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Paper short abstract:

Is coloniality all there is to colonial photography, or can we find in it traces of a “resistant response” (Maria Lugones) or “the colonial difference” (Walter Mignolo)? Analyzing photographs of people in South-West Africa under German rule, I invite the audience to discuss this question.

Paper long abstract:

Colonial-era photographs from Africa are documents of colonialism and colonial ideologies. They have usually been taken by people who were on the masters’ side of the colonial divide; they are steeped in colonial ways of seeing and showing; their visual rhetoric often conforms to and support colonial narratives. Postcolonial readings of colonial photographs have again and again critiqued photographs’ coloniality. They have shown that the supposedly realistic character of photography can obscure their ideological character, and that literal readings of colonial photographs always run the danger of reproducing colonial ideologies.

Yet is coloniality all there is to colonial photography? Do we have to discard them in their entirety as documents of colonialism? Or can we also see traces of a different reality in the people they depict – traces of a “resistant response” (Maria Lugones) that, while affected by colonialism, does not completely merge with colonial ideologies? Can photographs help us to discover (as Lugones called for in the realm of gender) traces of “the colonial difference, emphatically resisting” the “epistemological habit of erasing it”?

I ask these questions through the analysis of a number of photographs of people in South-West Africa under German rule, in which colonial narratives are as present as signs of ‘resistant responses’, and invite the audience to discuss the possibilities of separating both, or at least of using photographs to keep alive our awareness of the colonial difference.