Pub Date : 2020-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2020/V46A10
Candice Steele
Certain anthropological narratives of South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, such as Monica Hunter’s 1936 Reaction to Conquest and Philip Mayer’s 1963 Townsmen or Tribesmen, persist as potent referential ‘bodies of knowledge’. By laying down the coordinates of Black rural and urban experience, such studies continue to animate concepts of tradition and modernity, effectively conjuring up notions of ‘the border’, both literally and metaphorically. Encountering Pauline Ingle’s photographic collection amidst these circuits of knowledge and ways of seeing is to recognise that it is both unusual and exceptional. It is a collection of over 4000 images that are not only located in a rural area but also covers a sustained time period, corresponding to the period of formal apartheid. The concept of the rural is amplified in the collection, positioning it as a site of development, as the ‘not yet modern’, in which subjects are figured both in class hierarchies and in relation to Daniel Morolong’s urban photographs in and around East London in the 1950s. Employing the theory of social acts enables a re-contemplation of the subject, and a reading of the social that suggests a set of possibilities and futures beyond what currently constitutes the rural and the urban; and upturns the disciplinary optics that condition the predominating ethnographies and historiographies of the Eastern Cape. The whole problem is born of the fact that we have come to the image with the idea of synthesis... The image is an act and not a thing. – Jean-Paul Sartre, L’imagination
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Pub Date : 2020-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2020/V46A5
Jordache A. Ellapen
This photo-essay considers the other lives of family photographs by offering an analysis of my mother’s collection of professional studio portraits and other vernacular photographs shot between the mid 1950s and late 1960s. How do we read the photoarchive of an ‘Indian’ woman born in 1941 to parents who were wards of the colonial state? A woman who was one generation removed from the sugar-cane plantations and coal mines where Indians were indentured as a coercive labour force? Influenced by Santu Mofokeng’s project The Black Photo Album and Tina Campt’s method of ‘listening to’ rather than ‘looking at’ photos, I refigure the family photo-archive to produce The Brown Photo Album, which is an experiment in seeing and being seen. In a context where the institutional visual archives of colonialism and apartheid have trained South African publics to see and thus know the Indian in very specific ways, this article redirects us away from the violence of the visual to the relationship between race, aesthetics and affect. It positions the family photo album not only as an alternative archive of the Indian experience but also as an archive through which we can begin to comprehend the Indian experience otherwise. This project probes the making of Indianness in the Natal Midlands, shifting the lens from urban centres like Durban and Johannesburg. As a work in progress, I present The Brown Photo Album as an experiment, an iteration of a project, a praxis of refiguring family photos in order to understand what this archive can reveal about our past, presents and futures. The Brown Photo Album: An Archive of Feminist Futurity is an artistic project that refigures the photo-archive of my mother, Velliammah Ellapen (née Moodley), an Indian South African woman born in 1941. In this iteration of The Brown Photo Album, I focus on a collection of her professional studio photos shot between the mid 1950s and late 1960s in Ladysmith by Bully Narrandes, an Indian photographer who ran the now defunct Victory Studios. Since I was young, I have been drawn to my mother’s performances in these photos and her attention to style and fashion. The photos directed me to her dreams and desires and offered a sense of her personhood
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Pub Date : 2020-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2020/V46A6
Iona Gilburt
This article seeks to examine the emergence of the image of hysteria that originated at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris in the late nineteenth century and has since been transferred across new generations of phototexts through ekphrasis. It is first shown how this stereotypically feminine and sexualised image was initiated by the medical tome Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière – an effect that belies the physicians’ original intentions – and is then taken up in the public imagination by the surrealists André Breton and Louis Aragon before emerging in Georges DidiHuberman’s 1982 critical text Invention of Hysteria. Didi-Huberman’s monograph offers insight into how persistent this image becomes, even taking shape in discourses that attempt to undermine it. Didi-Huberman furthermore highlights how developments in photographic technology have contributed to the shaping of hysteria. Finally, this article considers how the figure of the hysteric appears in J. M. Coetzee’s 2005 novel Slow Man in the character of Marianna. The manner in which she is depicted presents an ekphrasis that can be matched to the vision of hysteria that began with the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière, thereby showing how this histrionic and gender-stereotyped iteration of hysteria from the nineteenth century remains a readily accessible mode of expression.
