Voicing, Looking, Perspective

What, semiotically speaking, is a perspective? Synthesizing the notions of voicing in linguistic anthropology and looking in film and visual studies with Fanon’s phenomenology of racialized perception, this article situates perspective as a constitutive feature of semiosis and, vice versa, sign activity as constitutive of how perspectives evenementially and historically emerge in and circulate across events. To exemplify this process, I analyze select aspects of the 2018 trial of Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke for the murder of a Black teenager, Laquan McDonald. I focus in particular on the contextualized courtroom use of a forensic digital animation created by the defense to provide the perspective of Van Dyke in the event of his murder of McDonald.