Photography and Resistance: Anticolonialist Photography in the Americas 3030961575, 9783030961572

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Photography and Resistance Anticolonialist Photography in the Americas Claire Raymond

Photography and Resistance

Claire Raymond

Photography and Resistance Anticolonialist Photography in the Americas

Claire Raymond Department of Art The University of Maine Orono, ME, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-96157-2    ISBN 978-3-030-96158-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96158-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Tracy Immordino / Alamy Stock Photo. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

Written during the pandemic, and during a time of extraordinary personal upheaval, this book could never have been completed without support from friends and family. I am grateful to Karena D’Silva, Wendy Satin Rappaport, and Joan Braun for unfailing friendship. Tremendous thanks to Anna Warner for providing image permissions support. Lucy Williams and Chris Stinson are the best editors alive, and helped me cross the finish line. Conversations with Shelley Niro are the treasure of this book. I am very grateful to the artist for her time and generosity of spirit. Thanks also to my great editor, Lina Aboujieb, of Palgrave Macmillan. As always, the greatest debt and gratitude goes to my husband, Mark, and son, Ioannis. As my son pointed out when he was a toddler, I am much better at writing than at cooking. How lucky to have a family that thrives in precisely that arrangement. I acknowledge also that the land of Virginia, where I wrote the first draft of this book, and the land of Maine, where I write now completing the book, respectively are the ancestral homelands and unceded territory of the Powhatan, the Chickahominy, the Mattaponi, and the Monacan (in Virginia) and (in Maine) of the Maliseet, the Passamaquoddy, the Penobscot, and the Micmac—holistically the Wabanaki. I am grateful for these lands that held me in the task of writing this book. All mistakes are mine.

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Contents

1 Introduction: Anticolonialist Photography in the Americas  1 Decolonizing the Photographic Imagination   4 The Photograph as Act   9 What Disappears, What Persists  11 On Theory, Methodology, Identity  11 Refusals  14 Photography and Disappearance  15 Theory of the Invisible  21 2 Seen and the Unseen 31 A Small Matter of Wars  32 Ancestors  33 Monuments and Photographs  36 The Naked Image  38 The Persistence of Colonialist Memory  39 3 Staging Returns 47 The “Un-Document”  48 The Right to Look  50 Visibility Against Surveillance  54 4 Empire’s Battlefields 59 Ten Pretty Little Indian Houses  62 vii

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Contents

Playing War  70 Against Erasure  72 Ideas of Origin  74 Temporal Frames  74 Vistas  77 5 Empire’s Dirty Wars 87 Elegy and Mourning  88 Memory and Return  88 Object Studies  89 Feminist Gaze  98 Feminism across Boundaries 104 Rebecca Belmore’s New Naming 112 6 Exiles and Diasporas121 Symbolic Form in Exile 123 Eternal Return, Coming Back 125 Rewriting the Body 127 Dialogic Trace 128 7 Gendering Decoloniality133 Carrie Mae Weems’s Diasporic Haunts 134 Waltzing 135 Gender’s Harms 138 The Parlor 142 Interiorities 146 8 Algorithms of Resistance151 Shelley Niro’s Self-Reflections 153 Cara Romero’s Indigeneity 155 Matika Wilbur’s Map 158 9 Reclaiming History165 Coyote and Other Tales 165 Water Memories 167 Television 170 Place/No-place 172 Indigenous Woman 174

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10 Nomads, Reterritorialization181 Project 562, Nomadism, Finding Home 182 Processual Nomadism 183 Nomads and Women 192 The Inherency of Reterritorialization and Nomadism 195 La Pieta 196 11 Conclusion: Photography, Reappearing209 Beyond the Sacrificial Economy 214 Index223

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 2.2

Fig. 2.3

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2

Fig. 4.3

Fig. 4.4

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Landscape of the Body (Epilepsy Test), 2011, gelatin silver print, 24 × 40″ (61 × 101.6 cm). Copyright LaToya Ruby Frazier. Used with permission. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery LaToya Ruby Frazier, John Frazier, LaToya Ruby Frazier and Andrew Carnegie, 2010, gelatin silver print, each 19½ × 43¾″ (49.5 × 111.1 cm). Copyright LaToya Ruby Frazier. Used with permission. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery LaToya Ruby Frazier, Aunt Midgie and Grandma Ruby, 2005, gelatin silver print, 15½ × 19¼″ (39.4 × 48.9 cm). Copyright LaToya Ruby Frazier. Used with permission. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery Shelley Niro, Grand River, from the series Battlefields of My Ancestors, 2015, color inkjet print on archival paper, 17 × 22″. Copyright Shelley Niro. Courtesy of the artist Shelley Niro, Ten Pretty Little Indian Houses, from the series Battlefields of My Ancestors, 2015, color inkjet print on archival paper, 17 × 22″. Copyright Shelley Niro. Courtesy of the artist Shelley Niro, Sullivan-Clinton Campaign, from the series Battlefields of My Ancestors, 2015, color inkjet print on archival paper, 17 × 22″. Copyright Shelley Niro. Courtesy of the artist Shelley Niro, Fergus: Source of the Grand River, from the series Battlefields of My Ancestors, 2015, color inkjet on archival paper, 17 × 22″. Copyright Shelley Niro. Courtesy of the artist

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List of Figures

Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6

Fig. 5.1

Fig. 5.2

Fig. 5.3

Fig. 5.4

Fig. 5.5

Fig. 5.6

Fig. 5.7

Shelley Niro, Lundy’s Lane, from the series Battlefields of My Ancestors, 2015, color inkjet print on archival paper, 17 × 22″. Copyright Shelley Niro. Courtesy of the artist 68 Shelley Niro, Abandoned Road across from Beaver Dam Site, from the series Battlefields of My Ancestors, 2015, color inkjet print on archival paper, 17 × 22″. Copyright Shelley Niro. Courtesy of the artist 69 Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 01, Sara Méndez), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist  93 Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 02, Teresa Meschiati), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist 94 Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 03, Ledda Barreiro), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist  95 Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 04, Isabel Cerruti), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist 96 Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 05, Marta Candeloro), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist 97 Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 07, Liliana Gardella), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist 99 Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 09, Emilce Moler), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist 100

  List of Figures 

Fig. 5.8

Fig. 5.9

Fig. 5.10

Fig. 5.11

Fig. 5.12

Fig. 5.13

Fig. 5.14

Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 10, Liliana Callizo), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4. cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 11, Marta Candeloro), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist  Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 12, Maria Luz Pierola), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist  Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 14, Hebe Cáceres), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist  Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 15, Ana Maria Careaga), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist  Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 16, Beatriz Pfeiffer), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist  Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 19, Isabel Fernández Blanco), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist 

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List of Figures

Fig. 5.15

Fig. 5.16

Fig. 5.17

Fig. 5.18

Fig. 7.1

Fig. 7.2

Fig. 7.3

Fig. 7.4

Fig. 7.5

Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 20, Liliana Gardella), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist  Paula Luttringer, Untitled, from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist Paula Luttringer, Untitled, from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist Paula Luttringer, Untitled, from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist Carrie Mae Weems, Sorrow’s Bed, from the series The Louisiana Project, 2003, gelatin silver print, 20 × 20″. Copyright Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York Carrie Mae Weems, A Single’s Waltz in Time (triptych), from the series The Louisiana Project, 2003, gelatin silver prints, each 20 × 20″. Copyright Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York Carrie Mae Weems, A Single’s Waltz in Time (frame 1), from the series The Louisiana Project, 2003, gelatin silver print, 20 × 20″. Copyright Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York Carrie Mae Weems, A Single’s Waltz in Time (frame 2), from the series The Louisiana Project, 2003, gelatin silver print, 20 × 20″. Copyright Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York Carrie Mae Weems, A Single’s Waltz in Time (frame 3), from the series The Louisiana Project, 2003, gelatin silver print, 20 × 20″. Copyright Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

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  List of Figures 

Fig. 10.1

Fig. 10.2

Fig. 10.3

Fig. 10.4

Shelley Niro, Trunk, from the series La Pieta, 2007, third image of seven color/black-and-white prints on beaded red cloths, 50 × 40″. Collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC. Copyright Shelley Niro. Courtesy of the artist Shelley Niro, Young Man’s Chest, from the series La Pieta, 2007, fourth image of seven color/black-and-white prints on beaded red cloths, 40 × 60″. Collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC. Copyright Shelley Niro. Courtesy of the artist Shelley Niro, Gothic Landscape, from the series La Pieta, 2007, fifth image of seven color/black-and white-prints on beaded red cloths, 40 × 60″. Collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC. Copyright Shelley Niro. Courtesy of the artist Shelley Niro, At the Edge, from the series La Pieta, 2007, sixth image of seven color/black-and-white prints on beaded red cloths, 40 × 60″. Collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC. Copyright Shelley Niro. Courtesy of the artist

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Anticolonialist Photography in the Americas

Speaking at the eerily titled “Standing Up for Faith and Freedom Conference” on April 23, 2021, the former United States senator and CNN news analyst Rick Santorum asserted a unified American “we” of European descent, arguing that “We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans but candidly there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture” (emphasis added).1 Santorum’s comments reflect how foundational discourses of settler colonialism, such as terra nullius and related myths of coloniality, continue to propagate and circulate even as America moves, uneasily, into the third decade of the twenty-first century. For Santorum and his audience, the argument that “there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture” is not the nonsensical claim it would appear, prima facie, to be. For his rhetoric imagines an “America,” a United States of America, that consists solely of “patriots,” a term intended to indicate and encapsulate citizens of the United States who are straight, White, and Christian, and who believe that straight, White Christians are the only inhabitants of the United States with a full right to be citizens, counted as such.2 Patriotism, here, is a euphemism for claiming the right to erase those who are not White, straight, and Christian. It has nothing to do with ancestral ties to the landmass called America, which ancestrally belongs to Indigenous Americans and to no one else. Instead, Santorum’s comments reflect the code of disappearance that governs coloniality, that

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Raymond, Photography and Resistance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96158-9_1

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is, the rhetorical and often material efforts to erase or elide not only Indigenous Americans but also people descended from the African diaspora; people of mixed race descended from Indigenous Americans, Europeans, and the African diaspora; Latinx; and people of Asian descent, in the context of American sociality. A code of erasure is at the heart of the project of “coloniality,” as Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh, drawing from Aníbal Quijano, develop the term.3 This code of erasure is on full display in Santorum’s egregious suggestion that what we now call the American continent was a blank slate when Europeans arrived on American shores. On the contrary, before contact, North America was fully populated with Indigenous Americans. Hence the work of coloniality has been and continues to be the effort to erase not only the history but also the idea of Indigenous Americans’ primary rights to the land and, oftentimes, right to existence as such. This code of erasure is as old as contact and as new as the dregs of Trump-era rhetoric. It is an ongoing climate of thought that undergirds White supremacist notions of Americanness. Whereas this book is not an in-depth history of the processes, rhetorics, and acts of coloniality’s erasures, it is a space for looking at this specific aspect of coloniality—its images and words that work to ignore, diminish, displace, erase, and disappear Indigenous and non-European people—encountering this rhetorical violence through the lens (literal and figurative) of women photographers who contest coloniality’s erasures, who create new images and words that supplant, subvert, and remake the colonialist sociality of this place “America.” This contestation occurs through the photographic image. In the effort to fight, to overturn, centuries-long codes of erasure of Indigenous presence and vitality, the photographic image is a singular tool. It is ubiquitous; photography in the vernacular and commercial is everywhere in our world. And yet, a photographic image can stand as a unique (if, typically, easily replicated) visual mark. More than a trace, photography is the formal space wherein the always vanishing visual world returns. Photography is flexible, mobile, quotidian, and procrustean. It reflects what is there but can also make us see and see anew what exists as opposed to what we believe exists. Even in the era dominated by CGI (computer-generated imagery) and digitally manipulated images, photography’s testimonial force persists. It confronts us with the force of the visible real, even as it can reflect on this very problematic of what appears to be real and why it so appears. Photography is not a language, argues Roland Barthes, and yet it

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influences the language of culture, shaping the oneiric, eidetic spaces from which the cultural imaginary emerges.4 The eidetic works at the level of supposition and encodes and shapes a field for decoding supposition. A photographic image engages the memory of earlier images. Hence, the work of the photography of resistance is to register a counterdiscourse.5 Counterdiscursive images work against the grain of the deep suppositions that support (often in a negative way) the structure and functioning of a given sociality. The erasure of the oppressed of coloniality functions as a support, an egregious one, to the dominance and destructiveness of White, masculine, capitalist patterns of using the resources of the earth and its people. It is not, of course, that the photographers whose works are studied in this book are unary, or represent unary positions vis-à-vis coloniality. The artists do not all necessarily espouse political arguments made in this book. Rather it is that resistance through visuality subverts the rule of coloniality that insists on the erasure, either partial or complete, of the colonized. The rhetoric of erasure is a visual rhetoric; subverting and overturning it is visual work. The photographic image is congenitally tied to the embodied form and, by extension, to the earth.6 This is its hinge for the work of decolonization. As Frantz Fanon writes, “For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land.”7 The process of being cut off from ancestral land, and having access to no other source of sustenance (of becoming de facto wards of the invading state), is the undertow image of coloniality’s violence. This effect is central to the work of colonization, this effort to take away Indigenous access to ancestral land, to diminish Indigenous presence on and sovereignty of that land. Hence, the quote from Santorum with which I opened this discussion not only reflects that particular individual’s views but also speaks to a dominant strain in American iconology, a belief that precontact America has no meaning in present-day America, a belief that America has been entirely remade in the image of Europe. Combating these vicious rhetorics of erasure, the photographies of resistance against disappearance discussed in this book deploy image worlds to show what is still present in America, the force and meaning of Indigenous America, and also the image and voice of those brought to America through colonization’s violations.8 Even as the dominant culture turns away, ignore, belies, and falsifies the presence of Indigenous and anticolonialist people and forces in America, these presences not only persist but create America. The public imaginative reach and space of the

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photograph is crucial to the activist work of visualizing and voicing presence. Here, photography functions as a kind of liquid theater. Jacques Rancière points out that “theatre is first and foremost the space of visibility of speech, the space of problematic translations of what is said into what is seen.”9 Photography, as Barthes reminds us, is cousin to theater, photography connected to theater not only for the reasons that Barthes cites— “Photography is a kind of ancient theater, a tableau vivant, a figuration of the made-up and motionless face beneath which we see the dead”—but also for a few more.10 Photography is theater because of its constant translation into the public sphere, because it exudes from and persists in the public imagination. Photography is a “visibility of speech” and a “space of problematic translations of what is said into what is seen.”11 It is public. The image’s ease of translation, crossing between the mark of light and CGI, between simulacrum screens and physical manifestations in space-­ time, enters and shapes abiding notions of publicity as such. Even as photography with editing apps can now produce deepfakes, the medium retains an ability to manifest in the public sphere as reality, altering the imaginary realm that becomes the material real in social space.12 The labor of photographic images that contest coloniality is, then, to enter the broader imagination of what we believe is “America” and to deconstruct the distorting skew of settler colonialism, thus creating in the place of mythic distortion the clarity of visible history.

Decolonizing the Photographic Imagination Photography historically stands among the forces of colonization, deploying, expressing, reflecting, and asserting the settler colonialist gaze. The medium has long served as a tool of discursive colonization.13 As John Tagg and others make clear, the photographic image has been conscripted by colonialist forces to create propagandistic images that masquerade as verity and to create pedagogic visual texts masked as facts.14 The history of photography includes an extensive history of White settler colonialists taking photographs of colonized people, Indigenous American, African American, Asian American, and Latinx peoples in images that attempt to signify and enact domination and oppression.15 And yet, the photographic gaze is never stable but instead is multiple, differential, always shifting, according to who is able to leverage the social and economic power to access the technology and circulate images. As Jae Emerling rightly argues, there is not one photography but multiple photographies.16 This book, on

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photography, resistance, and disappearance, concerns the use of the camera and the photographic image to redress, undo, resist, and overturn entrenched patterns of cultural erasure that were originally inculcated and enacted—in part—by photographic practices and that continue to be fomented and extended by coloniality’s deployment of the photographically based image. And yet, photography also is an apt tool of resistance, of decoloniality, because to take up the camera is to assert a capacity to shift the angle of the always multifarious gaze of the machine of vision. That does not mean, of course, that just because a woman or feminine-­ identified person operates the camera the image is feminist; and it does not mean that just because a person of Indigenous American, African American, Asian American, or Latinx descent deploys the camera the result is automatically decolonialist. Within the scope of this book the images studied are, I will argue, anticolonialist images. I make no claims, however, regarding the personal politics of the artists. At once fragmentary and depressingly unary, the problematic of disappearance in coloniality occurs at the depths of, or at the vanishing point of, colonization. The White supremacist cultural dream is suppression and erasure of those not of European descent; and the co-occurring desire of colonization is complete access to land, resources, and labor—for the extraction of goods sets in motion forces that trend toward the expulsion, displacement, oppression, silencing and erasure of Indigenous populations and of all those who are colonized. And yet, this very notion, and eidetic vista, of the disappearance of the non-European, the non-White, is itself a form of discursive colonization. At the outset, then, I want to make clear that this is not a book that argues that people of the African diaspora, Indigenous Americans, Latinx peoples, and Asian Americans exist in a condition of actual erasure or disappearance. On the contrary, the work of this book is to excavate, by paying witness to photographically based works, the false perception from the perspective of coloniality that Indigenous Americans are no longer vital to the identity of Americanness, or that African Americans are less central than Whites to the national narrative, or that Latinx peoples and Asian Americans are fundamentally “other” to the ideation of Americanness. Just as the work of decolonizing the museum space is work enacted through collaboration between descendants of colonized peoples, including descendants of peoples against whom genocide has been enacted, and descendants of settler colonialists, so also decolonizing the photographic canon—part of the goal of a book like this one—is a collaborative process. As a White woman of

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predominantly European ancestry, descended from settler colonialists long present in the American Southeast, I see my role in writing this book as that of a witness, a witness to the decolonizing visual work of the photographs around which this work coalesces. It is not my work of writing that is decolonizing; rather I write as a witness to the anticolonialist photographies of Shelley Niro (Mohawk, Bay of Quinte), Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe), Matika Wilbur (Swinomish and Tulalip), Carrie Mae Weems, Ana Mendieta, An-My Lê, Paula Luttringer, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Martine Gutiérrez. The labor of decolonizing the photographic archive is immense. Each of these photographers (and multimedia artists) practices an approach to art that Cara Romero insightfully glosses as “indigenization.”17 Pressing the envelope of photographic conceptualization and symbolism, these photographies are “medicine” as Edgar Villanueva (Lumbee) and John Bear Allison (Eastern Band Cherokee) deploy the term.18 They are medicine in that they stage confrontations with histories of ongoing enforced disappearances, both bodily (in the memorialization of the disappeared in Luttringer’s and Belmore’s works) and culturally, in the work of all the photographies explored in this book. The symbolic space of what has been suppressed, erased, effaced, in colonialist violence, is excavated in these works. This book does not suggest any neat contiguity between disparate social and ancestral worlds that suffered under colonization but rather meditates on modes of resistance across groups that share resonance and cumulatively shape discourse. The core of my ethos in writing is to recognize and honor the ideation of Indigeneity in the scope of that culture we now call American. Shawn Wilson (Cree) argues that “an Indigenous research paradigm is made up of Indigenous ontology, epistemology, axiology, and methodology.”19 In other words, an indigenizing paradigm is all-encompassing. Likewise, to decolonize the image world of coloniality takes a combination of ontology, epistemology, axiology, and methodology. Hence, reading photographies that express and explore the American problematic of the African diaspora, as well as the cultural memories and lives of Latinx and Asian Americans, must be informed by the intellectual work of indigenization and decolonization. This is not to appropriate Indigenous American intellectual labor for the use of other colonized peoples but rather to acknowledge deeply that the bedrock and foundation of decolonization in the Americas is Indigenous American theory, that is, ontology, epistemology, axiology, and consequently methodology. For

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this book, ontology means forefronting the lived and historical realities of erasures and effacements that coloniality enacted and continues to enact. Epistemology extends from photographic and counterdiscursive traditions of image making and image circulating. Axiology is of critical importance, insofar as the photographers on whom this book focuses already reflect populations marginalized by coloniality; I want to pause here, then, and linger somewhat on this threadbare euphemism, marginalized. Pushed to the side, the invisible population is yet tacitly included in the idea of the nation-state, pressed to its periphery, occupying the blind spot where coloniality’s violence creates the politics of nonbeing, at the periphery. Peripheral vision, the ability to see not what is directly the front, or what is the nation’s chosen public face, is also an angled point of view for decolonizing image circulation. The social space of the disappeared of coloniality, those who have historically been erased, is the figural space of the unfigured in this social landscape. This is the topos of the photography of resistance, a space that leverages resistance to erasure. Photography’s testimonial capacity is skewed and rewired by photography of resistance. Here, what has been pushed to the periphery is rememoried (to draw from novelist Toni Morrison’s evocative neologism), renegotiated to bring presence back to those effaced by the violent processes of coloniality.20 The term coloniality as deployed by Mignolo and Walsh indicates a widely and deeply entrenched economic, social, legislative, and judicial system that creates and sustains dominance for European colonialists, primarily in land spaces that are not Europe.21 The logic of settler colonialism is to erase Indigenous peoples, replacing them with colonists. In this sense, genocidal intention and action often, though not always, go hand-in-hand with coloniality.22 Always a facet of North American coloniality is the desire, design, mentality, and instrumentality to substantially replace Indigenous peoples with White settlers. This code of replacement is also, as corollary, a code of erasure, an implicit urge to erase those who are colonized, even as the practice of colonization depends on the suppression, and labor, of these peoples. The double violence of coloniality, then, is the nexus of conceptually translating human beings into either resources to be extracted or impediments to resource extraction.23 This violence was extraordinarily pronounced in the process of colonization of the Americas and in the United States of America, a nation-state wherein the Jeffersonian ideal of erasing all presence of Indigenous peoples, through assimilation and displacement, was long held as policy, however fragmentary. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson presents Indigenous American

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culture as moribund by falsely diminishing his record of the numbers of Powhatan and Monacan peoples (the Indigenous tribes of what we now call the state of Virginia) living in the area.24 He advocates that European settler colonialists should intermix with Indigenous Americans until such time as there are no people left with the identity of being Indigenous American, that is, extinction through assimilation. Jefferson’s genocidal ideal here may be seen as part of his motivation for the momentous Louisiana Purchase of 1803, which displaced thousands of Indigenous Americans.25 Moreover, the system of boarding schools and the infamous “termination policy” that held sway from the late nineteenth century into the mid twentieth century in the United States of America implemented or attempted to implement Jefferson’s goal of making Indigenous Americans “American” by eradicating their identity as Indigenous Americans. The haunting and genocidal phrase “kill the Indian, save the man” indicated the idea that Indigenous Americans could become fully “American” by being absorbed into Whiteness by adopting European-­ influenced cultural beliefs and behaviors.26 Sequent policies aimed at erasing the cultural and material presence of Indigenous Americans expressed the distortions of the cultural imagination of coloniality.27 The ways that Indigenous Americans have persevered, maintaining culture and historical memory and continuity despite genocidal colonization, is the larger context for the work of photography of resistance, photography that resists, refuses, lays bare, and ultimately overturns coloniality’s goals of erasure.28 Although this book, Photography and Resistance: Anticolonialist Photography in the Americas, is not exclusively concerned with the history and art of Indigenous Americans, it traces parallels and overlaps of coloniality’s dispossession of non-European peoples. There are obvious differences in ways that coloniality in the Americas has discursively interpreted and profoundly harmed Indigenous Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinx peoples; yet, a positional similarity inheres in what Frantz Fanon describes, eloquently, as the enforcement of a “black skin, white masks” mentality, wherein anyone who is non-European is compelled to perform in the mode of the European or face erasure—either bodily erasure, in the form of genocidal death, or social erasure, in the form of enforced identity.29 Glen Sean Coulthard's Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition extends, deepens, and complicates Fanon’s argument, making the case that Indigenous people do not gain sovereignty by accepting indoctrination into Whiteness but rather by rejecting it.30 Photography of resistance reembodies the disappeared of coloniality, using the visionary trope of the photographic medium to strip the violence of coloniality’s masking.

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As a feminist visual tactic, this practice is enacted by women (cis and trans) photographers. As Kendra Greendeer (Ho-Chunk) argues, the work of Indigenous feminism is to regather the broken pieces of our ecological situation in coloniality.31 Some might call this philosophy ecofeminism, but Jolene Rickard argues it is what Indigenous women, in America, have always practiced and theorized.32 The ecofeminism of anticoloniality is intrinsic. It is intrinsic to resistance to coloniality that what we call the “environment” or the natural world is given respect and veneration. Photography as technology extends a history of reflecting the natural world.33 As poet Joy Harjo (Muskogee Creek) writes, “Remember to thank each maker of stitch and layer of pattern, the dyer of color in the immense house of beauty and pain.”34 The photograph is also a made image-object. Although it acts as a kind of transmaterial image, because of the ease with which photographic images can be circulated through digital and internet technologies, the printed photograph—and all the photographs discussed in this book are printed image-objects—stands as a made thing, a noun. The importance of this materiality inheres in the photograph’s capacity to take its place in public social space. The transmaterial spaces of the internet are, of course, discursive public spaces, but the embodied immediacy of encountering photographs in gallery, museum, and above all in public, civic space is crucial for the work of the photography of resistance, for this is the work of reembodying the disappeared in public imagination that is, always, ultimately public space.

The Photograph as Act Intrinsic to Indigenous ontology is what we might now call “ecopoetics” and “ecofeminism,” but as Jolene Rickard (Tuscarora) contends, ecological sovereignty has always been at the core of Indigenous thinking.35 Ecofeminism is nothing new to Indigenous Americans, and Rickard questions the extent to which the current trend of ecofeminism steals from Indigenous American thought without attributing to Indigenous American women this work of theorization. She rightly asks, what do Indigenous American women gain by joining the banner of ecofeminism when they have always practiced and theorized precisely this worldview and praxis?36 Like Western, White feminism, photography has an uneasy relationship to environmental concerns and stewardship. As with virtually any invention of capitalism, we can safely say that the health of the earth itself would be better if there were no photography, inasmuch as the processes of

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analogue photography involve toxins while the fossil fuel energy consumption of computer-based image making and circulation is obscene. And yet, given the larger context in which we live, wherein the possibility of erasing these technologies is nonexistent, to deploy photography for the purposes of indigenization, including expressing ecological concerns, can be argued to strengthen the positionality of ecology. The act of photography has an always complicated relationship to the natural world. Photographs can accurately render the natural world, as photography’s progenitor William Henry Fox Talbot recognized, arguing poetically that photography allows nature to write herself (and Niépce similarly argued that photography enables nature to copy herself).37 But the photographic process depends variously on chemistry and technologies that are, in their production and disposal, inarguably damaging to the health of the environment. Digitized photography does not sidestep environmental concerns, inasmuch as it too is often printed, and even when it is not printed but only shared screen to screen it must be remembered that the creation of computers and the massive and vast energy drawn on to allow the circulation of images online are profoundly deleterious to the environment. Photography now translates through CGI, swallowing all other image systems. Its leveling force pushes to the periphery other forms of signification and foments an obsessive repetition pattern wherein there is never an end to the creation and circulation of the photographically based image, as the image does not bind itself to consistent frame or place. This endless photograph becomes a kind of white noise, a kind of erasure, at the periphery of vision. And yet the photograph can also function even now as a witness, showing testimonial of what has been suppressed, pressed down into the invisible. This is the paradox of the photography of resistance. That is, it deploys the tools of discursive colonization by flipping the script and revealing the suppressed ravages of colonization. Here, the photograph speaks as a witness changing the eye, the lens, the mode of vision. Argues Elizabeth Solomon (Massachusett at Ponkapoag), honoring Indigenous space emerges from recognizing that wherever you are in America you are in Native space, in a place where Indigenous tribes have “an ancient and inseparable connection with that space.”38 The struggle to photograph America returns, always, again and again, to the origins of the United States, or rather to what precedes those origins, the place of Indigenous Americans. A question that this book approaches, then, from the perspective of decoloniality (though I the author am not an Indigenous American), is why photography? What does

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photography bring to the deep wound and complex problematic of American presences and absences?

What Disappears, What Persists Voice, spoken aloud, lingers in the mind, then sifts by degrees into memory. All day I have been listening to disembodied, faced voices through the online Zoom platform as has become customary during the COVID-19 pandemic. Like these spectral image-words, written words also move, or rather, the eye reading them moves along the page (differences of course between how different written languages arrange spatially on surfaces). The still photographic image, by contrast, stays. Even on a screen it stays, if you do not flick to the next image. The larger and more complex an image the more it can be thought of as a text across which the eye has to move to read, the less it is a unified sign, and yet even such images are also legible as a unified space; the space of the individual photographic image is unary.39 The composite, gathered sign of an image exists differently in time from the durational quality of language, which must be walked through, as it were, but photographic images also contain expansive duration via access to past, present, and future as symbol. The photograph is sometimes (in some iterations) a meta-image, its presence as image intensified by differential temporality.40 In this sense, photography is as far from language as image can go and also is uncannily close to, neighboring, the root of language, the frozen moment where the image becomes meaning. It is in this sense that photography of resistance engages the linguistic apparatus embedded in image. It is here that as activist art photography of resistance engages language as part of its activism. Why is it that photography, rather than other media and other signs, other semiotic marks, coheres with the protest against social, political, and bodily erasure of the oppressed? That is the problematic of activist art that frames and motivates this book, Photography and Resistance: Anticolonialist Photography in the Americas. The answers to photography’s proximity to activism are embedded in my discussions of each individual set of works explored in this book.

