Expose and Punish: Trial by Moving Images in Revolutionary China

Abstract

My dissertation traces a history of how class struggle was made of and through moving images in China. Whereas many existing studies concerning socialism and leftist cultural politics treat class struggle as a given fact, my dissertation draws back the curtain on how class struggle was constructed in China. Much emphasis has been put on either the violent components of Mao’s class war or Chinese class struggle as a project saturated with displays, performances, and spectacles. However, the intersection of class struggle as both spectacular violence and spectatorial violence remains largely underexplored. Through historicizing the merging of violence and spectacle within an overarching class-coded system, however, my dissertation suggests the mutual constitution of image making and justice, upon which the project of class struggle was legitimized, and in effect produced everyday violence. Drawing on archives, fieldwork, and an audiovisual corpus, the project examines the mass production of what I call looks of enmities—penal spectacles, incriminating media, hate images, antagonistic ideologies, and encounters of watching-as-judging. Overall, the project is a dual history of trial as media and media as trial. Concerning the complex interrelation between photographic media vis-Ã -vis socialist criminal justice and violence driven by a singular and overarching system of partitioning coded in the term class, my dissertation intends to challenge established boundaries within which both film/art-historical scholarship and legal historiographies are usually approached and disseminated. I address the following questions: Historically, how did (audio)visual media and trial/execution, whether legal or extralegal, intersect in China? How did moving images enact and, in turn, shape punishment and the politics of enemy-making in the age of class struggle? Theoretically, (how) is justice visible? How does an image shame or judge, and how does cinema punish? Methodologically, what is the role of the archive in history, historiography, and historical thinking? How do archival images live their own lives?