Affective Images

Marietta Kesting is Junior Professor for Media Theory at the CX Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, Germany.

"Kesting has done much in her circumspect, thoughtful account of South African images of social conflict, encompassing the human rights issues of economic abjection, political resistance, gender-based violence, immigration, national and ethnic identity, and the fomenting of attacks by the dispossessed upon the dispossessed … Kesting's important study makes the South African situation both accessible and exemplary, and should be of significant value to scholars and students surveying a wider range of contrasting but comparable geographical and political landscapes." — Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute"Throughout the book, the rich and detailed descriptions of photographs and films are a strong asset, speaking of Kesting's sensitivity towards images … Kesting takes an innovative approach to analyse the country's visual culture and to rearrange its established orders … Kesting therefore offers readers a new understanding of South Africa's visual culture and opens up the field to also examine the more recent use of images (for instance on social media) while relating them to historic examples of the twentieth century." — Sehepunkte"In its focus on lens-based media, the book not only tackles some of the questions around the visuality of migration and xenophobia, but also does so using the media (photography and film) that are probably the most complicit in the visual witnessing and translation within this field." — Rory Bester, coeditor of Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Mapping Context and Place2. Affective Images2.1. Photographs of Black Suffering and Violence2.2. Affective Images in the "New" South Africa3. Burning Questions3.1. The "Burning Man"3.2. The Afterlife of Nhamuave’s Photographphoto gallery follows page 1184. Photographic Speech Acts4.1. Migrant Life and the Image4.2. Documentary Participatory Photography and Politics5. In/Visibilities and Reenactments5.1. De-identification and Multiplication?5.2. From Documentary to Fiction—and Back: District 9 6. Conclusion: Affective Images of BelongingNotesGlossaryBibliographyFilmographyIndex