Paper short abstract:

In this paper I examine temporalities of self-fashioning focusing on photographic studio practices of young Bamileke women in Yaounde, Cameroon. I argue that the temporalities of studio performances help young women maintain hope in achieving utopian futures.

Paper long abstract:

Young Bamileke women living in Yaounde, Cameroon, like their contemporaries across the continent are stuck in waithood (Honwana 2012), unable to attain valued forms of social adulthood. As their repetitive attempts to get by fail at times they venture for excursions to photographic studios where they engage in star-like photographic performances in front of camera lens. These performances, I argue, solicit "as if" attitude which is achieved through studio's relationship to time. Studios halt time and as such disturb rather than feed into production of linear time as modernist narratives about camera would have it. Studio is the time of possibility as young women transcendent waithood and pose as economically and socially successful celebrities and stars. Thus, studio "disrupts" personal biographies as chains of successive events and failures; in the performances "the temporal boundaries are dissolved, temporalities reversed, and temporal loops permitted that may capture not only what has been lost" (Behrend 2017) but also what has not been, echoing "nostalgia for the future" (Piot 2010). The fractal time was materialised in the photograph and as such the effects of what happens in the studio lingered into the quotidian life: taken "as if", studio portraits hanging on the walls were saturated with the temporality of the "not yet" (Strassler 2010) but also of "this should have been". As such I argue temporalities of studio excursions created possibilities for reverie despite the opposite experience of the postcolonial subject in the everyday (Mbembe 2001, Tonda 2005).