Introduction: Visual histories of occupation(s)

Abstract

I thank all scholars who took part in the Cultures of Occupation Conference, held at the University of Nottingham in January 2018. Their comments and suggestions, especially during the final discussions, helped to shape this Introduction.of the main exponents of such an approach, suggests: 'Visual history … considers images in a wider sense both as sources as well as independent artifacts of historiographical research and likewise looks at the visuality of history and the historicity of the visual. ' 6 Responding to the wider 'visual turn' that has been experienced in the Humanities, as well as the increasing ease with which scholars can now access large numbers of historical and contemporary images, this approach places 'the visual' at the centre of the study of the past. For Paul, visual history 'addresses the whole field of visual practice as well as the visuality of experience and history' . 7 Most importantly, however, visual history takes as its starting point a simple yet often neglected principle, that is, the need to write 'against the ingrained anti-visualism of the social sciences' and accept -as Sumathi Ramaswamy argues -that 'pictures, too, have stories to show and arguments to manifest, and that images are not just illustrative and reflective but also constitutive and world-making rather than world mirroring' . 8 Indeed, one of the most fundamental contributions made by adherents of this approach is the belief that images -regardless of the media in which they are produced -can generate an agency all of their own. As Horst Bredekamp suggests, for example, 'Politics requires images, it gives rise to images; but it can also follow where images may lead. ' 9 In this volume, we shall see various examples of precisely this process in the politically fraught context of occupation.Rather than drawing a clear distinction between 'art history' , 'cultural history' and 'visual cultures' , then, the 'transdisciplinary research' inherent in visual history can provide a space within which scholars from diverse disciplinary traditions can engage with one another. Indeed, many 'visual historians' have been open to the lessons that parallel approaches, such as 'visual cultures' , can provide, for 'visual history' entails not just the foregrounding of images in accounts of the past, but also an acknowledgement (and historicization) of the ways in which wider social and cultural contexts shape which images (or groups of images) are seen, how they are seen and by whom they are seen. Below, we will explore how recent cases of occupation have been instrumental in reinforcing such sensibilities in the theoretical scholarship.In adopting 'visual histories' in its very title then, this book demonstrates that art historians, cultural historians, visual anthropologists, critical theorists and visual cultures scholars can engage in fruitful debate (in this case on 'occupation') without necessarily replicating each other's methods and/or sources. Indeed, while a good deal of scholarship that has been written consciously unde...

Introduction

“…In popular culture, the circulation of sounds and images in mass media related to, for instance, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Indigenous dispossession or the actions of the global Occupy movement has all created distinct associations with the word's meanings. 2 The US military invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) marked a trend towards what might be called 'occupation studies' (Taylor 2021). In sound studies, this same moment inspired an expanding subfield of literature describing and theorizing the sounds of war, some of which will be discussed later in this Introduction.…”