KEYNOTE
Vietnam, Socialist Futurities, and Counterfactualities
By Thy Phu (University of Toronto)
With the waning of French colonialism and the rise of U.S. imperialism, the architects of the Hanoi-based Democratic Republic of Vietnam sought to create a socialist vision of a prosperous future which, at a time of division and escalating violence, was still to come. The North Vietnamese sought to call forth a future of technological progress, economic prosperity, and cultural renewal, and illustrated magazines played an integral, though little understood, role in this process. At the same time, still other images were created through a process of restaging that can be seen as proleptically memorializing the loss of South Vietnam, which was then anticipated. This presentation explores the potential of photography to conjure different temporalities of the war in Vietnam, as projected through the propaganda images published in Vietnam Pictorial, the communist state’s most prominent illustrated magazine, and through restaged images and reenactment photography created and circulated by diasporic Vietnamese communities. Taken together in a context of local, national, and international visual exchange, these photographs constitute warring visions which offer alternative perspectives on how to see and remember this prolonged global conflict.
PRESENTATIONS
Hong Kong in Transition: Caring for Others in Empire’s Wake
By Nadine Attewell (Simon Fraser University)
What does decolonization look like? Once, we might have sought out photographs of monumental moments of transition (such as the raising and lowering of flags) to locate the arrival of decolonization in the transfer of power from one state to another, the colonial past given way to the postcolonial present. It has long been clear, however, that colonialism is not an event but an enduring structure. In this talk, I reflect on the non-monumental – non-revolutionary – temporality of decolonization through thinking with and against two photographs taken by British military personnel in Hong Kong at the end of the Second World War. Both were produced as part of the photographic effort to demarcate legitimate British rule from the brutalities of the Japanese occupation. At the same time, the photographs highlight the care- and relation-work of Asian and Asian diasporic survivors of the occupation, at once evoking and betraying a different temporality of liberation, one tied to painstaking, iterative, and everyday practices of sustenance and repair. What can we learn through looking at these photographs, taken in the interregnum between one colonial regime and another, from a historical moment – post-handover, post-National Security Law, post-pandemic – and diasporic location that make the horizon of decolonization in Hong Kong ever more difficult to discern? How might they reorient our own practices of relating to photographic and other archives as a response to perceived and anticipated loss (of loved ones; of place; of political possibility)?
Picturing a Taste for the Soviet: Bookselling and Consumer Culture in late Twentieth Century India
By Jessica Bachman (University of Washington)
Most view the Soviet Union’s efforts to mass produce and distribute books in translation to global audiences during the second half of the twentieth century through the lens of cultural diplomacy or the Cold War. But the strong propaganda focus of these traditional narratives leaves little breathing room for Soviet literary objects and their non-Soviet consumers to inhabit alternative temporalities and cultural worlds outside the well-studied bipolar struggle for ideological supremacy between the USSR and the United States. This presentation proposes a new, decolonial framework for understanding the decades-long unfolding of the Soviet book project in the Third World. Taking India as a case study and focusing on non-official visual and discursive representations of Soviet book circulation in the state of West Bengal from the 1970s and 1980s, it argues that third-party Indian booksellers played a critical role in decoupling this project from the intentions and imperial ambitions of its creators. Photographic images of the bookselling and distribution activities of two of the Soviet Union’s largest third-party book vendors in India—the Calcutta-based Vostok and Bingsha Shatabdi (Twentieth Century)—sit at the heart of this analysis. Exhibiting a strong documentary focus on marketing and markets, festivals and fairs, children and parents, these photographs tell future-oriented, intergenerational stories that establish Soviet books as objects of tasteful middle-class self-fashioning and vehicles of social mobility during decades marked by increasing economic deregulation and rising literacy rates.
