Cartooning the Camp: Aesthetic Interruption and the Limits of Political Possibility

Abstract

Over the last thirty years, post-structuralist, feminist and other IR theorists have asked questions of the ways in which discourses on sovereignty seek to foreclose political possibility. To do so, they have advanced a decentralised, contested, incomplete and relational understanding of politics that presupposes some sort of (fragmented) intersubjective agency. There is one site, however, that appears to confound this line of argument insofar as it is commonly understood to exemplify an entirely nonrelational, anti-political 'desolation': the concentration camp. Drawing on feminist theory to establish the terms of an aesthetic mode of 'interruption', this paper will identify a compelling challenge to this position in a comic book drawn by Horst Rosenthal, a German-Jewish detainee at Gurs in Vichy France who was later killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Rosenthal's piece will be read as an 'aesthetic interruption' that mounts a powerful critique of the logic underpinning his concentrationary experience, and in so doing demonstrates one way in which (to however painfully limited a degree) the political might be 'brought back in' to discussions about sovereign power.

Humorous States: IR, New Diplomacy and the Rise of Comedy in Global Politics

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“…One might read the body of comic art produced by detainees in Nazi concentration camps in the same way (cf. Wedderburn, 2019).…”

Security, sexuality, and the Gay Clown Putin meme: Queer theory and international responses to Russian political homophobia

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“…While this research is vast and varied, poststructuralist approaches and critical security studies have been at the forefront of engaging the visual in IR (Andersen et al, 2015;Bleiker, 2018;Hansen, 2011;Vuori and Andersen, 2018). Within this burgeoning subfield, there has been a focus on the politics of photorealistic genres, though scholars are increasingly asking how more illustrated genres-mostly cartoons and comics-relate to security (e.g., Aradau and Hill, 2013;Cooper-Cunningham, 2019;Dittmer, 2005;Dodds, 2007;Hansen, 2011;Särmä, 2018;Shim, 2017;Wedderburn, 2019). In this article, I theorise the implications of memes for IR by exploring how 'Gay Clown Putin' has been used in the international response to Russian political homophobia.…”

Experience and Ways of Seeing: The Limits and Promises on the Concept of Violence Through Aesthetics Deviations and Works of Art

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