A Pedagogy of Rhetorical Looking: Atrocity Images at the Intersection of Vision and Violence

We begin with an image.A 19-year-old young man with a wounded left arm hanging motionless at his side lists to the right as he crawls out of a small covered boat where he had taken refuge from the manhunt. His face bloodied and festooned with the red dot of a sniper's laser sight, he lifts his sweatshirt to demonstrate his lack of a weapon as he surrenders to the police. One of an array of 48 photographs leaked by Massachusetts State Police Sgt. Sean Murphy two months after the April 15, 2013, Boston Marathon bombing, the photograph records the apprehension and arrest of Dzhokhar T sarnaev, one of two perpetrators of the tragedy that killed three and injured over 260 civilians (Cooper, Schmidt & Schmitt).1 A "tactical photographer" for the state police and a participant in the search for the Tsarnaev brothers, Murphy released the set of documentary photographs for publication online in Boston without authorization (Wolfson). Portraying police officers, police vehicles, and emergency personnel, the array also includes a shocking group of images featuring Tsarnaev, docile before his captors, body injured, exposed, and vulnerable. Jeopardizing his career, Murphy leaked the photos to rebut a very different image of Tsarnaev published on the cover of Rolling Stone, one that Murphy believed glamorized the young terrorist. Fearing the image would serve as "an incentive" for others to commit terrorist acts, the police sergeant wanted the public to see the "real" Tsarnaev: an intimidated terrorist caught in a sniper's gun sight (qtd. in Wolfson).2We open with this image from the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing to emphasize three related points germane to atrocity images, which we define as photographs depicting human-against-human violence. First, Murphy's unauthorized release of the photographs highlights the paradoxical role of an atrocity image in legitimating one act of violence-Tsarnaev's capture-while protesting another-the Boston Marathon bombing. Second, the leaked images and the context reveal the presence of myriad acts of violence nested in and complicit with the overt corporeal suffering of victims and perpetrator; and, third, the tension Murphy identifies between the manhunt images and the Rolling Stone cover, between what he understands as real versus glamorized, stresses the importance of perception, or the ways in which the viewer-including the photographer-sees an image and thus determines the nature, cause, and effect of the violence portrayed. These three points encapsulate the reinforcing and troubling relationship of violence, image, and vision in an era when violence and its mass mediation proliferate. We situate our essay within this fraught relationship to argue for the value of rhetorical looking as a pedagogical strategy in the English classroom, one concerned with undermining violence through visual engagement.As violence outside and inside the academy expands in scope and frequency, its salience within the language classroom likewise increases. Michael Blitz and C. Mark Hurlbert stress this point, arguing that "the teaching of writing has everything to do with both violence and peace" (51, emphasis original); to ignore its reality and its importance to literacy, they argue, "is to invite a living death into our classrooms" (22). The teaching of literature is equally implicated in the need to grapple with violence, as Mary Rose O'Reilley makes clear. In an era marked by "students' calm acceptance of violence as a cultural norm" (27), the literary imagination and the literary text, she contends, can help teachers and students picture a "different kind of world, a different balance of forces" (35) where "'people stop killing each other'" (Hasan, qtd. in O'Reilley 9). Rhetorical looking enriches that language-oriented agenda, and it does so by directing attention to the intersection of image and vision with violence, identifying the atrocity image as a potential site for intervention in the narrative of humans harming humans. …