Stony Brook University Faculty of Sciences and Humanities

ABSTRACT

How should we understand the relation between the viewer and the object of a depiction in the context of a visual joke? In an attempt to understand some of the implications of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s ‘Observer’- ‘Native’ relation, I’ll argue that the harm the ‘Observer’ commits against a subject (taken as ‘Native’) is made all the more damaging when someone takes themselves to be a passive ‘Observer’ rather than a participatory observer. This harm, I’ll attempt to show, can be committed by either of two separable roles: the role of the creator of the visual representation (depictor) and the role of perpetuator of the visual representation (the viewer). By creating and purveying a false category with which to pick out and make sense of the subject, the depiction does damage to its viewer not by instructing them about what to recognize but how to interpret and treat what they recognize.