Abu Ghraib as Anti-Racist Spectacle? New Media and Atrocity Imagery

• In Event: Visual Communication: Images and Identities

Abstract

This paper looks to the scandal surrounding the Abu Ghraib photographs in order to assess the ways that recent racial spectacles have acquired their meanings, and the kinds of contests waged over those meanings. Racial spectacles are examined as, in part, struggles over vision—over what we are meant to see, and how we are to understand visual evidence. The paper asks how new media works to shape visions of race in a digital age.

Author

• Jonathan Markovitz, California State University, San Marcos