Photography and Resistance : Anticolonialist Photography in the Americas

This book argues that photography, with its inherent connection to the embodied material world and its ease of transmissibility, operates as an implicitly political medium. It makes the case that the right to see is fundamental to the right to be. Limning the paradoxical links between photography as a medium and the conditions of political, social, and epistemological disappearance, the book interprets works by African American, Indigenous American, Latinx, and Asian American photographers as acts of political activism in the contemporary idiom. Placing photographic praxis at the crux of 21 st -century crises of political equity and sociality, the book uncovers the discursive visual movements through which photography enacts reappearances, bringing to visibility erased and elided histories in the Americas. Artists discussed in-depth include Shelley Niro, Carrie Mae Weems, Paula Luttringer, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Matika Wilbur, Martine Gutiérrez, Ana Mendieta, An-My Lê, and Rebecca Belmore. The book makes visible the American land as a site of contestation, an as-yet not fully recognized battlefield. Acknowledgments Contents List of Figures Chapter 1: Introduction: Anticolonialist Photography in the Americas Decolonizing the Photographic Imagination The Photograph as Act What Disappears, What Persists On Theory, Methodology, Identity Refusals Photography and Disappearance Theory of the Invisible Chapter 2: Seen and the Unseen A Small Matter of Wars Ancestors Monuments and Photographs The Naked Image The Persistence of Colonialist Memory Chapter 3: Staging Returns The “Un-Document” The Right to Look17 Visibility Against Surveillance Chapter 4: Empire’s Battlefields Ten Pretty Little Indian Houses Playing War Against Erasure Ideas of Origin Temporal Frames Vistas Chapter 5: Empire’s Dirty Wars Elegy and Mourning Memory and Return Object Studies Feminist Gaze Feminism across Boundaries Rebecca Belmore’s New Naming Chapter 6: Exiles and Diasporas Symbolic Form in Exile Eternal Return, Coming Back Rewriting the Body Dialogic Trace Chapter 7: Gendering Decoloniality Carrie Mae Weems’s Diasporic Haunts Waltzing Gender’s Harms The Parlor Interiorities Chapter 8: Algorithms of Resistance Shelley Niro’s Self-Reflections Cara Romero’s Indigeneity Matika Wilbur’s Map Chapter 9: Reclaiming History Coyote and Other Tales Water Memories Television Place/No-place Indigenous Woman Chapter 10: Nomads, Reterritorialization Project 562, Nomadism, Finding Home Processual Nomadism Nomads and Women The Inherency of Reterritorialization and Nomadism La Pieta Chapter 11: Conclusion: Photography, Reappearing Beyond the Sacrificial Economy Index "This book argues that photography, with its inherent connection to the embodied material world and its ease of transmissibility, operates as an implicitly political medium. It makes the case that the right to see is fundamental to the right to be. Limning the paradoxical links between photography as a medium and the conditions of political, social, and epistemological disappearance, the book interprets works by African American, Indigenous American, Latinx, and Asian American photographers as acts of political activism in the contemporary idiom. Placing photographic praxis at the crux of 21st-century crises of political equity and sociality, the book uncovers the discursive visual movements through which photography enacts reappearances, bringing to visibility erased and elided histories in the Americas. Artists discussed in-depth include Shelley Niro, Carrie Mae Weems, Paula Luttringer, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Matika Wilbur, Martine Gutiérrez, Ana Mendieta, An-My Lê, and Rebecca Belmore. The book makes visible the American land as a site of contestation, an as-yet not fully recognized battlefield"--Page 4 of cover