On Theory, Methodology, Identity How do we write outside of, beyond, that is, write our way out of coloniality’s frame? The frame of Western discourse is, without question, historically masculinist and racist. And yet, the frame of coloniality is, for all its

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violent hegemony, also permeable and multivalent. As a White scholar writing a book mostly about artworks created by women of color, I find every path of language, on this topic, problematic. If I write only as an apologist for coloniality that is surely somewhat insincere as I survive and exist within this framework. Even so, if I write presuming that Indigenous American, Latinx, Asian American, and African diasporic women artists create works entirely outside coloniality, I falsify the brilliance and scope of these artists, who know, shoulder, and critique nuances of Western theories of being and knowing.41 That is, it is insulting to the artists on whom I write if I write with the pretense that I, a White person, could in any way protect others from coloniality’s knowledge. We all have this knowledge. It is the English language, that is, writing and conversing in English always already reflects a path of colonization. As a scholar, I work and write and study in English.42 The claim of “listening” to Indigenous voices is patronizing, condescending to Indigenous and diasporic peoples. Instead, in this book, I write critically from the perspective of Western theory, in which I was educated, in this critique of coloniality drawing from the work of theorists of decoloniality who themselves were often educated in this same Western frame. Surely it is correct, as Jolene Rickard, Phil Deloria, Susan Miller, Audra Simpson and others persuasively argue, that Indigenous ways of knowing are not Western.43 I strive to reflect this perspective of radical Indigeneity in my writing for this book. But it is also important never to lose sight of the reality that philosophers, theorists, artists, and others who are people of color know as much about Western ideology and practice—and indeed being in some ways the victims of Western ideology and acts arguably and tragically know much more—as do descendants of settler colonialists. And also that “they” were never entirely and unremittingly passive victims but instead through the push and pull that was and is coloniality’s violent barbarism we all yet influence and create this culture. In other words, do I write here “as a White woman”? I’d rather not. But I am White, primarily descended from settler colonists who came to the American continent. What I mean to convey is that the theory of decolonization and anticolonialism is a theory responding to a culture that emerges from violence, violation, and also from resistance and counterinsemination. It is never the case that coloniality’s regimes reflect unilateral power against nullity; instead, these regimes emerge from violation and resistance to violation. Santorum is—patently—wrong when he says there is “not much Native

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American” in American culture. America is the effect of all those cultures that suffered because of America’s creation, as well as of those peoples who materially benefited and benefit from coloniality’s violent regimes. The social and intellectual space from which I leverage this book’s critique of coloniality, then, is one of intellectual intermediacy, and hence of mourning, mourning for the inherently violent way that America became America, but also of hope for ways that corrective turns can still be made. America is melting, not so much a melting pot as rather a scene that is melting. What might arise from its aftermath? I see the artists addressed in this book as visionaries who create visual maps and ways beyond the entangled morass of coloniality’s regimes. Needless to say, I do not speak for these artists but rather speak of them, as a scholar who speaks of art. In my first visual culture book, Francesca Woodman and the Kantian Sublime (published by Ashgate, now Routledge, 2010), I contended with Kantian aesthetic theory not to glorify the problematic work of Immanuel Kant but to acknowledge, yes, here is something that was written on aesthetic theory, and in Francesca Woodman I found a feminist artist who troubled, complicated, and also extended Kant’s theory of the sublime. That dialogue to me was worthy of bringing to light. The viability of Western theory as theoretical modality, in light of the violent systems with which it worked hand in glove, is obviously problematic, but it is essential that we face that modality with honesty. If I had money for every time a scholar whose life is well financially supported (indeed in something like luxury) by an institution that is itself deeply implicated in racist histories espoused complete disavowal of those very forces that continue to support her plush livelihood, then I would myself have a luxurious position in the academy (which I do not). If Walter Mignolo critiques anticolonialist thinking as dependent on coloniality, I note that coloniality’s factuality manifests as trauma.44 Coloniality manifests as historical trauma, contemporary trauma, past and ongoing trauma. The response to trauma is to claim the reality of the violence as part of dismantling the system of that violence.45 This work of mourning the violence of coloniality’s regimes, including Kant as a key contributor to coloniality’s taxonomy, is not the work of disavowal but of facing, parsing, rejecting, extending, troubling, complicating, and one hopes ultimately moving past the violative falsehoods on which coloniality’s worldview and world-acts were founded. In women artists, cis and trans, studied in this book one finds a manifestation of the new, that is, the anticolonialist new vision. I write toward that vision, decisively not to claim that I own it, but to say how I see it. That I

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see it. Coloniality is the ghost that haunts us, in America. It haunts me, personally. It haunts us all differently, for certain and without question very differently according to our differential histories, but the ghost is in America’s house, in all of our houses. The urgency is to address that ghost.

Refusals For Shelley Niro (Mohawk, Bay of Quinte) in Battlefields of My Ancestors, language is part of the picture; literally her photographs in this series often reveal words. Words on plaques, words on advertisements, words on federal signage. Niro recognizes, in several works part of the larger Battlefields of My Ancestors series, the force and danger of monuments and commemorative plaques. Notably, Niro’s photographic works on the Statue of Liberty (in For Fearless and Other Indians) and of the statue commemorating Haudenosaunee Joseph Brant precede her series Battlefields of My Ancestors. As in signal earlier Shelley Niro works—For Fearless and Other Indians and The Shirt, for example—Battlefields of My Ancestors uses language as a key component of its subversive and critical force. Pictorial space, in this series, is anchored by the appearance of words on plaques and other commemorative historical signage. In Niro’s Battlefields of My Ancestors, the picture plane emerges as an uncanny frame, placing us (those who view the series) into hollowed out, evacuated spaces of coloniality. These spaces are not welcoming, they are not homey. They have not created feelings of safety but instead are eerie, threatening in the way that homelessness and displacement loom always at the boundary or limit of every capitalist space. Homelessness is capitalism at its worst (and all too frequent) outcome for those who are pushed to the bottom of the capitalist ladder. Niro’s photograph of an advertisement for a house in a prospective housing development (Fergus, Source of the Grand River) makes this point painfully clear. The photograph shows an image of a crepuscular model home built in the style of settler colonialist late-stage capitalist ideas of home. The home is depicted in the advertisement to look like a mansion, although it’s down-market, billed as inexpensive. The ploy of the advertiser is that by buying into land that is actually Indigenous American— not only ancestral land but also land granted to First Nations people by the national government—the presumptively White purchaser will save money, thereby getting ahead in the capitalist game. The condensed lyric abstraction of Niro’s image-text points to the erosion and disappearance

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not only of Indigenous American lands but also of Indigenous American modes of home, of Indigenous American homeyness. The uncanniness, the eeriness, of this advertisement for a home that is built on stripping away home from the Indigenous people, a sign that was literally placed on the boundary of the river demarcating the reservation site, is the text and subtext of Niro’s quietly forceful photograph. With this lyric abstraction, that is, the condensed symbolic image repertoire of Niro’s photograph of a settler colonialist commercial for home at the edge of a reservation, we enter photography and disappearance.

Photography and Disappearance Photography would seem to be about what you see, the medium of the surface, the mark of light’s reflection and refraction hitting the material world. Vernacular photography is almost always about saving the images of nouns—persons, places, things—so that these facts so eminently transient in time are more slowly lost to our eyes, held by light’s imprint (photo-graph). And yet, precisely photography’s dead-eye mimicry, its ability to “save” (delay the vanishing of) what is lost of the material world as we move through time (say, the way someone or something looked on a particular date), connects the medium to disappearance. As Fox Talbot wrote of his calotype invention, photography fixes the shadow.46 Also on the level of matter, photography tends toward vanishing: the medium is typically less materially stable than other image-making practices, as the very emersion from light’s mark makes photographs (with some exceptions, such as ferrous cyanotype and photogravure) significantly vulnerable to damage by light exposure over time. As I approach this topic of photography’s multiple traces, its records of what vanishes, my inspiration is the medium’s fragility, but my emphasis is to reread this fragility as it is deployed by women photographers who leverage photography to explore and expose cultural traumata, including the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, and the enslavement of peoples of the African diaspora in the Americas. Photography as testimony is typically documentary, in the sense of recording images of events, though of course there is always slippage between such nominal categories of the medium.47 The photography of Ana Mendieta, Paula Luttringer, Carrie Mae Weems, Rebecca Belmore, Shelley Niro, An-My Lê, Matika Wilbur, Martine Gutiérrez, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Cara Romero resists categorization as documentary even as it stands as documentation of sociohistorical realities,

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conceptually synthetic physical traces of cultural history. Photography in their work becomes a trace of a trace, a memory of a memory, evoking not the discrete moment (photography’s typical temporality) but the duration, the long gaze of time. As Jay Prosser argues, in Light in the Dark Room, photography is wedded to loss.48 Cara Romero’s (Chemehuevi) photograph TV Indians exemplifies this durational photography: it is a portrait of Indigenous Americans in traditional garments standing in a California field surrounded by television sets.49 TV Indians visually puns on the erroneous ways that media present Indigenous Americans.50 The image shows the extensive landscape of the Chemehuevi tribe, in California’s Mojave Desert, as a temporal field that in its long time frame (the millennia throughout which California’s Indigenous people have continued to inhabit the land) extends beyond and encompasses the shallow plane of White media, White media denoted here by the junked television sets in the photograph. The Indigenous people pictured around the televisions are vivid and durational, their temporality extending into the past and future, beyond the shallows of television screens. Even as it confronts erasure, TV Indians subverts the code of disappearance into which American cultures have typically fitted Indigenous Americans—the clichéd representations of Indigenous Americans on television shows. What is at stake here is reenvisioning the meaning of photography that is documentary, revising the understanding of how photography’s evidentiary, testimonial habits can be expanded beyond traditional photographic documentary temporality, how photography can document durational temporalities, affect, mourning, and cultural trauma. The temporal bend of the photographs studied in this book reach beyond the moment, reach across disparate times, contesting the received temporality of photography wherein the medium tends to condense seeing to a millisecond exposure or, at most, several hours of long exposure. Photography and Resistance instead consider art works whose formal arc of temporality is elongated, engaging the politics of cultural erasure from this crucial bend, looking at photographs that are capable of altering the way we see the photograph’s temporality, the way we define what is documentary photography. I interpret the works studied in this book as photographs that document the real, and yet they do not fit the traditional rubric of documentary photography. This depends, then, on a visual contestation of what is the “real.” Through close readings of the photographies of Mendieta, Luttringer,

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Weems, Belmore, Niro, Lê, Gutiérrez, Frazier, Wilbur, and Romero, I work toward a visual theory of the palimpsestic history of coloniality, coloniality confronted by the photographers on which I focus in this book. By staging disappearance, the photographers studied in this book reverse the erasure from visibility of oppressed histories in the Americas. The real, then, is as François Laruelle suggests in The Concept of Non-Photography, specifically that which eludes our attempts to theorize and codify. It is gleaned through the kind of edge of photography, where the photographic image emerges as tactic rather than technical repository of accreted social power.51 Troubling the power of the machine as carrier of social hegemony, Carrie Mae Weems’s series Slow Fade to Black, for instance, rephotographs African American singers from Nina Simone to Koko Taylor, printing the images in deep purple and blue hues and blurring the singers’ faces and figures, showing how dominant American culture “fades” the achievements and voices of African American women. These photographs represent durational time, beginning with the time when the singers were originally photographed, while singing, extending through the years since that time, the years during which the singers’ presence was increasingly neglected or, in the case of Marian Anderson, not given full respect. The blurred effect of the images also reaches back before the moment of the singer singing, invoking a spectral ancestry of African American music, a tradition that is at once quintessentially American and also perpetually unrecognized as genius. The blur of the images instates this extended temporality, engaging across times the extensive and slow meaning of cultural erasure. The singers rephotographed by Weems thus appear ghostly, the deep colors that Weems deploys in her prints suggesting a kind of purgatorial temporal arc, wherein the life force, the voice, the embodied voice, of the singer is cast adrift by cultural erasure, as White America ignores or suppresses African American women’s genius. The documentary force of Weems’s Slow Fade to Black stems from this bend of temporality; what the photographs document is disappearance, or near-disappearance, across time. Disappearance, in its social meaning, the meaning to which this book attends, often does not happen in an instance but across time. The documentary testimonial nature of the photography of resistance inheres in its durational gaze, its force of what Gerald Vizenor calls survivance.52 Consider how Martine Gutiérrez’s (Mayan) Indigenous Woman magazine of self-portraits extends the moment of the self-portrait across the

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124 pages of her self-made magazine. Some of the self-portraits hearken back to Gutiérrez’s childhood, evoking Mayan dolls marketed to tourists, whereas others mimic cutting-edge high-fashion spreads. The lush color photographs on glossy paper build a self, across time, and they specifically respond to erasure. Gutiérrez states, “No one was going to put me on the cover of a Paris fashion magazine, so I thought, I’m gonna make my own.”53 Facing invisibility, Gutiérrez deploys her face—her self-portrait— in various costumes and maquillage, covered by fruits and masks. Her self-representation plays between White culture’s expectations of Indigenous femininity and Gutiérrez’s expression of her own fashion. The result blends vanishing and reappearing, as the erasure of stereotype vies with the revelation of self. The time line of the book is both autobiographical and extensive: there is no one moment when “the” Indigenous woman is revealed; instead she is extensive and embedded in the visual history of erasure and reappearance, in Gutiérrez’s splendid self-portrait-as-magazine. In my study of activist photography’s relationship to disappearance, in the work of Mendieta, Luttringer, Weems, Belmore, Niro, Lê, Gutiérrez, Frazier, Wilbur, and Romero, the code of disappearance is the keynote of the visual politics of resistance. The photograph’s testimonial force makes it the article of resistance to erasure. Even as digital photography’s mergence with CGI in social media and popular media is commonplace now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and so we know that an apparently “real” photograph can be entirely fake, the medium retains its tie to the documentary, the evidentiary. This is not only because of cultural factors of interpretation but also because, at its core definition, photography is light’s mark, the material trace of the physical.54 Photography’s fragility is only enhanced by the rise of deepfakes; now photography is a physically fragile medium (less stable than paint or stone, or—in digitized circulation held on a screen—only code) whose stability as the skin of fact (the print of light recorded at a precise time) is eroded by the mergence of digital photography and CGI. In the twenty-first century, photography is threatened by the impending sense of its own fakeness. It is precisely in this context that photography meets disappearance. The haunted place of acknowledging embodied suffering through these transient oneiric traces of photographic images expands the intention and scope of photographic documentation. Ana Mendieta, Paula Luttringer, Carrie Mae Weems, Rebecca Belmore, Shelley Niro, An-My Lê, Martine Gutiérrez, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Matika Wilbur, and Cara Romero do not

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directly document events and instances in the photographs that I study in this book (although Frazier notably does have an extensive body of work that hews closer to traditional documentary photography), but instead these works photographically conjure the social and cultural realities of erasure, loss, disappearance. Ana Mendieta’s Siluetas shape an overwhelmingly large, lifelong elegy for her identity as a displaced person, displaced from her native Cuba, whereas Luttringer’s photographs of ordinary, everyday objects and places in Argentina potently express her—and too many others’—experience of imprisonment during that country’s Dirty War. Carrie Mae Weems reembodies the spectral presence of the enslaved African American woman on Southern (United States) plantations in The Louisiana Project, whereas Rebecca Belmore, in The Named and the Unnamed and Vigil, gives embodied photographic force to commemorating and memorializing, elegizing Indigenous American (Canadian) women who have been disappeared through social and sexual violence. An-My Lê and Shelley Niro revisit the wounds of American battles of imperialist conquest in Small Wars and Battlefields of My Ancestors, respectively. Martine Gutiérrez and LaToya Ruby Frazier subvert clichés of seeing Indigenous American and African American selves and home places, remaking the self-portrait in a haunted anticolonialist frame. Cara Romero’s underwater photography envisions the rising of long-submerged ghosts, as she places Chemehuevi people in contexts of drowning and rising that take the long view of the California landscape that is the Chemehuevi homeland. In her First American Girl series, Romero dresses down the racism and coloniality of the American Girl doll phenomenon, creating intricate images that honor the reality of Indigenous American cultures.55 In this series, in which intricately and accurately costumed Indigenous women represent their tribes, the erasure of Indigenous cultures is redressed, the “dolls” are Indigenous American women dressed in tribal regalia that they and their families have created for the photograph. The pictorial “boxes” holding the dolls are frames intricately designed according to tribally symbolic patterns, and the paraphernalia with which they pose are tribally significant objects. In the inaugural image in the series, Wakeah, Kiowa/ Comanche, the young woman is photographed in buckskin that her family members created over the course of a year. Each “doll” in Romero’s series is vivid, living, popping with contemporary color fields. These dolls show not only the deep linearity of Indigenous cultural histories but also their contemporary force and vivacity.

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In her stand-alone photograph, Eufaula Girls, Romero envisions Creek (Muskogee) women swimming in Oklahoma. The Muskogee were forced out of their Georgia and Alabama homeland by Andrew Jackson’s illegal policies in the 1820s and 1830s and are now based in Oklahoma. Romero’s photograph is literally one of immersion, immersing the young women in deep sepia. The Muskogee pushed out of Alabama and Georgia return, in Romero’s photographic dream, but the return is one of rebirth, through water, of moving through drowning back toward life. In Eufaula Girls and First American Girl, the traversal of Indigenous American women from a state of frozen almost deathliness—that of the doll, that of drowning—back to states of vivid full life is envisioned. As Romero states, in her address as part of ESMoA’s (an art museum in El Segundo, California) “Matriarchs” exhibit, her First American Girl series is a response and rebuttal to White colonialist depictions of Indigenous American women as dolls.56 In the series, those pinioned inaccurately as silenced dolls become vivid and pose among clothing and symbols that eloquently convey their real and living cultures. At stake in these carefully planned, intricately orchestrated photographs is the act of articulating the photographer’s role as inheritor, interpreter, and conveyor of cultural trauma and haunting. These women photographers reimagine and reembody cultural traumata that are at the crux of what America and the Americas mean.57 Disappearance is the underbelly of all photography, the code of materiality on which photography depends. It is also the underbelly of America, the narrative of suppression, oppression, erasure—erasure even with palimpsestic layering of cultures—as the cultures of the colonized are systemically pushed out of view. The conceptual photography of Mendieta, Luttringer, Weems, Belmore, Niro, Lê, Gutiérrez, Frazier, Wilbur, and Romero draws traction from the interior frisson between the material trace and the remembered, between cultural memory of personal exposition; above all from the consanguinity of photography as the medium that records and resists disappearance; and from America as the colonialist space wherein so many have disappeared and also persist. Their photographs are not about the narrowly personal but instead expansively bear witness to, and stage resistance against, centuries of colonialist oppression. This large time frame, the sweep of centuries compressed into a singular image, is the essence of the photography of resistance, as it carries within it the constant movement between visibility and invisibility, between erasure and representation. Photography’s eerie blur of the embodied and

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the disembodied, the visible and all that is excluded from the frame, matches the suppressed and never-finished histories of colonization and oppression in the Americas. In the visual landscape of deepfakes that is the CGI and photographic world of the twenty-first century, the documentary force of photography is eroded but also is opened to wider meaning.58 Romero’s Eufaula Girls testifies to loss, submersion, and rising, resistance, but it does not straightforwardly document the pollution in Eufaula. Instead, it blurs the boundary between Lake Eufaula and the Eufaula River, both signifying lost terrain and displacement for the Muskogee people. Traversing from Alabama, the tribe’s original homeland, to Oklahoma, the photograph conceives of the long sweep of history that led to the tribe’s expulsion from the land, the Alabama River’s degradation under White stewardship, and the flooding of tribal land in Oklahoma. The precepts of our expectations of photography as the medium of immediacy are tested and altered by photography of resistance, which makes photography a medium of haunting, staging a dual temporal field of before and after rather than simply now. Romero’s Eufaula Girls are, perpetually, falling in the water but also rising with air bubbles, threatened by water’s dangerous immersion, because we cannot breathe water, but moving toward life with visible breath.

Theory of the Invisible Addressing the problem of theory in the discipline of art history, art historian James Elkins notes the obvious but ill-addressed problem that art theory is applied across cultural contexts.59 What becomes de facto universalized art history theory is primarily French post-structuralism (I also draw on the work of these theorists in this book, among many other sources). In other words, European, male, and White. Elkins’s comments indicate an unfortunately valid assessment of the field but also, possibly, reflect his own immersion in White maleness. That is, one most frequently tends to encounter feminist, antiracist, anticolonialist theorists when reading—and writing—about the work of women and non-White artists. There is, implicitly and horrifyingly, an unspoken but very much obeyed and reproduced hierarchy whereby White, male, European theorists are drawn upon to analyze not only White, male, European artists but also all other artists, whereas feminist and anticolonialist theorists are drawn upon only to theorize the art of women and those who are not White. This

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entrenched pattern indicates an implicit or habitual frame of belief that White, male, European theorists have the intellectual vantage to address all art, whereas feminist and anticolonialist or non-White theorists are seen as experts only in the mode of addressing the art of women and of those artists who are not White. Largely this pattern also holds for heteronormative and queer theorists, although Foucault crosses that boundary, showing that the social power of White, male, European privilege is transcendent. In theorizing the meaning and mode of invisibility and visibility in photography of Indigenous American, African diasporic, and Latinx women photographers, I want to forefront the problem Elkins pinpoints. An implicit sense of a legitimacy of thought tends to flow from recourse to “foundational” theorists who are White, male, and European, whereas theorists who are not White and male, regardless of accomplishment, are deemed useful in contexts for which their gender, race, and position vis-á-­ vis coloniality render them appropriate—in the implicit and not fully critiqued (if critiqued at all) biases of patriarchal coloniality. Clearly, White, male theorists (including Elkins, for all his perspicacity) write from the perspective of feeling and believing they have the right to address and make universal claims. For this book’s exploration of photography and disappearance, I approach theory in a threefold way. I draw on White, European, male theorists, but deploy their work in the service of anticoloniality; I make use of precisely that presumption—of White masculinity—that it can address the putative “universal.” This is an uneasy process, wherein I acknowledge that in drawing from White, male theorists I play my part in sustaining their unjustified dominance in the cultural paradigm of the West (within which context I, as a White, American woman, write). I also draw on Latinx, women, queer, Asian, and Indigenous theorists to unpack the fine grain of the topoi of invisibility in photography. And, importantly and largely invisibly, I develop my own theory of invisibility and disappearance as a visual code of resistance. I say “invisibly” because even now women are among that group who are not given latitude to create theory. Rather we are trained to carefully apply the theories of men. Even Judith Butler, arguably the most influential nonmale philosopher of the end of the twentieth century, is granted that space because she theorizes gender, a woman’s domain of concern. I, a woman, dutifully apply Foucault and Rancière, because I find their work illuminating of some aspects of the art I encounter in this study. But my emphasis is on forging new theory to

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encompass and clarify what it is that women photographers do when they create visible forms of erasure. My argument is that Shelley Niro, An-My Lê, Paula Luttringer, Martine Gutiérrez, Carrie Mae Weems, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Cara Romero, Rebecca Belmore, Matika Wilbur, and Ana Mendieta create new worlds with the praxis of photography of resistance, and these new vistas demand new theory. Jolene Rickard and Jack Forbes have developed the idea of “visual sovereignty” as antithetical to settler colonialism, and I humbly extend their notion of visual sovereignty to the invisible, or rather to the places where the visible shadows forth the unseen.60 The quickening of vivid presence, as Mel Y. Chin defines animacy, emerges in the photography of resistance that Robin Kimmerer, in Braiding Sweetgrass, defines as a kind of grammar of animacy; we see in these images that which is almost not there to be seen, that which is adumbrated and suggested as the cusp of the visible.61 The photography of resistance, then, is not about deathliness or succumbing to erasure. On the contrary, it is about finding within settler-colonialist conditions of estrangement and violence the visual codes of animacy that confront that violence and visually move beyond it. To enter visual sovereignty is to find visual ground that celebrates the vividness of the gaze of those historically oppressed by coloniality and also to acknowledge and gaze upon—turn the gaze toward—the violence of settler colonialism and its outgrowth into present-day capitalist modes of land use and abuse. A dissociation from surroundings, not only natural surroundings but also the built environment of coloniality, produces dissociative occupation of embodied space. To dissociate is to feel oneself become invisible. But to depict dissociation, to unmask it, is to reclaim one’s place in space, to reverse and subvert the powerless position into which settler colonialism has pushed the historically colonized. The history of Indigenous American, Latinx, and African diasporic peoples, through genocide, enslavement, and displacement, is a history of attempted erasure.62 In writing about the photographic work of Indigenous American, Latinx, and African diasporic women artists and the idea of disappearance addressed in the works through these creations, I emphatically do not pose a retrenchment of belief that Indigenous American, Latinx, and African diasporic peoples are disappeared. On the contrary, my impetus and project is to trace the ways that the artists studied in this book lay bare, reveal, subvert, and resist disappearance—historically emergent from and still enforced by the terms of settler colonialism—by staging disappearance undoing its subterranean, nagging, lasting force.63 The

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activism of the photography of resistance is rooted in differential relationships to the land of the Americas. African diasporic, Latinx, and Indigenous American women have historically deeply different relationships to the land of the Americas. The cultural experiences of the groups are, on the one hand, comparable by brutal oppression to Euro-American settler colonialism, but on the other hand they are radically different in the historical relationship to the American land. For Niro, Wilbur, Belmore, Romero, and Gutiérrez, ties to the land as Indigenous people (Romero and Gutiérrez are mixed race, half White, half Indigenous) are radically different from those of LaToya Ruby Frazier and Carrie Mae Weems who, as mixed-race descendants of the enslaved and of the African diaspora descend from ancestors who were kidnapping victims, forced to survive in not only inimical but alien places. Ana Mendieta and Paula Luttringer, as Latinx artists, descend from the complex and troubled amalgam of European settler colonialism, Indigenous peoples’ persistence, and enslavement, that is, the social world that emerges from European (Spanish speaking) settler colonialism, Indigenous American, and African diaspora that is termed Latinx, or products of Iberian colonization. Mendieta’s and Luttringer’s work emerges specifically in response to governmental violence in Latin America of the latter half of the twentieth century, violence that is inseparable from policies of the United States.64 Paradoxically, as cultures and nation-states promulgated by colonization (colonization by Southern Europeans, Spanish, and Portuguese), Latin American nations also are treated as the colonized by the United States. The oppression of women is grounded in this patriarchal philosophy. In Luttringer’s and Mendieta’s works, a vivid opposition to monumentalism emerges. For Mendieta and Luttringer, the complexity and hybridity of Latinx origins do, even so, emerge in resistance in Cold War aesthetics. The history of repressive and violent political regimes of Argentina (of right-wing juntas supported by the United States) and the egregious situation that emerged between Cuba and the United States are prime features in the fallout of the Cold War. The violence, and exile, experienced by Luttringer and Mendieta— Luttringer imprisoned by state-sponsored violence and Mendieta sent into a kind of exile—are direct and severe consequences of the long reach of the Cold War. Luttringer and Mendieta draw on photography to attend to the liminal, the presence in absence, the quality of resisting the violence (never entirely vanquished) of the Cold War.65 The Cold War is itself an extension of coloniality as the United States engaged in territorial strategies that cemented its status as an empire during the second half of the twentieth

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century.66 For Mendieta and Luttringer, the aesthetics of resistance are haunted by processes of memory and evocations of return. The haunting processes of memory and return are keynotes in this book. For coloniality’s violence of erasure is the effort to highjack, supplant, and subvert the cultural memory of places and peoples, whereas the photography of resistance is that act of resistance to memory’s suppression. In the photography of resistance, the history, meaning, and memory of America is contested and reanimated. America is not the land of “patriots” as Santorum would have it. No, America is the land of Indigenous Americans, who are still here. It is also the land of the descendants of enslaved people, the land of Latinx people, of Asian Americans, and of Americans of European descent. It is a country that is founded on the painful and egregious predicate of attempting to erase Indigenous Americans of taking their land. That is the foundation of America. No surprise that it is haunted terrain. Photography as the medium of haunting is apt for resistance to America’s violent political silencings. It is antimonument, the opposite look of those monuments in carved stone that for too long commemorated Confederate generals and memorialized the men who killed and displaced Indigenous Americans. Photography with its fragility, with its tight bond to time’s relentless passage, is the antimonument. Yes, it preserves image, but always counterbalanced with photography’s preservative function is its openness to time. Photography arrives always in a state of partial exhaustion, always as echo, reflection, eerily contemplative. It knows that time has passed within its compass and look; yet, in activist photography, the effort of recuperation is so intensive that a transformation takes place. What has happened is confronted. In this confrontation the putatively invisible becomes hauntingly and vividly visible.

