Karen Jacobs

Optic/Haptic/Abject: Revisioning Indigenous Media in Victor Masayesva, Jr and Leslie Marmon Silko

This article uses Hopi videomaker Victor Masayesva, Jr’s 1992 film, Imagining Indians, and Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1991 novel, Almanac of the Dead, as test cases through which tore-evaluate a central debate in visual anthropology about the meanings and values of indigenous visual media, and as complex representations which force us to move beyond that debate’s endorsements and critiques. Through their shared embrace of anti-visualist modes, both Masayesva and Silko develop alternative strategies of visualization intended to revise neo-colonial relations – strategies which seek to reconstruct the modes of visual mastery linked to a Western optic into a more desiring, pleasurable relation to the image through the resources of proximity and tactility. They not only redraw the territory of subject– object relations informed by the gaze, but more foundationally may be said to rewrite the ‘scription’ through which social rules are inscribed upon the body, and to redesignate what Homi Bhabha has called the ‘rules of recognition’ that regulate colonial encounters.

Retouching Queer Kinship: Sontag, Leibovitz, and the Ends of the Photographic Lens

Annie Leibovitz’s postmortem photograph of Susan Sontag in A Photographer’s Life, 1990–2005 publicizes its subject in the same visual space that protects its privacy, writing over its contemporaneity with a series of more legible nineteenth-century and modernist visual codes, just as it aspires to write over celebrity spectacle with the intimate and sustained gaze of contemplation and witness. This process of writing over is not just spatial but temporal, anchored in moments of rupture, suture, and recursivity, as well as in strategies through which the apparently static image aspires to acknowledge, touch, and potentially rework its usable pasts. The volume’s collective use of “temporal asynchrony” constitutes a queering of the latent teleologies of linear sequence (from the teleology of heterosexual reproduction to the inscription of ideas of social order broadly), and in terms requisite to Leibovitz’s project to redescribe kinship as queer or lesbian history.

Theorising the new geomancy: the case of HAARP*

ABSTRACT Has the US military been weaponising the weather? On what evidence might we begin to know? This essay begins by acknowledging the obstacles a classified military facility imposes on what we can know of it. Yet such State-sanctioned obstructions of knowledge are merely official iterations of a much broader problem basic to vernacular environmental knowledge: that we denizens of the Anthropocene now routinely face epistemological challenges in relation to earthly signs and their ambiguous production in ways quite independent of security protocols. In order to parse the visual and popular cultural responses to HAARP that follow, this essay turns to the ancient practice of geomancy (through which sensitive interpreters ‘flesh out’ natural signs). I repurpose geomancy to describe a model of anxious environmental reading, one that fuses the material and symbolic into an uncanny symbiosis with Earth. The new geomancy is best regarded as that structure of feeling that addresses itself to our planet’s ungraspably complex changes. In this theorisation of the new geomancy, HAARP – together with its symptomatic epistemological constraints – thus serves as a hyperbolic instance and a norming bellwether.