Reframing disaster: Creativity and activism

Abstract

The following interviews emerge from a research project entitled Representing Postcolonial Disaster: Conflict, Consumption, Reconstruction, which is funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (UK). Specifically, the interviews formed part of a conference and series of activities on the theme of Reframing Disaster, which took place in Leeds in November–December 2014 and commemorated a series of significant anniversaries in 2014, including the 10th anniversary of the South Asian Tsunami, the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, and the 30th anniversary of the Bhopal gas disaster. The aim of the Reframing Disaster activities was to open up new perspectives on how we understand global disasters in time and space; to analyse how different disasters — social and natural — are portrayed, compared, and memorialized across a range of media; and to explore especially how writers, artists, filmmakers, and photographers have gone about the task of reframing our understanding of disaster. Technocratic definitions of disaster, such as the one used by the UN, tend to place a strong emphasis on social “impacts” by framing disaster, for instance, as a “serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society” (The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, 2009). By contrast, historical and anthropological commentators tend to conceive of disaster more as a process that combines natural and social factors, in particular socially constructed forms of vulnerability, and which transforms and evolves in complex ways over time at the interface of environment and society (Hewitt, 1998). This latter approach is much more in tune with how we have found postcolonial writers, photographers, and artists respond to disasters, not least through their sensitivity