Notes 1. Eric Wemple, “Santorum Flails and Fails in CNN Appearance Following Comments on Native American Culture,” Washington Post, May 4, 2021, h t t p s : / / w w w. w a s h i n g t o n p o s t . c o m / o p i n i o n s / 2 0 2 1 / 0 5 / 0 4 / santorum-­f lails-­f ails-­c nn-­a ppearance-­f ollowing-­c omments-­n ative-­ american-­culture/. 2. Michael Leroy Oberg, “Rick Santorum and His Critics Are Both Wrong about Native American History,” Washington Post, April 29, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/04/29/rick-­ santorum-­his-­critics-­are-­both-­wrong-­about-­native-­american-­history/. See

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also Michael Leroy Oberg, Native America: A History, 2nd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2017); and Michael Leroy Oberg, Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism and Native America, 1585–1685 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). 3. Aníbal Quijano and Michael Ennis, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–80. See also Walter Mignolo and Catherine E.  Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 4. Cornelius Castoriadis and Kathleen Blamey, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). 5. Sara Mills, ed., Michel Foucault (London and New  York: Routledge, 2003), 91. 6. That is, the photographic image defined as that which is produced when through the mechanism of a camera the reflection and refraction of light off material objects is secured on a capture medium. See Richard Benson, The Printed Picture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2008). 7. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 2002), 43. 8. Janet Catherine Berlo and Ruth B.  Phillips, “‘Encircles Everything’: A Transformative History of Native Women’s Arts,” in Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, ed. Jill Ahlberg Yohe and Teri Greeves (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019), 43–73. 9. Jacques Rancière, “The Surface of Design,” in The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007), 88. 10. Michael Fried, “Barthes’s Punctum,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 3 (Spring 2005), 539–74. 11. Rancière, “Surface of Design,” 90. 12. Castoriadis and Blamey, Imaginary Institution of Society. 13. Renée L. Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College: University Press of New England, 2000). 14. John Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); and Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Noonday Press, 1991), 91–93, 107–9. 15. Claire Raymond, 16 Ways of Looking at a Photograph: Contemporary Theories (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), xxii–xxxv; 169–81; and Claire Raymond, Women Photographers and Feminist Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2017), 181–221. 16. Jae Emerling, “Forces and Forms: Theories and Methods in the History of Photography,” in The Handbook of Photography Studies, ed. Gil Pasternak, 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 2020), 97–113.

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17. Anne Wallentine, “‘The World I Wish People Knew’: Photographer Cara Romero on Redefining Contemporary Native Art,” Hyperallergic, January 6, 2021, http://hyperallergic.com/612795/cara-­romero-­ndn-­radicalimagination-­grant/. 18. Edgar Villanueva, Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance (Oakland: Berrett-Koehler, 2018); and John Bear Allison, interview with author, February 2019. 19. Shawn Wilson, Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (Black Point, NS: Fernwood, 2008). 20. Toni Morrison, Beloved, 1st Vintage International ed. (New York: Vintage, 2004), 43. 21. Mignolo and Walsh, On Decoloniality, 55. 22. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387–409, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240. 23. Ibid., 395. 24. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1743–1826 (Philadelphia: Prichard and Hall, n.d.), 99–112 (electronic edition), accessed November 27, 2021, https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/jefferson/jefferson.html. See also Founders Online, “From Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Hawkins, 18 February 1803,” National Archives, accessed November 27, 2021, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-­39-­02-­0456. 25. Anthony F.  C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 273–75. 26. Ward Churchill, Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2004), pp. 6–16; https://archive.org/details/killindiansavema00chur. 27. David E.  Wilkins and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, American Indian Politics and the American Political System, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). 28. Charles F. Wilkinson, Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations, 1st ed. (New York: Norton, 2005), 271–03 and 352–82. 29. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 100. 30. Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 31. Kendra Greendeer, “Contemporary Indigenous Artists in the US and Canada” (virtual lecture and panel presentation, 109th College Art Association of America Annual Conference, February 11, 2021).

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32. Jolene Rickard, “Indigenous Gendered Power Structures and Feminisms” (The Feminist Art Project at the 109th College Art Association Conference, virtual, February 13, 2021). 33. William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London: Green and Longmans, 1844), 1. 34. Joy Harjo, “Honoring,” Avery Point Global Café, October 9, 2020, https://globalcafe.aver ypoint.uconn.edu/fall-­2 020/honoring­by-­joy-­harjo/. 35. Jolene Rickard, “Visualizing Sovereignty in the Time of Biometric Sensors,” South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 2 (April 1, 2011): 465–86. 36. Rickard, “Indigenous Gendered Power Structures and Feminisms.” 37. Fox Talbot, Pencil of Nature, 1. 38. “Native Americans and the National Consciousness: Virtual Reading and Conversation with Joy Harjo” (virtual lecture, presented by Harvard University Native American Program and Harvard Art Museums, April 5, 2021), https://calendar.college.harvard.edu/event/native_americans_and_the_ national_consciousness_virtual_reading_and_conversation_with_joy_harjo. 39. Emerling, “Forces and Forms,” 105–9. 40. Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 15–31. 41. Nancy Mithlo, Knowing Native Arts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020), 12–15. 42. Not as a scholar but as a poet, I study the Muskogee language to better understand the place in the world where geographically I came from, western Georgia, where my ancestors have lived for centuries. During the pandemic, I dropped this practice but will return to it when I can. See https:// www.claireraymond.org/work/poetry-­claire-­millikin/. 43. Philip J. Deloria et al., “Unfolding Futures: Indigenous Ways of Knowing for the Twenty-First Century,” Daedalus 147, no. 2 (2018): 6–16. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48563014; Susan Miller, “Native Historians Write Back: The Indigenous Paradigm in American Indian Historiography,” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 1 (2009): 25–45; Jolene Rickard, “Absorbing or Obscuring the Absence of a Critical Space in the Americas for Indigeneity: The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 52 (2007): 85–92; and Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 44. Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); L. Elena Delgado and Rolando J. Romero, “Local Histories and Global Designs: An Interview with Walter Mignolo,” Discourse 22, no. 3 (2000): 7–33; and Walter Mignolo, “Are Subaltern Studies Postmodern

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or Postcolonial? The Politics and Sensibilities of Geo-Cultural Locations,” Dispositio 19, no. 46 (1994): 45–73. 45. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). 46. Fox Talbot, Pencil of Nature, 55–56. 47. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography after Photography: Gender, Genre, History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 138. 48. Jay Prosser, Light in the Dark Room: Photography and Loss (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 49. All artworks by Caro Romero discussed in this book are viewable on the artist’s personal website, https://www.cararomerophotography.com/. The artist’s personal political views do not necessarily cohere with my reading of her works. 50. See artist’s personal website, https://www.cararomerophotography.com/. 51. François Laruelle, The Concept of Non-Photography (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic x Sequence Press, 2011), 44. 52. Gerald Vizenor, Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 1–24. 53. Nadiah Rivera Fellah, “Searching for an Indigenous Fashion Star, Martine Gutiérrez Casts Herself,” Aperture, September 28, 2020, https:// aperture.org/editorial/martine-­Gutiérrez-­indigenous-­woman/. 54. Kaja Silverman, The Miracle of Analogy: Or the History of Photography, Part 1 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 23. 55. Tamara Ikenberg, “LIVING DOLLS: Chemehuevi Photographer’s First American Girl Portraits Pop with Color and Cultural Detail,” Native News Online, August 26, 2020, https://nativenewsonline.net/arts-­ enter tainment/living-­d olls-­c hemehuevi-­p hotographer-­s -­f irst-­ american-­girl-­pop-­with-­color-­and-­cultural-­detail. 56. ESMoA, First American Girl Series: NAOMI, Cara Romero, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9doke9DRSJY. 57. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion (Boston: Beacon Press, 2021), 18–50. 58. Kashmir Hill and Jeremy White, “Designed to Deceive: Do These People Look Real to You?,” New York Times, November 21, 2020, Science, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/21/science/artificial-­ intelligence-­fake-­people-­faces.html; and Samuel J.  Gershman, “The Generative Adversarial Brain,” Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 2 (2019): 1–8, https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2019.00018. 59. James Elkins, The End of Diversity in Art Historical Writing: North Atlantic Art History and Its Alternatives (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2020); and James Elkins, What Happened to Art Criticism? (Chicago: Paradigm Press, 2003), 4–10, 26–29.

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60. Jolene Rickard, “Diversifying Sovereignty and the Reception of Indigenous Art,” Art Journal 76, no. 2 (2017): 81–84. 61. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 49–58. See also Mel Y.  Chin, Animacy: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 62. Monika Fabijanska, ed., The Un-Heroic Act: Representations of Rape in Contemporary Women’s Art in the U.S. (New York: Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery, 2018), published following an exhibition of the same title, organized by and presented at the Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery, New York, September–November 2018; and Monika Fabijanska, Ecofeminism(s) (New York: Thomas Erben Gallery, 2020), published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title, organized by and presented at the Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, June–July 2020. 63. Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley, eds., We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85/A Sourcebook (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum, 2017), published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title, organized by and presented at the Brooklyn Museum, April 21– September 17, 2017. 64. Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 3–4. 65. Mendieta was an earthworks and performance artist and yet her work is known now through photographs and films, and her reputation after death far exceeds her visibility, in the art world, before death. See Claire Raymond, “Roland Barthes, Ana Mendieta, and the Orphaned Image,” The Conversant: Interview Projects, Talk Poetries, Embodied Inquiry, September 2014, 1–22. 66. Ana María Reyes, The Politics of Taste: Beatriz González and Cold War Aesthetics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

CHAPTER 2

Seen and the Unseen

The unresolved arc of visible invisibility shapes the photography of resistance. The images studied in this book reckon with unsettled histories of the Americas, histories of political erasure, histories that the photographers studied conjure into symbolic image, histories that entail violent acts of suppression and “disappearing” colonized peoples, with the term colonized here signifying people who are inscribed in the position of coloniality vis-à-vis the dominant society and the state.1 The artistic act of lifting into visibility those histories that have been erased—of genocide, of enslavement, of government-sponsored disappearing of citizens—stretches the documentary capacity of photography to encompass expansive temporal fields.2 Of avant-garde art’s response to politics, Jacques Rançiere makes the case that its role is to “inscribe the shock of the material, and testify to the original gap.”3 The original gap, in America, is the cleavage between the myth of national progress and the material reality of the oppression and suppression of the colonized. Rancière continues, “Sublime art is that which resists the imperialism of thought forgetful of the Other,” for “sublime art is the contemporary witness of this planned death and its implementation.”4 Whereas Rancière refers to art in response to the Holocaust, the parallel with America’s genocide, of Indigenous Americans, is salient. More to the point, the regime of imperialism that is “forgetful of the Other” is the regime of coloniality. It is the work of the photography of resistance, in its steep resistance to erasure and silencing of the

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colonized, to be the contemporary witness to the erasures of coloniality or, rather, to those who are under threat of erasure by industrial capitalist imperialism.5

A Small Matter of Wars In this chapter, I turn to works of Shelley Niro (Mohawk, Bay of Quinte) and An-My Lê that engage the idea and interrogate the image of imperialist wars. While the wars that Niro and Lê query in their searing works, Battlefields of My Ancestors (see chapter 3) and Small Wars (respectively), are in some sense far apart temporally, with the original wars of settler colonialists against the Haudenosaunee taking place in the eighteenth century and the United States’ war of so-called containment in Vietnam taking place in the mid twentieth century, the long reach and the never-yet-over sociality of settler colonialism in the Americas brings the events closer together than the temporal field might indicate. In my reading of these photographic series, I am especially attuned to the work of witnessing that Rancière ascribes to sublime art, art that protests imperialist systems that are “forgetful” of their victims. The photograph, here, is deployed to embody and reveal the counternarrative to the myth of settler colonialism. An-My Lê’s series Small Wars documents reenactors of what is known colloquially in America as the Vietnam War (1955–75). Creating her series at the end of the twentieth century and in the early twentieth century, Lê photographs Vietnam War reenactors in Virginia. These reenactors meet and restage the war in Vietnam in central Virginia, in the United States. In this series of photographs, Lê meticulously records the restaging of battles, by American aficionados, of the imperial war that displaced her family of origin and scarred her nation of origin. The images blur our recognition of what we are seeing: looking at her photographs, we are immediately compelled to question, are these real battles? If so, why is the landscape that of central Virginia, while the machinery and uniforms evoke the war in Vietnam? The eerie unreality of the reenacted wars Lê’s images depict speaks to the brutal real effects of the Vietnam War through the symmetry of haunting. In the reenactors’ war, there are no dead, but the 2 million Vietnamese dead are present in Lê’s subtle photographs. They are present in the disparity between the reenactors’ co-optation of Vietnam, a war that overwhelmingly harmed the people of that nation, and the relative safety of central Virginia, where the reenactors play war. The dead are present in the empty space around the reenactors’ dramas, photographed by Lê, that

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is, the landscape that the photographs hold, showing how the “small wars” of the reenactors are not pressured by threats from others but play out in an uncanny vacuum at the edges of the American suburbs, suggesting that for many Americans, wars of conquest and empire are small matters, the deaths of non-Americans trifles on the path to unstated empire. The dead are present in Lê’s unseen but emotively evoked landscape of Vietnam, a resonant absence that Lê’s photographs document, that is, document if we reconceive of what documenting through photography can be. Lê’s Small Wars performs documentary through absence: its images show the ghosts, the haunting force, of the Vietnam War by not showing that war, by showing instead its facsimile recreated on American soil. They show and shadow the landscape of that imperial war that was conducted by Americans not on American soil and thus reveal the hubris of the American cultural landscape, making of the land a place to play at war. The psychic landscape of the imperial war is the land of the aggressor. Hence the eerie confusion of Lê’s photographs of reenactors, of staged pretend battles that are almost mistakable for real battles; this blur is matched in her work by a clarity, the clarity of what and who are not there. The erasure of the Vietnamese people and land in America’s imperialist war is the presence documented in Lê’s Small Wars series, as the trope of reenactment takes on painful heft through the revelatory visualization of traumatic erasure. The reenactors enjoy their game, but for Lê the pretend wars open the pain of nostos, of the Vietnam her family fled because of America’s imperialist war. Her camera documents her own history of displacement; the photographs show the absence or rather the erasure of the meaning and impact of the war for the Vietnamese.

Ancestors Deploying photography to confront imperialist coloniality, as a force of erasure, and in this case also genocide, documenting centuries of displacement, Indigenous Canadian photographer Shelley Niro creates a series of glossy photographic images, Battlefields of My Ancestors, that document her return to sites of imperialist and colonialist slaughter of the Haudenosaunee (Niro is an enrolled member of the Bay of Quinte, Mohawk) and continued displacement of the Haudenosaunee under the ongoing system of coloniality. In the sites Niro photographs, Indigenous American losses either are not memorialized or are inappropriately, disrespectfully, noted. America and Canada have erased, disregarded, and

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suppressed the suffering of Niro’s ancestors.6 But Niro goes back, to sites of genocidal violence and of murder and displacement, and her camera captures traces of the erasure of her ancestors from the Canadian and American landscape that the traditional lands of the Haudenosaunee bridge. In some images of Battlefields of My Ancestors, the battles, or massacres, that pushed the Haudenosaunee off their lands are marked with small plaques by which coloniality celebrates its barbarity. Niro’s photographs capture the plaques at oblique angles, noting the way rural roads veer off from the lands where the eerie absence of her people still resonates. She returns to her ancestral homelands of the Haudenosaunee, but the homelands are effaced, replaced with plaques, and cut by high-tension wires and by other markings of late capitalist, colonialist empire. We are not postcolonial, argue Niro’s photographs, but still living in the space of the colonized world, a social space in which Indigenous North Americans are effaced from their historical lands. The somber absences that Niro’s photographs capture jar with the title of the series, Battlefields of My Ancestors. In these documentary photographs, we don’t see epic battles fought between visible warriors. We don’t see people of any sort. Rather we see empty spaces marked by industrial trappings and government plaques. We see the ancient and ongoing battles of conquest, coloniality, usurpation, and genocide. The forced removal of most of the Haudenosaunee from the territory now called the United States of America is mourned in Niro’s photographs.7 But her presence as witness, as photographer, brings a rebuttal to the Haudenosaunee’s erasure. Niro’s implied presence and her implied gaze (behind the camera) reintroduce the Haudenosaunee to these battlefields: she stands in the places from which her ancestors were forced out, and she stands with her camera facing the absence of her people but also refuting the absence of her people. For she is present. She sees the land. The somber, elegiac cast of Niro’s Battlefields makes them documentary photography aligned with the project of the photography of resistance, this work of capturing with the camera the traces left by colonialist violence, violence that in the Americas went largely unrecorded by the camera. These images record Niro’s journey and also they are photographic records of colonialist violence.8 The work of the photography of resistance is to draw contrast with these brutal documents. Documentary photography’s immediacy is interrogated by the photography of resistance, which troubles the temporality of photography.9 In the long gaze of Niro’s

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Battlefields of My Ancestors, hundreds of years are compressed in images of resonant absent presence. She documents faithfully, clearly, what is left in the aftermath of displacement and genocide, as the photographs reach beyond their frames, elegiacally touching the crepuscular sense of something, and someone, waiting to be revealed, almost revealed by the camera. The tendency toward literalism of photography is cast in shadow by the photography of resistance, which insists on temporal metaphor, that is, not symbol, not allegory, but the constant bridge that is metaphor, between the past and the present, between the time of seeing now and the accreted layers of history that create the material world seen. Niro’s Battlefields of My Ancestors, with its potent depictions of absences, creates a marked contrast to nineteenth-century photography of Indigenous Americans killed or captured by colonialist European forces. The searing image of Spotted Elk (Big Foot), frozen on the so-called battlefield where he was killed in the Wounded Knee massacre, photographed by George (Gustave) Trager, stands as documentation of the dehumanization of Indigenous Americans.10 It also enacts dehumanization, as the photograph displays no respect for Spotted Elk, instead turning his death into a spectacle of the myth of American conquest. Similarly, Louis Herman Heller photographed captured Modoc Indigenous Americans after the 1872–73 colonialist violence that stripped the Modoc of their ancestral lands.11 In these images, the captives are almost entirely without agency. And yet, even so trapped, they stare at the camera with an understanding of the injustice facing them. They look angry, stoic, resigned. The documents are signed by Jefferson Davis, attesting that they are accurate photographs of Indigenous Americans held captive. Eadweard Muybridge also photographed the Modoc war. These images do not see from the vantage of the Modoc. They do not take into account the reason for the war, that is, White encroachment on Indigenous lands. They depict the Modoc as criminals, trespassing on White America’s right to conquest. Likewise, Trager’s photographs of the site of the Wounded Knee massacre, with corpses of Lakota being shoveled into trench graves, are not intended to reflect on the atrocity and tragedy of the massacre but instead to present for White audiences a kind of trophy of documentation of Indigenous erasure.12 Niro’s Battlefields of My Ancestors, by contrast, goes to the scenes of Indigenous erasure and gives images to that absence. Here, there are no humiliating or degrading photographs of “conquered” Indigenous peoples, people whom American statesman John Yoo some 150  years later

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referred to as deserving no human rights because they are “like Indians,” in being legally killable.13 In profound rebuttal to this discourse of silencing and erasure, Niro poses her confrontation with lost ancestral territory and massacred ancestors in Battlefields of My Ancestors. The land becomes a full presence even as the photographs mourn the people absent from it. The series of photographs subtly redefines documentation by photography, linking the testimonial force of the photographic with an elision, an image of erasure and return to the site of erasure.

Monuments and Photographs Photography of resistance limns the distinction between materiality and cultural history. In Carrie Mae Weems’s The Louisiana Project, antebellum Greek Revival architecture in and around New Orleans enacts a haunting as the photographer contrasts photographs of ornately preserved Southern architecture with the industrial, run-down neighborhoods principally inhabited by New Orleans’s African American population.14 The photographic series does not materially alter the architectures it witnesses, but it entirely alters our way of seeing these architectural structures.15 Through its intense quietness, Weems’s series of images potently presents the still public erasure of the history of African American enslavement in the preservation of antebellum architecture. The nonappearance of the presence of African American slaves, in the memorial work of White dominance, Weems contests by placing her own body, clothed in nineteenth-century servitude garb, in each scene photographed. She becomes the witness of White cultural violence, violence materially manifest in architecture, a spectral but embodied figure watching, witnessing. She is an absent presence, or rather a present absence, abiding as witness in the very landscape of racist domination that effaced the historical reality of the presence of enslaved people, leaving them unmemorialized. Weems stages haunting in The Louisiana Project, pressing the mirroring quality of photography to draw her viewer into the act of witnessing the erasure or disappearance of the lived experience of African Americans both under the conditions of enslavement and in the early 21st–century (the series is from 2003) system of racist oppression. Eerily prescient to Hurricane Katrina’s devastation, Weems’s Louisiana Project reveals New Orleans’s oppressive racial caste system, a system held in place by architectures that also symbolically manifest it. The solid structures of buildings and of antebellum mansions contrasting with the industrial structures by

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which impoverished African American neighborhoods are set articulate erasures of oppressed people; and in Weems’s photographs the erasures are not only in the sense of the unmemorialized enslaved dead, but also in the sense of the living who are silenced and erased by the economics of racism and cannot move away from neighborhoods of impoverishment. Weems shows this clearly in the photograph The Abyss. The hidden structure of social oppression Weems makes visible by documenting erasure, documenting who has been disappeared from the historical record of carefully preserved architecture and who has been pressed to neighborhoods of public housing and industrial pollution. This built environment houses what Richard Frishman eloquently calls “ghosts of segregation.”16 The remnants of Jim Crow, and of enslavement, persist in the built environment of the early twenty-first century. And yet Weems’s Louisiana Project also shows how these ghosts are embodied living people, those who inhabit the impoverished neighborhoods and public housing projects of the South now. In The Abyss, Weems in her nineteenth-century dress, faces New Orleans’s oldest housing project.17 The abyss partly refers to the way that generations of families become trapped living in these substandard government-sponsored domiciles, and it also signifies the way that capitalism closes its eyes to the suffering of those in public housing, setting public residents outside vision, in a kind of abyssal space that is unacknowledged. This witness figure, performed by Weems in The Louisiana Project, is anonymous.18 She stands as the abstract figure of witnessing. In The Abyss, the photograph’s spacing as well as her stance and her garment all imply that she does not live in the housing project, is not visiting there, but rather appears as a spectral form of witnessing. Such is Weems’s position vis-à-vis all the architectural spaces photographed in The Louisiana Project. She performs abstract witnessing, a twist or torque on the self-portrait (because it is Weems whom we see in these images). She performs the self-­ as-­ghost, but not a powerless ghost, rather a formidable witness standing and facing not so much the remnants of racist structures of oppression as their persistence, inscribed in architecture. The absence of other human beings in the photographs emphasizes Weems’s project’s status as photography of resistance. No one is here but the witnessing ghost, and yet even so the social worlds of these built environments teem thickly with populations of the oppressor and oppressed, the erased.

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The Naked Image The colonialist myth that Indigenous peoples and people of African descent are unclothed in an ontological sense fuels the violence of colonization both historically and now, with racism the ideological structure through which colonization persists. Part of the work of the photography of resistance is reclothing, so to speak, the colonized body, creating images that correct and alter entrenched visual and conceptual distortions of coloniality. Colonialist depictions of Indigenous Americans and African Americans demean their subjects by showing them naked or not fully clothed. These images encode what Barthes calls (writing about a cover of the French magazine Match) the mythology of colonization.19 Photography as documentary of what has been suppressed and elided stands as stark rebuttal to the egregious documentary habits of colonizers’ photography, which often exposes colonized people in extreme and unchosen positions of vulnerability.20 In the photographic works of Ana Mendieta nakedness is reencountered as presence protesting erasure. Mendieta’s decades-long project, the Silueta series, began with a nude self-portrait taken in Mexico’s Oaxaca Valley at the site of an archeological excavation.21 Here, she covers her nude body with flowers and turns so that we see only the outline of her.22 This nude is at once sacrificial and protected, both anonymous and personal. In this inaugural image of the Silueta series, the erasure of the Indigenous inhabitants of Yagul, Mexico, Mendieta protests by placing her naked—vulnerable—body in their stead. This inaugural Silueta is less about Mendieta herself and more about her role, in the performance of the photograph, of embodied restitution of the near erasure of Indigenous Mexican culture through the violent process of colonization. As Mendieta goes on to develop the extensive series, she develops an implicit conversation between Silueta sites in Iowa and Mexico, contrasting the landscapes of these two differently colonized regions.23 In Mexico, the traces of Indigenous cultures, precontact, persist in archeological sites and architectural structures, whereas in Iowa, colonization has had a more completely devastating impact. The Siluetas as Mendieta develops the series become stripped forms, neither nude nor clothed, but eerily between revelation and cover—outlines—and traces of a woman’s body instate its presence and insist on visibility in the face of erasure. The traced outlines of Mendieta’s body instate a liminal zone between body and image, between naked vulnerability and outline’s fixed sign, silhouette. The transient nature of Mendieta’s subtle earthworks belies the permanency of the

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photographic and film works that the artist created to record her earthworks. Mendieta uses her camera to create lasting (or somewhat lasting, given photography’s own material fragility) marks, records, traces of her embodied and disembodied encounter with sites of earlier colonization. Repeatedly she stages this encounter as of the utmost urgency, urgent not only for her own survival but also for that of all who are and have been displaced by coloniality. It is not only her own exile from Cuba the work mourns but also more broadly Mendieta’s Silueta series as it addresses the impact of colonization on the Americas.24 Walter Mignolo’s theory of decoloniality applies to Mendieta’s nakedness, in the Siluetas, as Mendieta’s embodied and disembodied presence in her photographs exposes the modernity/coloniality paradigm. Mendieta contests the boundaries of coloniality, placing her body’s outline in photographs as a lost-and-found sign of exile and return. The photographs are documents. Mendieta without question saw them this way, documenting her earthworks practice.25 As such they document the disappearance not merely of Mendieta cast out from Cuba; more broadly, the Siluetas document the erosion of Indigenous American culture’s embodied connection to the earth under the press of the border-­establishing practices of coloniality, and the effect this erosion has on the relationship of northern America with Latinx America. It is nation-state boundaries that declare the presence of coloniality.26 And it is nation-state boundaries that Mendieta’s Silueta series images of earthworks eloquently protest. Mendieta’s outline, in the Silueta series, demarcates not simply her own embodied present absence but also the erasure of Indigenous bodies’ traditional ways of connecting to the earth. Mendieta states that her work “carries on a dialogue” with the earth, emplacing the body’s trace chthonically rather than according to the colonialist dictates of the meaning of earthly space. As Nicholas De Genova argues, the time of diaspora, the time of the so-called displaced person, is the time of dispossession, of not being allowed to lay claim to social space.27 Mendieta’s photographs of earthworks contest this temporality of erasure, emphatically stamping earth, laying her claim to place through documentary photographic trace.

The Persistence of Colonialist Memory The photography of resistance stages traces and vivifies traces, bringing to visibility the erased and effaced histories of colonialist regimes. The work of the photography of resistance is to show the ghosts among whom we,

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in the Americas, daily live and to bring to light the living presence of the descendants of those whose lives were radically estranged and, in many cases, ended by coloniality/modernity. If some elements of LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photography seem to pull from straightforward documentary, I suggest instead that her work The Notion of Family stages visual poetics of erasure and protest against erasure, a radical photography of resistance. The invisibility of those African Americans who are living out their lives in industrial neighborhoods, in the slow violence of industrial pollution, is a deeply historicized invisibility. Frazier’s photography seems to trace the surface but is really of layers, layers of sedimented history of oppression, and of family tradition as resistance. The disappeared world of industrial violence (that the middle class and the wealthy look away from, refuse to see), the violence pollution does to the human body, is the hither side of triumphal capitalist so-called productivity (Fig.  2.1). Frazier vivifies and visualizes this erasure in images that superimpose the human, loving vision

Fig. 2.1  LaToya Ruby Frazier, Landscape of the Body (Epilepsy Test), 2011, gelatin silver print, 24 × 40ʺ (61 × 101.6 cm). Copyright LaToya Ruby Frazier. Used with permission. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery

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Fig. 2.2  LaToya Ruby Frazier, John Frazier, LaToya Ruby Frazier and Andrew Carnegie, 2010, gelatin silver print, each 19½  ×  43¾ʺ (49.5  ×  111.1  cm). Copyright LaToya Ruby Frazier. Used with permission. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery

of her family with landscapes of ruined industrial neighborhoods and polluting factories set within those neighborhoods.28 Consider how Frazier’s composite photograph showing a historical plaque honoring the White founder of Braddock, one Mr. John Frazier (Fig. 2.2), juxtaposed with a childhood photograph of LaToya Ruby Frazier, draws the connection to colonization explicitly. A pretty little girl in a clean dress, here, is juxtaposed with the overbearing face of Andrew Carnegie and a plaque honoring the White patriarch whose implied rape of an African American woman “founded” the Frazier family. The girl’s innocence and the founder’s lack of innocence are welded through the image of a plaque commemorating the patriarch, that is, showing him as he is seen in the eyes of the society that allows the slow violence of pollution. The triptych reveals the face of Carnegie not as a beneficent philanthropist but rather as a prime forger of the very industrialization that pollutes Braddock, causing illness for Frazier’s family. The cultural historical framework of industrial neighborhoods inhabited by African Americans is coloniality/modernity. Herein, human lives, families, suffer the continuation of embodied oppression through coloniality. And this suffering is unseen, placed in areas that those with money, even just middle-class money, do not visit, do not drive through, do not even see from the window of a car. The invisibility of families like Frazier’s is of course entirely one-sided and ideological. They are not invisible to themselves. This real visibility is the poignant, sharply pointed statement of Frazier’s camera work. She

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Fig. 2.3  LaToya Ruby Frazier, Aunt Midgie and Grandma Ruby, 2005, gelatin silver print, 15½ × 19¼ʺ (39.4 × 48.9 cm). Copyright LaToya Ruby Frazier. Used with permission. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery

shows us how this family appears to the daughter who loves them. To her, they are not erased, but they are visible as the victims of cultural erasure. In The Notion of Family, the presence of photographs within photographs and of dolls and mirrors in photographs throughout the series articulates the haunted nature of visibility (Fig. 2.3). Here the photographic images appear as a holy shrine, encasing and holding Frazier’s family, and herself, in the halo of light. Against erasure the family cherishes images, often images of itself. The daughter, Frazier, builds this archive of presence in the face of disappearance as the mythogogic act of creating The Notion of Family, instating familial visibility through layers of human presence within the industrial landscape. The “notion” of family is, then, both a belief and a desire. The young photographer knows that her family is not invisible. They are fully visible in her gaze. Rather they are disappeared by larger, broader

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structures of racism and unfettered capitalism in the United States of America; they hold that space from which America wants to turn away. Frazier desires that their erasure be undone, and the photographs of The Notion of Family soar on this desire to show the fullness of coloniality, to show its capacity to erase and disappear the colonized, and also the will to show what coloniality’s regimes cannot and does not erase: The Notion of Family. This photography of resistance calls into vivid existence, into presence, into visibility, the erased terrain of coloniality. For this terrain was never really erased, only pressed beneath the surface of palimpsestic colonized social space. The work of this photography of resistance is to excavate the suppressed traces of the disappeared, to document not only the presence of these traces but also the work of bringing them to light. In this sense, the photographer herself, her very presence, is part of the documentation that is the antidocument of the photography of resistance. She documents her own process of encountering the reemergence of that which has been obscured, rendered invisible, through coloniality. She documents her family’s profound act of living on. Frazier’s use of the techniques of doubling and layering create an ongoing immersion in the lived effect of racism’s slow violence, but also—crucially—her deployment of doubling and layering acts as a continuously opening door through which paths beyond injustice and the abjection it inflicts are indicated. Her images rise into visibility through the force of this sense of pathways out of drowning. Doubling and layering create photography as supremum, a boundary of temporality where the past is ongoing and also transcended through a family’s notion of itself.

