LAUSR

ABSTRACT This essay focuses on the conditions of possibility underpinning the visualization of the end of the Sri Lankan war as a site of massive atrocity in need of international intervention. Highlighting the ease with which complex and multiple histories and subjectivities of violent conflict are erased in a series of globally acclaimed investigative documentaries broadcast by Britain’s Channel 4 news, this essay maps the conventions, codes, and histories that govern visual representation of heinous acts of cruelty and their constitution by way of the dead and imperiled body. The paper argues that this tendency to exhibit the corpus extremis as the privileged sign of mass violence should be understood as a geopolitically situated practice that sentimentalizes global power relations, reproducing racialized forms of objectification and inferiorization in the present.