This article examines the meaning‐making work of historical, cultural, and visual references in the 2022 anti-Zero-COVID policy protests in China. Characterized by homemade protest placards, the wave of 2022 grassroots protests were striking, typically citing well-known historical quotes, written in red paint, or the use of plain white paper. Using the frameworks of affect theory and analyses of visual culture, I draw attention to underexamined forms of Chinese cultural and visual traditions of protest, and address the following empirical questions: Which national visual cultural references are mobilized in this contemporary protest; how do people repurpose specific cultural idiosyncrasies to voice political dissent; and how do these references contribute to local political meaning‐making and community-making? Via a qualitative analysis of such signs, this study identifies three types of cultural resources permissible by the state that became co‐opted in the protests: 1) literature from anti-imperial times, 2) motivational slogans and symbols from the cultural revolution, and 3) the contemporary technique of censorship. These references are appropriated for the potential afforded by their recognizability, their affective function to articulate the political cause, and their ability to bypass censorship and generate communities across national and regional boundaries. Examining the A4 Revolution as a paradigmatic case, I argue visual historical citation holds significant aesthetic, affective, and political value, particularly in its capacity to mobilize the masses within undemocratic environments. The affective visuals used in the protests can be read as a performative, strategic, and psychosocial device of “critical inheritance from the bottom up,” one that invites citizens to re-access cultural memory and critique the oppressive present.
Keyword: visual culture
Review of Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power by Sampada Aranke (Duke University Press)
Sampada Aranke’s Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power begins by insisting on the importance of visual culture to the Black Panther Party’s platform before exploring the Party’s use of political posters, flyers, magazine covers, a documentary, and other ephemera to mobilize community members in the wake of the state’s murder of Bobby Hutton, Fred Hampton, and George Jackson. In doing so, Aranke argues that the BPP “transformed these state-sanctioned murders into opportunities to engage political action” (2). Cautiously navigating the speculative and often violent nature of the archive when it comes to Black life and death, Aranke draws on the work of theorists like Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe to balance storytelling with first-person narratives, archival coverage, and political theory from the era. Throughout, Aranke centers the importance of fugitivity and futurity to the Black Panther Party, which suggests a deep connection between the Black power movement and the prison abolition movement. Indeed, toward the end of Death’s Futurity, Aranke argues that these “spectacularized murders mark a transition from Black Power to prison abolition.” While I hoped for a more robust discussion of the transition between these intimately linked movements, Aranke’s Death’s Futurity nonetheless offers a critical exploration of the use of visual culture in revolutionary movements.
Review of Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory by Cristina Visperas (New York University Press)
In Skin Theory, Cristina Visperas identifies how the captive body in the postwar era is positioned as the ideal test subject. She does so through a thorough interrogation of Albert Kligman’s primarily dermatological human experiments at Holmesburg Prison to argue that racial capture enables the research enterprise. Suturing conversations in Black studies, science and technology studies, and carceral studies, each chapter reads objects in relation to these experiments to argue that grounding its brutal procedures was a visual culture enabled by the figurative uses of the skin.
Review of Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam by Thy Phu (Duke University Press)
Thy Phu’s Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam draws on archives of the Vietnam War that center Vietnamese perspectives to complicate the historical and contemporary visual representation of Vietnamese identities that have been filtered through the Western narrative of the Vietnam War. Her book emphasizes the significance of typically denigrated visual materials including propaganda and vernacular photographs. She focuses on the complex deployment and reception of photographic objects as politicized symbols, sources of memorialization, and identity formation.
Commentary on “Urban Interventions / Intervenzione Urbane”
Gavin Grindon responds to ‘Urban Interventions / Intervenzione Urbane’ by Alexander Dellantonio.