Notes 1. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion (Boston: Beacon Press, 2021), 18–50. See also Jean M.  O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 2. Heather Ahtone, “Making Our World: Thoughts on Native Feminine Aesthetics,” in Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, eds. Jill Ahlberg Yohe and Teri Greeves (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020), 37–43. 3. Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007), 132.

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4. Ibid., 133–34. 5. Eduardo Mendieta, “Toward a Decolonial Feminist Imaginary: Decolonizing Futurity,” Critical Philosophy of Race 8, no. 1–2 (2020): 237–64, https://doi.org/10.5325/critphilrace.8.1-­2.0237. 6. Ian Austen and Amber Bracken, “With Discovery of Unmarked Graves, Canada’s Indigenous Seek Reckoning,” New York Times, June 26, 2021, World, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/26/world/canada/ indigenous-­residential-­schools-­grave.html. 7. Approximately 3000 Mohawk tribal members currently live in Franklin County, New York, on the Akwesasne reservation. 8. Mick Gidley, “Visible and Invisible Scars of Wounded Knee,” in Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis, ed. Jay Prosser (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 25–38. 9. Kris Belden-Adams, Photography, Temporality, and Modernity: Time Warped (New York: Routledge, 2019), 69–70. 10. Allison C.  Meier, “Native Americans and the Dehumanising Force of the Photograph,” Wellcome Collection, March 29, 2018, https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/WrUTGh8AACAA1FH8; “Uŋpȟáŋ Glešká: Spotted Elk,” Akta Lakota Museum & Cultural Center, accessed October 24, 2021, http://aktalakota.stjo.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=8359. 11. Paul Sorene, “Portraits of Captured Native Americans after the Modoc War,” Flashbak, October 17, 2019, https://flashbak.com/modoc-­war-­ prisoners-­portraits-­420219/. 12. Claire Voon, “A Rare Collection of Nineteenth-Century Photographs of Native Americans Goes Online,” Hyperallergic, May 3, 2018, http:// hyperallergic.com/434729/19th-­c entury-­p hotos-­n ative-­a mericans-­ american-­antiquarian-­society/. 13. Writes Red Nation podcast journalist Nick Estes: Consider former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo’s 2003 “torture memos” in support of torture in the War on Terror. As Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd notes, Yoo cited the 1873 Modoc Indian Prisoners Supreme Court opinion that justified the murder of Indians by U.S. soldiers. “All the laws and customs of civilized warfare,” the Court opined, “may not be applicable to an armed conflict to Indian tribes on our Western frontier.” “Indians” were legally killable because they possessed no rights as “enemy combatants,” as it is with those now labeled “terrorist.” See Estes, “Indian Killers: Crime, Punishment, and Empire,” The Red Nation, January 11, 2017, http://therednation.org/indian-­killers-­crime-­ punishment-­and-­empire/.

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14. Carrie Mae Weems, The Louisiana Project, 2003, photographic series, http://www.carriemaeweems.net/galleries/louisiana.html#header. 15. Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson, “Afrotropes: A User’s Guide,” Art Journal 76, no. 3–4 (2017): 7–9. Copeland and Thompson insist in reference to contemporary art that engages with enslavement: Shuttling between temporally estranged scenarios … poses history as an open site that can be reconfigured both despite and because of the ongoing modes of violence that situate [B]lack subjects within modern regimes of power. While the institution may have officially ended, [slavery] is far from over, and freedom is not an end, but an ongoing and elusive process that can be brought into view through repeated attempts at its visualization. [Slavery] is constantly returned to through iconic forms that suggest the visual dynamics through which Africans came to be seen and were urged to see themselves as slaves, while also fostering new means of identification and resistance across and within the diaspora. 16. Rich Frishman, Ghosts of Segregation, photography, contemporary/ongoing exhibition, https://www.ghostsofsegregation.com/gallery.html?folio =GALLERY&gallery=IMAGES]. 17. See artist’s personal website, http://carriemaeweems.net/galleries/louisiana.html. 18. Please see chapter 6 of this book for a deeper read of Weems’s work in The Louisiana Project. 19. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Noonday Press, 1991), 115. 20. Elizabeth Ferrer, Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021), 44–54; and Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2005), 2. 21. Sherry Buckberrough, “Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series (1973–1980): In and Out of Feminism,” in Iconic Works of Art by Feminists and Gender Activists, ed. Brenda Schmahmann (New York: Routledge, 2021), 147–61. 22. Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Labyrinth, Silueta series, Mexico), 1974, color photograph, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/mendieta-­untitled-­ silueta-­series-­mexico-­t13357; and Olga M.  Viso and Ana Mendieta, Unseen Mendieta: The Unpublished Works of Ana Mendieta (Munich: Prestel, 2008), 76, 78. 23. Claire Raymond, “Roland Barthes, Ana Mendieta, and the Orphaned Image,” The Conversant: Interview Projects, Talk Poetries, Embodied Inquiry, September 2014, 1–22. See also Susan Best, “The Serial Spaces of Ana Mendieta,” Art History 30, no. 1 (2007): 57–82.

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24. Walter D. Mignolo, “Introduction: Coloniality of Power and De-Colonial Thinking,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 155–67; and Nicholas De Genova, “The ‘Crisis’ of the European Border Regime: Towards a Marxist Theory of Borders,” International Socialism: A Quarterly Review of Socialist Theory 150 (2016): 33–56. 25. Claire Raymond, Women Photographers and Feminist Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2017), 94–95. 26. Walter D. Mignolo, “Decoloniality and Phenomenology: The Geopolitics of Knowing and Epistemic/Ontological Colonial Differences,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 32, no. 3 (2018): 360–87, 377. 27. Nicholas De Genova, “‘Doin’ Hard Time on Planet Earth’: Migrant Detainability, Disciplinary Power and the Disposability of Life,” in Waiting and the Temporalities of Irregular Migration, ed. Christine M. Jacobsen, Marry-Anne Karlsen, and Shahram Khosravi (London: Routledge, 2020), 186–201; Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls, trans. Dolores M.  Koch (New York: Viking, 1993). Hauntingly states Arenas: “I have not existed since I went into exile.” 28. LaToya Ruby Frazier, The Notion of Family (2001–2014), photography, https://latoyarubyfrazier.com/work/notion-­of-­family/.

CHAPTER 3

Staging Returns

Cara Romero (Chemehuevi) deploys mythogogic imagery to reinstate the emphatic visual presence of the Chemehuevi tribe in the California landscape. California, as historians Brendan Lindsay, Samuel Redman, and Andrés Reséndez make clear, was the scene of programmatic genocide, as colonial settlers and government avowed unmistakable intent to eradicate the Indigenous peoples of California and enacted violence, massacres, displacement, dispossession, and servitude to effect the erasure of Indigenous Californians.1 The idea of California in the national cultural imagination of the United States does not include Indigenous people; rather it is more about Hollywood and the film industry.2 Romero’s work reinstates the visible presence of Indigenous Californians in their ancestral place.3 Romero’s photograph Spirits of Siwavaats, for example, envisions the tradition of Chemehuevi roadrunners, traditional messengers, reborn in young boys straddling a rusted truck in the Mojave Desert.4 Indian Canyon deploys a young, contemporary Chemehuevi boy in traditional garments sitting on a canyon rock, laying claim to the land. In these images, the erased presences of ancestral Indigenous Californians are envisioned as reborn in the bodies of the young boys.5 Evolvers shows young Indigenous Californian boys running through a desert space filled with wind turbines, the spirited movement of the young boys expressing the return of ancestral spirits to the land. Romero’s breathtaking work Water Memory plaintively envisions the necessary rebirth of return to visibility of Indigenous people in California. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Raymond, Photography and Resistance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96158-9_3

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The river water that traditionally supported Chemehuevi life, and from which colonization and genocidal efforts cut them off, is the scene for this underwater photograph. Moreover, the land Chemehuevi had traditionally inhabited was flooded by the Army Corps of Engineers to create a dam, thereby driving out the tribe and erasing its ancestral land.6 In Romero’s photograph, the figures are both rising and sinking, drowning and baptized. The immersive water element, buoyant and unbreathable, holds the figures in a kind of anticipatory space, where their return to claim their ancestral lands is imminent. This liminal space is the doorway through which Romero’s figures move from erasure into visibility.

The “Un-Document” The photography of resistance exemplifies what Jacques Rancière describes as the redistributing of the sensible to recover the lost subject of history.7 The nonunary, nonlinear history of the colonized Americas is the subject of the “un-document” that photography of resistance documents—that which has been suppressed, erased, and documented in its manifestation as disappearance’s trace. The resistance to coloniality through these photographic interventions effectively sabotages the visibility in public space of received White history of the Americas, moving to the site of what has been concretized as America’s official history and revising White America’s hypervisibility.8 In the photography of resistance, the redistribution of the sensible manifests as a restaging of history to access suppressed histories of Indigenous American and African diasporic history.9 This history is of erasure and resistance, what Walter Benjamin describes as the lost subject of history.10 In the photography of resistance, the photographic terms of visibility are leveraged to contest the hypervisibility of the White history of the Americas.11 To picture what is invisible, to picture suppressed history, or history erased, and to picture the disappeared in a photograph is to alter the notion of visibility because photography is the practice of the surface, the image of the skin of light, the skin of materiality. The photograph of what has disappeared recovers the lost subject of history.12 Here, the manifestation of the disappeared occurs through the concretization that is photography’s visual code. You cannot photograph an idea, but rather always must photograph a noun. By definition, a photograph is a mark of the world, however modulated by photo editing.13 It traces the visible world and persists in the world as a visible mark. The photography of resistance

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as a political act redistributes the visible, documenting that which has been erased, effaced. In keeping with the nonlinear time of remembrance and cultural memory, my book does not trace a lockstep history of the colonization of the Americas; instead I follow the lead of the photographers whose works are the core of this study. Never about absolute erasure but instead about staging and encountering resistance to invisibility, the photography of resistance guides this book’s vision of the histories of coloniality in the Americas. It connects the war in Vietnam with the removal of the Haudenosaunee to Canada; it links Argentina’s Dirty War with the genocide of Indigenous peoples in California; and it notes how Ana Mendieta’s photography of her exile from Cuba intertextually converses with Carrie Mae Weems’s photographic witnessing of entrenched patterns of economic injustice in New Orleans. In other words, the argument of this book concerns not merely how photography can be deployed to resist erasure through the documentation of the disappeared, but also how the nonlinear time of coloniality’s regime renders disappeared the very presence of its object. The act to recuperate this presence depends on photography’s connection to embodiment. The direct object of coloniality is the colonized body.14 This body is worked on by the regimes of coloniality/modernity directly, through repressive policies and direct violence and violation, through genocide and enslavement. But, also, this body is imagined by coloniality/modernity as the locus of control, through surveillance. The photography of resistance, as with all symbolic imagery and imagery as such, does not directly alter the history of the colonized body; rather it intervenes in the field of the imaginary, the eidetic, which is the real fulcrum of coloniality.15 If photography cannot revive the dead, it can reimagine the dead as disappeared presences, shaping the landscape of the present. As such, this imagery reshapes the cultural imaginary and overturns earlier histories of erasure. Images, manifestations of the cultural imaginary, reflect and produce social power relations. To be pushed off the map of visibility is to be the colonized. Coloniality/modernity distributes access to the cultural imaginary according to an inverse relationship to Indigeneity. The colonized are erased from the cultural imaginary through a process of discursive colonization.16 And they are removed from physical spaces through practices of cultural genocide, displacement, and economic policies like redlining. The photography of resistance responds to these movements that push off the map the visibility and physicality of the colonized. These photographs are

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maps that produce the space of presence they claim, charting ways for the colonized to regain and reclaim presence in the landscape of ongoing oppressions stemming from coloniality/modernity. The historical trauma of place that is the effect of coloniality—the geographic space where the colonized are displaced, murdered, or oppressed in place—is addressed by photography’s physical specificity in the anticolonialist works studied in this book. Geography is, of course, the primary site of coloniality, with the goal of taking over land. Photography as the skin, the surface of light, the trace of the material real can act as the most direct medium of the haunting and subversion of the terms of material oppression by which coloniality claims and alters geographic space. Photography is immanently public, translating the material real to the easily circulated image. The photography of resistance locates the presence of the colonized, Indigenous American and diasporic African, within the frame of that context that the cultural imaginary of coloniality/modernity has stamped as White and European. This photographic documentation of disappearance is the art of mapping erasure and return.

The Right to Look17 The terms of visibility and invisibility parallel appearance and disappearance in reflecting and creating patterns of social power. The ability to reclaim presence in the social and material landscape of colonized social space through photography depends also on photography’s eerie relationship to social space. Unlike mural art or other forms of public protest art, photography—which can be used as billboard and therefore public material—more often represents social space rather than appearing in social space, if we think of public space as the basis of the polis. Photography represents space but does not always occupy public space in the way that performance art or mural art does. It is a kind of hypercathected eidetic world drawing from the visible through the memory of the photographer. Moreover, photographers Frazier, Weems, Niro, Belmore, and Romero make public showing of their photography an avowed center of their practice. Belmore and Romero use billboards to showcase their photography, and Weems and Frazier are practitioners who create photographic projects that showcase specific communities in venues eminently open to the general community wherein the photographer created the work.18 Consider how for Shelley Niro to return to, inhabit, photograph, occupy, and document the lost places where once her ancestors were

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slaughtered is an exercise in power and a formal instatement of familial melancholy. The photographs of sites of ancestral loss and erasure—the revivification of ancestral presence through the melancholic formality of the photograph—are at once a subversion of the enforced invisibility of Indigenous Americans in the American and Canadian cultural imaginary and also a recognition of the limits of vision, acknowledging the way that the past remains locked against revision. But of course, Niro’s is the revelation of the actual story of colonization, rather than the myth of the colonizer, it is this revelation that is the text of the photography of resistance. The past cannot be revised, but knowledge of it can be. Niro’s Battlefields of My Ancestors and her triptych self-portrait Abnormally Aboriginal appear in public space, reinfusing the Canadian public vista with a chance to see and know some of what was lost to everyone when Niro’s ancestors were victims of genocide. The intersections between art and public discourse are more variable than simply art being shown in the sphere of outdoor public space. The work of the photography of resistance is to intercede in the public imagination, through various means and intersections. A commonality across the field of the photography of resistance is representation and replication, within photography, of various kinds of public space. Carrie Mae Weems lays claim to the neighborhoods and museums of New Orleans; Shelley Niro and An-My Lê do the same for battlefields open to public observers commemorating imperial wars; Ana Mendieta claims the differentially colonized spaces of Mexico and Iowa; Martine Gutiérrez invokes Guatemalan Indigenous landscapes through ironic reference to tourist tropes; LaToya Ruby Frazier reclaims Braddock neighborhoods as a reenvisioned peopled landscape; and Paula Luttringer returns to Argentina specifically to lay claim to those places that were used to torture and imprison and then to reenvision those spaces, now accessible to the public. Photography, in this way, traverses hegemonic power structures and can work to erode forces of structural and conceptual oppression. Power reproduces itself through imaginary structures that foment and manifest into material realities. Codifications of cultural memory are acts of power. The contestatory interventions of photographies of disappearance reassert the right of the dispossessed to possess cultural memory, to disidentify as the colonized.19 Troubling the terms of power, the photography of resistance recognizes the palimpsestic quality of cultural memory, going beneath the layers of coloniality’s ideological pressures and premises— violently applied— exposing the countermemory of ancestral presence

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and remembrance.20 Acts of nation-state violence, the erasures those acts produce and the double erasure of their public suppression, lay out coloniality’s vision of who has the authority to look and to be seen, while photographies of disappearance contest precisely this authority.21 These photographies dramatize the conspicuous absences of Indigenous and African diasporic presences in the surface landscape of the palimpsest of America’s idea of itself, contesting and protesting disappearance. Indigenous North American Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe) dramatically represents the disappeared in her work The Named and the Unnamed. The multigenre work involves performance art, video, and photography. I focus on the ways that photography in particular has the capacity to resist the disappearance of the colonized because it is in the stillness of the photographic image that the dead and erased are conjured back into persistence. Consider how Belmore’s photograph State of Grace embodies presence as the trace of the disappeared. Marking the lost Indigenous and Métis women who were abducted from the corner of Gore and Cordova Streets in Vancouver, British Columbia, Belmore performs The Named and the Unnamed, and films the performance (which took place at the corner of Gore and Cordova). As part of the assemblage of the multigenre work Vigil (which incorporates the video of the performance The Named and the Unnamed), the photograph, State of Grace, a still emblem, marks the perpetual presence of the disappeared.22 Here, a young Indigenous woman with eyes closed seems between sleeping and waking, between life and death. The photograph is a black-and-white inkjet print that has been cut into strips so that in its place on the wall it moves with air currents, becoming a haunting, vivid presence in the room, as if the woman were breathing. The epidemic of disappeared Indigenous women in Canada reflects entrenched patterns of oppression and silencing. Whereas Belmore’s turn-­ of-­the-twenty-first-century work specifically mourns and memorializes the Indigenous women killed by serial killer Robert Pickton, the problem of murdered and disappeared Indigenous women in Canada is a continuing epidemic. That epidemic reflects government policies that fail to protect Indigenous people generally and the specific force of racist sexism that views the bodies of Indigenous women as fair game or open target for men of other races. Anishinaabe researcher Anita Harper rightly notes that Indigenous women continue to be hypervulnerable (statistically) to abduction and murder because as a group they are “economically, socially, and politically” marginalized.23 To be at the margins is to be partly erased;

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to be disappeared, abducted, or murdered is to be almost wholly erased. Belmore’s photographic work State of Grace redresses this erasure. The structure of coloniality/modernity places Indigenous women, as a group, in the quadruple vulnerability of poverty, femininity, political invisibility, and social invisibility. Belmore’s photograph redresses this invisibility, not simply by giving visibility to disappeared Indigenous women but by addressing also poverty, femininity, and social and political silencing in her image. In Belmore’s photograph State of Grace, the young woman appears untouchable, without vulnerability to the gaze. She is not encased in the trappings of poverty but instead appears in a luxurious bed-like space. Her image becomes, here, a form of voice, and her inhabitation of a State of Grace directly speaks to the political marginality of Indigenous women in Canada and the United States. The nation-state has no power over her, in Belmore’s reenvisioning of the disappeared Indigenous woman. Instead, she exists above the nation-state, in a state of grace, her own sublime sphere. The image sustains presence. Paralleling Belmore’s praxis, the nation-state as the fulcrum of coloniality is explicitly rejected as arbiter and controller of culture through the paradigm of Indigenous methodology introduced by Susan Miller (Seminole).24 Miller instates, instead, Indigenous methodology as that which exposes coloniality, that which sees the earth and the cosmos as living beings not partitioned by state sovereignty, and that which seeks decolonization as an ontological foundation. Belmore’s State of Grace contests the nation-state as the space of power. The ideas and acts of the nation-state foment and continue to support and hold in place the violence of colonization, which is an ongoing act in the coloniality/modernity paradigm. The nation-state as the rule of law, Miller argues, is antithetical to the structure of Indigenous thought and ethics.25 She contends that the core of Indigeneity is the organization and governance of people not through obeisance to a strictly bounded European-style nation-state; instead it is through a conceptualization of all living entities, including the earth, as part of a whole that interact and must be treated with mutual respect always. This knowledge of interdependence of all living things is a core aspect of Indigenous thought and runs directly counter to nation-­state theory, which holds that only the bounded nation-state is a legitimate boundary for political (broadly interpreted) power. Miller extends this concept of Indigeneity as interconnectedness to include respect and honor for the dead, the ancestral community. In Belmore’s

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State of Grace, the nation-states of Canada and the United States of America are surpassed. It is, instead, the grace of the Indigenous community that holds the disappeared, granting them vivid presence through this act of reenvisioning their place in the palimpsest of this North American continent’s history.

Visibility Against Surveillance The photography of resistance is, as I’ve argued, never an acceptance of the forces toward cultural erasure to which coloniality/modernity impel the colonized. Rather the opposite force emerges from the photographs studied in this book that remember through the body of the image cultural memory that has been suppressed. It is the photograph’s taut connection to the material body that makes it the medium through which to address erasure of the colonized body. The photography of resistance is not a rediscovery of the lost subject of history; rather it is an articulation of that which was never fully lost but suppressed. In other words, rediscovery implies complete silencing and complete negation, whereas the suppressed, palimpsestic histories of North American coloniality/modernity were never entirely silenced or negated but, obviously, not given public visibility. Who has the right to look is twinned by the question of who has the right to be seen as central, pivotal to national discourse, that is, who has the right to determine the terms of their own appearance. Of course, here, the phrase “has the right” is not meant in absolute ethical terms but rather in relative terms of social power—who is permitted to create visibility central to the nation-state’s mythic discourse of identity. As the events of sedition at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, indicate, the belief that one’s group—and only one’s group—has the right to visibility in America appears to be a supposition of descendants of White settlers. On January 6, followers of Donald Trump, who was then president, attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election by force, storming the Capitol as the official sanctioning of the president-elect, Joseph R. Biden, was being certified. The almost entirely White crowd carried replicas of the Confederate battle flag. The implicit message of the ill-organized attempted coup (an attempt to overturn the results of a democratic election) was that the colonized—those who are not White—had no right to vote, no right to determine the government’s expression of coloniality/modernity. Here, the historical subjects of

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colonization, people of Indigenous American, Latinx, and African diasporic descent, as well as people of Asian and South Asian descent, are viewed by the White mob as illegitimate participants in the construction and process of the government of coloniality. The White mob does not want to undo coloniality/modernity. Rather, their objection to Biden’s assuming the presidency was that the coalition of voters who elected him included a substantial number of African American voters. The disenfranchisement of African Americans is not only the cornerstone of the United States’ scandalous Reconstruction period, but also the undergirding impetus of Republican gerrymandering and restrictive voting laws in the second decade of the twenty-first century.26 Hence, the January 6, 2021, mob’s attempt to overturn the election of 2020 was a direct repudiation of historically colonized people’s right to participate in the process of governance that coloniality/modernity puts in place. In other words, not only are the historically colonized here at a double disadvantage—having voted despite voter-suppression tactics deployed against them, participating in a governmental system designed to suppress and exclude them—but also their perseverance in finding a way out of no way, their finding a way to count and to be heard in the process of coloniality/governmentality, is repudiated by the White mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6. As art historian Catherine Gander argues, the imaginative landscape of dominion and authority in the United States extends from historical patterns of enslavement and colonization.27 For the Trump-incited mob, that erroneous perception of rightful authority included the self-perceived right to forcibly overtake government buildings, including the Capitol, where Trump’s swarm of supporters expressed feeling justified in breaking windows and forcing members of the U.S. congress to barricade behind interior doors. The impetus for this action was not conferred on the mob by any federal authority (although former-President Trump clearly did incite the sedition) but instead was spurred by nothing other than its members’ assumption that their Whiteness gave them implicit access to all government buildings of the United States. The belief in the right to inhabit public spaces is congruent with the belief in the right to control and access public visibility and voice, which is opposite to the process of being under surveillance. Being under surveillance does not lift erasure but, on the contrary, enforces it. Visibility, in the way that Weems, Frazier, Mendieta, Gutiérrez, Belmore, Niro, Romero, Lê, Wilbur, and Luttringer insist upon in their photographies, is the resistance to

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surveillance and the refusal of the multiple disappearances that coincide with coloniality/modernity. At stake in the photography of resistance is the reordering of documentation of history, a rearranging of colonialist notions of visibility. In Weems’s Louisiana Project and Sea Islands Series and in Frazier’s The Notion of Family, we inhabit the temporally extensive haunting of America’s history of enslavement. In Mendieta’s Silueta series and Luttringer’s The Wailing of the Walls/El Lamento de los Muros, the disappearance and erasure of citizens under state-sponsored violence is contested. Lê’s Small Wars and Niro’s Battlefields of My Ancestors contest histories of colonialist wars and the ways they reshape the landscape and then are suppressed as if their effects were always given. Belmore in Vigil, Gutiérrez in Indigenous Woman, and Romero in several photographic works discussed in this book present the vivid presence of Indigenous Americans who have long been erased in the national consciousness of the myth of the United States as a beacon of democracy and human rights. The photography of resistance is a political act, deploying aesthetics to overturn inherited patterns of colonialist violence. The photography of resistance redraws the American palimpsest, pulling into visibility the suppressed landscape of the colonized. The work is anticolonialist, yes, and also in seeking a way to revoke and rebuke colonialist visibility the photography of resistance redefines the documentary.

Notes 1. Brendan Lindsay, Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846–1873 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012); Samuel Redman, Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); and Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). 2. Anne Wallentine, “‘The World I Wish People Knew’: Photographer Cara Romero on Redefining Contemporary Native Art,” Hyperallergic, January 6, 2021, http://hyperallergic.com/612795/cara-­romero-­ndn-­ radical-­imagination-­grant/. See also Angela Aleiss, Making the White Man’s Indian: Native Americans and Hollywood Movies (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 2005). 3. Michael G.  Doxtater, “Indigenous Knowledge in the Decolonial Era,” American Indian Quarterly 28, no. 3/4 (2004): 618–33.

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4. “Chemehuevi (Native Americans of the Southwest),” What-When-How (website), https://what-­when-­how.com/native-­americans/chemehuevi­native-­americans-­of-­the-­southwest/. 5. Heather Ahtone, “Indigenous Art as a Beacon of Survival,” in Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now, ed. Mindy N.  Besaw, Candice Hopkins, and Manuela Well-Off-Man (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2018), 18–29. 6. Alicia Inez Guzmán, “The Profound Photography of Cara Romero,” New Mexico Magazine, January 24, 2019, https://www.newmexicomagazine. org/blog/post/cara-­romero/. 7. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics : The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. and ed. Gabriel Rockhill, 1st ed. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), 7–14. 8. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 9. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 2002), 50. 10. Beatrice Hanssen, “Philosophy at Its Origin: Walter Benjamin’s Prologue to the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels,” MLN 110, no. 4 (1995): 809–33. 11. Maria Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia 25, no. 4 (2010): 742–59. 12. Ronald Beiner, “Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy of History,” Political Theory 12, no. 3 (1984): 423–34. 13. Claire Raymond, 16 Ways of Looking at a Photograph: Contemporary Theories (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 14. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 16; and Walter Mignolo and Catherine E.  Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 15. Cornelius Castoriadis and Kathleen Blamey, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). 16. Renée L. Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College: University Press of New England, 2000), 5, 149–51. 17. Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to  Look: A  Counterhistory of  Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 18. Wallentine, “‘The World I Wish People Knew.’” 19. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, vol. 2, 3 vols., Cultural Studies of the Americas (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 168–79.

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20. André Corboz, “The Land as Palimpsest,” Diogenes 31, no. 121 (March 1, 1983): 12–34, https://doi.org/10.1177/039219218303112102. 21. Anthony Howell, “THE DEHUMANIZATION OF ART (1925) Jose Ortega y Gasset,” anthonyhowelljournal (blog), September 15, 2015, https://anthonyhowelljournal.com/2015/09/15/the-­dehumanization-­ of-­art-­1925-­jose-­ortega-­y-­gasset/. 22. Maggie Tate, “Re-Presenting Invisibility: Ghostly Aesthetics in Rebecca Belmore’s Vigil and The Named and the Unnamed,” Visual Studies 30, no. 1 (2015): 20–31, https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2015.996388. 23. National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (Canada) et al., Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, vol. 1a (Quebec, Can.: National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, 2019), 313, https://www.mmiwg-­f fada. ca/final-­report/. 24. Susan Miller, “Native America Writes Back: The Origin of the Indigenous Paradigm in Historiography,” Wicazo Sa Review 23, no. 2 (2008): 9–28. 25. Ibid., 12–15. 26. Timothy Snyder, “The American Abyss,” New York Times, January 9, 2021, Magazine, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/magazine/ trump-­coup.html. 27. Catherine Gander, “Black and White Landscapes: Topographies of Disorientation in the Works of Carrie Mae Weems and Claudia Rankine,” Journal of American Studies 54, no. 3 (2020): 517–40, https://doi. org/10.1017/S002187581900094X.

