Zanele Muholi's Affective Appeal to Act
ABSTRACT This article provides a theoretical framing for Zanele Muholi's visual activism in South Africa. Despite colonial, heteronormative, and patriarchal ideologies that have imaged her community of black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex people as invisible citizens of a larger society and hypervisible deviant outsiders of that same collective, Muholi's photographs attempt to shift the conventions of the gaze. Drawing on Ariella Azoulay's photography theory and Jill Bennett's affect theory for art, I argue that Muholi's photographs bring forth an affective appeal to act. Azoulay's notions of “citizenship” and the “civil contract of photography” call on photography's responsibility to act on behalf of those depicted in images of atrocities. Bennett's “empathic vision” describes a relational perception of art, where one is affectively struck by the visual imagery. Reading Azoulay's political, ethical vision and Bennett's embodied methodology for visual culture together, I suggest that Muholi's practice moves her audience to see differently—where seeing the photographed in and of itself becomes an act of political restoration.
L'art de (ré)imaginer l'Afrique du Sud
L'Afrique du Sud contemporaine est parcourue et faconnee par un ensemble d'images, souvent negatives, parfois contradictoires, qui contribuent a la construire comme un territoire violent, segrege mais aussi divers tant sur le plan naturel que culturel. Nous proposons ici de nous interesser a la maniere dont ces images produisent ce que nous appelons un « imaginaire territorial » qui participe a la (re)invention de la nation sud-africaine contemporaine. A partir de differentes experiences de terrain menees en Afrique du Sud, nous analyserons les images mobilisees au service de cet imaginaire territorial, avant de montrer comment la mise en art de l'espace permet de confirmer ces images en les ancrant dans le territoire ou, au contraire, de les transformer et de proposer ainsi un imaginaire territorial alternatif.
The Tsadik and His Soul’s Sparks: From Kabbalah to Hasidism
The present study shows the continuity between the Safedian Kabbalistic view of the relations between the sparks of a certain soul, and the Hasidic theory, that was conceived of as innovated by and characteristic of 18th century Hasidism, as to the responsibility of the Tsadik for the sparks that belongs to his soul. In the two literatures, the rescue of a spark of one's soul is related to the beautiful captive woman that is conceived of as an externalization of an inner dimension of the righteous person, immersed in a shell.