Anti-Exhibition Intermedia: Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man and the Rethinking of Kinship, Violence, and Sovereignty in 1950s South Korea
By Jae Won Edward Chung (Rutgers University)
Maligned for decades by critics and intellectuals despite its global success, Edward Steichen’s “The Family of Man” (1955) has been enjoying a measured rehabilitation in recent years. Against critiques of irresponsible ahistoricism, manipulative sentimentalism, and unabashed populism, today’s scholars have pointed to its utopic democratic vision, its non-identitarian emphasis, and its distancing from representations of coercive power. As Ariella Azoulay argues in Steichen’s defense, “This exhibition is a first visual effort after World War II…to constitute a civil contract not by beheading the sovereign but rather by eliminating his signifiers par excellence.” In South Korea too, “The Family of Man” was a major media event and contributed substantially to solidifying photography’s position in the cultural field. While acknowledging the significance of the responses of South Korean photographers to the exhibition, this talk privileges a transmedia framework to understand how some of the key themes and arguments of the exhibit, as well as its underlying conditions of possibility, were being contested in contemporary literature and cinema. I see Steichen’s top-down curatorial design and techniques of photographic self-archiving as further extensions of imperial visuality. Against this totalizing operation, I trace the emergence of what I call “anti-exhibition intermedia” across literature and cinema, which drew attention to the problem of sovereign violence and its logic of visualization and temporal closure. Anti-exhibition intermedia, I go on to argue, enables the strategic embodiment of fugitive temporalities that contest Steichen’s monolithic and homogenizing vision, described as “a mirror of the universal elements and emotions in the everydayness of life—as a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world.”
Imperial Empiricism and Its Blind Spots: A Specular Approach to Time
By Harry Gu (Hobart and William Smith Colleges)
Colonial archives are the products of colonial ideologies. As such, they seldom show colonized people as subjects of history. This bias is certainly exemplified by photographs produced by British activities in China in the late 19th century, now kept at remanent deposits of various colonial institutions. This paper is a case study of the Scottish geographer John Thomson (1837-1921) and his photo-illustrated books, which obsessively documented the people and landscape of China. He frequently contrasted Chinese history against Western history to show Chinese civilization’s relative stasis. However, Thomson’s photographs are not simple ideographs. Shot with the slow and laborious wet-collodion process, they inevitably document things that are elusive to their operator. For example, in his photographs of the British colony Hong Kong, the Chinese laborers who moved slowly on the busy city streets are ironically rendered more visible than their Western counterparts. Indeed, decolonizing readings of colonial photographs have been primarily focused on such details that the German critic Walter Benjamin provocatively termed the “optical unconscious.” Speaking against this type of reading and the logic of empiricism, I argue that an alternative approach to the colonial archive can emerge if we ask what the visible evidence wouldn’t allow us to argue. What the ideology of empiricism dictates as unarguable then is precisely where new arguments must be made. To derail from the modernist dichotomy of progress and stasis and to seek time at its different pressure points, this paper will conclude with some speculative readings of the photographs as a thought experiment.
Thibaw’s Throne: Optical Aphasia and Colonial/Decolonial Imagination in Burma
By Jie Guo (University of South Carolina)
In the wake of British conquest of Mandalay in December 1885, Upper Burma was annexed and the Burmese Konbaung dynasty’s last king Thibaw (1859-1916), exiled to India. Before long, photographic images of Thibaw’s captured palace—its architecture, grounds, furniture, the citadel wall, the moat, etc.—began to emerge and circulate. This paper focuses on Felice Beato’s (1832-1909) widely circulate photograph of Thibaw’s empty throne, one of the most iconic images from the post-conquest palace. Centrally and symmetrically framed in the image, the throne occupies the majority of the picture, leaving little room for its surroundings—that is, for traces that would tie it to its spatial and temporal milieu. Radically cropped from its the original context, the image, with apparent “timelessness,” is constantly inserted into different narratives about Burma. During the colonial era, when Thibaw’s image was suppressed out of fear of Burmese nationalistic unrest, Beato’s photograph, used metonymically to stand for Burma and the Burmese, became a handy tool in the British production of the spectacle of imperial solidarity and order. Ironically, in contemporary Burma/Myaanmar, the same image, now a tool for decolonial self-imaginings that emphasize Burmeseness, is invoked to challenge the very visual rhetoric it used to help create in the colonial era. In both colonial and decolonial narratives, the function of the throne image as a visual metonym for Thibaw is suppressed for political reasons, and such manipulations inevitably lead to what I can optical aphasia, which hinders effective, critical (visual) expression. Repressed into the optical unconscious, Thibaw nonetheless haunts this image, threatening to disrupt both colonizing and decolonizing narratives and temporalities.