CHAPTER 4

Empire’s Battlefields

For Mohawk (Bay of Quinte, Turtle Clan) photographer Shelley Niro, Battlefields of My Ancestors stands as public statement and antimonument. The photographs record public space, reveal public space, and in turn are intended to be displayed in public spaces—installation art as photography. The images also, importantly, signify public North American space; that is, they often show plaques signifying places where Indigenous Americans were attacked, places where genocide was enacted, in the United States and in Canada. The haunting effect of the images derives from Niro’s cool look, almost dispassionate, at the “commemorative” plaques as wounds or scars on the landscape that speak of the almost entirely erased, suppressed—in public land use—historical presence of Indigenous Americans. But also, the photographs’ force draws from the subterranean feeling or sense of Niro’s sister, Bunny, who traveled with her back to the homeland from which the Mohawk were displaced, and who wept while Niro photographed.1 That emotional center is also at the core of the images. They are calm, dispassionate, and yet they are also deeply mournful. The images are acts of mourning the land from which the Mohawk have been displaced, and they are acts of resistance, reclaiming the land by seeing it, going to it, photographing it, and articulating it within the gaze of the Indigenous photographer. The images are, implicitly, given force through sisterhood. In this installation, Battlefields of My Ancestors, Niro turns the tables on coloniality’s acts of erasure, deploying the photographs to observe public space—its habitual erasure of the historical presence of Indigenous © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Raymond, Photography and Resistance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96158-9_4

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Americans—and to reinsert into public space the mnemonic field of Indigeneity, the images printed large and on acrylic, when shown at the Ryerson Center in Toronto, thus becoming public signage commenting on public signage. Subverting the public signifiers on which the images comment, the installation contests the terms of American public space and the invisibility assigned to Indigenous people in the polis. But, also, in addition to being activist art it is a pure work of mourning and of honoring ancestors. The photographer claims her ancestors in the title, Battlefields of My Ancestors, signifying her allegiance and alliance with all Indigenous Americans, not just the Six Nations. Niro instates her photographic gaze as the arbiter of what should be seen in public space as the record of public history and, indeed, of what must be seen in public space as the full record of American history to supplant the literally whitewashed version that is predominantly circulated in coloniality. The photographs of Battlefields of My Ancestors serve to overturn the suppression and erasure of Indigenous presence but also to mourn the erasure of Indigenous presence. They stage disappearance—the displacement of the Mohawk as well as the subsequent and synchronic suppression of the reality of Mohawk presence—to create and enact appearance. Niro created the series over the course of 25 years. It began as a personal journey that she and one of her sisters, Bunny, took together, driving from Canada—where the Haudenosaunee were pushed by colonialist wars—back to the original homeland of the Haudenosaunee, the Mohawk Valley in what is now called New York State.2 Niro and her sister would drive around these ancestral homelands seeking traces of their ancestors’ millennia-long presence on the lands. Niro would take photographs and her sister would weep, mourning the loss that displacement and genocide has forced onto their family and their community, both the ancestral and the contemporary community. The photographs that form Battlefields of My Ancestors show this division; they show Niro’s dispassionate gaze in the photographs; and, also, in their melancholy vistas they show her sister’s weeping. In this doubleness, the clarity of vision, dispassion, and visibility of mourning—weeping—inheres the traction of the photographs. The Mohawk River (in New York) and the Grand River (in Canada) shape the edges of, or frame, the project of depicting the spaces of battles by which the Mohawk people were displaced. The Mohawk River has been diminished by hydroelectric dams, so that as Niro photographs it, we see the ghost of its former force. The Grand River, by the reservation in Ontario, is flanked by high-tension power lines, a haunting sign of its

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conscription to industrialization (Fig.  4.1). As Niro and her sister drive between Canada and the United States, traversing the boundary of colonization—the line between nation-states—by this process of “rememorying,” they recover the ground from which their ancestors were displaced, where their ancestors were killed, and they reach, by way of return to, the traditional ancestral lands of the Haudenosaunee.3 The work of Battlefields is, then, the work that novelist Toni Morrison describes as “rememory.” It is photography as a process of reencountering ancestral suffering. But in this reencounter, the series stages the reappearance of what has been disappeared. The ancestral lands of Niro’s ancestors, the places where they were killed and of which they were dispossessed, reemerge through Niro’s camera; encountering disappearance, the reality of that land, the reality of the land as Haudenosaunee ancestral terrain, reemerges.

Fig. 4.1  Shelley Niro, Grand River, from the series Battlefields of My Ancestors, 2015, color inkjet print on archival paper, 17 × 22ʺ. Copyright Shelley Niro. Courtesy of the artist

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Ten Pretty Little Indian Houses Consider Niro’s photograph, Ten Pretty Little Indian Houses, of a small boulder bearing a plaque that reads, “A very pretty Indian town of ten houses, burned September 21st, 1779.” (Fig. 4.2). The succinct words, drawn from Journals of the Military Expedition of Major General John Sullivan, searingly implies not only the destruction (for no reason given, other than imperialist encroach) of Indigenous homes, but also presumably the deaths of those inside the houses. It eerily conveys that the town was “pretty,” a space then that the inhabitants enjoyed, that was home and comfort to them. This is not about ownership of land, but about home. The pretty houses’ desecration hangs in the air around the photograph, with the plaque standing as a scar achingly inadequate to what was lost. In exchange for a town, where people were comfortable and at home, is a

Fig. 4.2  Shelley Niro, Ten Pretty Little Indian Houses, from the series Battlefields of My Ancestors, 2015, color inkjet print on archival paper, 17 × 22ʺ. Copyright Shelley Niro. Courtesy of the artist

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barren plaque set on a low stone. It is almost neglected, a space so easily passed over. The photograph itself is a kind of scar that honors the invisible town, the erased town, commenting on the injustice of its erasure. In the gaze of the photograph time is extended and compressed. This is photography with a long gaze, of long form. The burned village, and those who died in the conflagration, are invoked and become vivid in the mind’s eye—they were pretty—making that day in September 1779 visible in its swirl of flame. At the same time, the temporal extension of the project of colonization is manifested in the photograph. Colonization of course did not begin in 1779, but even so 1779 is significantly distant in time from the second decade of the twenty-first century, the time of Niro’s photographic installation. Colonization has happened and it is still going on—this is the signification of Niro’s photograph. The time of coloniality is not over but extends from the burned houses of 1779 through to the contemporary luminous photograph that Niro deploys, as a statement in public space, public space shaped and still controlled by terms of coloniality. The strategies of visibility that the photography of resistance deploys turn on a skewing and revising of the conceptual frame of the image. For Niro’s Battlefields of My Ancestors series, the public process of the photographs moves through an implicit narrative of witnessing wherein the photographer privately witnesses the plaques and landscapes of colonialist violence and then brings that view, dispassionately, into public space, iterated as a new public visibility. Niro’s photographs “only” record what is there to be seen, but by wresting the plaques and landscapes from their quotidian place in coloniality’s habits of visibility, she alters the frame around the scenes, rearranging the visible by replacing the space (frame) around these plaques.4 A telling companion to the plaque discussed above is Niro’s photograph of the large plaque affixed to a perpendicular stone in New Hampshire, commemorating the same General Sullivan for his campaign against “the Six Tribes” (Fig. 4.3). The plaque’s celebration of the near erasure of the Six Tribes (that is, the Six Nations) from the United States, as they were mostly forced into Canada, involving as it does mass death, displacement, or in a word, genocide, is shocking. Niro’s photograph does not alter the text or the scene, but the shocking effect of the image stems from this precision. The image, in the installation Battlefields of My Ancestors, estranges the plaque within its quiet bucolic New Hampshire setting, making clear that the state of New Hampshire celebrates genocide and celebrates an enactor of genocide, General Sullivan. The frame of the small monumentality of the plaque is enlarged in Niro’s

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Fig. 4.3  Shelley Niro, Sullivan-Clinton Campaign, from the series Battlefields of My Ancestors, 2015, color inkjet print on archival paper, 17 × 22ʺ. Copyright Shelley Niro. Courtesy of the artist

photograph, as the photograph not only transfers the gaze outside coloniality but also enlarges the critique of the social field that commemorates genocide. It is through redrawing of the frame that Niro’s Battlefields of My Ancestors takes quotidian scenes of “everyday” Canadian and American landscapes, the plaques celebrating the erasure of Indigenous people from the landscape as well as the marks of colonialist industrialization across the landscape, and makes of the series a radical political critique of coloniality. Each individual image is quiet, documentary in feel. But the effect of the always depopulated scenes is haunting. Not haunting in a gentle or gothic way, but confrontationally haunting. This is the system by which we live. We, citizens of Canada and the United States of America, live in, live with, coloniality. That is the frame through which we habitually see. Coloniality/modernity is our common lens, our everyday lens. The engine of Niro’s project, in Battlefields of My Ancestors, is to take apart that

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habitual frame of seeing through, seeing in, seeing from the perspective of coloniality.5 The images recording monuments and landscapes both shrink and enlarge those markers, skewing the frame around them, estranging them from the quotidian settings, making us see them anew. The photographic medium is essential for Niro’s installation, which draws on photography’s documentary and testimonial capacity and its public legibility. The evidentiary force of the installation carries its subversive and revolutionary potential. It is work that can only be done in photography. Murals, paintings, sculpture, performance—none of these would convey the specific wrenching of the frame of seeing that is the crux of Niro’s anticolonialist installation. The works printed in large formats, 40″ × 60″, with acrylic protectors, were shown in various cities and towns in Ontario (where Niro now lives). In these public installations, Niro’s Battlefields of My Ancestors takes public space that is largely ignored—the plaques and memory sites of Indigenous ancestral lands, lands where Niro’s ancestors were killed and from which they were exiled—and inserts it into public space that garners attention, that is, art galleries and town centers. She takes the abandoned roads, the choked rivers, the tawdry advertising selling off Indigenous ancestral lands, the tiny plaques commemorating massive losses for the Mohawk; she takes these habitually ignored, almost unseen public places and, through photography as a process of rememory, emplaces knowledge of these spaces into public view and public discourse. In Niro’s photograph Fergus: Source of the Grand River, from the series Battlefields of My Ancestors, the Grand River where Mohawk, Six Nations, have been resettled is shown as a boundary and also as a site of boundary violation by coloniality (Fig. 4.4). Six Nations of the Grand River is the largest reservation in Canada. It is a tiny fraction of the land originally promised the Six Nations in the Haldimand Treaty.6 Niro’s photograph shows a billboard advertisement for a company called Reid’s Heritage Homes, wherein the advertisement promises prospective buyers that they can “save thousands” by buying homes in Fergus, that is, encroaching on the already curtailed and fragmentary land of the Haudenosaunee. The bucolic scene is marred by the commercial billboard. More to the point, the multiple displacements of the Haudenosaunee are revealed in the photograph. The Haudenosaunee were pushed out of the Mohawk Valley in the late eighteenth century and then resettled in Canada around the Grand River; most of that land was lost as the reservation land now is a sliver of that originally promised in the Haldimand Treaty. And, now, in the

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Fig. 4.4  Shelley Niro, Fergus: Source of the Grand River, from the series Battlefields of My Ancestors, 2015, color inkjet on archival paper, 17 × 22ʺ. Copyright Shelley Niro. Courtesy of the artist

twenty-first century, the land is again being stripped away, sold to Whites with the promise of “saving thousands” by encroaching on Haudenosaunee land. The pressure of capitalist coloniality is clear in Niro’s image. It is the desire to have money and save money that spurs White coloniality. Ironically, the company calls itself “heritage homes” whereas the effect of the real estate venture is to strip even further the actual “heritage” of the North American continent—Indigenous American. The sign promising “heritage” is actually about suppressing and erasing the real inheritance of the land, by which Whites encroach and displace Indigenous Americans. Niro’s photograph, Fergus: Source of the Grand River, then alters how we interpret the concept of heritage/inheritance and how we fit this concept in the social landscape of North America. The model home pictured on the billboard suggests colonialist wealth and suburban comfort. It leaves no space for other modes of sociality, but insists on dominating the

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imaginative as well as the literal landscape with its mass. Niro’s photograph turns the table on this implicit erasure of Haudenosaunee presence. Noting that the sign stands on land where Whites fought and killed Indigenous peoples—that is, noting that the land itself was a battlefield— Niro’s photograph rearranges how we might conceptualize homeyness. She reveals the violence behind coloniality’s ideology of home. For Whites to “save thousands” of dollars means the erasure of the disappearance, through death and displacement, of “thousands” (many, many thousands) of Indigenous Americans. White dollars are privileged signifiers drawn into visibility by coloniality while Indigenous lives are suppressed and erased. Niro’s photograph brings back into visibility these erased Indigenous “thousands,” reinstating Indigenous American presence. Lundy’s Lane from the series Battlefields of My Ancestors displays the signage of Drummond Hill Cemetery, as if there were not also, here, the site of Indigenous deaths, suffering, and displacement. The sign that Niro photographs signifies also that this is the site of the Battle of Lundy’s Lane, July 25, 1814, part of the War of 1812 (Fig. 4.5). Haudenosaunee who were allied with the British to repulse the Americans were killed in the battle, and—an irony never noted in the Drummond Hill Cemetery signage—the battle itself was fought on the land from which the Haudenosaunee had been dispossessed. For Indigenous warriors, the War of 1812 was an attempt to push the colonizers off their land, allying with the British so that America could become again Indigenous land. Instead, the War of 1812 definitively closed a key path for possible Indigenous regaining of their land, that of alliance with an external ally. This attempt to halt colonization of their land failed, making the Battle of Lundy’s Lane, the bloodiest battle fought on Canadian soil, a key signifier of the loss of land, and independence, of Indigenous Americans. In Niro’s photograph, the eerily celebratory sign and calm-looking burial ground signify the extensive reach of coloniality. This is not a burial ground for Indigenous Americans. It is a place where Whites lay claim to the land even in death. Abandoned Road across from Beaver Dams Site from Battlefields of My Ancestors shows an abandoned, derelict, rural landscape near the site of the Battle of Beaver Dams (Fig. 4.6).7 The battle in which Mohawk died fighting for the last chance to repulse American colonization leaves only the trace of this abandoned road. Looking at the image, one imagines the foreclosed struggle of the Mohawk to regain and retain their lands. The road presents a starving landscape, emblematizing the wastefulness of

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Fig. 4.5  Shelley Niro, Lundy’s Lane, from the series Battlefields of My Ancestors, 2015, color inkjet print on archival paper, 17 × 22ʺ. Copyright Shelley Niro. Courtesy of the artist

coloniality’s use of land. The pattern of coloniality’s use of land is encroachment followed by desecration. The land is held but not held sacredly. The compulsive waste product of capitalist coloniality is, above all, wasted land, trashed land, discarded land. The road’s poignant narrowing toward the vanishing point carries with it the whole feeling of grief and the pointlessness of coloniality’s violent press to subjugate land. The land thus secured by White coloniality is not held sacred, never valued beyond its temporary transient economic usefulness. Battlefields of My Ancestors stages a confrontation with coloniality/modernity by radically expanding the temporal frame and conditions of seeing. The series allows us to see what is not there, and what has for centuries been there. What is not there, and the long form of what is still there waiting to be seen, is the focus of the photographs in Niro’s Battlefields of My Ancestors. To show what is not there is an

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Fig. 4.6  Shelley Niro, Abandoned Road across from Beaver Dam Site, from the series Battlefields of My Ancestors, 2015, color inkjet print on archival paper, 17 × 22ʺ. Copyright Shelley Niro. Courtesy of the artist

emphasis of the series: Niro’s ancestors are not there, on that land, because colonizing violence destroyed their ancestral access to the land, even their ties to the land that go back many thousands of years. It is not that Niro’s ancestors are not literally present on the land, as one would hardly expect anyone alive in the eighteenth century to still be alive in the twenty-first century, but that Niro’s ancestors’ descendants are not present on the land, that the land was violated and taken through colonization, through violence against Niro’s ancestors. This violence continues in the exclusion of the ancestors’ descendants from the land. Emphatically, Niro the photographer is there, present on the land, with her camera as she photographs. And yet, in her isolation, in the depopulated landscapes that once were ancestral villages and lands, the violence of coloniality is articulated poignantly. Even traveling with her sister, the photographer works in

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relative isolation, the two women standing for a lost community on ancestral homeland. The landscape that is not and that persists is the revelation of Niro’s installation Battlefields of My Ancestors. The photographic series, designed for display in public space, shimmers with multiple temporalities. It instates a liminal space where we are shown anew Niro’s ancestors’ lands and the places where colonial violence killed and displaced them, but we are also shown the present-day landscape of coloniality. Between these poles—the erasure of Indigenous presence and the violent assertion of coloniality’s landscape—Niro’s Battlefields shows the battle, the struggle, to reveal and inhabit both durational temporalities, the duration of Indigenous land and the duration of coloniality’s desecration of the land. The photographic installation Battlefields of My Ancestors inserts photography’s representation of public space into public space. The emotional, ancestral tie to the land that Niro photographs moves through the images into the public spaces of display so that the loss of ancestral land becomes a publicly stated loss. The double framing of loss extends the temporality of the images so that their duration precedes the loss of ancestral land and also acts as postlude to that loss. Standing as the installation does in and for and of public space, it alters coloniality’s public space, making us aware of how empty, barren, is public space in coloniality. The deep emotional attachment that percolates through Niro’s haunting and mournful images of lands her ancestors lost, and lands on which her ancestors were killed, is articulately absent from the public space of coloniality. Battlefields of My Ancestors shows what is not there: the meaning of land under coloniality stripped of any force other than financial profit. The critique of coloniality, the work’s anticolonial power, inheres in its ability to show the disappeared, show the invisible, show what is erased through the patterns of land use and land occupation in coloniality/modernity.8

Playing War An-My Lê’s Small Wars, performing a different kind of mnemonic work than Niro’s, similarly deploys photographic documentary to testify to coloniality’s violence in North America. Lê, who was born in Vietnam, fled the country with her family because of the ravages of America’s imperialist war in Vietnam. She created Small Wars to show “the Vietnam of the mind,” black-and-white footage of Vietnam War reenactors (apparently mostly White men) in central Virginia in the early twenty-first

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century. Eerily, the photographs of the reenactors are difficult to distinguish from images of war itself. Only knowledge of the flora of central Virginia, as compared with that of Vietnam, clues us that this is not the Vietnam War itself. Possibly also the lack of bloodshed and terror cue us to the difference. The series exemplifies the virtual simulacra of images about war that philosopher Jean Baudrillard argues is experienced as more real than war itself: It is precisely when it appears most truthful, most faithful and most in conformity to reality that the image is most diabolical—and our technical images, whether they be from photography, cinema or television, are in the overwhelming majority more “figurative,” “realist,” than all the images from the past cultures. It is in its resemblance, not only analogical but technological, that the image is most immoral and perverse.9

With that said, the photographs in their disturbing calm reflect uncannily against well-known documentary photographic images of the Vietnam War. For this was the last imperialist American war that was shown to the public through photographs and television that did not cover but exposed the horrific violence of the war. Described, chillingly, as “the living room war,” the carnage that America wrought in Vietnam was visible through photographic media in a way that later imperialist wars were not.10 Nick Ut’s photograph of the naked, burning child Phan Thi Kim Phúc seared itself into the national imagination, an image that still signifies horror even as the imperialist violence of the United States has not abated, just become less widely disseminated in photographs. The violence of the image, whereas it could have been faked, was not. Phan Thi Kim Phúc and the other children seen running and burning were horrifically injured. The look of terror on their faces is far from the placid facial expressions of the reenactors in central Virginia. Compare, for example, the 1968 news image Marines Riding atop an M48-Tank to Lê’s Rescue. Both images feature smoke and military vehicles (a tank and a small plane, respectively), yet the soldiers’ need to protect themselves from the violence of their own guns (plugging their ears against the noise) stands in contrast to the calm reenactors. Likewise, the crowdedness of the real soldiers, their youth, and the disorganization of war itself contrast sharply with the reenactors’ script. The young men fighting in the real war are vulnerable, messy, and frightened. The reenactors are in control, excited. Virginia’s pine trees

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show in Lê’s photograph, whereas the news image from the Vietnam War shows bamboo and other grasses native to Vietnam. The reenacted war is a “small” war, a miniature version of the real catastrophe. Photographs are also “small” encapsulations of events, containing in fixed frames the expansive pain of war. The temporality of photography expands and contains the time of events. The war in Lê’s country of origin, called by the U.S. imperialist term “the Vietnam War,” wreaked permanent trauma on its survivors, not only the American soldiers who often came home with posttraumatic stress disorder but also the people of Vietnam, people like Lê’s family who were displaced, people who lost family members, who fought in battles, whose bodies and souls were scarred by the war. The war, then, doesn’t end but continues. Lê creates a haunting effect of what was erased by the war showing how a strategic policy by the United States—a game of imperialism—erased and effaced, displaced and harmed, her family, her country of origin. The game of war’s reenactment, then, stands as proxy for the game of imperialist strategy in war in Lê’s photographic series. This gamesmanship is contrasted with the poignantly human world of her family history. The small wars, then, are not just the reenacted wars, not just the photographs, that compress the pain of war into framed image, but also the way that imperialist strategy conceptualizes such wars of aggression as miniature, that is, not as hefty as wars fought on home soil. The imperialist press of capitalism shrinks countries and wars into the goal of dominion, erasing the people who live, and who are killed, in the country where imperialist capitalism brings the war. Small Wars protests this shrinking of the meaning of land, landscape, history, family, ancestry, protests the way that imperialist capitalism shrinks the meaning of the lands it wrenches under coloniality.

Against Erasure Roughly contemporaneous, Niro’s Battlefields of My Ancestors and Lê’s Small Wars reflect painfully on the extensive reach of coloniality’s erasures. Both series insist on visibility for the very aspects of violence and violation that coloniality operates by hiding and suppressing. As Greg Grandin argues (albeit not in reference to the genocide of North American Indigenous people), capitalist empire often works by suppressing the

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record of it violence.11 Direct exposure of the violence that creates and sustains coloniality is hidden in a “workshop,” the discreet practice of ravaging other lands and peoples to open further markets, to access further land, is a compulsive habit of coloniality. There is no end for coloniality’s overreach because the mechanism or machine of colonization can never reach stasis or satisfaction. It is less a self-perpetuating system than a system that must have new erasures, new suppressions, to continue. It is not just the taking of other peoples’ lands, the stripping of land from ancestral stewardship and guardianship, that defines the work of coloniality, but also the suppression of this violation. As Turner describes it, in his influential nineteenth-century thesis of American expansion, the suppression of the “Indian” in what becomes America is the essential act and action of coloniality.12 This compulsive erasure is not, however, incidental or accidental but of the substance of coloniality, which creates its sociality precisely through the process of suppressing Indigeneity. That is, what defines Americanness is not its European origin but the process by which it erases Indigenous culture, presence, and people where it lands. This process extends in a lineage of coloniality’s habits from Niro’s invocation of ancestral history of the displacement of the Haudenosaunee as an act at the precise origin of the United States of America to Lê’s visual meditation on the war of coloniality in her nation of origin, Vietnam. The compulsive act of coloniality is not “merely” killing and displacing people on the land from which they wish to extract monetary value but erasing the traces of those deaths and displacements, absorbing the colonized into the mytheme of nationality. To reinstate the human and material landscape that came before coloniality, and that persists if altered and unseen through coloniality, Niro and Lê confront the specific violence of colonization’s hard power, that is, the direct application of violence against Indigenous and national populations, wars of conquest (genocidal against Indigenous Americans). This pattern of hiding the meaning and impetus of its “small wars” is integral to the mythology of Americanness. Coloniality/modernity in the Americas depends on cultivating and enforcing a belief in the benevolence of the project of colonization.13 The pain of violence coupled with erasure or suppression is the object of the evocative photographic documentation that Niro and Lê enact.

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Ideas of Origin Niro’s Battlefields of My Ancestors emerges from her experiences of coming back to the Mohawk Valley from which the Haudenosaunee were displaced and feeling the chill of, as she puts it, “blood memory.”14 It also stems from her work with the legend of Sky Woman.15 As a witness of the suppressed, erased, invisible battlefields of coloniality, Niro metaphorically performs like Sky Woman: in the Battlefields photographs we do not see the photographer, of course, but through her gaze our gaze (as we look at these images) is floating between times, between earth and sky, witnessing the places of blood memory. The process of falling into history, falling into our own place in history, Niro well understands as traumatic.16 The trauma of disconnection from the ancestral land of the Mohawk Valley, the rupture after centuries of stable connection to the land into the dislocation brought about by settler-colonialist wars, percolates through the vision of the photographs of Battlefields. The images are desolate, haunting, and expressive of social spaces full of unexpressed, unexpiated trauma. In this sense they chime with Lê’s gesture of drawing in memory—from Vietnam before her family was displaced by colonialist war—which infuses her documentation of war reenactors with pain. Both Niro and Lê insist on revealing the devastation of inherited, ancestral connection to lands from which the living are now brutally separated. Niro can go back, physically, to the Mohawk Valley. She can stand on the place of settler-colonialist war battles, but she cannot regain the land in its former state. Lê can document the war reenactors’ “return” to Vietnam, but she herself has become an American and, whereas she could return to the country of her birth, the experience of having never been wrenched away is completely unavailable to her—it is trauma that lives on.

Temporal Frames The inaccessible and yet always present time outside coloniality, the time that comes before settler-colonialist wars and genocides, the time that also persists though suppressed in the context of coloniality, is the time of the photography of resistance. It is the time of battlefields hiding the unacknowledged disavowed dead. It is the time of returning to those places of violence, the battle, photographing them not from the perspective of the settler-colonialist regime of power and surveillance but against the temporality of that regime, against the temporality of “progressive” time that

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imagines it moves beyond the temporality of Indigeneity.17 The time of Niro’s Battlefields and Lê’s Small Wars is expansive and unstable. It is both then and now, in the way of trauma, it is both the time when the Haudenosaunee were fighting to hold onto their ancestral land and the time when their descendants have been displaced from that land; it is the time before the Vietnam War and the time after that war of imperialist aggression. In the way of coloniality, the time of Indigeneity is suppressed but the photography of resistance excavates this suppressed time. As image persists in time and crosses temporalities, the photography of Niro and Lê moves through the arc of coloniality by refusing the settler-colonialist temporality. This refusal of the temporal frame of conquest turns on the refusal to surrender visibility. By invoking that which has been suppressed in the visual palimpsest of coloniality’s mythos, Niro and Lê disallow the erasure of those killed by colonization’s “progress.” The battlefields and wars they show are not typical documentary photography. They do not show corpses or the wounded. They do not show the literal—“real”—battles, soldiers, and bombed landscapes. Rather they show the landscape of trauma and survivance living on despite the anguish of what one’s ancestors and immediate family, and oneself, have suffered through coloniality.18 Living on by stepping outside the locked and constraining frame of coloniality/modernity. As Rancière writes of such artworks (not writing of Niro’s and Lê’s photography specifically) “alterity enters into the very composition of these images.”19 However here the alterity is not that the images are not referential but that they reference the invisible, they reference not specifically documented events but durational events, durationality as a state of traumatic persistence in coloniality. “The wordless immediacy of the visible … radicalizes its effect,” writes Rancière, and in Niro’s and Lê’s depictions of battles rendered invisible through coloniality it is the immediacy of seeing the unseen that draws us into the haunting documentation of coloniality’s effect.20 Coloniality compulsively produces disavowed ghosts, those whose lives are taken by settler-colonialist wars, those who are displaced, those whose lives are mangled by coloniality’s practice of hard power and soft power. As Niro poignantly discusses, Indigenous American youths are far more likely to commit suicide than youths of any other demographic; Indigenous American girls and women are far more likely to be victims of domestic violence and to be “disappeared,” that is, abducted

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and never found. Coloniality is not an event in the past, or even a set of events in the past, but an ongoing traumatic condition. For Lê, the ongoing traumatic condition is a “Vietnam of the mind,” here referring not to Vietnam the country of her origin but to the damage done to her country—and family—of origin. The shift into the psychology of the colonized is evoked and analyzed in Frantz Fanon’s theorization of the psychological impact of colonization. Writing in the mid twentieth century, he argues, “Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.”21 This monstrousness Fanon specifically understands as its psychological torture of colonized subjects, its simultaneous subjugation and erasure of the subjectivity of non-European cultures and peoples. Niro’s Battlefields of My Ancestors and Lê’s Small Wars are in that category of art that Rancière describes as sublime in its representation of the “unrepresentable.”22 Whereas Rancière describes the unrepresentable trope of Oedipal blindness, I suggest that the photography of resistance represents the unrepresentable fact of American history as the intolerable, marked by the original sins of genocide and enslavement and the continuing wars of imperialist conquest, leaving in its continual wake of violence “an identity between presence and absence.”23 The unrepresentable America is the one suppressed by coloniality/modernity’s myth of progress. Against this myth, in the space between presence and absence, Niro and Lê create counter mythologies, myths of revelation; the unrepresentable violence of America is not the Oedipal myth, a centerpiece of Western culture, but the unrepresentable erasure of what the Americas were before the advent of coloniality/modernity. Here I do not reference a prelapsarian, Edenic idealization but rather the social, geographic, and historical space outside coloniality. This is compulsively reiterated, by colonialist mythology, as the unrepresentable, the disappeared. The work of the photography of resistance is to make these unrepresentable presences present. Photography on the surface tells the story of the imminently representable; it is wedded, welded, to the immediate, the skin of light, the real and visible materiality of time and world. Its connection to war is “war photography,” and yet Niro and Lê show a different kind of war photography. Consider Pete Hamill’s comments, in Vietnam: The Real War; A Photographic History by the Associated Press, on the role of photography in war: “The commitment … was to the truth of the war.”24 Yet as he closes

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his lyrical essay on the truth value of documentary photography of war, Hamill poignantly notes the role of temporal duration in understanding the war, stating, “Something triggers memory: Aretha Franklin singing Respect; the sound of a helicopter in the sky; a TV commercial for a war film . . . and then the war suddenly returns in a rush. Full of fear. Screaming. Pain. Loss.”25 In other words, the truth value of straight photography, while searing, is also incomplete. The durational temporality of memory is that which comes on in a rush of pain and loss. This is the documentation of Niro’s and Lê’s wars, their inherited wars, ancestral scars, hidden “small” wars on the way to the United States’ domination. I do not mean here, of course, to detract from the power and value of straight documentary photography. Its evidentiary force is one of the purest forms of photography and a powerful tool for political contestation, bearing what Susie Linfield so rightly calls the “cruel radiance” (quoting Walker Evans).26 And yet, the photography of resistance carries the rush of memory across time, the temporal durationality of inherited cultural pain or intergenerational trauma. Niro and Lê show no suffering bodies, no corpses, no moments of battle. They show the duration of imperialist wars, the effects on the next generation, and the next and the next. They make the argument that settler-colonialist wars do not end, but rather they take on new forms, the forms of haunting persistence. For how does one photographically document intergenerational trauma? The answer is by revising and reenvisioning documentary photography.

