Trump and the Need for a New Visual Activism

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Chenjerai Kumanyika, who notes his growing scepticism about the effectiveness of visual protest media. We must pay more attention to the changes that are occurring at this time, and to what new interventions still work.

There is a particular need to the visual ways in which media activism reproduces existing media tropes, and how else such activism may be presented. There are elements in such videos that may work against the analyses that are now required: the videos constantly tether us to the present; they do not enable us to reflect on how we got where we are now.

(Chenjerai is showing a number of fascinating activist videos here.)

There is also a focus on the spectacle as a deviance from the norm, which eschews continuity and everyday activism and resistance. The challenge here is to attend both to the short-term crises and the long-term reasons for these developments.