Potential Legal History in the Art of Sonny Liew

Abstract 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.