Abu Ghraib photographs were deliberate, memorialized spectacles mirroring American lynching postcards

Evidence

The photographs that emerged from Abu Ghraib were orchestrated, designed, and thoughtful. They were not spontaneous, or, in the words of many commentators, the result of a few bad apples. The soldiers who set up the pyramids of naked bodies, for example, took extra care to make sure that “each man had his penis touching the buttocks of the man below.” Great care was taken in the abuse of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib. Much like the lynchings of African-Americans, the crimes of Abu Ghraib became a public and visible event. Nearly two thousand photographs were taken, suggesting that in some way, the perpetrators wanted to memorialize the crimes. There is a precedent in US history for such a horrible subject of photographic documentation. At one time, the photographs of lynchings were popularized, made into postcards, while special trains ran by the sites of the crimes—making the death of black men a kind of entertainment that lived on far beyond the original crime and its viewing. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 752

The photographs that emerged from Abu Ghraib were orchestrated, designed, and thoughtful. They were not spontaneous, or, in the words of many commentators, the result of a few bad apples. The soldiers who set up the pyramids of naked bodies, for example, took extra care to make sure that “each man had his penis touching the buttocks of the man below.” Great care was taken in the abuse of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib. Much like the lynchings of African-Americans, the crimes of Abu Ghraib became a public and visible event. Nearly two thousand photographs were taken, suggesting that in some way, the perpetrators wanted to memorialize the crimes. There is a precedent in US history for such a horrible subject of photographic documentation. At one time, the photographs of lynchings were popularized, made into postcards, while special trains ran by the sites of the crimes—making the death of black men a kind of entertainment that lived on far beyond the original crime and its viewing. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 752

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the spectacle of foreign bodies in medieval/Renaissance art that the reader tracks across this book; also connects to the lynching-as-entertainment scholarship (e.g., Without Sanctuary). — connects to: Abu Ghraib photographs revealed American culture’s dependence on the sexual-humiliation equation. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 194
• QUESTION: Does the author elsewhere establish a direct visual or conceptual genealogy from lynching postcards through torture porn to Abu Ghraib, or only a parallel?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 752