George Floyd in Papua: Image-Events and the Art of Resonance

This article offers an introduction to the “image-event” as both concept and method through a focus on the circulation of images around the killing of George Floyd. It examines how these images reverberated and resonated in West Papua, a restive region of Indonesia that has been the site of a long-standing separatist movement. It critically examines a celebratory media discourse that sees the US-based Black Lives Matter movement as expanding outward to spark similar movements elsewhere, a logic that reiterates long-standing colonialist narratives that figure places like Papua as backwaters belatedly receiving and imitatively taking up ideas that flow from the metropole outward. Questioning such assumptions, the article suggests that attention to image-events and the art of resonance can better reveal the ways that long-standing global asymmetries affect the flow of images and the course of political action.