Introduction: Notes on Counter-Narratives

‘… people often claim their right to a dignified image by staging a quarrel with the pictorial realm.’^[1]

Sharon Sliwinski called this her ‘modest’ point in the book Visualising Human Rights.^[2] The human rights discourse, Sliwinski posits, hinges upon the image of humans as bearing inalienable rights with an inherent dignity.^[3] As such, the definition of human rights as articulated in international law, is anchored in this right to a dignified image. Consequently, human rights struggles or quarrels become avenues to safeguard and affirm this vision.

Visual culture has a long history of being used to promote and defend human rights.^[4] The 1755 Lisbon earthquake, for example, is often cited as an early instance of how visual representations were used to usher in a secular notion of human suffering and to call for action to prevent future tragedies.^[5] Pictures of the earthquake and its aftermath circulated widely throughout Europe, helping shape the public imagination of what it means to be ‘the human’.^[6] Thus, Sliwinski’s observation is indeed modest.

However, the production and circulation of imagery in human rights discourses do not invariably align with ethical standards of image-making. Much like their verbal or written counterparts, the choices surrounding which visual representations of suffering gain visibility are often dictated by the dynamics of the artistic marketplace.^[7] These decisions are influenced by several factors, including cultural, economic, political, social, journalistic and legal cues.^[8]

It follows that such a paradigm is likely to run the risk of neglecting and/or misrepresenting the human rights struggles of marginalised groups. This makes it necessary to research the visual politics surrounding such image-making. Yet, the scholarship on visual communications — within and beyond the discipline of law — has faced criticism for its deep-rooted Eurocentric focus.^[9] The majority of its engagement has traditionally centred on topics concerning North America and Europe.^[10] This skewed focus has given rise to counter-narratives like #CommunicationSoWhite, which called on critical media studies to look beyond the Global North.^[11]

On that account, art activists delving into human rights struggles in the Global South are likely to face many challenges.^[12] This is because they provide counter-narratives to the above-mentioned dominant artistic marketplace cues. They subvert both domestic and international pictorial narratives by drawing attention towards and reinterpreting human rights struggles of persons in the Global South. As a result, art activism emerges as an important site for the vernacularisation of human rights.^[13] This is not the least because it translates the rhetoric of rights into terms that are resonant in the socio-cultural milieu of the Global South, but also for its ability to facilitate the international journey of these narratives.^[14] As argued by Sally Merry, the anthropologist who coined the term vernacularisation of human rights, this global exchange of ideas helps domestic human rights discourses extend their reach to audiences, allies and resources beyond their immediate locales.^[15]

My thesis then is that art activism in the Global South is an instrumental jurisprudential activity. It enables the dynamic re-articulation of international human rights law to the distinctive and often anti-marketplace contexts of the Global South. In this essay, I will attempt to unpack two case studies that exemplify this point. First, is the exhibit UYGHUR: Reclaiming our Story. Second, the documentary Undaunted: Voices from Myanmar’s Resistance.^[16] Each case study uses different theoretical, methodological and empirical approaches to art activism to narrate and counter-narrate stories within human rights movements. While the former aims to recast the lives of Uyghur persons beyond the singular narrative of persecution, the latter is a plea to not forget Myanmar and its protest against the military junta. So, what do they have in common? Both initiatives strive to unsettle popular narratives, or the lack of, related to their respective human rights violations. Notably, they do this through counter-narratives grounded in epistemologies of the Global South.

 This piece will follow a five-part structure. First, I will lay a brief groundwork by discussing the key conceptual frameworks I will use in the essay. This will include introducing and connecting notions such as the Global South and the art activist. This exercise will offer the necessary context for subsequent sections. In the second part, we will turn our attention to the first case study — UYGHUR: Reclaiming our Story. I shall use Danish Sheik’s theoretical account of staging repair to understand how the exhibit, through its reparative reading of human rights, serves as a jurisprudence of repair for international human rights law.^[17] The third section will then focus on our second case study — Undaunted: Voices from Myanmar’s Resistance. Here, I hope to highlight how the documentary, through its art activism, holds legal aesthetics to account when it seeks to perform a ‘vanishing act’.^[18] Fourth, the two case studies shall be followed by a critical analysis of the role art activism in the Global South in development of international human rights law and jurisprudence. I will argue that art activists promote and grow human rights through the various roles they play — as witnesses, public intellectuals and social change-makers.^[19] This jurisprudential engagement helps reimagine international human rights law and its universality, thereby challenging what Ratna Kapur describes as ‘freedom in a fishbowl’.^[20] Lastly, there is a concluding section. I will reiterate key arguments, address any potential limitations and raise some critical questions which surface from this discourse, all of which are crucial to understanding the intertwined nature of art activism and international human rights law.