Photographing Never: Photography, the Ottoman State and the Making of Armenian Emigrants
By Zeynep Gursel (Rutgers University)
This paper investigates the temporality of never, a future action depicted explicitly as one that will not come to pass. Specifically how might photography guarantee never? This paper investigate this peculiar and radical tense in photography by investigating the Ottoman state’s practice of photographing Ottoman Armenians before allowing them to migrate abroad so that they may never return between 1896 and 1908.
This paper draws from a multi-year project, Portraits of Unbelonging, examining one of the first uses of photographs to police borders of nations and empires. It studies the history of Ottoman Armenian emigration from the Ottoman east to the United States from the politically fraught and often violent 1890s to the end of Abdülhamid II’s reign in 1909. The larger project asks: How has photography policed borders and differences? How do photography and statecraft intersect in the making and unmaking of citizens? Portraits of Unbelonging is a double-sided history of migration, examining one of the first uses of photographs to police borders. It studies the history of Ottoman Armenian emigration from the Ottoman east to the United States from the politically fraught and often violent 1890s to the end of Abdülhamid II’s reign in 1909.
Like each individual terk-i tabiiyet photograph, the official document used in the renunciation of Ottoman nationality for emigration, the project faces two directions; it links an Ottoman past to an American future. This paper focuses on why Ottoman Armenian subjects’s potential return to the empire needed to be policed and prevented through photography. In particular what does it mean to photograph subjects in relation not to the present or the future but to the peculiar temporal frame of never?
Countervisualizing Korean Camptowns: On Kang Yong Suk’s From Dongducheon (1982) and Black Temporality
By Jung Joon Lee (Rhode Island School of Design)
Gendered and racialized representations of Korean camptowns, and readings of these through the geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific, typically capitalize on the hypervisibility of Blackness to turn the Black subjects into the manifestation of American imperialism and gendered violence. This, in turn, presents Korean camptown women as symbols of a racially violated nation. This paper problematizes such gendered and racialized rhetoric through an analysis of Black temporality vis-à-vis transpacific experiences in the face of de facto segregation in Korean camptowns, as presented in Kang Yong Suk’s 1982 photography series From Dongducheon. This analysis centers countervisuality (Mirzoeff 2011) and Black temporality (Ahad and Ibrahim 2022), considered alongside what Tavia Nyong’o refers to as the cinematic capturing of “a certain fundamental criminality that accompanies being-sent” in reading Blackness (2017); and the doubly diasporic undertaking of Black GIs “being-sent” to military bases in South Korea. It also takes into account the erasure of Blackness – the paradoxical hypervisibility which renders the Black subjects of camptown representation “un-visible,” per Ralph Ellison — as a tactic for suppressing scrutiny over camptown racialization and the subsequent visualization of that Blackness, with all its contextual caveats and repercussions regarding the status of Blackness among and as a stand-in for “Americans.” The paper claims that the failure to consider Black temporality – let alone the erasure of temporality in general — in reading photographs of camptowns leads to imagining camptowns only through the vicious circle of nationalist-masculinist victimology and anti-Black racism.
