Document Type
Article
Abstract
Amid the vitriolic nationalist responses to 9/11, social critics as early as fall 2001 observed that the mainstream media’s self-absorbed focus on the attacks has served to deflect many Americans’ attention from the complex historical impact of U.S. foreign policies. Either implicitly or explicitly, these critics of 9/11 discourse have called for Americans to "look elsewhere" in order to avoid reproducing a victim narrative. If the relentless focus on 9/11 reinforces a nationalist myopia, looking elsewhere is, however, no guarantor of recognition, much less of accountability. After all, photographs of veiled women in Afghanistan readily turned women into symbols of gender oppression that fed post-9/11 war logics just as pictures of Iraqi militants reinforced specters of terrorism.
As part of this special issue examining the ways in which 9/11 haunts contemporary national rhetorics, I explore the call to "look elsewhere" as an alternative optics intended to glean insights about international political conflicts, their histories and the suffering wrought by American foreign policies. In taking up this demand to recognize the suffering of others, I examine the ethical challenges of witnessing the war on terror for American viewers. This essay develops a critical methodology for looking elsewhere that includes engagement with the competing demands of citizenship that emerge from visual sites whose affective power draws the viewer into spaces of grief and mourning. I consider both formal elements within photographs as well as the dynamics between viewer and image in order to argue that an ethical gaze can only occur through, not despite, the encounter with spectacles of violence and suffering.
Repository Citation
Kozol, Wendy. "Looking Elsewhere." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 11, no. 2, 2011, pp. 1–21. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol11/iss2/3