Emergent Human Rights Contexts: Greg Constantine's "Nowhere People"

In "Nowhere People: The Global Face of Statelessness," the photojournalist Greg Constantine documents the conditions of statelessness and the lives of stateless people across the globe. The online version of the exhibition consists of several multimedia compilations and photo-essays on the Rohinyga in Burma, Dalit in Nepal, Bihari in Bangladesh, Hill Tamils in Sri Lanka, children in the state of Sabah in Malaysia, Nubians in Kenya, and ex-Soviets in Ukraine. As Constantine notes in his introductory materials, the United Nations estimates that nearly fifteen million people are stateless: "Statelessness can come as a result of conflict, shifting borders or in the creation of a new state, but in most cases, statelessness is rooted in discrimination and intolerance." Constantine's stated rhetorical intent is evidentiary; he wants to counter the invisibility of statelessness and "provide tangible documentation of proof that millions of people hidden and forgotten all over the world actually exist." ¹

Although we approach Constantine's documentary project from distinct disciplinary perspectives as professors of rhetoric and folklore, we share an interest in understanding the pragmatic and ethical challenges of representing the conditions of statelessness and, more broadly, the circulation of knowledge about human rights violations. Constantine's stated goal is to "document and expose the human face and personal histories and stories of stateless people." We are interested in the conditions of this invisibility. Constantine points out that "stateless people are invisible to most." We ask, for whom are the stateless invisible? In asking "for whom" the stateless are invisible and "to whom" their newly staged global visibility is addressed we aim to contextualize the evidentiary promise of "Nowhere People." Through the examination of the disciplinary protocols, the aesthetic principles, and the symbols that designate social groupings and to which human rights representations are tethered, we hope to show how Constantine navigates these protocols. Given that the tools to create and distribute images have democratized and the subaltern increasingly can and does speak directly for herself, we ask what role photojournalists and scholars can play in the generation of human rights contexts and witnessing publics.

Social media may be transforming the power dynamics of human rights representation, but we should not overestimate the impact of technological innovations or underestimate the valiant efforts and material risks that those resisting repressive regimes continue to face. Additionally, we should attend to the risks of romanticizing stateless subjects or unmooring representations of statelessness from the contexts and technologies that shape their production, reception, and circulation as part of a broader visual human rights culture. In The Spectatorship of Suffering, Lilie Chouliaraki argues that "the ethical disposition that connects spectators with the distant sufferer depends on the capacity of . . . symbolic practices to produce proximity with sufferers and propose action to alleviate their misfortunes." ² We add that in addition to producing proximity, our ethical responsibility also requires what Dominick LaCapra refers to as "empathic unsettlement," critical awareness of the differences that limit proximity. ³

Constantine's photographs provide evidence of a variety of proximities, including the intimacies between the subjects themselves, between the photographer and the subjects of the photographs (about which we know very little in this case), and between distant spectators and the photographs. ⁴ Even (or especially) humanizing photographs, which might alert and awaken distant audiences to injustices, call attention to the limits of understanding, empathy, and identification. Constantine's photographs invite provocative questions; for example, once a situation is made visible, to whom is it legible, and what are the conditions of its legibility? Photojournalists working in the field of human rights use certain compositional techniques (such as the close-up facial portrait) to simulate visual proximity between sufferers and distant spectators. Yet the political efficacy of such aesthetic practices, we want to suggest, lies not only in the humanization of the suffering "other" but in the capacity of the producers and receivers of such images to generate interactive human rights contexts, however provisional, which interrogate social injustices and imagine a "just" future. The responsibility for documenting human rights violations does not lie solely with violated subjects...