visions of justice. Appealing to the humanitarian impulse usually now involves
complex processes of mediation. As Lilie Chouliaraki points out, “mediation does
not simply act on a pre-existing public, but constitutes this public as a body of action
in the process of narrating and portraying distant suffering”.^66 In doing so it can fall
prey to the dangers of merely creating participants in a “spectatorship of suffering”.
I will discuss the issues that arise in the context of two important and interrelated
modes of appeal to action: images of suffering and personal narratives.
Many of the parameters of the humanitarian appeal were set during the
pioneering phase of humanitarian campaigning. Arguably, they have not changed
that much over the ensuing two centuries. Where today we may wear plastic
bracelets to indicate support for campaigns against global poverty, abolitionists
could indicate their allegiances with one of Josiah Wedgwood’s famous seals
featuring a chained, kneeling African and the legend “Am I Not a Man and a
Brother?” The image spread, in an early example of “viral” marketing, to adorn
books, leaflets, snuffboxes and cufflinks.^67 The image directly challenged the viewer
to identify the slave as a fellow human, forcing an explicit rather than implicit
exclusion from that category should he or she reject the appeal.
Even more iconic was Thomas Clarkson’s diagram of a slave ship, the
Brookes , a revolutionary image first published in that revolutionary year, 1789. It
showed cross-sections of each level of a typical slave ship, with 482 slaves in the
unimaginably cramped positions, body to body in tight rows, in which they would
have made the journey across the Atlantic. This image, though sensational, was also
sober, for Clarkson and his colleagues were careful not to exaggerate in its
composition. For example, the number of slaves carried was at the bottom end of
the range the ship was actually recorded as having carried.^68 For Thomas Laqueur,
the key to such an image is that it renews our vision, it demands that we “ see the
middle passage for what it was: something other than an exercise in the mere
66
67 Lilie Chouliaraki, The Spectatorship of Suffering (London: Sage, 2006), 199.
68 Hochschild, Bury the Chains , 128-129.
Ibid., 155. Today, some NGOs like Amnesty are especially careful not to exaggerate or
sensationalise their subject matter.