Vistas The land itself is dramatized in these works, though different from that in traditional landscape photography. The frame for Lê’s work, for example, is close and tight rather than expansive. An explosion (the image titled Explosion) in the Virginia woodland and countryside, for example, is represented as a kind of miniature war, literally a small war, in that the close frame shows the tiny scale of the reenacted war. This feminization of the historically masculinist tropes of war photography and landscape photography slyly subverts and critiques the gruesome pain and violence of settler-­colonialist wars as well as the acquisitive, conquest-framed practice of landscape photography, traditionally practiced by members of the settler-­colonialist group as a gesture of commanding or expressing command or domain of the landscape.27 Here, Lê deploys a decolonizing feminist intervention, bringing into her Small Wars series a layered critique of

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the masculinist violence of coloniality/modernity. As Lê states, it is the camera that protects her from experiencing the full pain of remembering a “Vietnam of the mind.” But the camera protects her also because she uses it as a tool to contest politically oppressive structures that erase the experience of Vietnamese people during the settler-colonialist war in Vietnam. Through her camera, this experience of pain is approached, represented, in the subtly encroaching witnessing of Small Wars. She does not make fun of the reenactors but does submerge their project in the affective pain of the child displaced by the war they are reenacting. The smallness of the reenactors’ gesture imbues the series with pathos; we feel saddened both by and with the reenactors, as we look at them through Lê’s lens. The poignancy of Lê’s gaze on the war reenactors is precisely its small scale. The miniature fits the typology of the feminine/feminized, wherein the small, the miniature, is coded feminine.28 Lê, through her miniatures of war photography, subvert expectations of the feminine, by playing precisely on the trope of the miniature, the small, the supposedly unimportant. And in doing so, Lê diminishes any possible heroism of war.29 At the same time, she brings a child’s gaze to the war that tore apart her childhood, the smallness of settler-colonialist wars; that is, the absolute lack of heroism at the core of these violations is subtly revealed in Lê’s Small Wars. Similarly, and differently, the feminist gaze plays an understated but forceful role in Niro’s Battlefields of My Ancestors. For Niro’s gaze, here, is that of the vestal daughter who returns to the cindered landscape of her family, demands justice, and takes account of the harms done. Niro undercuts any possible mythic heroism of battlefields and all that hangs over settler-colonialist preservation of these sites, heralding the valor of putative founding fathers. By contrast, Niro’s battlefields are places hollow, empty, bereft, and stripped of the real forefathers of America—Niro’s ancestors, Indigenous Americans. Niro’s battlefields are the spaces of aftermath, places where the national myths (in Canada and the United States) of suppressing and erasing the presence of Indigenous Americans are exposed. The perfunctory dismissal of “Indian” villages in the plaques photographed in Niro’s Battlefields series acts as a deep scar, an emblem of a deep wound, where the symbolic force of settler-colonialist dismissal of the weight and meaning of genocide and displacement of Indigenous Americans is part of the scar. That is, Niro’s Battlefields of My Ancestors reveals simultaneously the haunting effects of genocide and displacement down generations and also the culpability, the ongoing culpability, of

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settler-colonialist mythologies of conquest. Niro’s acts of witnessing express a feminist vision in their resistance. Niro does not reveal herself and does not stage direct confrontation with the settler-colonialist actors who hold in place the system of domination that still oppresses Indigenous Americans. Instead, her witnessing is very still, employing remote sensing abilities so that the confrontation with coloniality/modernity occurs in the images themselves. In other words, Niro removes herself from the drama of confrontation so that it is lodged in the photographs through the motivated gaze of the witness that defines the series Battlefields of My Ancestors. What is feminist about this shift that makes confrontation a kind of reader-response moment, bringing the viewer into the place of contestation? One might say Niro shifts her ego out of the frame as she beckons the viewer into the frame. Importantly, I do not suggest that this rearranging of the visible is feminine.30 Rather it is feminist.31 Niro’s Battlefields of My Ancestors beckons the viewer to stand with her in witnessing the long-reaching, temporally durational effects of settler-colonialist violence. There is no easy resolution for this grief, and yet resistance to the mythology of coloniality/modernity is necessary because only in this space of resistance do we see history accurately. The accuracy of Niro’s vision is paramount. In her Battlefields series, Niro surveys the damage done, the wreckage of coloniality. Instead of villages, we see dreary commemorative plaques. Instead of Haudenosaunee culture, we see colonialist burial grounds. We see abandoned roads, rivers strewn with the debris and detritus of industrial development. We see advertisements with pictures of homes rather than the vivid ancestral home of the Haudenosaunee people. In other words, we see a landscape not only purloined but also denuded of beauty and substantive meaning. We see the “shallows” of coloniality and capitalism, the landscape stripped of meaning, transmuted instead to industrial or capitalist “value.” The battlefields, then, are not just those on which battles once were fought but a terrain on which battles, of a different but related kind, are still being waged. The encroachment onto Haudenosaunee land is not over and in the past but ongoing, as the project of coloniality/modernity entails late-stage capitalist actions that further erode the land, that hold onto the land for capitalist purposes. It is not that Niro is a Marxist, nor that she lives her life outside capitalist structures. Rather, her photographs strip away the veneer of the inherent desirability of capitalist land-use patterns, strip away the unceasing promulgation of desire that is capitalist propaganda masked as progress.

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Niro’s camera shows time as durational, dual—we are always already in the present time—when she reveals the stripped land wrought by coloniality and late capitalism, and the time when the land was lived on by the Haudenosaunee, a much longer time, one that supersedes the present in its duration and yet is also suppressed by the present. The mournful durationality of her vision sustains an encounter with the trauma of coloniality and late capitalism, a trauma that is experienced not only by Indigenous Americans but also by anyone—everyone—living within this system, because of its suppressions and ongoing need for masked violence to propagate its structures of domination. As Mignolo argues, it is through the compulsive reproduction of power structures that coloniality depicts itself as the status quo.32 Niro’s work, in Battlefields of My Ancestors, is to pull away the mask of the acceptability of the status quo, showing that this is not the world that has to be, although it is for this moment the world that is. The battlefields that Niro and Lê show, then, are not episodic and of one time but durational and extensive through memory and the materiality of memory. The impersonal and impassive vistas of the photographic series Small Wars and Battlefields of My Ancestors unfold to the deeply personal and affective (emotive) turn of the photographers’ history in families and descendants of those ravaged by coloniality’s overt violence. In this way, Niro and Lê reveal their own traumatic engagement with the palimpsest of what constitutes American land.33 The land as palimpsest, as André Corboz insightfully theorizes land-use patterns under coloniality/modernity, has a subtext of immense violence in America. The trauma of inhabiting this palimpsest from the vantage of the displaced is the undercurrent of Niro’s and Lê’s battlefield series of photographs.34 The violence of genocide haunts Niro’s Battlefields, that is, the dead and the displaced, the self as survivor whose foundational, ancestral ties to the land persist but are harmed by settler-colonialist violence with its ongoing reach. In Lê’s Small Wars, the erasure of the experience of the Vietnamese in the Vietnam War is subtly and painfully dramatized. In Small Wars, the Vietnamese experience is missing entirely; the reenactors ignore it. This is precisely the dominant American response to this conflict—concern about the experience of Americans, not about the suffering, death, and displacement of Vietnamese. As Lê photographs the reenactors she reinstates the presence of a Vietnamese gaze—her gaze—with the pain of her

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remembered trauma as a child during the war, a child whose family was displaced by the war. But her presence is felt in the photographs, through their Benjaminian aura; she critiques the American erasure of the Vietnamese experience by showing this erasure, showing a suppressed invisibility. The subversive interventions of Niro’s and Lê’s critique of wars work through the oscillation of visibility and invisibility. In these series, what is not shown is larger than what is shown. That is the point. In Lê’s “Vietnam of the mind” the suffering of Vietnamese people and the ravaging of the land stand almost as the unrepresentable.35 The degree, extent, and duration of suffering and loss, for Lê’s family, which lost Vietnam and was displaced by the war, are represented in Lê’s Small Wars through their unshown quality. The suffering’s durationality is not unshowable, but rather is shown through the adumbration of the photography of resistance. What disappears is not the suffering itself, not its extension in time, but the knowledge or acknowledgement of the dominant culture (in the United States) of the harm done to the Vietnamese people and land. Evoking this specific disappearance, Lê connotes also the depth of loss. One might say her photographs shade toward the unspeakable, but of course image is articulation. Speech is here, for it is speech (visual sign) that indicates an urgency of suffering and loss revealed precisely in its hidden and revealed force. Extension in time has a privileged, if involuted, relationship to the photographic. The photograph has been the mark of how some noun—person, place, or thing—appears at a specific moment in time, the welding of time and light (for time is swallowed by light) into sign (image, eidos). As such, it has often been deployed and interpreted as the medium of the instant.36 As Jacques Lacan argues, wedded to the urge of the gaze is the photographic register, the moment at which the self becomes the object of the other’s gaze, and the sun’s gaze, is the distillation of a terrifying subjectivity of loss: I am photographed.37 That is, I come into visibility through the exposure of sunlight and the glare of the other’s seeing me; in light, and before the other, I am exposed, laid bare. This is the essence of the photographic, its surveillance of the visible, its ability to freeze, condense, cut, stop, and hold the image. And yet, in the photography of resistance the moment of exposure before the other is the ominous durational time of exposure to coloniality. There is no one single instance in which the traumata that Niro and Lê depict took place. Instead, there are multiple

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ongoing aggressions, battles, wars, displacements, genocides, that have been and continue to be produced by the structure of coloniality. The repetitive, reiterative violations and violence of the structure of coloniality mean that photographing one moment in this violence somewhat misses the temporal reach and force of this violence. For what coloniality produces is violence that it then erases. Not erases in the sense of heals and mends, but erases in the sense of absorbs into the mythical structures of its violence. Violence becomes progress, in this ideological transmutation wherein coloniality obscures its wars. Hence, the titles of Niro’s and Lê’s works are both crucial and critical to understanding the series. Battlefields of My Ancestors implies heritage, familial extension, and yet what Niro’s photographs reveal is heritage stripped away, damaged, purloined, and familial extension distorted through coloniality’s violence. These images chill us with their revelation of the ongoing force of coloniality, the deep reach of this history and its unending force. The land is not only palimpsest but also bereft, stripped of the culture the Haudenosaunee (Niro’s ancestors and people) created over millennia in North America. In this place of mourning there is no one fixed moment of loss but successive sequential acts of violence and traumata that are ongoing. The duration of coloniality calls for photography that does not encapsulate a moment but rather opens across the field of visibility the harms and griefs of coloniality’s ongoing—largely suppressed and invisible—wars. Lê’s Small Wars similarly exposes the temporal depth and duration, the ongoing trauma, of settler-colonialist wars. The allusions to landscape photography that Lê and Niro make are part of the haunting critique of settler-colonialist wars. The typology and iconography of landscape photography is itself a history of erasure of Indigenous presence as landscape photography in particular articulated the conquest of the American landscape. The tourist or anthropologist with a camera seems gentle compared with the soldier with a gun, but they work somewhat in tandem. The expansive late nineteenth-century landscape photography of the American West occurs because Indigenous Americans had been displaced, murdered, and disappeared from the lands so photographed. It is not that Carleton E.  Watkins, Timothy H.  O′ Sullivan, William Henry Jackson, and Frank Jay Haynes were themselves violent in intent when they photographed the newly “won” West.38 Rather, here, art follows violence. After

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the ebbing of so-called Indian Wars, that is, after Indigenous Americans are displaced, the conquest of the West by parasitic settler-colonialist culture begins to erase the violence that “opened” the American West to Europeans by creating myth and art in support of that myth.39 Landscape photography articulates domination subtly.40 Its violence is soft, it comes after hard violence and serves often to cover over hard violence, to create the myth of properness of the status quo. Lê’s and Niro’s works subvert the trope of landscape photography, undoing the sense of dominion and showing instead its ancillary of suffering. The vistas in Niro’s Battlefields are mournful and foreclosed. They are the flip side of nineteenth-century dreams of landscape photography. They show not dominion, not dominion by anyone, but rather omission, the loss of the land not simply as belonging to the Haudenosaunee but as sacred, yes, to the Haudenosaunee but also just as sacred. Land is not sacred in coloniality: instead, it is dominated. American landscape photography of the later nineteenth century ironically celebrated the idea of an “untouched” land, erasing the people—Indigenous Americans—who had lived there for millennia. The land as European settlers found it, as coloniality found it, was not unpopulated, but instead it was the home of Indigenous Americans. Landscape photography lays claim with soft violence. But Niro’s subversion of the trope of landscape photograph adumbrates the foreclosed vistas of coloniality, the deaths and displacement wrought by colonialist violence that “opened” the land for settler use. The sorrowful tight frames of her plaques, the askew roadside glances, the graveyards, the abandonment, these are the inherited landscapes of coloniality. Niro’s and Lê’s revelations stage a reinvestigation of the documentary and landscape, revising and expanding these photographic tropes. Indeed, at the boundary of the documentary and landscape is the fold of decolonization. Testimony, often testimony to violence, is the mark of documentary, whereas landscape is the articulation of access. Access and violence are the key urges of coloniality. In folding documentary and landscape traditions, in subverting them by twinning them, Niro and Lê expose the fault lines of photographic tradition even as they expand and, ultimately, engage photographic tradition. The photography of resistance is not antiphotographic but instead reshapes the boundaries of the photographic, bending the medium, reforming it through the vision of the activist eye that unmasks the violence and ongoing violative effects of coloniality.41

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Notes 1. Artist in interview with author, February 19, 2021. 2. Ibid. 3. I take the term rememory from Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, where its context is deeply entwined with trauma and the land. Toni Morrison, Beloved, 1st Vintage International ed. (New York: Vintage, 2004), 43. 4. François Laruelle, The Concept of Non-Photography, trans. Robin Mackay (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). 5. Fabiola Cineas, “Ibram X. Kendi on Why White America Is Still Shocked by White Supremacy,” Vox, January 12, 2021, https://www.vox. com/22227102/anti-­racism-­ibram-­kendi. 6. Alison Elizabeth Norman, “Race, Gender and Colonialism: Public Life among the Six Nations of Grand River, 1899–1939” (PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 2010), 44–45. 7. Ernest Alexander Cruikshank, The Documentary History of the Campaign upon the Niagara Frontier in the Year 1812 (Welland, ON: The Lundy’s Lane Historical Society, 1900), http://archive.org/details/cihm_05284. 8. Scott Lauria Morgensen, Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 79. 9. Jean Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images (Sydney: Power Institute Publications, 1990), 14. 10. “The War in Vietnam: A Story in Photographs,” National Archives, last reviewed April 25, 2018, https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/ vietnam-­photos. 11. Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 87–97. 12. Tiziano Bonazzi, “Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis and the SelfConsciousness of America,” Journal of American Studies 27, no. 2 (1993): 149–71. 13. Donna Merwick, “Violence as a Trait in Colonial North American Culture,” Australasian Journal of American Studies 7, no. 1 (1988): 40–51. 14. Artist in conversation with author, February 19, 2021. 15. Ibid. 16. Emma D.  Velez, “Decolonial Feminism at the Intersection: A Critical Reflection on the Relationship between Decolonial Feminism and Intersectionality,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 33, no. 3 (2019): 390–406. 17. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 37–70.

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18. Gerald Vizenor, ed., Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 45–49. 19. Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007), 3. 20. Ibid., 5. 21. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 2002), 312. 22. Rancière, Future of the Image, 111. 23. Ibid., 123. 24. Pete Hamill, introduction to Vietnam: The Real War; A Photographic History by the Associated Press, by Associated Press (New York: Abrams, 2013), 25. 25. Ibid., 35. 26. Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), XV. 27. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York : Dell Pub. Co., 1977), 64–65. 28. Griselda Pollock, “Femininity: Aporia or Sexual Difference?,” in The Matrixial Borderspace (Theory Out of Bounds), by Bracha L. Ettinger, ed. Brian Massumi, vol. 28 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 1–40. 29. Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012); and Linda Nochlin, Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1988). 30. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. and ed. Gabriel Rockhill, 1st ed. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012). 31. Toril Moi, “Feminist, Female, Feminine,” in The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism, ed. Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 116–32. See also Toril Moi, What Is a Woman? And Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 32. Linda Martín Alcoff, “Mignolo’s Epistemology of Coloniality,” CR: The New Centennial Review 7, no. 3 (2007): 79–101. 33. André Corboz, “The Land as Palimpsest,” Diogenes 31, no. 121 (March 1, 1983): 12–34, https://doi.org/10.1177/039219218303112102. 34. Hilary Weaver and Elaine Congress, “The Ongoing Impact of Colonization: Man-Made Trauma and Native Americans,” in Mass Trauma and Emotional Healing around the World: Rituals and Practices for Resilience and Meaning-Making, ed. Ani Kalayjian and Dominique Eugene, vol. 2, Human-Made Disasters (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), 211–26; and Maria Braveheart-Jordan and Lemyra DeBruyn, “So She May Walk in Balance: Integrating the Impact of Historical Trauma in the Treatment of

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Native American Indian Women,” in Racism in the Lives of Women: Testimony, Theory, and Guides to Antiracist Practice, ed. Jeanne Adleman and Gloria M. Enguidanos (New York: Haworth Press, 1995), 347. 35. Jacques Rancière, “Are Some Things Unrepresentable?,” in The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007), 111–37. 36. Jae Emerling, “Forces and Forms: Theories and Methods in the History of Photography,” in The Handbook of Photography Studies, ed. Gil Pasternak (London: Routledge, 2020), 97–113, https://doi-­org.proxy01.its.virginia.edu/10.4324/9781003103974. 37. Jacques Lacan, “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit A: Split Between the Eye and the Gaze,” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998). 38. Janelle Gelfand, “The Untouched West: Photography from the 19th Century,” Cincinnati Enquirer, December 8, 2016, https://www.cincinnati.com/story/entertainment/arts/2016/12/08/untouched-­w est-­ photography-­19th-­century/94675492/. 39. Renée L. Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College: University Press of New England, 2000), 147. 40. Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975). See also Lucas Foglia and Meghann Riepenhoff, introduction to On Landscape and Meaning, ed. Richard Misrach (New York: Aperture Foundation, 2020). 41. François Laruelle, The Concept of Non-Photography (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic x Sequence Press, 2011).

CHAPTER 5

Empire’s Dirty Wars

In a series of uncanny returns, Argentinian-French photographer Paula Luttringer photographs her survivorship of Argentina’s Dirty War. The photographs were taken when Luttringer returned (she no longer lives in Argentina) to the scenes where other victims and also she herself suffered imprisonment during the reign of the far-right regime supported by the United States.1 The Dirty War describes state-sponsored terrorism whereby citizens deemed threatening to the right-wing dictatorship (supported by the United States government) were disappeared—that is, tortured, imprisoned and, for some 30,000, murdered. These disappeared are the subject of Luttringer’s El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls. Luttringer was imprisoned by the junta in Argentina as a pregnant 21-year-old university student of botany; in her photographs she stages remembrance of those who did not survive their imprisonment, and gives voice to those who did survive.2 I connect the Dirty War to Lê’s “Vietnam of the mind” and to Niro’s photographs of the battlefields of her ancestors because, although in Argentina the United States was not directly the junta, its power and influence were behind the right-wing dictatorship’s rise to power and maintenance of power. In other words, the violent regime of settler-colonialist wars was enacted in Argentina under the auspices of U.S. support, a situation summed up by Greg Grandin as “empire’s workshop,” with the United States practicing the moves of empire in South America.3

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Elegy and Mourning Giving visuality to the social, cultural, and affective aftermath of right-­wing dictatorship, elegiac objects are the mode of Paula Luttringer’s El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls. A survivor of being “disappeared” and imprisoned during Argentina’s Dirty War, Luttringer returns to her country of origin to photograph remnant objects around the sites of former makeshift prisons, in which Argentina’s former right-wing dictatorship imprisoned those it believed had leftist leanings—including youthful university students like Luttringer. No people appear in Luttringer’s photographs, which instead show a dilapidated shoe, a trashed soccer ball, a window in a damaged wall, a drain, an ant, a grotto space with concrete stairs, architectural spaces of terror and abyss. The objects and architectural elements (walls) “wail” in the photographs as they convey a terrible and comfortless force of entrapment and suffering. The images are intimate and deeply claustrophobic. Each object and space shown is ordinary, mundane, and also brutally haunted in Luttringer’s sfumato-toned black-and-white photographs. The images document the memory of the suffering of survivors, whose words accompany images in heart-wrenching captions, and also implicitly the series documents those who did not survive imprisonment. And yet they are not documentary photographs. They are elegies for those who did not survive and testimony for those who survived but not without damage. Luttringer returns to prison sites where she suffered and others were erased. She returns with her camera. She resurrects the scenes of harm, returning years later, years after the crimes against humanity were committed, finding damaged objects and photographing them at these sites, which are themselves damaged objects.

Memory and Return For Luttringer’s El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, return is embodied, literal, and also figurative. It is always fraught with immersive terror. The immersive force of her photographs speaks to the photographer’s journey of return, as she leaves Paris (where she now lives) to return to Argentina to photograph sites of former prisons run by the now-ousted right-wing, civic-military dictatorship. Around these sites, Luttringer photographs objects and architectural elements with a tight focus so that we feel pressed toward the objects, forced into the architectural spaces. Viewing the photographs, we do not have the ability to see beyond the objects photographed, but, as with those imprisoned, our focus is narrow, tight,

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inescapable. As a survivor of solitary confinement (while a teenager in juvenile after running away from an abusive home), I am sensitive to the embodied and emotive force of constriction evoked in Luttringer’s photographs. This is the photography of fear and of surviving fear, for the bridge between the sacrificed and the survivors is a photographic bridge in the photography of resistance. As image, the photograph becomes the substance, the tissue, the integument, joining those who cannot represent themselves with the witnessing gaze of the survivor—whether that be Weems’s role as survivor of African Americans’ enslavement (never having been enslaved herself, she is descended from those who were enslaved), Niro’s return to battlefields where her ancestors were massacred, or An-­ My Lê’s surreal “return” to Vietnam as she photographs war reenactors in central Virginia. So also, in Luttringer’s work, the documentation of disappearance depends on the survivor’s gaze, depends on her knowledge of what has been lost, and depends on her ability to engage witnessing that transcends the loss through the image’s affordance of seeing transfigured. It is seeing transposed to the register of return. The difference of return is that in returning the survivor sees with the eyes of one who knows she can survive and has survived but that others did not survive. This transposition of suffering to a space of Levinasian facing—through the object-work of photography—is a form of political resistance.4

Object Studies Luttringer’s photographs in El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls are studies in the poetics of terror (Figs. 5.1–5.18). The images represent the frozen stare of the imprisoned, the entrapped terror of those held captive by violators, of those who know they may not survive this captivity and that, if they do live through it, they will survive carrying wounds and horrors with them. The photographs give visibility to this frozen state of terror and especially to its persistence across time.5 Years, decades, after surviving imprisonment, torture, sexual abuse, and other human rights violations, the survivors of Argentina’s far-right Dirty War remain caught in personal terror and anguish and, also, in the still-unresolved political situation, wherein many of the regime’s crimes against humanity have yet to be punished. More to the point, the United States has not been called to account for its imperialist role in supporting the right-wing regime that enacted the crimes of Argentina’s Dirty War. Luttringer’s images stare at the corners of imprisonment from the point of view of the imprisoned; even though taken decades after she survived

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being kidnapped, wrongfully imprisoned, and tortured by the junta, the photographs represent her return to this place of trauma. They seal together the past and the present in the long gaze of each haunting (and haunted) photographic image (of the series). The process of the making of the photographs is legible in the embodied emotive force of the images.6 While we, of course, are not told by the images themselves that they are taken by someone once imprisoned, the images yet convey the painfully elongated time of trauma. The unending time of trauma coheres with photography’s uncanny duality along the stretch of time. In these photographs it is always the time of now, that is, the time of the image’s creation, but also this eidetic now extends across each viewing of the image, skewing and stitching time so that the image is always now and not now, always past and present at the same time. The temporality of photography is the temporality of trauma. This quality is not always forefronted in photography, but Luttringer’s series deploys and articulate this aspect of her medium forcefully. We, looking at the images, are always with the imprisoned person seeing the desolate objects and interiors and also with the formerly imprisoned person in the time of return to the former prison. For the violated, for the imprisoned, the time of return is eternal. It is eternal return through the photograph, in Luttringer’s work, for the imprisonment has never ended in the psyche of the survivor. Not only are the dead, the missing, or the “disappeared” of the Dirty War not going to be brought back to life, but also the survivors, Luttringer among them, carrying the memories of being disappeared, will not encounter the object worlds of the Americas without encountering that material and social space as a space of violation. El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls visceralizes—makes visceral—this object world of violence. It is a particularly colonialist violence, the violence of what historian and theorist Greg Grandin calls the “workshop” of empire, as the United States practiced (and in some ways still practices) acts of domination in the quieter theater (quieter in the sense of being less internationally visible and watched) of South America. The raw pain of the objects in Luttringer’s El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls embodies in image the unending temporal nightmare of the disappeared. The series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls stages uncanny returns as a former prisoner of the right-wing regime comes back to mourn the dead and to grieve her own, and other survivors, suffering and trauma. And yet, just as Niro’s and Lê’s works are personal mementoes testifying to—documenting—intergenerational and cultural traumata (they are never about just the photographer but about her people, her family, her

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ancestors), so also Luttringer’s haunted photographs are not expositions simply of her personal suffering but testimony to and memorial for the disappeared, the victims of the regime who did not survive, who cannot come back. Through their captions, the photographs give explicit voices and names also to other survivors. In this sense, the act of coming back is paramount as an act of witnessing and instating political voice. Luttringer returns to Argentina solely to create these photographs. She does not come back casually or for pleasure but to mourn and commemorate the dead. The images are antilandscape. They are tightly shot, claustrophobic photographs of a shoe, a soccer ball, stairs, a drain hole, a window, a scarred wall, an insect. She creates them so as to give name to survivors, voice to survivors, and also to give a certain sense of home to the dead, the sacrificed. In Luttringer’s uncanny returns, the longing for horizon, release, is denied. Instead, we are placed in the space of the prisoner, our eye close to the drain on the floor, or gazing up at the stairs that do not lead to an exit we (placed by the photograph in the point of view of the imprisoned) can access. Our eye fastens on an ant with the hallucinatory proximity of a bad dream. A window, behind which another hidden prison is held, looks ominously out onto the street where those who pass by sense but cannot reach to save the imprisoned. The uncanny nightmare sense of not being able to assert one’s volition, not being able to save oneself, permeates these photographs of salvage. Those photographs taken outdoors, of a damaged soccer ball, an abandoned shoe, express a sense of coming too late, arriving to see the damaged objects after the harm has been done, after the wearer of the shoe has disappeared. The soccer ball, signifying a soccer stadium that the junta repurposed as a prison and torture center, is also a forlorn sign of play disrupted, play that was torn away. The generation of the disappeared is marked by the disappearance of classmates, people whose youth was all they had. The truncating of time, the foreshortened temporality of the disappeared, is the subject and topos of Luttringer’s work in El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls. But also the lengthening of time, the terrible state of trauma’s unfinished pace, is also at the core of the images’ aesthetic force. It is the unfinished effect of time, that is, the lives that were ended, the lives damaged, that the photographs articulate. In Luttringer’s work, time closes in or time has closed in. The uncanny impossibility, or near impossibility, of release from the conditions of the Dirty War structure El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls. Even though that specific violence is over, it is not over for those who were killed, for those whose loved ones were killed, for those who were imprisoned but survived. Luttringer, photographing objects, documents lost time, lost human beings. She documents the disappeared.7

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Focusing tightly on a drain hole in a former prison site, Luttringer places the drain hole in implicit parallel to the camera’s aperture, also subtly suggesting a loupe, a tool used to study gemstones (Luttringer was a gemologist before taking up photography) (Fig. 5.2). The tight focus brings the viewer into the field of vision of the imprisoned, a space where a drain gathers blood, and even in this grievousness also suggests a way out. The negative “gem” of loss is the artifact viewed through this dark loupe. The image is angled tightly and vertiginously so that we— the viewer—feel as if we were falling into the drain’s spiral. The close-in view leaves us nowhere to go, no way out beyond the frame of the image. And yet the specificity of imprisonment is only metaphorically suggested by the photograph’s strictured vista. The force of the image comes through the making visible of the psychical impact of physical imprisonment. The palpable impact of embodied suffering, embodied loss, controls the image. Looking at this photograph, we are aware intently, and to the exclusion of almost every other signifier, of the lost person, the loss of kinetic space—that is, the loss of the opportunity to inhabit space fully and without constraint. We are looking through the eyes of a survivor at the stray evidence of atrocity. It is in seeing—in bringing to light—the materiality of atrocity’s echo that Luttringer survives through images. Survivance, as Indigenous American (Ojibwe) scholar Gerald Vizenor theorizes the term, means living on after the impossible conditions of coloniality have been imposed.8 Survivance is a term that Vizenor developed with specific consideration of Indigenous American culture, and Paula Luttringer is not of Indigenous American descent. Yet, Vizenor’s theorization of survivance is also a strategic assessment of conditions under coloniality/modernity and, in this sense, applies to Luttringer’s photography in El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls. Luttringer’s work is positioned at the edge of disappearance, it remembers the disappeared and encounters the photographer’s own near erasure during the time she was imprisoned. She encounters her own battle for survival in the photographs. The mythic quality of Luttringer’s images pose a counterdiscourse to coloniality’s mythos of progress and order. In place of coloniality’s mythos of progress, Luttringer places the uncanny objects of her survivance, these mournful damaged spaces and things—shoe, soccer ball, stairs,

Fig. 5.1  (No. 01) El 13 de Julio del 1976, entre las 23 y 23.30 horas, golpearon fuertemente la puerta de mi casa. En ese momento me encontraba terminádole de dar el pecho a mi hijo Simón. Cuando me sacaron de la casa les pregunte que iba a ocurrir con el niño, me contestaron que no debía preocuparme, que esta guerra no era contra los niños. Esa fue la ultima vez que vi a Simón y que tuve noticias de él. Sara Méndez fue secuestrada en la ciudad de Buenos Aires el 13 de Julio de 1976, y trasladada al centro clandestino de detención Automotores Orletti. En marzo 2002 la ex detenida desaparecida Sara Méndez encontró a su hijo Simón Riquelo, que había sido secuestrado en 1976 junto con ella en Buenos Aires y luego separados. Lo buscó durante 26 años, siguió pistas falsas e incluso le dijeron que había fallecido. On July 13, 1976, between 11 and 11:30 p.m., there was a loud knocking on the door of my home. At the time I was in the middle of breastfeeding my son Simon. When they led me out of the house I asked them what was going to happen to the boy, and they told me not to worry because this war wasn’t a war against children. That was the last time I saw or had word of Simon. Sara Méndez was abducted on July 13, 1976, in Buenos Aires. She was then taken to the secret detention center “Automotores Orletti.” In March 2002 the former detainee and one of the “disappeared,” Sara Méndez, found her son, Simon Riquelo, who had been kidnapped with her in Buenos Aires, after which the two were separated. She spent 26 years looking for him, following false leads and even being told that he had died. Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 01, Sara Méndez), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 5.2  (No. 02) Me trasladan inmediatamente después de mi llegada a La Perla a la sala de tortura. Me desnudan y atan con cuerdas los pies y las manos a los barrotes de una cama, quedando suspendida en el aire. Me ponen un cable en un dedo del pie derecho. La tortura fue aplicada en forma gradual, usándose dos picanas eléctricas que tenían distinta intensidad: una de 125 voltios que me producía movimientos involuntarios en los músculos y dolor en todo el cuerpo, otra de 220 voltios llamada “la margarita” que produce una violenta contracción como si arranca-ran todos los miembros a la vez. Intento suicidarme tomando el agua podrida que había en el tacho destinado para otro tipo de tortura llamada “submarino”, però no lo consigo. Teresa Meschiati fue secuestrada en la ciudad de Córdoba el 25 de septiembre de 1976, y trasladada al Centro Clandestino de Detención La Perla. Immediately after my arrival at La Perla I was taken to the torture room. They stripped me and tied my feet and hands with ropes to the bars of a bed, so that I was hanging from them. They attached a wire to one of the toes of my right foot. Torture was applied gradually, by means of electric prods of two different intensities: one of 125 volts, which caused involuntary muscle movements and pain all over the body, and another of 220 volts called La Margarita (the daisy), which caused a violent contraction—as if they were ripping off all your limbs at the same time. I tried to kill myself by drinking the filthy water from this can they used for another kind of torture called “ducking,” but I didn’t manage it. Teresa Meschiati was abducted in the town of Cordoba on September 25, 1976. She was then taken to the secret detention center “La Perla.” Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 02, Teresa Meschiati), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist.

