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Pornotropes

University Hall 215, Department of English, 1897 Sheridan Road, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208-2240, USA, a-weheliye{at}northwestern.edu

This article foregrounds the link between slavery and sexuality explored by Hortense Spillers — what she calls pornotroping — which exposes some of the limitations of Giorgio Agamben's `homo sacer' (sacred man) figure by calling attention to how political violence frequently produces forces that exceed it. This is followed by an analysis of the film Sankofa , ostensibly an uplifting narrative about the horrors of slavery, which nevertheless cannot help but eroticize the brutality that the filmmaker seeks to denounce, and which demonstrates the visual logic of pornotroping. Finally, Agamben's notion of potentiality leads to a discussion of freedom in pornotroping, one that might lead to novel instantiations of humanity.

Key Words: cinema • Giorgio Agamben • the Holocaust • Hortense Spillers • sexuality • slavery • violence

Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 7, No. 1, 65-81 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1470412907087202


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