A Controversy of Faces: Images from Bali and Abu Ghraib1

Abstract

The Bali bombing of 2002 and the US war against Iraq have been partly defined as media events by a series of photographs depicting the perpetrators of serious crimes in attitudes of jocularity . Photographs of “the smiling bombers” and US torturers at Abu Ghraib have caused shock and outrage because their grinning, smiling and laughing seems starkly at odds with the criminal acts for which the bombers and torturers have been charged, and, in some cases, convicted. Yet divergent meanings have been assigned to the photographs by western political elites. While the Bali bombers have been characterised as representing all that is wrong with and barbaric about militant Islam, the Abu Ghraib torturers have been dissociated from the US military and its values through their representation as a few isolated miscreants. However, I analyse the smiling of the bombers and torturers as forms of symbolic communication entailing resistance and mockery of state power on the part of the bombers, and domination and knowing humiliation on the part of the torturers. The clamping of meaning around these images by powerful political interests forecloses on the possibility of a deeper understanding of what is at stake in the war on terror and, for ordinary consumers of these images, encourages complicity in the rolling back of civil and political rights. 1Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Postcolonial Roundtable of the Postcolonial Research Group, University of Newcastle, 6 October 2004 and at the Religion and Politics in the International Multicultural Society panel at the British International Studies Association conference on 20 December 2004. My thanks to the participants at both those events for insightful comments. I also wish to extend particular thanks to Kate Manzo, Richard Fox, Robert Schütze, David Campbell and Pam Allen for their comments on written drafts and/or for suggesting helpful materials that may otherwise have escaped my attention. I hope the article lives up to the quality of their advice and suggestions.