Potential Legal History in the Art of Sonny Liew
Keywords:
graphic novel, interlocutor, apparatusAbstract
This article reads Sonny Liew’s graphic novel The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (2015) as an expression and interlocutor of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s method of potential history. Thinking alongside Walter Benjamin’s media theory and philosophy of history, Azoulay reconceives the camera shutter as a material apparatus that executes the imperial violence of expelling, and making obsolete, the past from the present in the name of progress. Azoulay’s critical practice finds its artistic analog in Liew’s comic, which contests official accounts of Singapore’s pre-independence history by remediating archived photographs of the nation’s former politicians. My bilateral reading of Liew and Azoulay advances ‘potential legal history’ as an emerging methodological-theoretical perspective that orients legal scholars to photographs, graphic novels, and other visual-narrative forms as vital matters for the reimagining of national histories.
References
1
The fields of visual anthropology, visual literacy, media studies, visual culture, visual studies, and memory studies have inquired into photographs and other visual matters: see Martha A. Sandweiss, “Seeing History: Thinking about and with Photographs,” The Western Historical Quarterly 51, no. 1 (2020): 8–9. Sandweiss herself has advocated for and demonstrated the value of photographs in American history: see Martha A. Sandweiss, The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2025). For a recent bibliography of works on history, method, photography, and historiography, see Elizabeth Edwards, Photographs and the Practice of History (London, New York, and Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 129–40.
2
See Linda Mulcahy, “Eyes of the Law: A Visual Turn in Socio-Legal Studies?” Journal of Law and Society 44, no. S1 (2017): S111–28. Some of the founding works on law and visuality include: Costas Douzinas and Lynda Nead, eds., Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law (The University of Chicago Press, 1999); Alison Young, Judging the Image: Art, Value, Law (London: Routledge, 2005); Richard K. Sherwin, Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque: Arabesques and Entanglements (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2011); Peter Goodrich, Legal Emblems and the Art of Law: Obiter Depicta as the Vision of Governance (Cambridge University Press, 2014); Peter Goodrich and Valérie Hayaert, eds., Genealogies of Legal Vision (London: Routledge, 2015); Desmond Manderson, ed., Law and the Visual: Representations, Technologies, and Critique (University of Toronto Press, 2018); Desmond Manderson, Danse Macabre: Temporalities of Law in the Visual Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Peter Goodrich, Judicial Uses of Images: Vision in Decision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023). I am grateful to the second reviewer for urging the list’s expansion.
3
On the visuality of literature and its contestation of copyright qua proprietary authorship, see Benjamin Goh, The Materiality of Literature: Rereading Authorship and Copyright with Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025).
4
Critical legal history has sought to account for the contingencies, contradictions, and pluralities in our inheritances that, intractably, exceed Enlightenment thought: see Robert W. Gordon, “Critical Legal Histories,” Stanford Law Review 36, no. 1–2 (1984): 57–125.
5
Attentive to the historiographical disturbances prompted by the photographic medium, Elizabeth Edwards has sought to excavate the “meta-presuppositions” (ix) that underlie the writing of history. Instead of reducing them to the same logocentric terms that tend to be applied to textual documents, photographs ought to be studied for their medial specificities and implications. These include not only the unique inscriptive traces of photographs but also the new sense of authenticity that the photographic registration of physical realities brings to history. Photographs “inscribe the real” (19), more literally than letters do, which troubles the textual priority in history and other logocentric fields: see Edwards, Photographs and the Practice of History.
6
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 77. Barthes distinguishes photography from the visual and literary arts: “Painting can feign reality without having seen it. Discourse combines signs that have referents, of course, but these referents can be and are most often ‘chimeras.’ Contrary to these imitations, in photography I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality and of the past” (see Barthes, 76).
7
“Spectrum” is Roland Barthes’ term for the photograph’s content because it not only retains an etymological link with the medium’s exposure as spectacle but further registers the spectral return of the referent: see Barthes, 9.
8
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London and New York: Verso, 2019); Sonny Liew, The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (Singapore: Epigram Books, 2015). Liew’s work was republished by Pantheon Books in 2016. It not only won the Singapore Literature Prize (Fiction) in 2016 but also clinched three Eisner Awards for Best Writer/Artist, Best Publication Design, and Best U.S. Edition of International Material (Asia) in 2017.
9
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994), 188.
10
Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, trans. Anthony Enns (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 132–35.
11
McLuhan, Understanding Media, 194–95; Kittler, Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, 136–45.
12
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana Press, 1992).
13
Benjamin, 220–21.
14
Benjamin, 221.
15
Benjamin, 241–42.
16
See also Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1931–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 518. It was in the earlier piece that Benjamin first advanced the notion of the aura. My claim is that Azoulay’s potential historicization of photographs may be understood as one such practice of politicizing photography.
17
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 253–64.
18
Ariella Azoulay, “The Darkroom of History,” ANGELAKI: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 29, no. 4 (2005): 57–77.
19
Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 255.
20
Azoulay puts it more strongly: “This is, of course, the instantaneous photo-flash”: Azoulay, “The Darkroom of History,” 66.