这篇文章试图研究歇斯底里的形象的出现，起源于Salpêtrière医院在巴黎在19世纪后期，并已被转移到新一代的照片文本通过ekphrasis。它首先展示了这种刻板的女性化和性化的形象是如何由医学巨著《影像学》(Iconographie photograpque de la Salpêtrière)发起的——这种效果掩盖了医生的最初意图——然后被超现实主义者安德列·布列顿和路易斯·阿拉冈带入公众的想象，然后在乔治·迪迪·休伯曼1982年的批评性文本《歇斯底里的发明》中出现。迪迪-休伯曼的专著提供了对这一形象如何持久的洞察，甚至在试图破坏它的话语中形成。迪迪-休伯曼进一步强调了摄影技术的发展如何促成了歇斯底里症的形成。最后，本文考察了J. M.库切2005年的小说《慢男人》中歇斯底里的形象是如何出现在玛丽安娜这个人物身上的。她被描绘的方式呈现出一种短语，可以与歇斯底里的视觉相匹配，这种视觉始于《图像摄影》Salpêtrière，从而展示了这种19世纪的戏剧性和性别刻板印象的歇斯底里迭代如何仍然是一种容易接近的表达方式。
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Pub Date : 2020-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2020/V46A8
Rui Assubuji
This article engages with the historiography of the Portuguese empire with reference to Mozambique. It explores the impact of visual archives on existing debates and asks what difference photographs make to our interpretation and understanding of this colonial past. Deprived of their ‘historical rights’ by the requirements of the Berlin treaties that insisted on ‘effective occupation’, the Portuguese started to employ a complex of knowledge-producing activities in which photography was crucially involved. This article examines different photographic moments before and during the ‘Pacification Campaign’ that assured Portugal’s authority over the Gaza Empire in southern Mozambique in the 1890s, by official, commercial and missionary photographers. It identifies controversies over the small number of portraits of the Gaza king Ngungunyane that took on distinctive and disputed ‘other lives’ after their initial production. The realisation of how one image might be disassembled to generate others becomes an exercise – in visual terms – of rethinking colonial violence. A critical engagement with the slippages and repositionings around photographs, and the errors or disputes in various captions, allows for a better understanding of the production of both silence and particular narratives in the archives and popular history. The demonstration of these other lives matters because it stimulates awareness of what is seen, what is made visible, and addresses the desire to look beyond the image to find others in a continuous interrogation of photographic excess. Introduction: Portraits and Silences in the Archive Atlas often begins...in an arbitrary or problematic way...quite unlike the beginning of a story or the promise of an argument; and as for the end, it often reveals the emergence of a new country, a new zone of knowledge to be explored.1 This study analyses photographs from different archives against a backdrop of related information that is mostly focused on the ‘effective occupation’ of Mozambique 1 G. Didi-Huberman, Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 3.
这篇文章涉及葡萄牙帝国与莫桑比克的史学。它探讨了视觉档案对现有辩论的影响，并询问照片对我们对这段殖民历史的解释和理解有何不同。由于柏林条约坚持“有效占领”的要求，葡萄牙人被剥夺了“历史权利”，他们开始从事一系列知识生产活动，其中摄影是至关重要的。本文考察了19世纪90年代葡萄牙在莫桑比克南部加沙帝国确立权威的“安抚运动”之前和期间的不同摄影时刻，这些照片由官方、商业和传教士摄影师拍摄。它确定了对加沙国王恩贡贡亚尼的少数肖像的争议，这些肖像在最初制作后呈现出独特而有争议的“其他生活”。从视觉的角度来看，如何将一幅图像拆解成另一幅图像，是对殖民暴力的重新思考。对照片周围的滑动和重新定位，以及各种标题中的错误或争议的批判性参与，可以更好地理解档案和流行历史中沉默和特定叙述的产生。对这些其他生命的展示很重要，因为它激发了人们对所见之物的认识，使人们意识到什么是可见的，并在对摄影过度的持续追问中，提出了超越图像寻找他人的愿望。简介:《档案地图集》中的《肖像与沉默》通常以……以武断或有问题的方式……不像故事的开头或争论的开端的;至于结尾，它往往揭示了一个新国家的出现，一个有待探索的新知识领域本研究在相关信息的背景下分析了来自不同档案的照片，这些照片主要集中在莫桑比克的“有效占领”1 G. Didi-Huberman, Atlas或焦虑的同性恋科学(芝加哥:芝加哥大学出版社，2018)，3。
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Pub Date : 2020-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2020/V46A16
Ross Truscott
{"title":"Ambivalent: Photography and Visibility in African History","authors":"Ross Truscott","doi":"10.17159/2309-9585/2020/V46A16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2309-9585/2020/V46A16","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53088,"journal":{"name":"Kronos","volume":"72 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77270994","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2020/V46A13
S. Longford
{"title":"Putting Gestures to Work: Georges Didi-Huberman, Uprisings","authors":"S. Longford","doi":"10.17159/2309-9585/2020/V46A13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2309-9585/2020/V46A13","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53088,"journal":{"name":"Kronos","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74296084","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2020/V46A3