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Fig. 5.3  (No. 03) Había hormigas que entraban y salían, entonces me pasaba mirando a esas hormigas porque esas hormigas entraban y salían al mundo. Andaban por la tierra, por el afuera, y volvían al adentro, y entonces ya no me sentía tan sola. Ledda Barreiro fue secuestrada, el 12 de enero de 1978 en la ciudad de Mar del Plata, y trasladada al Centro Clandestino de Detención La Cueva. Ants used to come in and out, and I would watch these ants because they were coming in and then going out into the world. They were walking across the earth, the outside world, and then coming back in again, and watching them I didn’t feel so alone. Ledda Barreiro was abducted on January 12, 1978, in Mar del Plata. She was then taken to the secret detention center “La Cueva.” Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 03, Ledda Barreiro), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 5.4  (No. 04) Por las noches pasaba algo extraño, los gritos de la tortura eran diferentes que de día. Aunque los gritos de la tortura son siempre iguales pero resuenan de otra manera en uno. Y cuando a uno lo vienen a buscar de noche también es diferente. No están constantemente en mi memoria, ni los ruidos ni los gritos, pero cuando hago memoria sí están y me entristece, me paralizo en ese grito, me quedo en ese tiempo, en ese lugar. Como alguien dijo, yo lo estuve pensando bastante y creo que es así, aunque la vida continúe y nos hayan liberado a algunos, del “pozo” nunca se sale. Isabel Cerruti fue secuestrada en la ciudad de Buenos Aires el 12 de julio de 1978, y trasladada al Centro Clandestino de Detención El Olimpo. Something strange used to happen at night; the screams of torture were different than those during the day. Even if the screams of torture are always the same they sound different at night. And it’s also different when they come to get you at night. The noises and the screams are not with me always, but when I do remember them, it makes me very sad. I am paralyzed by those screams, I’m back in that time and place. As somebody once said—and I’ve given this some thought and I think it’s right—although life goes on, although some of us were freed, you never get out of the pit. Isabel Cerruti was abducted on July 12, 1978, in Buenos Aires. She was then taken to the secret detention center “El Olimpo.” Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 04, Isabel Cerruti), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist.

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Fig. 5.5  (No. 05) No había algodón, no había trapos, no había nada. No te daban nada. Cuando teníamos el período menstrual goteábamos, perdíamos sangre, goteábamos sangre y yo nunca me olvido que nos sacaban al pasillo y nos golpeaban con palos en las piernas y en el cuerpo y decían: miren como gotean y pierden como las perras, son igual que las perras, van dejando la sangre por el camino. Marta Candeloro fue secuestrada en la ciudad de Neuquen el 7 de junio de 1977, y trasladada al Centro Clandestino de Detencion La Cueva. There were no cotton wads, no cloth; nothing. They didn’t give you anything. When we had our period we would drip blood, and I’ll never forget how they would drag us out into the corridor and beat our legs with sticks, saying, “Look how they drip and lose blood, just like dogs, just like bitches, leaving a trail of blood behind them.” Marta Candeloro was abducted on June 7, 1977, in Neuquen. She was then taken to the secret detention center “La Cueva.” Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 05, Marta Candeloro), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist.

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drain, occluded window. The uncanniness of space in Luttringer’s photographs emerges from the tight frame the photographer deploys. Taking in these images, the viewer feels she is not merely viewing photographs but is contained in a painfully immersive experience. Luttringer takes apart the architectures of heteropatriarchy, supplanting them with close-frame small worlds that show the violence of the larger structure. The claustrophobic terror of these paradoxically condensed and overwhelming vistas eats into the viewer, claiming a countervisibility, one that moves almost beneath the skin. Feminist activism against Argentina’s Dirty War implicitly is pronounced in these elegiac images.

Feminist Gaze Madres de la Plaza de Mayo staged resistance to the right-wing dictatorship and its human rights abuses, this public activism starting in the early 1980s. Esther Careaga and María Eugenia Bianco were disappeared because of their activism against the state’s violence. Luttringer follows in the footsteps of this feminist activism but her path is one of haunting return. With her camera, working in the twenty-first century after the final march of resistance of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo has taken place (in 2006), Paula Luttringer returns when the damage has been done, the dead are gone, when the harm is irretrievable, and yet also when immediate danger is past. But as a survivor of imprisonment and disappearance herself, Luttringer’s gaze never trusts that she is safe, and her photographs are deeply imbued with anguish and fear. Ana María Reyes, in The Politics of Taste, interprets the Cold War as generative of a set of aesthetic conditions, through the lens of which we can read Luttringer’s frozen scenes.9 The force of resistance in her photographs is both palpable and mournful. Resistance, here, comes as mourning, after the disappeared have been disappeared, and the dead are dead. Mourning continues after those who, like Luttringer, survived being imprisoned. They have been profoundly traumatized, and that trauma persists despite the survivors’ physical release, and despite shifts in national politics after the right-wing junta was ousted. Trauma persists in the minds of survivors because this kind of trauma brings with it, or rather is constituted by, the deep and unavoidable knowledge of the human capacity for violence. One can never unknow that reality (of

Fig. 5.6  (No. 07) Evidentemente, en todas las sociedades esas cosas espantosas en algún momento se pueden hacer, en otros no. Creo que no hay sociedad que no contenga la posibilidad de que eso pase. No existe, eso es una fantasía o una expresión de deseo de algunos que creen que viven en sociedades donde eso no puede pasar . . . Tal vez uno para poder hablar, necesitaría un ambiente de más contención. En la medida que empezás a sentir un poquitito de rechazo, ya vos también te cerrás. Entonces es como un círculo vicioso, un perro que se come la cola y todo contribuye a qué? Al manto de silencio. Liliana Gardella fue secuestrada en la ciudad de Mar del Plata el 25 de noviembre de 1977, y trasladada al Centro Clandestino de Detencion Esma. Obviously, in every society these appalling things can happen at some point or another. I don’t think there’s a society where it would be impossible for this to happen. It doesn’t exist; it’s just a fantasy or wish of those people who believe they live in societies where it couldn’t happen . . . Perhaps in order to talk about it you’d need to feel more secure. As soon as you begin to feel a bit rejected, you too close yourself off. So it’s like a vicious circle, a dog chasing its tail. And what does all this contribute to? To the cloak of silence. Liliana Gardella was abducted on November 25, 1977, in Mar del Plata. She was then taken to the secret detention center “Esma.” Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 07, Liliana Gardella), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist.

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Fig. 5.7  (No. 09) Las mujeres estabámos en una celda muy chica, había una ventana en la puerta y a la derecha había un asiento de cemento. Recuerdo esto porque cuando nos llamaban para una nueva sesión yo me agarraba a el de una forma infantil para no ir. Emilce Moler fue secuestrada en la ciudad de La Plata, el 17 de septiembre de 1976, y trasladada al Centro Clandestino de Detencion Pozo de Arana. They put us women in a tiny cell; there was a window in the door and to the right there was a concrete seat. I remember this because when they came for us for another session I used to grab hold of the bench like a child, so as not to go. Emilce Moler was abducted on September 17, 1976, in La Plata. She was then taken to the secret detention center “Pozo de Arana.” Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 09, Emilce Moler), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist.

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Fig. 5.8  (No. 10) Es muy difícil contar el terror de los minutos, horas, días, meses, vividos ahí . . . En el primer tiempo el secuestrado no tiene idea del lugar que lo rodea. Unos lo habíamos imaginado redondo, otros como una especie de estadio de fútbol con la guardia girando sobre nuestras cabezas. No sabíamos en qué sentido estaban nuestros cuerpos, de qué lado estaba la cabeza y hacia donde los pies. Recuerdo haberme aferrado a la colchoneta con todas mis fuerzas para no caerme, a pesar de que sabía que estaba en el suelo. Liliana Callizo fue secuestrada en la ciudad de Córdoba, el 1 de septiembre de 1976, y trasladada al Centro Clandestino de Detención La Perla. It is very hard to describe the terror of the minutes, hours, days, months, spent there. At first when you’ve been kidnapped you have no idea about the place around you. Some of us imagined it to be round, others like a football stadium with the guards walking above us. We didn’t know which direction our bodies were facing, where our head was, where our feet were pointing. I remember clinging to the mat with all my strength so as not to fall even though I knew I was on the floor. Liliana Callizo was abducted on September 1, 1976, in Cordoba. She was then taken to the secret detention center “La Perla.” Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 10, Liliana Callizo), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist.

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Fig. 5.9  (No. 11) Yo nunca volví a tener relaciones sexuales, me negué a mi condición de mujer, es decir, mi vida sexual acabó en ese momento, no en el momento de la violación sino en el momento en que nos secuestraron. Tardé mucho tiempo en darme cuenta de que eso eran secuelas. Yo me negué a la sexualidad, y eso no hace tanto que lo descubrí, no hace tanto tiempo. Marta Candeloro fue secuestrada en la ciudad de Neuquen el 7 de junio de 1977, y trasladada al Centro Clandestino de Detención La Cueva. I never had sexual relationships after that; I denied the fact of being a women, that is, my sex life ended at that point, not at the time of the rape but at the point I was kidnapped. It was a long time before I realized that these were the sequels. I denied my sexuality, and it wasn’t long ago that I realized this, not very long. Marta Candeloro was abducted on June 7, 1977, in Neuquen. She was then taken to the secret detention center “La Cueva.” Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 11, Marta Candeloro), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 5.10  (No. 12) No puedo estar en lugares cerrados. Por ejemplo, voy al baño y dejo la puerta abierta, siempre tengo la puerta abierta; no tolero estar encerrada. Creo que tiene que ver con el tema de la capucha, la sensación de ahogo y de la violación . . . Toda violación implica mucha culpa también y aparte mucha verguenza. Es una de las tortur-as más denigrantes para una mujer, creo que tiene que ver con eso, el asumir digamos que vos fuiste violada es una cosa muy terrible, ese es el tema. Yo creo que hay muchas cosas que no se dicen, que no nos animamos a decir, este mundo privado que escondemos, que no lo largamos . . . Maria Luz Pierola fue secuestrada en la ciudad de Concordia, el 25 de febrero de 1977, y trasladada al Centro Clandestino de Detención La Casita de Paracao. I can’t be closed in anywhere. For example, I go to the bathroom and leave the door open, I’ve always got the door open; it’s no big deal if my dogs come in, but I can’t bear being closed in. That it’s also to do with the business of the hood, the feeling of suffocating and the rape . . . Rape is always accompanied by a lot of guilt, and also a lot of shame, an awful lot of shame. It’s one of the most degrading forms of torture, for a woman, and I think it’s to do with that, because it’s terrible having to acknowledge you were raped. I think there are many things [that] don’t get said, that we don’t get around to saying, that private world we conceal, we don’t let it out. Maria Luz Pierola was abducted on February 25, 1977, in Concordia. She was then taken to the secret detention center “La Casita de Paracao.” Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 12, Maria Luz Pierola), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist.

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human cruelty), once one has been the victim of violence. The aesthetic of pain and erasure persists in her photographs, accurately, because pain persists in survivors. In Luttringer’s photographs, the stilled objects, balls, windows, stairs, drain holes, shoes, insect, move into the range of vision with the hallucinatory clarity of bad dreams, every detail fully articulated and also blurred. The testimony that the nightmare of disappearance does not end just because the government that conducted the violence has been pushed out is forceful in Luttringer’s El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls. For indeed those killed do not return to life, and the trauma of survivors is unending. Luttringer lives in Paris; she cannot bear to live in Argentina. But she returns to her country of origin specifically to create the photographic series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls. The courage of work is visible in the images. They are repeated acts of steeling oneself, steeling one’s vision, to see the horror of the real.

Feminism across Boundaries In Luttringer’s photography of return, a parallel of sorts emerges with Niro’s Battlefields of My Ancestors, as Niro returns from Canada to the traditional lands of the Haudenosaunee in what is now called the state of New York. Similarly, and differently, An-My Lê returns not by returning to Vietnam, but by photographing Vietnam War reenactors in the state of Virginia in Small Wars. She “returns to the scene” of the war that displaced her family and exiled her to America. The act of return, in Battlefields of My Ancestors, in Small Wars, and in El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, poses photography, photographic reseeing, as counternarrative to the erasures of coloniality. For as the wars—the so-called Vietnam War, Argentina’s Dirty War, the wars of settler-colonialist society against Indigenous Americans—all extend from the same erasing and erosive force of coloniality, so also the resistance to these forces of erasure is return through reseeing. The photographer returns to the place where her ancestors, her family—she herself—have been violated, killed, displaced, dispossessed. She returns and assembles images, photographic testimony, to refute and refuse the silencing and invisibility that settler-colonialist violence forces on its victims.

Fig. 5.11  (No. 14) Dijeron que íbamos a un sitio donde encontraríamos a muchas personas que habían desaparecido y de las que ya nunca se sabría nada, que nosotros también habíamos desaparecido y ya no existíamos para el mundo, que tampoco existían ya nuestros nombres. Me revisaron y preguntaron por los objetos metálicos que pudiera llevar, incluído si tenía puesto DIU. Posteriormente me enteré que esa rutina preveía la aplicación de electricidad y que no existiera ningún otro elemento conductor. Hebe Cáceres fue secuestrada en la ciudad de La Plata en junio de 1978, y trasladada al Centro Clandestino de Detención El Banco. They said we were going to a place where we’d meet lots of people who had disappeared and about whom nothing more would ever be known, that we too had disappeared and no longer existed in the eyes of the world, that not even our names existed and that we should answer with the name they gave us. They left me handcuffed and blindfolded in a sort of courtyard, where they searched me and asked me about any metal objects I might be carrying, even if I had an IUD fitted. Later I found out that this routine was what they did before giving you electric shocks, to check that there was no other conductor on you. Hebe Caceres was abducted in June 1978 in La Plata. She was then taken to the secret detention center “El Banco.” Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 14, Hebe Cáceres), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 5.12  (No. 15) Tengo marcas que se ven, y que un chiquito de 5 años te diga ¿qué es eso mamá? es difícil. Es difícil porque uno quiere ahorrarles a los hijos el sufrimiento, a uno ya no le duele. Los hijos sufren mucho con el sufrimiento de los padres, pero uno les tiene que contestar porque es parte de nuestra historia. Uno lo contesta muchas veces: cuando está triste y tiene que explicar por qué, o cuando se queda pensando, lo contesta a veces sin palabras. Uno se pasa la vida explicándoles a los hijos lo inexplicable. Ana Maria Careaga fue secuestrada en la ciudad de Buenos Aires el 13 de junio de 1977, y trasladada al Centro Clandestino de Detención Club Atlético. I’ve got marks that show, and it’s hard when a 5-year-old boy asks you, “What’s that, Mum?” It’s hard because you want to save your children from suffering—you yourself don’t hurt anymore. Children suffer a lot through their parents’ suffering, but you have to answer their questions because it’s part of our history. You answer a lot: when you’re sad and you have to explain why, or when you’re lost in thought; sometimes you answer without words. You spend your whole life explaining the inexplicable to your children. Ana Maria Careaga was abducted on June 13, 1977, in Buenos Aires. She was then taken to the secret detention center “Club Atletico.” Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 15, Ana Maria Careaga), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 5.13  (No. 16) En mi caso fue previa a la tortura y siempre el jefe, eso fue todas las veces, siempre era el jefe de la patota. Por eso las mayores dificultades que tuve para resolver fueron las de las relaciones sexuales . . . a mí me costó mucho volver a recibir una caricia, sentirla como caricia y no como manoseo. Con ella fue diferente, ella tenia un físico muy espectacular y los guardias venían y la violaban sin torturarla. Es diferente la sensación de rechazo y de angustia que te produce que estén violando a alguien al lado tuyo que el otro tipo de tortura . . . Pegar nos pegaban a todos, la picana la aplicaban con todos pero esa situación te generaba un rechazo y una angustia mucho mayor . . . Beatriz Pfeiffer fue secuestrada en la ciudad de Concordia, el 25 de febrero de 1977, y trasladada al Centro Clandestino de Detención La Casita de Paracao. In my case it was prior to the torture and always the boss, it was always like that, it was always the leader of the mob. That’s why the greatest difficulties I had to overcome were those to do with sexual relationships . . . it was really difficult to receive a caress again, to feel it as a caress rather than as groping. With her it was different, she had a really great figure and the guards would come and rape her without torturing her. The sensation of repulsion and distress that is produced by having to watch someone being raped at your side is different from the other type of torture . . . They would hit all of us, they used the cattle prod on all of us, but this situation created a much greater sense of repulsion and distress. Beatriz Pfeiffer was abducted on February 25, 1977, in Concordia. She was then taken to the secret detention center “La Casita de Paracao.” Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 16, Beatriz Pfeiffer), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 5.14  (No. 19) ¿Cómo no iban a escuchar los gritos si la sala de tortura daba a la calle? Tímidamente empezaron a hablar los vecinos: uno vio movimiento de entrada y salida de autos y un carpintero escuchaba los gritos y otro dijo que le llamaba la atención cuando tapiaron las ventanas del frente . . . Ir a ver a los vecinos tanto tiempo después fue una cosa increíble. Les dije: yo estoy hablándoles de los fantasmas desde adentro y ustedesestán hablando de los fantasmas desde afuera. ¿Se dan cuenta que todos fuimos víctimas, que no hay diferencia entre ustedes y yo? Yo lo pude haber sufrido físicamente pero en las vivencias éramos los de adentro y los de afuera. Isabel Fernández Blanco fue secuestrada en la ciudad de Buenos Aires, el 28 de julio de 1978, y trasladada al centro clandestino de detencion El Olimpo. How could they not hear the screams if the torture room was next to the street? Timidly at first, the neighbors began to speak: one saw cars entering and leaving; a carpenter heard the screams; and somebody else said that he noticed when they covered the front windows. Going to see those neighbors so long afterwards was incredible. I said to them, “I’m talking to you about the ghosts from the inside, and you are talking about the ghosts from outside. Do you realize that we are all victims, that there are no differences between you and me? I may have suffered physically, but in terms of experiences we were those on the inside and those on the outside.” Isabel Fernández Blanco was abducted on July 28, 1978, in Buenos Aires. She was then taken to the secret detention center “El Olimpo.” Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 19, Isabel Fernández Blanco), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 5.15  (No. 20) Y eso te marca, es una sensación lacerante que te acompaña el resto de tu vida. Te queda el doble guión que tenés que estar todo el tiempo dándote cuenta qué es del trauma y qué es de la vida normal. Yo tengo doble trabajo en la vida. Tengo que considerar cuáles son las sensaciones que son del trauma y qué es lo que hay abajo con mucha menos intensidad y más diluído, qué es lo de la vida normal. Entonces hablo con alguien que nunca estuvo en un chupadero y ahí hago de persona normal y me doy cuenta de cuál es, y ahí le doy pie al registro normal. Esas cosas que nos pasan a todos los que fuimos víctimas de la represión. . . . Liliana Gardella fue secuestrada en la ciudad de Mar del Plata el 25 de noviembre de 1977, y trasladada al Centro Clandestino de Detencion Esma. And this marks you, it’s a wounded feeling that stays with you the rest of your life. You’re left with this dual task; you have to be constantly working out what comes from the trauma and what from normal life. I have this dual task in life. I have to decide which feelings are the result of the trauma and what there is beneath of less intensity, more diluted, which is what comes from normal life. So I talk to someone who was never in a clandestine prison and then I play the role of a normal person and I realize what that involves, I step into normality. These things that happen to all of us who were victims [of] repression. . . . Liliana Gardella was abducted on November 25, 1977, in Mar del Plata. She was then taken to the secret detention center “Esma.” Paula Luttringer, Untitled (No. 20, Liliana Gardella), from the series El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist.

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Fig. 5.16  Paula Luttringer, Untitled, from the series El Lamento de los Muros/ The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist

Although there are no marks or symbols explicitly gendered in Niro’s Battlefields of My Ancestors, An-My Lê’s Small Wars, and Luttringer’s El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, one can make the case that these photographic series are feminist interventions, counternarratives posed against masculinist violence expressed in coloniality. This is not to say that coloniality does not extend from European and White Anglo women, but rather that the system has a gendered valence, a torque of domination that feminist scholar Johanna Oksala argues extends from the repertoire of male domination in traditional European culture.10 The pattern of violation against Indigenous peoples has often been enacted against Indigenous women. This pattern is explored in great depth by Anishinaabe performance artist, filmmaker, and photographer Rebecca Belmore. It is to Belmore that I turn now.

Fig. 5.17  Paula Luttringer, Untitled, from the series El Lamento de los Muros/ The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist

Fig. 5.18  Paula Luttringer, Untitled, from the series El Lamento de los Muros/ The Wailing of the Walls, Argentina, 2000–2005, inkjet print of a photograph, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle 308 photo rag, 36 × 36″ (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Copyright Paula Luttringer. Courtesy of the artist

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Rebecca Belmore’s New Naming The various undeclared dirty wars of coloniality are numerous. Anishinaabe multimedia artist Rebecca Belmore invokes, finds again, and gives form to the disappeared in several of her photographically based works. In Bloodless (2003) Belmore captures a young Indigenous woman wrapped in a white garment that almost entirely covers her face and body. The woman is curled into the fetal position. The image is mysterious in that it does not indicate any specific history or landscape, it does not indicate what form of violence, nor by whom, was visited on the young woman. But it is clearly a photograph of the effect of violence. The photograph protests coloniality; in particular, Belmore created the image in protest against George W. Bush’s illegitimate war in Afghanistan. Several of her photographic works invoke white as a sign of death and red—blood—as a sign of Indigenous vividness and visibility and also a marker of Indigenous peoples’ suffering of violence, their blood shed. Belmore’s performance and photographic pieces Blood on the Snow; Vigil, The Named and the Unnamed; and Fringe, as well as Fountain and White Thread, play white against red. Blood on the Snow shows a downy white field—a white quilt that covers the floor of an installation room— interrupted by a single white chair covered in white quilting the top of which is a deep, seeping red. The suggestion of blood, of the massacre that took place at Wounded Knee and many other murders and massacres of Indigenous Americans, here is delicately, painfully, drawn.11 The scene looks almost placid, but it is terrifying. It is almost peaceful and yet overwhelmingly emotional and mournful. The installation’s photograph matches the color schemata of Bloodless and Fringe, works in which violence against Indigenous Americans, including the signal violence of genocide, is represented through condensed symbols. The draining away of blood, of taking the blood of Indigenous Americans, is a graphic and accurate way of describing the history of settler-­colonialist violence in North America. The starkness of Belmore’s vision sets up a contrast between the field of possibility and the field of actuality. Bloodless and Blood on the Snow set up a contrast between the Whiteness of coloniality, its aspect of freezing life, of freezing out life, and the blood of vividness, the blood of life, that also is vulnerable to bloodshed through colonialist violence. Belmore is a multimedia artist, but her still photographs stand out as mournful emblems encapsulating the

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ongoing pain of Indigenous Americans in the settler-colonialist context. These overtly political works are, even so, so subtly cast in symbolic form that Erwin Panofsky’s work on symbolic force can be drawn upon to understand Belmore’s formal reach and power.12 The still, stopped moment of the photograph in Belmore’s work often signifies a space of mourning, where the aesthetic stillness of the held image opens to allow the viewer to mourn loss. The resistance to disappearance couched in these elusively symbolic and subtle images inheres in symbol as representation of mourning, with a refusal to allow violence, the source of mourning, to go unmarked, a refusal to allow settler-colonialist violence to stand unchecked, uncritiqued. It is a refusal to allow the myth of Euro-Anglo “progress” in North America to be the myth that is believed.13 In this sense, Belmore’s work is both antimythic and also suggestive of, proposing of, countermyths—new myths by which to interpret contemporary North America. The mythic terrain of Belmore’s red-and-white photographies emerges from mourning, resistance, and toward envisioning what might rise, what might come from subversion and transcendence of Euro-Anglo violence in North America against Indigenous North Americans. Her starkly mournful vision is not one of succumbing to settler-colonialist violence but of facing grief and using that grief as a strength from which to mount ironclad resistance. Belmore’s works Bloodless and Fringe and State of Grace, as well as White Thread, show women in states that suggest extreme liminality, wherein it is hard to gauge if the woman pictured is alive or dead, sleeping or in some other liminal space or state. The haunting sense of mourning that must go on, mourning that should not stop because the violence to which it responds does not stop, is a central fact or aesthetic act of Belmore’s photographs. In Bloodless, the woman’s garment is a mourning sheet, a winding sheet, as well as a cape of self-protection, a kind of invisibility that at once erases her and saves her from the violence of coloniality’s ways of seeing Indigenous women. As in Mixed Blessing (2011) and Wild (2001), so also in Bloodless Belmore uses hair to signify Indigenous identity. By showing only the woman’s hair, she suggests her Indigeneity. By contrast, the fetal position of the model suggests something dire has happened to her. Settler-colonialist violence, which Belmore saw was an active factor in the Afghanistan war, continues. It is not just that Euro-­ Anglos committed genocide and dispossessed surviving Indigenous Americans of ancestral lands but also that this pattern continues in

