For Donald, did this archive remind him of the Japanese soldier as a vicious enemy, thus helping to keep alive the racism central to nationalist justifications for war? Or did the photographs of family members and soldier buddies that look remarkably like Donald’s own pictures function as aide-memoires of the Japanese soldier’s humanity? Did Donald

If shame sullied Donald’s own memories of his military service, then what was his “compulsive, repetitive and nostalgic desire” to return to a moment of origin signified in the acquisition of these souvenirs?

ambitions. Photojournalism furthers these ambitions to the extent that this cultural practice produces an ethnocentric gaze at social violence occurring “elsewhere.” Atrocity images often privilege a normative gaze that can be intentionally moralistic because they call for a judgment by the viewer

Foucault (1972, 129) rejects assumptions that the archive provides direct and unmediated access to history. Instead, he conceptualizes the archive as a system, or the “rules of practice,” which legitimizes, limits, and directs what can and cannot be said. In other words, he argues, “the archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that

Naming a group of objects an archive certainly functions as a form of boundary making that elides the multiple purposes that material objects have, purposes that often change over time.

Visual culture studies in this period moved from understanding archives as repositories of documentary evidence to conceptualizing them as productive institutional sites of visual knowledge. This post-structuralist turn has led to innovative methodological inquiries into how archives elicit myriad negotiations around subjectivity, citizenship, and

Recoil here references turning away with an emotional intensity suggestive of the backward force that can occur when firing a gun. Denial, for instance, is an emotional reaction that distances the viewer from the violence.

How can I as a U.S. citizen look at the torture archive without recoiling in horror and disavowal or, conversely, implicating the analytic within the voyeuristic gaze at this spectacle of cruelty and suffering? What if I cannot avoid either response?

If the archive is both an institutional and a discursive site of control, Derrida argues, then technologies of archivization are fundamental to the production of legible and hence authoritative historical narratives