Abstract
This essay considers the complex response to the global circulation of images of Fabienne Cherisma, a fifteen-year-old girl who survived the Haitian earthquake on 12 January 2010. A week later, Cherisma was fatally shot by police allegedly warning looters away from crumbling buildings in Port-au-Prince. Numerous foreign photographers took pictures of her body which would go on to win prestigious international awards for photojournalism. Using Alexander Weheliye’s tracing of “enfleshment” through Hortense Spillers’ notion of the “pornotrope” to read Blackness into discourses of biopolitics, and considering what Diana Taylor has called “percepticide” in crimes against humanity, I examine the humanitarian responses to the images of Cherisma’s death. I read the missing notion of the bystander within these significant concepts in human rights discourses and analyze how its framing exposes biopolitical anxieties of viewers’ own vulnerable condition rather than a concern for Cherisma’s and, by extension, other Haitians’ experiences with disaster.
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