but revels in it. What does one make of perpetrators who, rather than hiding in the shadows, smile and wave at the camera? As David Keenan observed of the Kosovo War in 1999, the visual archives of political violence produced by perpetrators themselves have a distinctive grammar that challenges liberal assumptions about the power of the image to expose, to shame, or to condemn. My roundtable contribution will discuss the curatorial politics of atrocity media and the challenge it poses for ethnographic engagements in a time of neo-fascist resurgence. Addressing the state-sanctioned aesthetics of the genocide in Gaza and the Trump regime’s mass deportation campaign, I will explore how atrocity media fractures the myth of a humanist viewing public and gestures to the consumption of violence as a politically polyvalent practice. If one of the conditions of ethnographic labour is sharing a world with others, performative violence by and for an audience reminds us of the constitutive impossibility of worlding premised upon structural dehumanization. It deprives anthropology of its favourite hermeneutics of counterintuition—with which the discipline has previously unmasked racial liberalism’s many hypocrisies—by manifesting a power so unbridled that it coarsens thought and vulgarizes critique. When cruelty becomes the message, what does ethnography have left to teach?