C. Morton
The essay draws on two case studies from the photographic archive of British social anthropologist Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1902–73) on a fieldwork expedition to Kenya and South Sudan in 1936. The case studies reveal how connections can be made within an archive to articulate new narratives around often well-known photographs. The case studies explore the relationship between two different practices of looking: that involved in the act of photography, and that of looking at archival photographs as historical sources. Whilst the abundance of visual information in the archive reveals photography’s endless potential for recodability, the essay argues that the photographic archive is also characterised by obscurity and limitation, and that the small dramas that are sometimes fleetingly glimpsed in the photographic hinterland will for the most part remain partial, unintelligible, and unarticulable by historians. Although there is a visual abundance in the photographic archive with which we might engage, what is shown to us is not abundantly clear. The essay argues that the important historical connections between the concepts of visibility and knowledge in a discipline such as anthropology often break down when the archive is recalcitrant, revealing its own limits as much as its bounty.
{"title":"Attempted Portraits: Photography, Obscurity, and the Articulation of the Past","authors":"C. Morton","doi":"10.17159/2309-9585/2020/V46A3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2309-9585/2020/V46A3","url":null,"abstract":"The essay draws on two case studies from the photographic archive of British social anthropologist Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1902–73) on a fieldwork expedition to Kenya and South Sudan in 1936. The case studies reveal how connections can be made within an archive to articulate new narratives around often well-known photographs. The case studies explore the relationship between two different practices of looking: that involved in the act of photography, and that of looking at archival photographs as historical sources. Whilst the abundance of visual information in the archive reveals photography’s endless potential for recodability, the essay argues that the photographic archive is also characterised by obscurity and limitation, and that the small dramas that are sometimes fleetingly glimpsed in the photographic hinterland will for the most part remain partial, unintelligible, and unarticulable by historians. Although there is a visual abundance in the photographic archive with which we might engage, what is shown to us is not abundantly clear. The essay argues that the important historical connections between the concepts of visibility and knowledge in a discipline such as anthropology often break down when the archive is recalcitrant, revealing its own limits as much as its bounty.","PeriodicalId":53088,"journal":{"name":"Kronos","volume":"11 3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78344676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2020/V46A2
R. Vokes
ABSTRACT This article examines the output of Uganda's official Photographic Section from the years of the Idi Amin regime (1971-9), an archive of 60,000 black and white images from which have recently come to light in the stores of the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation in Kampala. Drawing on recent developments in African visual studies, the article focuses in particular upon what this archive reveals about photographic circulations in and from Amin's Uganda. It finds that this new trove of negatives -when compared with press archives from around the world - is especially revealing of a growing nexus between official photography and all kinds of commercial photographies in the 1970s. This nexus played a key role in shaping both how the Amin regime was pictured at the time, and how its afterlife has continued to reflect down to the present time.