Conceptual Framework: The What, Who, Why of a Story

 My thesis and introductory notes on counter-narratives are likely to raise a few questions for a reader. Questions such as: What is the Global South? Who is an art activist? Why are they connected and/or relevant? Indeed, these are helpful queries to hold on to and address before we begin dissecting our proposed case studies. Addressing them will enable us to better understand and contextualise the following sections. Hence, that is what I will endeavour to do in this section.

First, what is the Global South? More specifically, what does the term Global South encompass for the purposes of legal analysis? Some critics have argued that the term lacks analytical precision, suggesting that it indiscriminately groups varied legal systems that share little in the way of normative foundations.^[21] They raise concern whether highly generalised concepts like the Global South offer any heuristic value that warrant their distinction from their counterpart, the Global North.^[22] Indeed, Italian political scientist Giovanni Sartori even argued that the concept of the Global South is a hopeless case — a ‘meaningless togetherness based of pseudo-equivalences’.^[23]

Contrary to the scepticism surrounding the concept, however, there exists several arguments that locate the Global South as a highly generative and intellectually productive category of academic analysis. As posited by the comparative law scholars, Philipp Dann et. al., the Global South is a useful concept to contextualise and understand distinctive legal contexts.^[24] It helps capture and re-conceptualise discourses from a subaltern perspective that is a result of the history of colonialism in the South and the geopolitics of knowledge production dominated by the North.^[25]

Hence, while Satori viewed the Global South as a comparative fallacy, Dann et. al. positioned it as a matter of epistemic justice.^[26] This is because, the latter perceived the Global South as ‘not only, or even primarily, a place, but rather a sensibility and perspective, a way of looking at the world as a whole’.^[27] Rather than entrenching a North/South dichotomy, they contend that the concept helps foreground uneven developments and the resulting subaltern experiences.^[28] Tobias Berger supports such a standpoint when he observed that the Global South is an imprecise, yet valuable concept.^[29] Berger argued that its worth lies in that it is a relational concept — for comparing global processes of marginalisation.^[30] Therefore, it is this interpretation of the Global South that I will adopt in this essay. I will explore the manner in which art activism addresses the human rights violations of the Uyghur community and Myanmar protests in a relational context — within the global human rights and artistic marketplace networks. A succinct example given by Dann et. al. captures the essence of this argument: the Global South can exist in the racially segregated urban ghettos of North America, as much as the Global North can be found in the affluent enclaves of Lagos, Mumbai or Rio.^[31]

Once we have answered the first question, tackling the second and third become relatively simpler tasks. Who can be classified as an art activist? Why are they connected and/or relevant to the Global South? Consider the artist, researcher and educator Brenda L Croft who archived visual records of her journey home. The motivation behind her work was to explore whether a home, whatever and however that may be, can exist for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander persons like herself — descendants of Australia’s Stolen Generations and deprived of their homelands, languages and communities. During this project, Croft remarked, ‘My family’s layered history has always informed my creative practice, whether visual, written or spoken presentation.’ This brings us to an important point. Croft acknowledges the diversity of modes of artistic engagement and their usage in interpreting subaltern experiences, such as those borne out of postcolonialism.

Caroline Turner and Jen Webb’s work on art in postcolonial nations provides us with a useful characterisation of art activists like Croft.^[32] They observe that artists of the Global South can be cultural and political activists when they produce art that is not only content-driven, but also negotiates between local and global concerns and translates issues of rights.^[33] As cultural activists, they produce art intended to mobilise affect. As political activists, they use art to organise and participate in causing political change.

Significantly, art activists in the Global South interpret human rights, engaging not only with legal aesthetics, media or imagery, but also with ways of looking, and of reconfiguring the patterns of dominance and subjection.^[34] This perspective aligns with the work of Croft, Turner, and Webb. The two case studies examined in this essay reflect such an application of art activism in human rights discourses. They do so through a plurality of forms of art — photography, videography, speeches, dance performances, musical renditions, and sharing food, among others. More importantly, they do this with an intension to centre subaltern experiences, marginalisation and subjugation. Their objective is not just to narrate, but to actively redirect the lens from the mainstream storytelling.

Click here for Part II.

