Culture’s photodermic enjoyment

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Steve Biko
• Paul Stopforth
• evidence
• death
• pleasure

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Huey Copeland, Athi Joja, Tyrone Palmer, Franco Barchiesi, and the anonymous reviewers for their critical commentary on various drafts of the paper. Natasha Korda at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Humanities provided space for presenting this work as part of the ‘Unmournable’ workshop. I would like to express gratitude to the workshop attendees for their comments and questions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See: Daley (1997).

2. An inquest is held when someone dies from reasons other than natural causes. It is not a trial. There are no ‘accused’ and no ‘defence’. See: Bernstein (1978, p. 28).

3. The more colloquial meaning of ‘Dit laat my koud’ is ‘I don’t care’ or ‘I don’t feel a thing’ (Woods, 1987, p. 214). See: Peffer (2009, p. 178).

4. Biko had also recently told his friend, journalist Donald Woods that if he were to die in such circumstances, ‘by any of four means, this would be a lie. The four were self-inflicted hanging, suffocation, bleeding (through for example, slashed wrists), or starvation’ (Woods 213).

5. This phrasing is borrowed from a James Baldwin. See: Baldwin (1985).

6. For a detailed discussion of ‘entanglement’ and ‘agential realism’, see: Barad (2007).

7. The significance of the Market Theatre is that it was a liberal enclave where multi-racial plays protesting the state were produced while the Group Areas Act prohibited inter-racial sociality. Protest-oriented theatre productions by Barney Simon, Percy Mtwa, and Mbongeni Ngema were staged in that space.

8. In his later work, Moten distances his position from that of therapy. Instead, he posits that he is ‘tarry[ing] with Hartman’s notion of diffusion, which is inseparable from a certain notion of apposition conceived of not as therapy but alternative operation’ (Moten, 2017, p. vii).

9. LaCharles Ward notices and critiques a similar procedure to ‘forensic seeing’ which he terms ‘legal seeing’, defined as ‘the visual and ideological filter through which the public have been conditioned to make sense of visual evidence of anti-Black violence and death’ (Ward, 2021, p. 369).

10. Stopforth claims to have been close acquaintances with Biko. He became involved with the Theatre Council of Natal, overseen by Strini Moodley and Saths Cooper, leaders who were among the accused in the SASO-BC trial of 1976. Stopforth met Biko through them in 1970 and visited him and his colleagues on occasion at the Natal Medical School (Hill 91).

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Mlondolozi Zondi

Mlondolozi “Mlondi” Zondi is an assistant professor of Global Black Studies in the Comparative Literature department at the University of Southern California, with research interests in contemporary Black performance and visual art. Mlondi’s work has been published or is forthcoming in The Drama Review (TDR), ASAP Journal, Mortality Journal, Performance Philosophy, Propter Nos, and Espace Art Actuel.