70. Political Violence and the Limits of Representation

In recent years, much ink has been spilled on the apparent return of political violence in the contemporary world. The profusion of descriptive categories attached to this issue is unsurprising, for political violence always puts intense pressure on the question of representation. Violence is a way to compel representation: it produces a spectacle that pushes the concerns of a particular group to the fore of popular discourse. It also circumvents representative legislative institutions such as parliaments or courts, therefore disrupting the normative role of mediation in political life in favour of an ethos of direct action. In all cases, political violence strikes at the heart of representation: it demands we rethink what it means to represent political agency itself. As such, this panel is situated at the intersection of two theoretical genealogies: critiques of representation on the one hand–from thinkers such as Judith Butler, Sylvia Wynter, and David Lloyd–and analyses of the ethics of political violence on the other–from Hannah Arendt to Frantz Fanon, from Homi Bhabha to Andreas Malm.

Art history is uniquely positioned to address that intersection, and so this panel seeks papers about the relationship between violence and representation, in both the aesthetic and political sense of the latter term. We are interested in staging a debate about the representation of political violence, the effects of violence on representation, and violence as a form of representation (or abstraction) in its own right. We are also interested in questions of subjectivity, visibility, and the ethics of political violence under various historical and ideological conditions: who, at any given time, is deemed the appropriate subject of resistance, and why? When is violence recognized as political violence, and how do images shape that process? We welcome submissions that grapple with these thematics from the eighteenth century to the present. Papers might address the relationship of art and culture to frontier violence, assassinations and propaganda of the deed, riots and rebellions, terrorism and insurgency, vandalism and sabotage, and other forms of politicized destruction or agitation.

Themes: Violence, representation, politics

Lead Convenor: Luke Naessens, Lecturer in Modern Art and Theory, UCL, United Kingdom

Co-convenors: Ariel Kline, Assistant Professor, Georgetown University, USA

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.