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Malini Chidambaram is an Assistant Professor of Law at the National Law School of India University (Bengaluru). Previously, she was an Alex Chernov Scholar and Research Assistant at the Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne (Naarm). Malini’s broad research interests include law and humanities, child and the law, family law, visual cultures, critical legal theory and feminist legal theory.

Her piece draws inspiration from pieces that were experienced by her as a student in Naarm. The Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation are the traditional custodians of this unceded land. The author pays her respects to their Elders and peoples — past, present and emerging. She also extends her appreciation to the organisers, curators and participants (performers and audience alike) of the two events who facilitated her engagement with these works.

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Picture Credit: Detroit Institute of Arts

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^[1] Sharon Sliwinski, ‘The Right to an Image’ in Jane Lydon (ed), Visualising Human Rights (Routledge, 2016) 32.

^[2] Ibid.

^[3] Ibid.

^[4] Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Anchor, 1989) [1977].

^[5] Thomas E. D. Braun and John B. Radner (eds), The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755: Representations and Reactions (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2005); Werner Hamacher, ‘The Quaking of Presentation’, in Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 261–93; Sharon Sliwinski, ‘The Aesthetics of Human Rights’ (2009) 50:1 Culture, Theory & Critique 23-39.

^[6] Sliwinski (n 5).

^[7] Lilie Chouliaraki, Matthew Orwicz, and Robin Greeley, ‘Special Issue: The visual politics of the human’ (2019) 18(3) Visual Communication 301–309.

^[8] Ibid.

^[9] Wimal Dissanayake, ‘Paradigm dialogues: A Europocentric universe of discourse’ in Bernard Dervin et al. (eds), Rethinking communication: Vol. 1: Paradigm issues (Sage, 1989) 166–168; Yoshitaka Miike, ‘Non-Western theory in Western research? An Asiacentric agenda for Asian communication studies’ (2006) 6(1/2) Review of Communication 4–31.

^[10] Anna Veneti and Maria Rovisco, ‘Introduction to Visual Politics in the Global South’ in Anna Veneti and Maria Rovisco (eds), Visual Politics in the Global South: Political Campaigning and Communication (Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2023) 2.

^[11] Purnima Chakravartty, Radhika Kuo, Victoria Grubbs, and Charlton McIlwain, ‘#CommunicationSoWhite’ (2018) 68(2) Journal of Communication 254–266.

^[12] Pippa Norris, ‘Political Activism: New Challenges, New Opportunities’ in Carles Boix and Susan Stokes (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) 628–49 at 629.

^[13] Sally Engle Merry, ‘Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle’ (2006) 108(1) American Anthropologist 38-51.

^[14] Sally Engle Merry, ‘The Global Travel of Women’s Human Rights’ (lecture, Dialogues in Arts and Science, NYU, May 2017).

^[15] Ibid.

^[16] Aung Naing Soe, ‘Undaunted: Voices from Myanmar’s Resistance’ (Athan, 2023).

^[17] Danish Sheikh, ‘Staging Repair’ (2021) 25 Law Text Culture 144-177.

^[18] Ibid.

^[19] Caroline Turner and Jen Webb, ‘The artist as cultural and political activist’ in Art and Human Rights: Contemporary Asian Contexts (Manchester University Press) 36-72.

^[20] Ratna Kapur, ‘Alterity, gender equality and the veil’ in Gender, Alterity and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl (2018) 120-150.

^[21] Ran Hirschl, Comparative Matters: The Renaissance of Comparative Constitutional Law (Oxford University Press, 2014) 218.

^[22] Philipp Dann, Michael Riegner, and Maxim Bönnemann, ‘The Southern Turn in Comparative Constitutional Law: An Introduction’ in Philipp Dann, Michael Riegner, and Maxim Bönnemann (eds), The Global South and Comparative Constitutional Law (Oxford University Press, 2020) 1-38.

^[23] Giovanni Sartori, ‘Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics’ (1970) 64(4) The American Political Science Review 1033–1053.

^[24] Dann et. al. (n 22).

^[25] Upendra Baxi, ‘Constitutionalism as a Site of State Formative Practices’ (1999–2000) 21 Cardozo Law Review 1183.

^[26] Sartori (n 23); Baxi (n 25).

^[27] Dann et. al. (n 22).

^[28] Ibid.

^[29] Tobias Berger, ‘The ‘Global South’ as a relational category – global hierarchies in the production of law and legal pluralism’ (2020) Third World Quarterly (published online 15 Oct 2020), 84.

^[30] Ibid.

^[31] Dann et. al. (n 22).

^[32]  Turner and Webb (n 19).

^[33] Ibid.

^[34] Ibid.