Uneven Disseminations and Reactivated Events: the Photographs of Gwangju in 1980, Short-circuiting Seoul, Reaching Afar to Germany, Japan, and the US
By Sohl Lee (Stony Brook University)
At the end of the global Cold War, South Korea’s new martial law-regime instituted in 1980 suppressed a citizen’s uprising in the city of Gwangju, resulting in the loss of an estimated 2,000 lives in the span of a week. While the access to the truth of the Gwangju Uprising (now widely known as “5.18”) was limited for most citizens of South Korea at the time, those living in Germany, Japan, and the US could view photographic images and documentary footage from Gwangju almost immediately after the uprising and its resultant massacre. The extent of the transnational pathway through which the images of Gwangju traveled is testament to the South Korean pro-democracy movement’s transnational nature, a significant aspect too often overlooked. What does the examination of media platforms that carried the message of Gwangju reveal today about the sociocultural significance of the event in the global scale–and the subsequent struggles against dictatorship and for citizenry rights that unfolded in 1980s South Korea? How did the spaces of anti-authoritarian state pro-democracy movement emerge by bypassing the state apparatus? What was the role of overseas Korean populations? Each set of stakeholders outside the peninsula forged distinct relationships with the event and its aftermath, and this diversity compels a reconsideration of the Gwangju Uprising’s global significance. At the same time, the case study of these select images call for a transnational history of photography, one that takes into account the sites of decolonial imaginations in solidarity albeit across multiple time-space demarcations. The paper concludes by returning to Gwangju, more precisely photography exhibitions in 1986-7, to explore photography’s power to activate sites of dissent and redefine the future for those participating in the nation’s democracy movement.
Performative Futility: Photographic Documentation and the Expanded Temporality of Performance in Chinese Contemporary Art
By Nancy P. Lin (Cornell University)
In a number of photographed performances from the mid-1990s, Beijing-based artist Song Dong (b. 1966) dramatized futile actions that appear to lack any lasting visible impact. One of many Chinese artists whose works incorporated futile actions throughout the 1990s, Song has consistently probed the aesthetic potential of futility across a wide Informed by recent scholarship on performativity and mediation, I develop the term “performative futility” to assess the ways in which Song’s works stage an expanded temporal relationship between the futile performance and its photographic documentation. I argue that Song’s works rethink performance art’s longstanding emphasis on the immediacy of action and offer an alternative to the popular trope of the “dissident Chinese artist,” a figure whose heroic legibility has been shaped by the Cold War–era rhetoric of a democratic West at odds with the socialist East. Decolonizing a distinctly Eurocentric formulation of the politics of aesthetics, I shed light on the highly nuanced ways in which Song and other Chinese performance artists during this period articulated new forms of agency and visibility within a postsocialist context. The notion of performative futility, I suggest, might point the way towards a more rigorous understanding of the politics of aesthetics in China today.
Critical Confluences: Anticolonial and Ecological “Vocabularies” in the Photography and Writings of Takuma Nakahira
By Franz Prichard (Princeton University)
This paper explores the anticolonial and ecological dimensions of Takuma Nakahira’s critical writings and photography in the wake of the macro-political upheavals of the global 1960s. The paper is derived from ongoing research into the ways specific affective and discursive articulations of embodied sensation (visuality, aurality, touch, and taste) informed Japanese writers, critics, and artists’ efforts to reforge relational “vocabularies,” at once anticolonial and ecological, through varied modalities of praxis since the 1970s. Here, I survey Nakahira’s engagements with the anticolonial thought of Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) as an important but overlooked dimension of the shifting modalities of his photographic praxis. As part of an expanded understanding of ecological relations (beyond dominant understandings of human-centric “environments”), Nakahira’s work offers a generative example of the entanglements of the anticolonial and ecological horizons of critical praxis that emerged in the wake of global upheavals of the 1960s. Charting the rapid evolutions of Nakahira’s photography and critical writings during the 1970s, I seek to elaborate the confluences among of these varied threads to differently illuminate the shared horizons of regional and planetary histories of photography. Moreover, I outline the ways that Nakahira’s work invites us to take seriously the transformative potentials of “unlearning imperialism,” what Ariella Azoulay has described as the dominant epistemological infrastructures that inform the contemporary conditions of our collective scholarly work of thinking, studying, and teaching with/in the planetary horizons of the humanities.