Culture’s photodermic enjoyment

Abstract

ABSTRACT The aesthetic depiction of the Black corpse raises questions about scopic pleasure, empathy, and the futility of evidence. This essay engages aesthetic speculation about intended justice through Paul Stopforth’s Elegy (1981) and the Biko Series (1980), drawings of Steve Biko’s corpse that are all oriented toward a counter-evidentiary logic whose aim is to disprove the evidence provided by the apartheid police. I posit that this investment in evidence (alternative, or otherwise), capitulates to the terms of the dominant regime by participating in the struggle for evidence (alternative or otherwise) in the first place. I also engage the entanglement between scopophilia and negrophobia/negrophilia in the image of the Black dead, not merely as features of Stopforths’ individual unconscious, but as civil society’s/culture’s most consistent dreamwork. Questioning the political promise of aesthetic mobilization of the corpse, I ask: Why is it necessary for the world to see the image of the corpse (again) in aesthetic practice, in order to reflect on violence, and what modes of recognition and identification are produced? My curiosity lies in what is enacted by recruiting the viewer to adopt such forensic seeing.