Race-conscious transnational activists with cameras

Abstract

This article examines a Canadian transnational solidarity activist's efforts to publicize human suffering through visual documentation. The objectives are to examine some of the ways activists negotiate ethical dilemmas about spectatorship and a white/Western gaze, and to consider the potential of the uses of visual documentation as a tool/tactic for subverting global white hegemony. The analysis focuses an one activists' attempts to capture and narrate experiences of suffering in the light of racialized relations of domination and subordination. The article argues that the strategies used to document and display photographs constituted the photographer and the viewers' understandings of themselves in ways that reinforce rather than subvert power. The article concludes by considering the implications of white/Westerners as mediators of the Other's suffering.

Conceptualizing justice tourism and the promise of posthumanism

“…Jus;ce tourists must be aware of Mahrouse's (2008) findings regarding advocacy work. In her research, the accounts given by jus;ce tourists to their fellow na;onals, of injus;ces found and experienced in the des;na;on ager the trip, mainly drew compassion for the ac;vists and pity for those suffering in the des;na;on.…”

Canada’s humanitarian reach and Maggie Helwig’s Where She Was Standing

“…In Loo’s words, “we could easily have outed ourselves as Canucks, especially in Bhutan” (2012: 13). Such perceptions of Canada’s helpful presence in even the most distant corners of the world are probably so solidified as Canadian common knowledge to need much underlining; the “Canadian national imaginary”, for Gada Mahrouse, is one “in which we position ourselves as having an exceptional propensity for compassion as observers of global suffering” (2008: 98). And indeed, the larger context is that in which Canadians are supposedly “the planet’s leading experts in the quiet heroism of getting along”, according to Canadian opinion poll processor and statistician Michael Adams in Unlikely Utopia , his paean to Canada’s tolerance of difference (2008: 108).…”

“…Lisa’s skin colour offers an implicit comment on Gada Mahrouse’s analysis of how “cross-racial solidarity activism is an anti-racist strategy based on a conscious and purposeful deployment of the dominant positioning that ‘whiteness’ inscribes on to some bodies” (2008: 88). Mahrouse outlines how people such as Lisa may be “known as ‘accompaniers’, ‘witness-observers’ or ‘human shields’” (2008: 88), going on to note that “the primary functions of these activists are to offer protection to those under threat of violence by drawing attention to their own ‘international’ presence, and to monitor, document and disseminate information on what they witness” (2008: 88). Although Lisa had not gone to East Timor in this role, the centrality of whiteness not just as a skin colour but as a signifier is bluntly clear to Rachel: “Of course if she had been white they wouldn’t have shot her” (43).…”

Locating Race: Global Sites of Post-Colonial Citizenship by Malini Johar Schueller

“…Schueller's incisive reading of Silko's text was especially illuminating for my own work which has examined the deployment of whiteness as a racialized privilege in transnational solidarity activism, including the ISM and the case of Rachel Corrie (see Mahrouse 2009Mahrouse , 2008. In particular, Schueller's insistence on locating race against the fictive universalism of globalization theories strongly suggests the importance of noticing the relations of power in white solidarity practices.…”