Ungovernable Eye: Photography, Colonial Governmentality and Irish Insurgency

Framing photography and policing through Michael Foucault’s concept of counter-conducts in his writings on governmentality, this article discusses photography’s provocations within colonial governmentality of the Irish insurgent movements of the mid nineteenth century. In 1866, British authorities legislated for suspension of habeas corpus in response to what they identified as the Fenian threat to the ideals of the modern liberal state. Fenian insurgency was not just an anti-colonial movement but an asymmetrical political fraternity with a trans-Atlantic membership that included retired American Civil War veterans. Mobilised for the identification and surveillance of Fenians traversing across the Atlantic and the Irish Sea, photography was used to arrest the likenesses of individuals whose mobility threatened the security of the state and its colonies. In this process, the photograph’s mass reproducibility and mobility as a material image-object was pressed into action to identify suspected insurgents. Exploring the entwined histories of photography, policing and the Fenian Irish, the article discusses how photography simultaneously contributed to and undermined colonial governmentality.