Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa, by Jennifer Bajorek

Abstract

thinking what Moser is thinking. By providing similar social contexts and “practicing a disobedient gaze” (2), Moser also reads dissonance into images of immigrant workers, Black business owners, and indentured laborers. However, as she freely admits, “to develop these moments of political contestation” (111) requires “some imaginative liberty on the part of the archival researcher” (110). Projecting Citizenship therefore offers a number of ruminations on projection, the most contentious of which concerns its author’s willingness to impose her own critically informed view of the archive onto COVIC’s multiple spectators of a century ago. The book’s success depends on a reader’s willingness to conflate how these slideshows might be read today with how they were actually received at the time. For this, there is no definitive evidence, other than the very real struggles for self-determination that marked the early twentieth-century histories of much of the British Empire. What is at stake in this project, then, is the relationship of archival research and “imaginative liberty” (110). What is at stake is the tension between history’s claim to speak with authority for and about the past, and its responsibility to the present to “imagine other ways of recognizing and living with one another in the world” (178).