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Paper short abstract

Understanding polarization as a basic questioning of the status quo, this paper seeks to make a contribution from a media anthropological perspective and embarks on a postcolonial journey of conflictive seeing in the context of global genocidal politics, from Gujarat/India, 2002, to Gaza, 2023-.

Paper long abstract

Polarization is usually seen as negative and is almost always leveled as an accusation against a political Other, who is identified as a threat to an inherently assumed unity. In this way, polarization has been used both by right-wing (indivisible ethnicity/homeland) and left-wing (divide-and-rule) as well as, especially, by liberal political forces who have been most convinced of the reasonability and unquestionability of their world view of a shared humanity.

I will discuss the relation between the challenges of this status quo and the challenges that arise when visual evidence becomes conflictive that concerns the truth of a crime against humanity. From a media anthropological perspective, I will follow the trajectory of liberal TV journalism in postcolonial India, during the 2002 pogrom against the Muslim minority in the regional state of Gujarat through Hindu-nationalist forces, and in post-Holocaust Germany, during the unfolding genocide against the Palestinian population in Gaza through the Israeli government. In both cases, the tension between what could clearly be seen to be happening, in different media, and its interpretation on the part of the perpetrating and complicit forces constituted a visual method in itself. In India, liberal journalism eventually failed to convey their evidence of a pogrom, accusing the Hindu right of (successful) polarization, while in Germany, liberal journalism largely denied the evidence of a genocide, accusing the pro-Palestinian left of (antisemitic) polarization. This constellation throws up questions both for increasingly complicated conditions of existential truth-establishing and for polarization as a productive means of truth-seeking.