{"title":"In and Out of Sight: The Afterlife of Official Photography from Idi Amin's Uganda","authors":"R. Vokes","doi":"10.17159/2309-9585/2020/V46A2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2309-9585/2020/V46A2","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines the output of Uganda's official Photographic Section from the years of the Idi Amin regime (1971-9), an archive of 60,000 black and white images from which have recently come to light in the stores of the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation in Kampala. Drawing on recent developments in African visual studies, the article focuses in particular upon what this archive reveals about photographic circulations in and from Amin's Uganda. It finds that this new trove of negatives -when compared with press archives from around the world - is especially revealing of a growing nexus between official photography and all kinds of commercial photographies in the 1970s. This nexus played a key role in shaping both how the Amin regime was pictured at the time, and how its afterlife has continued to reflect down to the present time.","PeriodicalId":53088,"journal":{"name":"Kronos","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90964103","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-12-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A9
S. Sheikh
Taking leave from obstacles to the creation of an 'environmental public' in contemporary post-apartheid South Africa and the political silencing and objectification of both nature and racialised subjects, this article interrogates and seeks to expand a specific figure: that of the witness. In the broader, global context of environmental violence, the witness – who, according to classical theories of testimony, is a sovereign subject who speaks in their own name – is considered in the context of constructed categories of active/passive and subject/object as these play out across race, nature and shifting conceptions of the human. The title, 'the future of the witness', prompts two questions: (i) In the context of (missing) environmental publics, in what ways we must reconceptualise the figure of the witness – on ontological, epistemological and political levels – as we move into the future? (ii) Faced with ever-escalating Anthropocenic destruction, is it possible for a witness to testify not only to past events and experiences, as per the generally accepted temporal schema of witnessing, but also to ongoing experiences that unfold into the future? In responding to these questions, it is argued (a) that the witness can no longer be considered as an isolated figure, but rather must be conceived as part of a testimonial constellation; and (b) that, in responding to ecological concerns, this constellation must be a more-than-human collective: an entangled form of sociality between humans and nonhumans that does not take recourse to modernist categories of 'human' and 'nature'. Moving, via South Africa, from the European Holocaust to global humanitarian and forensic practices, through European and North American science and technology studies as well as Amerindian thinking, the article gathers a generalised set of questions and propositions that might in turn be folded back into specific locales. Key is the classic postcolonial question of who ought to or has the right to speak in the name of whom. Where the witness is often denied self-representation or, more gravely, entirely absent or missing, the article surveys various practices of supplementary witnessing. However, such practices ofen find themselves caught within a representational dilemma whereby, despite the necessity of defending the rights of humans and nonhumans alike, 'speaking for' or 'giving voice' to dispossessed or missing subjects – including nature – runs the risk of further replicating the original colonial matrix of being, knowledge and power that is being contested. Drawing from aesthetic and speculative practices, the article asks what possible strategies might be available for navigating the challenges of representation and for conceiving of more-than-human environmental publics that contest the neoliberal indivisualization of responsibilty and actively bear witness both to unfolding environmental degradation and possible more liveable futures.
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Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2019/v45a4
Suzana Sousa
If the ambivalent figure of the nation is a problem of its transitional history, its conceptual indeterminacy, its wavering between vocabularies, then what effect does it have in narratives and discourses that signify a sense of ‘nationness’: the heimlich pleasures of the heart, the unheimlich terror of the space or race of the Other; the comfort of social belonging, the hidden injuries of class; the customs of taste, the powers of political affiliation; the sense of social order, the sensibility of sexuality; the blindness of bureaucracy, the strait insight of institutions; the quality of justice, the common sense of injustice; the langue of the law and the parole of the people.1
{"title":"Fighting over the Archive: Politics and Practice of the Art World in Angola","authors":"Suzana Sousa","doi":"10.17159/2309-9585/2019/v45a4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2309-9585/2019/v45a4","url":null,"abstract":"If the ambivalent figure of the nation is a problem of its transitional history, its conceptual indeterminacy, its wavering between vocabularies, then what effect does it have in narratives and discourses that signify a sense of ‘nationness’: the heimlich pleasures of the heart, the unheimlich terror of the space or race of the Other; the comfort of social belonging, the hidden injuries of class; the customs of taste, the powers of political affiliation; the sense of social order, the sensibility of sexuality; the blindness of bureaucracy, the strait insight of institutions; the quality of justice, the common sense of injustice; the langue of the law and the parole of the people.1","PeriodicalId":53088,"journal":{"name":"Kronos","volume":"78 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74806385","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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