Distant Wars Visible: The Ambivalence of Witnessing (Critical American Studies)

they identify the archive as a site of struggle and contestation not only over control of history and social memory but also over subjectivity and community formation.

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

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

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?

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

The “moment of encounter” (Bennett 2005), I argue, can foster forms of ethical spectatorship that can further our understanding of the ambivalences of witnessing that are the concern of this book.

I suggest we consider historical witnessing as an act of imagining subjectivity, for conjuring subjectivities in the photographic archive can expose the costs of citizenship for both men.

This chapter explores the affective politics of recoil and related reactions to the durational event of witnessing the visual traces of wartime violence.

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?