This article will examine the notion of subversive discourse found in both the Brazilian dance-martial art known as capoeira and the recent urban phenomenon called parkour, looking in detail at the origins and influences of the two disciplines. With reference to capoeira, I will argue that the linguistic structure which underpins the game provides the space for each capoeirista to develop his or her own creative expression or ‘personality’ within the framework of the discipline. When looking at parkour, I will consider the ways in which it embodies both the notion of flesh in Merleau-Ponty's later writings and how through such an understanding of their bodies and the space around them, practitioners of parkour, known as traceurs, are able to engage in what Foucault refers to as ‘technologies of the self’.

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Jérémie Dres's 2011 graphic novel, Nous n'irons pas voir Auschwitz, recounts a road trip taken by the author with his brother to explore their Polish-Jewish roots. 1 For Paris-born Dres, the idea of going to Auschwitz seemed deplorable not simply because of its reputation as a 'dark' tourist destination but also because the aim of the trip was to discover places associated with the lives of his great-grandparents, not their deaths. What their visits to Warsaw and elsewhere in Poland show is the way in which Jewish history and heritage have been both erased from the city's architecture and re-activated in other ways as a response to those visiting (from the United States and elsewhere) in search of their Jewish origins. A different critical perspective on Auschwitz-Birkenau is offered in Georges Didi-Huberman's Écorces, a photo-essay that calls into question the 'museification' of the site. 2 Didi-Huberman's account of his visit to Birkenau begins with three pieces of bark he has taken from trees on the edge of the camp. The bark offers a different material encounter with the site to the 'official' displays offered but also serves as a conduit for thinking about writing, photography, and the complex personal stakes of visiting such a site. I cite these two visual ethnographies as examples of exciting and highly personal forms of 'research' produced within the last decade for three reasons. Firstly, to lay specific emphasis on the importance of the visual not just as a means of documenting heritage and tourism sites and practices but as a research practice in its own right, echoing Paul Virilio's Bunker Archaeology project, itself an ongoing source of inspiration for scholars working on twentieth-century ruins. 3 Secondly, the texts produced by Dres and Didi-Huberman are indicative of how Auschwitz has come to operate not only as metonym for the collective atrocities of the Second World War but as site par excellence of 'dark tourism'. And finally, through their respective refusal of and encounter with Auschwitz, as a means of highlighting the deep-rooted suspicion amongst French and francophone scholars and heritage practitioners alike of tourism described in the anglophone world as 'dark'.Coined in 2000 by John Lennon and Malcolm Foley in their now seminal Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster, the notion of 'dark tourism' has produced entire libraries' worth of scholarship largely dominated by an Anglo-American perspective. 4 While the term 'thanatourism' had previously been proposed by Anthony Seaton to describe sites specifically dealing with death, 'dark tourism' has become the umbrella term for a great range of activities and sites dealing not only with death and atrocity but disaster, crime, and scandal. 5 However, although France's battlefield tourism features as a key example in Lennon and Foley's early study, the term 'dark tourism' does not translate well into French. It is frequently translated as 'tourisme sombre', which loses its sense of the macabre, lurid, or sensational. 6 Elsewhere t...

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The pixel and the technique of pixelating faces belong to a politics of fear and a digital aesthetics of truth that shapes public perceptions of criminality and the threat of otherness. This article draws on Paul Virilio’s account of the pixel in The Lost Dimension to analyze its specific role and operation in relation to contemporary representations of incarceration. In particular, the article considers the figure of the incarcerated informant. The incarcerated criminal or informant plays a complex role as both subversive other and purveyor of truth and as such constitutes an important example of the ways pixelation functions as a visible signifier of a dangerous truth while blurring, erasing, and ultimately dehumanizing those “speaking” this truth. The discussion forms part of a larger analysis of the production, framing, and circulation of images of otherness, identifying Virilio as key to debates around the violence of the screen.