Pictures from the Past: Affects and the Politics of Memory in Shattered Societies

Abstract

This panel questions, with a regional focus on the Middle-East, the interface between politics and memory in warring and post-conflict social settings. In societies devastated by internal violence, memorial practices construct and actualize bonds and boundaries. This panel aims to better understand the way visual representations articulate connections between experiences of violence and traumas, on the one hand, and the actualization of these experiences in the reification of social and political bonds and boundaries. That is to say, images not only express or represent these experiences, but they become generative modes of social understanding vis-à-vis experiences of solidarity, rejection, and trauma. A visual framework thus provides important possibilities for understanding the affective potential of images in political contexts. Indeed, the affective register serves as a key mode for tracing the linkages between memory and politics. As such, the general objective of the panel is to consider through the political use of visual modes of expression the complexity of temporality in the construction of social reality and thus re-examine the very borders of politics. Drawing upon theoretically rich and empirically informed case-studies, presentations should consider the following questions: How are spontaneous or more elaborated visual practices of representation engaging with the existence of conflicting social memories? How are these testimonies informed by affects originating in traumatic experiences? How are such practices about the past witnesses of present political processes?