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colonialist wars abroad, wars in which the patterns of erasure of Indigenous populations are continued. It does not end. Hence, the mourning displayed in Bloodless is mourning not only for the past but also for the present. White Thread mounts an implicit diptych image with Bloodless. Where Bloodless uses white cloth to signify death, White Thread draws on a white thread, threading through red cloth, to indicate oppression, constraint, and entrapment. As professor of philosophy Michelle Maiese makes clear, “Dehumanization is the psychological process of demonizing the enemy, making them seem less than human and hence not worthy of humane treatment.”14 The process of trying to erase, suppress, and disavow the humanity of Indigenous Americans is a long-standing programmatic in North American settler-colonialist culture. Belmore responds to this discursive violence in White Thread, showing an Indigenous woman covered by red cloth. The red may signify bloodshed, and it may signify lifeblood; the white thread wound through it signifies death, the death grip of coloniality. That you cannot see the woman’s face, that you see only her embodied form clad tight in a binding red and white-threaded garment indicates the force of coloniality in erasing the personhood, both individual and collective, of Indigenous peoples. The binding, constricting, violent quality of the cloth is marked. The fault of White violence is also clear as we read the image for its stasis; it is a violence that goes on, winding and winding around its victims. And yet, the photograph also turns the table on what Gerald Vizenor insightfully calls “victimry” (survivance).15 Belmore’s photograph confronts and disallows the subterranean mythic force by which White violence justifies itself. Notably, Belmore’s work deploys photographic images of Indigenous North American women. Drawing from the embodied presence of the living, the survivors of genocide, Belmore evokes a visual landscape wherein the disappeared, the dead, find place and presence through the living or as represented by their survivors. In this temporal duality, Belmore finds a liminal symbolic-image space, an eidetic space of intimation where time moves forward and back, the dead are not dead and the living are not free of the burden of representing the dead. Her vision is of communality not only across space but also across time. In Fringe, a photograph staged as a massive image on a billboard, Belmore presents a young woman, larger than life, whose form symbolizes both the suffering and the resilience of Indigenous American women. The “fringe” of the image’s title refers to stereotyped, clichéd Euro-Anglo visions of what Indigenous

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Americans wear. But the fringe is also a wound, a terrible scar, down the young woman’s back, dividing her body. The idea that Indigenous Americans are not central to North America but peripheral, on the “fringe” of what America is as a cultural entity is part of the violent process of discursive colonization that pretends Indigenous Americans are of the past rather than the present. The woman lies down, draped only by a white cloth. Again, the symbolic force of Whiteness Belmore draws on to drive the reckoning with violence. The violence the woman has endured is written on her body; her liminality, between death and life, is carried by the wound, which has healed but seems also to be of a size that would threaten survival, and by the white sheet and by her prone position as if on a dissecting table. The edge of death and life is also the edge of visibility and invisibility. With Fringe, Belmore shows that clichéd ways of seeing Indigenous Americans function as erasure, but the image reveals this erasure through the massive presence of its billboard-size articulation. The image haunts the landscape over which is presides: a spectral, liminal, vivid figure of an Indigenous American woman whose body has been wounded by settler-colonialist violence, including violent ways of seeing and categorizing Indigenous Americans. But also, in the presentation of the image, in its presence as image, the woman’s vividness and survivance, her passage from victimization to living forceful presence is articulated. An Indigenous way of seeing is articulated, as counternarrative to settler-­ colonialist visions of history and identity. This counternarrative is the force that works through Belmore’s spectral and liminal evocations of the aftermaths—the many aftermaths—of settler-colonialist regimes of violence. The stereotype of Indigenous Americans wearing “fringe”—that is, fringed garments—which draws from Hollywood depictions, Belmore understands as sinister in its capacity to strip Indigenous people of their actual, highly varied cultures. The multiple acts of cultural appropriation that co-occur with settler-colonialist physical violence are forms of erasure, ways of disappearing Indigenous people. These dualities of disappearance—the disappearance of victims of physical violence, including murder, and the disappearance of those who survive physically but are erased culturally—are the brutal terms of genocide. Belmore’s Fringe confronts genocide through image as counternarrative, insisting on the presence of Indigenous women on their own terms and through their own eyes. The trauma inherent in this positionality Belmore does not cover up but reveals. There is nothing soft, easy, or

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humorous about Fringe. It is a cold, harsh image. It stares down the history—the ongoing history—of genocide, the multiple disappearances of cultural erasure and physical violence. Fringe is not a study in individual fate or destiny, but, against coloniality’s obsession with that atomic personal, the image is a manifestation of cultural pain and resistance. It subverts invisibility at the fulcrum of the photograph’s tenacious capacity for testimony. The symbolic form of the image gestures toward the odalisque. Belmore’s work is to reorder, restructure, the meaning of Indigeneity in the context of visibility. She uses photography for its testimonial capacity and draws stark symbols—a palette of white, red, and black—to create visual manifestoes that stage a halting, a stopping, to the colonialist gaze. Belmore’s work is severe. It encounters trauma and of trauma creates symbolic form, in the sense that Panofsky theorizes the term, that is, a formal expression of a culture, a culture in time. Belmore’s work extends a formal expression of Indigeneity contending with the ongoing aftermath of settler-colonialist violence and violation. The trauma her work exposes is not stasis but metamorphic, of metaphor and metamorphosis. Belmore shows the metamorphosis through death, through liminality, to life that is her imagistic creation in the face of settler-colonialist erasures. Belmore’s work is of vivid liminality, structuring the painful and pivotal zone of survivance. To confront erasure and disappearance Belmore orchestrates photographic tableaux that trigger pain and that object to, overturn, and refuse the violence that caused that pain. Of her 2010 work sister, Belmore recounts, “sister was a site-specific work installed in the Audain Gallery at Simon Fraser University. The work was intended to be seen by participants of the February 14, 2010 Annual Women’s Memorial March for missing and murdered Indigenous women. sister faced Hastings Street in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.”16 The large, illuminated triptych shows an Indigenous woman with her back to the camera. She is wearing jeans and a denim jacket. Her arms extend outward, legs are apart, as if she is to be frisked by a cop. The neighborhood she faces is also an epicenter of crime against Indigenous and Métis women—disappeared and murdered women.17 As Jolene Rickard notes, Belmore instates the embodied presence of image to mourn and witness the missing and disappeared.18 The epidemic of missing and murdered women and girls of Indigenous descent in Canada and the United States, Belmore counters with sister (as she has also mourned in her earlier works Vigil and The Named and the Unnamed). The woman stands as if ready for police

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searching, she stands as always already seen as outside the law, unprotected by the law. The erasing force of settler-colonialist police apparatus is exposed by the woman’s vulnerable position. She is not protected, but instead seen—by White, settler-colonialist culture—as a body to be policed. This double erasure, of disappearance through violence and disappearance through misprision, Belmore critiques. The woman in sister wears nondescript jeans, clothes that signify even in their anonymity a relative lack of social power. She is not wearing fine and expensive garments. In the way that John Berger insightfully and depressingly argues in Ways of Seeing that our culture categorizes women through the rubric of what kind of touch can be done to them—what can be done to their bodies— Belmore’s sister spreads her arms and legs, ready for police interrogation, and her garments indicate that she is not well-to-do, not well-off, financially.19 The poor, in settler-colonialist capitalism, are never protected. The word sister is a colloquial phrase, in Canada, referring to Indigenous American women, the never-protected, the un-protected. It is in revealing this unjust exposure that Belmore launches her critique of settler-­colonialist ways of seeing. Here, of course, I do not rehash the outdated and debunked nostrum that women are inherently vulnerable.20 On the contrary, I follow Belmore in noting that Indigenous American women are statistically and structurally victimized by a social system and a police state that erroneously see them as guilty of crimes and then commit crimes against them.21 To reveal their structural exposure is not to suggest that Indigenous women are inherently in need of protection as such; rather it is to rebel against and refuse to submit to and keep silent about a system of sociality, coloniality, that brings about the erasure, both social and material (in instances of the missing and murdered), of Indigenous North American women. Belmore’s activist art mobilizes symbolic form to object to, deconstruct, and create a counternarrative against coloniality’s treacherous erasure of Indigenous peoples in the Americas.

Notes 1. Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006). 2. Victoria Verlichak and Paula Kupfer, “Paula Luttringer: Archaeology of a Tragedy,” Aperture, no. 206 (2012), 52–59.

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3. Grandin, Empire’s Workshop, 21–23. 4. Diane Perpich, “Figurative Language and the ‘Face’ in Levinas’s Philosophy.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 38, no. 2 (2005): 103–21. 5. “Argentina Dirty War: Torture and Baby Theft Trial Under Way,” BBC News, October 28, 2020, Latin America & Caribbean, https://www. bbc.com/news/world-­latin-­america-­54718440. 6. Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); and Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2014). 7. Alicia Partnoy, The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival (San Francisco: Midnight Editions, 1998). 8. Gerald Vizenor, ed., Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 1–3. 9. Ana María Reyes, The Politics of Taste: Beatriz González and Cold War Aesthetics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 8–11. 10. Johanna Oksala, Feminist Experiences: Foucauldian and Phenomenological Investigations (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016). 11. Mick Gidley, “Visible and Invisible Scars of Wounded Knee,” in Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis, ed. Jay Prosser (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 25–38. 12. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York: Zone Books, 1991). 13. Eduardo Mendieta, “Toward a Decolonial Feminist Imaginary: Decolonizing Futurity,” Critical Philosophy of Race 8, no. 1–2 (2020): 237–64. 14. Michelle Maiese, “Dehumanization,” on Beyond Intractability (website), ed. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess, Conflict Information Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder, July 2003, https://www.beyondintractability.org/ essay/dehumanization. 15. Gerald Vizenor, “The Ruins of Representation: Shadow Survivance and the Literature of Dominance,” American Indian Quarterly 17, no. 1 (1993): 7–30. 16. Rebecca Belmore, sister, 2010, photograph, color inkjet on transparencies, 2.13 × 3.66 meters, Audain Gallery, Whistler, British Columbia, https:// www.rebeccabelmore.com/sister/. 17. Jolene Rickard, “Rebecca Belmore: Performing Power,” in Rebecca Belmore: Fountain, exhibition catalogue for the Canada Pavilion, Venice Biennale (Vancouver: Kamloops Art Gallery and Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, 2005), 68–76. 18. Rickard, “Rebecca Belmore: Performing Power,” 69–70; and Emma D. Velez, “Decolonial Feminism at the Intersection: A Critical Reflection on the Relationship between Decolonial Feminism and Intersectionality,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 33, no. 3 (2019): 390–406.

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19. John Berger, introduction to Ways of Seeing (New York: Penguin Books, 1977). 20. Megan Thee Stallion, “Megan Thee Stallion: Why I Speak Up for Black Women,” New York Times, October 13, 2020, Opinion, https://www. nytimes.com/2020/10/13/opinion/megan-­t hee-­s tallion-­b lack-­ women.html. 21. Urban Indian Health Institute, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (Seattle: Seattle Indian Health Board, 2018), accessed September 18, 2021, https://www.uihi.org/wp-­content/ uploads/2018/11/Missing-­a nd-­M urdered-­I ndigenous-­Women-­a nd-­ Girls-­Report.pdf.

CHAPTER 6

Exiles and Diasporas

Ana Mendieta, arguably a less overtly politically engaged artist than Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe), shares with Belmore a trenchant and painfully powerful exploration of political resistance through symbolic form in multidisciplinary art. And of both artists it is accurate to say that their life’s work is the creation of art as a form of resistance to, refusal of, coloniality’s regime. Aesthetic form is essential to this work. Of Mendieta’s monumental Silueta series, Sherry Buckberrough (an art historian and, during Mendieta’s life, the artist’s friend) writes: A primary strength of the [Silueta] series, and the basis of any description of it, is its consistency in aspects of form and process. One can say that the Siluetas are a series of actions in which Mendieta positioned her own body, or a constructed proxy of it, in a carefully chosen and prepared location, most often in nature, though sometimes in archaeological ruins or on culturally sacred or religious sites. She then subjected her body or its substitute to a simple, specified process that incorporated natural forces—water, fire, earth, wind and/or natural growth. She documented these actions with photographs and Super-8 films.1

The formal torque of the Siluetas, then, is the series’ most salient and consistent feature. It is what declares its seriality. Mendieta, who was not of Indigenous descent, grounded her Siluetas in Indigenous American archeological spaces, her inaugural Silueta—Imagen de Yagul—taken in © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Raymond, Photography and Resistance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96158-9_6

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the archeological site near Oaxaca.2 Buckberrough suggests astutely that we can think of Mendieta’s Siluetas as self-portraits. Buckberrough’s interpretation, informed by tender personal memory of the artist, is refreshingly clear-sighted. More often, one encounters discussion of Mendieta in terms that problematically emphasize her connection, as a woman of color, to the earth, with Jane Blocker going so far as to connect Mendieta with the earth because of the color of her skin, a nonsensical linkage.3 In typifying Mendieta’s works under the rubric of ecofeminism, a potent question is inadvertently raised regarding the racial politics of ecofeminism.4 As Jolene Rickard (Tuscarora) rightly points out, we must question the appropriative tendencies of White ecofeminism, which feeds on Indigenous (and other non-European) traditions.5 Buckberrough notes that Mendieta was already concerned about the appropriative erasures of White feminism: Mendieta curated a show at A.I.R. entitled Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women of the United States. In the catalogue introduction she specified her own identity as a Third World artist, proclaiming: “…as women in the United States politicized themselves and came together in the Feminist Movement with the purpose to end the domination and exploitation by the white male culture, they failed to remember us. American Feminism as its stands is basically a white middle class movement”. (Mendieta, A. 1980)6

This problem with White feminism that Mendieta notes in 1980 is insufficiently—to say the least—resolved as I write in 2021. Mendieta’s Silueta series addresses the problem with the force of symbolic form. Consider a Silueta created at La Ventosa, Mexico (1976). Mendieta’s form, in outline, is sculpted into sand beside the ocean. The sand appears partly damp where a wave has moved across it. On the other side of the figure, the sand remains dry. Within the curved figural outline red pigment creates a visual landscape in some elliptical conversation with Belmore’s strong deployment of red and white, blood and emptiness. It is not that I would argue that Mendieta influenced Belmore. No, it is rather that both artists, grappling with the violence of settler colonialism, fighting this violence through image, create intertextually resonant symbolic landscapes in which suffering and erasure are contested.

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Symbolic Form in Exile Mendieta’s red-pigment Silueta at La Ventosa evokes a painful dreamscape wherein the ocean’s tidal movements gradually erode the symbol of the self and yet the photograph’s stasis, its presence as image-object, arrests and even reverses this erasure. Exponentially more people have seen Mendieta’s photograph of her earthworks at La Ventosa than saw her perform that earthwork originally. It is through the photograph that the work is visible, legible, resisting erasure. Even as Mendieta articulates a connection to the earth as a source of her Cuban-American ecofeminism, I note that what Mendieta lastingly creates is photographic, and that this art as lasting image is a protest against erasure. She is not interested in ephemerality as a goal or a virtue: on the contrary, she purposively and repeatedly stages erasure to object to and overturn the social force of coloniality on the bodies of non-White women. She skilfully deploys photographic filmic media to preserve her mark as an artist. The erasures performed and staged by this Silueta at La Ventosa are not a statement that Mendieta sees herself as erased, becoming earth, but rather that she instates in photographic image her presence. Specifically, her presence as an embodied seer who rebukes the very White feminism that, posthumously, has so vociferously claimed her. Indeed, Mendieta presents her body in conjunction with the earth specifically to rebuke the claims of settler colonialism on her body and on the bodies of women of color. Far from interpreting her own body as like the earth, her works are self-portraits of her difference from earth. Whereas Mendieta came from a wealthy and politically powerful (though also politically vulnerable) bourgeois family in Cuba, once she was transported to Iowa through Operation Peter Pan, she faced virulent racism.7 This scarring experience left her with a permanent mistrust of White, settler-­ colonialist culture even as her own antecedents, in Cuba, would have been among the colonizers (she was not known to be of Taíno nor of African diasporic descent). With her light brown skin, dark hair and dark eyes, and above all her Latinate name, Mendieta was marked in the United States, in Iowa, as a racialized subject. Her status as a person born and raised in Cuba marked her as part of “empire’s workshop,” that is, the space of imperial domination that the United States created for its exercises in authoritarian putative democracy.8 Mendieta did not inhabit the United States as a member of settler-colonialist bourgeois society. Instead, sent as an exile and as if an orphan (her parents were still living but under duress,

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her father imprisoned by Castro’s regime) to Iowa, Mendieta was seen as part of America’s racialized (through settler-colonialist discourse) Latinx underclass. The Siluetas, then, are misappropriated, in a manner that Rickard’s insightful theorization indicates, by White ecofeminism. It is yet clear that Mendieta sees feminism and anticolonialist protest as intimately and intensely bound to the revivification of the damaged earth, which has been polluted by industrial processes. The dialogue between herself, her body, and the earth is indeed the tissue of symbolic and dialectic substance that shapes Mendieta’s Siluetas. What I mean here is that ecofeminism needs to be understood beyond the White, settler-colonialist context of White women returning to a concern for Mother Earth and reengaged as part of the ongoing feminist work of non-White women who have, through the enforced material practices of capitalist ideology, been more likely to work the land, to know the land through labor. Mendieta’s earthworks are labor-intensive acts that emplace the body in symbolic spaces of landscape, captured by her camera as Super 8 films and slides. The symbolic work of the Siluetas inheres in their articulation as aesthetic image-form. Whereas I have written in earlier articles and chapters about Mendieta’s littoral zone Siluetas, here I want to focus on her Siluetas of scorched earth.9 Consider two Siluetas in which Mendieta’s use of water imagery is haunted by drought, parched conditions, and fire. In one memorable earthwork, she stages the explosive image of her own outline going up in flames. The use of combustives makes the outline very hard to read in the documentary images Mendieta produced from this work, and yet the outline is there, haunting the conflagration. In another Silueta image, dry earth bordering swamp land is pockmarked with divots set beside the figural outline of Mendieta’s body, as if here her outline becomes part of the wounded landscape of Iowa. The dance of verdancy and fire in the flaming image, a color slide, plays through the landscape of devastation in dry earth images.10 The body’s impression is barely legible among the craters of the paradoxical arid swampland. In this near illegibility manifests the persistence of self against violent circumstances. The sense of how easily a person can get lost is palpable in these images that peel back the layers and show the materiality of exile, of being a displaced person. Mendieta shows herself as a disappeared person who has also, paradoxically, left marks. The marks are transient on the earth but far more permanent, stable as image, in the photograph. In this sense, Mendieta leverages the photograph as the limit

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case, the test case, of revivification, of return. The image—any image—figures return through outline, always partial, evocative, and never whole. Mendieta’s self-portraits as a silhouette are dialogues not only with the earth but also with the haunted temporality of the image.

Eternal Return, Coming Back The photograph as the staging of the conditions and possibilities of return is a note that is sounded in all of the works discussed in this book. Return means those disappeared insist on being seen. For Mendieta, throughout most of her adult life return to Cuba was impossible, for reasons of state. Provocatively, Buckberrough argues that once Mendieta was able to go back to Cuba, the Silueta series ended. While this claim could be contested, it is powerful insofar as I would read the Silueta series as a mode of staging return to a place where Mendieta could not return. The larger question of whether the wound of exile could ever be healed in the political climate of continued coloniality is open, left open as a wound by Mendieta’s untimely death, and also left open by unsolved, unresolved political continuation of settler-colonialist systems of oppression and use of the colonized space, the colonized body. Cuba itself haunts the United States not only through its communism but also through its status as a colonialist space that does not as vehemently (or arguably does not at all) embrace capitalism as the goal and telos of political aggression. The unhealed place of impossible return, that to which the exiled, displaced person cannot return, then, is the topos of Mendieta’s Silueta series. The use of explosive powder lain within the outline of her silhouette and then set on fire, in the central Silueta shown above, suggests the pain and combustibility of coloniality’s compulsive patterns of exile. Cast into diasporic drift by the political currents of settler colonialism, by the system’s intrinsic repetitions of violence, Mendieta’s Silueta series not only articulates the pain of the displaced person as an erased person but also subverts, overturns, and protests this experience. By opening the pain of being erased, effaced, Mendieta stages protest, just as at the beginning of her career in the performance piece Rape she protested the violation and killing of another woman.11 In a piece that seems to pay homage to Mendieta, contemporary performance artist Alicia Grullon leverages the work The Rule Is Love #2 (Say Her Name) protesting the disappearance of Black, brown, and trans

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women, and the police killings of Black and brown women.12 Of the work, Grullon writes: This … performance … [is] part of a series of performances that look at ideas of what prompts people to act when they witness a situation where a person is in a vulnerable circumstance. For this performance, my only rule was to keep moving while not able to see, speak or use my hands. Passersby were asked to see me across 14th street safely and address me by one of the names of women killed by police violence handed to them by production assistants.13

Grullon’s piece explores what propels people to act when another person is in trouble, and ultimately connects settler-colonialist treatment of Black and Indigenous women with the treatment of the land, surveillance, legal ownership, and presumed power over women’s bodies. Social structures upholding the circumstances producing the death and disappearance of Black and Indigenous women stem from the universal assumptions of the White, male point of view. This point of view permits and even celebrates resource extraction and a continuance of settler-colonial plantation structure in real estate and in relationships of Black and Indigenous communities with outside space, public space, thereby creating this haunting sense that Black and brown women cannot safely be outside, outdoors.14 The architectures of heteropatriarchy create the public spaces that Black and brown women navigate from the radically undercut or disempowered position of those who are often seen by heteropatriarchy as expendable or part of the usable goods landscape. The structure of coloniality then is both physical and metaphysical. In Mendieta’s photographic works emergent from and, indeed, an intrinsic part of the Silueta series, the brown woman’s body (Mendieta’s body original to the series and implied throughout the series) is staged as always already gone but leaving traces that mark and alter and give meaning to the landscape. The idea of Ana Mendieta as a racialized subject itself illuminates the bizarre structures of coloniality’s ideologies of race. In Cuba, the Mendieta family, descended neither from African diasporic subjects nor from Indigenous Americans, held the position inherited from European colonizers. But in the United States, Ana Mendieta as a Latinx woman experienced brutal racism. This dual experience of race and racism is reflected in the bifurcation of the Silueta series such that Siluetas created in Mexico markedly contrast with those created in Iowa.

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In the heteropatriarchal landscape of Iowa, Mendieta comes to Dead Man Creek area and establishes Silueta works that potently symbolize the disappearance of brown women from Iowa. In the area we now call the state of Iowa, several Indigenous American tribes, including the Ioway, the Ho-Chunk, and the Sioux, were corralled into reservations or pushed out of Iowa entirely during harsh practices of settler-colonialist expansion in the area now called the United States of America. Mendieta, whose ancestors were settler colonialists from Spain, became radicalized by her experience of racism in Iowa, where her brown skin and Spanish-language background made her a target of racism. She was not known to be of Indigenous American descent but came to sympathize profoundly with the erasure and exile experienced by Indigenous Americans. Her inaugural Silueta was photographed in the space of an Indigenous American archeological site in Mexico.

Rewriting the Body Coloniality is an embodied history: embodied in the demarcated land and in the bodies of living human beings who descend from and inherit the yet unresolved terms of settler colonialism. The photographs of the Silueta series, then, come to stand not just for Mendieta and not just for the fate of so many residents of Cuba, Mexico, and South America who are cast adrift, exiled, by political forces controlled by the United States, but also for the erasure of Black and brown women’s presence in the social and economic structures of settler colonialism. Mendieta’s rejection of White feminism was not a rejection of feminism per se, but instead a reenvisioning of feminism as responsive to the erasure of Black and brown women, and more importantly as insisting on the reappearance, the emphatic emplacement, of Black and brown women in the landscape of the Americas. For Mendieta, this emplacement becomes photographic because the photograph preserves, as a kind of framed visual quote, the dialogue that Mendieta engages in her earthworks. It is critical to unpack the word dialogue as Mendieta uses it. Photography is not a language, Barthes argues, and yet the photograph does speak.15 The body, also, speaks. The dialogue of the photograph is the space of the extra-linguistic; dialogic with the body, the image answers the body’s presence and can record its absence. This dialogue is the sense in which Mendieta mobilizes the image of the body’s trace, its formal outline. She is in dialogue with the earth not because she is like the earth,

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as Blocker erroneously implies, but on the contrary because she is human, exile, different from the earth. It is in her humanity as articulator of symbolic form that her art is created. The silhouette is evoked as the origin of image, the imprint, the body’s remainder after it no longer inhabits the space. In recurrently regaining self-vision, as Buckberrough notes, selfportrait, restaging the prospect of viewing her outline in the landscape, Mendieta rehearses and overturns the experience of being forced out of a place. She chooses Mexico (generally coastal Mexico) and Iowa as the epodes, the galaxy of her revision of her own disappearance from Cuba played more broadly as the contrast between White space—Iowa—and Latinx space—Mexico. Neither of these landscapes is unmarred by settler colonialism, and the mournful work of Mendieta is to recognize the depth of this marring. The Siluetas at La Ventosa (Mexico) engages a sense of dissolution as freeing, whereas the Siluetas at Dead Man Creek Area (Iowa) feel claustrophobic, and yet both rehearse the problematic of the colonized body. The colonized body is epitomized as the erased body, in the Siluetas, but also the body that resists erasure, refuses and overturns erasure, by leaving a deep mark in earth.

Dialogic Trace The ecofeminist argument that Mendieta’s earthworks leave no trace on the landscape flies in the face of the actual work of her photography and films of those earthworks. For Mendieta’s photography not only leaves a trace, it is trace, it is a mark, as such. The Silueta series is Mendieta’s refusal to leave no trace. By no means are the poetics of the Siluetas a wish to leave no trace; on the contrary, the poetics of the Silueta series is to emphatically stage and refuse the gambit that a brown woman should leave no trace, should not be seen. In this sense, White ecofeminism drastically misreads Mendieta, which she seemed to predict when she broke with White feminism before her death. This misreading subtends the settler-­colonialist position that strains to envision Black and brown women as fully visible. As Alicia Grullon’s contemporary performance work The Rule Is Love #2 (Say Her Name) makes painfully clear, this is a dialogue in which one side has yet to be fully recognized.16 The act of returning, of recurrence, is one part of claiming space, making a claim on space. It is not that visibility in itself confers social power or even social presence, but that visibility, the mark of the image, attests to claims made. Alicia Grullon’s performance piece is set in public space and

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in real time to reinstate the presence of socially erased, and murdered, Black and brown women in the social landscape. The filming of the performance, however, makes permanent the mark of the reinsertion. For Mendieta, photographs and films recording the Siluetas function somewhat differently. For the most part, her earthworks were performed— performed in the sense of being nonpermanent marks on the landscape— without audience or with a small audience. They were mostly private ceremonies, private acts. But they were always accompanied by Mendieta’s camera, filming and photographing the works. The reinsertion of the disappeared into public space, here, happens photographically, through the camera’s enacted remembrance of the mark. In this sense, Mendieta’s work choreographs the photographic as the shepherd of her protest. Whereas the work itself is shaped of her body and of the earth, the “dialogue” between her body and the earth, the photograph is the mark that quotes this dialogue, reinserting into public space the orphaned body, the exiled body. The photograph articulates the dialogue, placing it in symbolic formal quotation marks. The use of fire in Mendieta’s most ephemeral Siluetas is striking. These are images that are performative in the most extreme sense, also vanishing in the most radical sense. Fire does not last. Even the singe left after the incineration becomes ashes, brushed aside. But it is in the Siluetas of fire that Mendieta pushes to its limit the trope of her massive series.17 Here, the photograph is of the essence of the series and also is pushed poignantly to frame and contain the momentary image of fire, which doubles as the image of the self’s outline vanishing. In its moment of manifestation fire is also disappearing; but in its power, fire does not signify victimization, but rather signifies threat. For Mendieta’s outline, her silhouette, to catch fire and burn suggests not only the symbolic form of the exile’s disappearance but also—potently—the force and power of her objection and protest to the conditions of her invisibility. The camera witnesses this transformation from abjection to protest. In this sense, the photographic medium is crucial to Mendieta’s Silueta series. It is through the camera’s gaze that the Silueta makes its statement outside the purview of Mendieta’s personal knowledge of her art. The camera witnesses her protest and carries this visible trace and mark of refusing invisibility. She stages the depth of erasure of the exiled, female, colonized body and stages erasure’s refusal. The series is a protest against the way that Mendieta was seen by White settler-colonialist society—as she was dubbed, while a teenager in Iowa, a “whore” apparently because of her Latinx appearance.18 It launches a

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protest against settler-colonialist ways of seeing human beings, seeing land, and protests against settler-colonialist ways of seeing as a formal act. Settler-colonialist visions of land abrade the land’s force as living, and instead see the land as a space of resource extraction. Mendieta’s protest photography makes a potent, subtle, symbolically powerful and numerically massive protest against the cultural disappearance of non-­ White women.

Notes 1. Sherry Buckberrough, “Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series (1973–1980): In and Out of Feminism,” in Iconic Works of Art by Feminists and Gender Activists: Mistress-Pieces, ed. Brenda Schmahmann (New York: Routledge, 2021), 149. 2. Emily Draicchio, “Ambiguous Categories: Strategic Essentialism in Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series,” Yiara Magazine, March 10, 2019, https://yiaramagazine.com/2019/03/10/emily-­draicchio-­ambiguous-­ categories-­strategic-­essentialism-­in-­ana-­mendietas-­silueta-­series/. 3. Jane Blocker, Where is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, and Exile (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 63, 124. 4. Elizabeth Ann Baker, “To Be Magic: The Art of Ana Mendieta through an Ecofeminist Lens” (Honors Undergraduate Thesis, Orlando, University of Central Florida, 2016), 39–40, https://stars.library.ucf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1016&context=honorstheses. 5. Jolene Rickard, “Diversifying Sovereignty and the Reception of Indigenous Art,” Art Journal 76, no. 2 (2017): 81–84. 6. Buckberrough, “Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series,” 151–55. 7. Jane Blocker, Where Is Ana Mendieta?; and Buckberrough, “Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series,” 147–61. 8. Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 2–7. 9. Claire Raymond, Women Photographers and Feminist Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2017); and Claire Raymond, “Roland Barthes, Ana Mendieta, and the Orphaned Image,” The Conversant: Interview Projects, Talk Poetries, Embodied Inquiry, September 2014, 1–22. 10. I refer to the following three images: • Ana Mendieta, color photograph documenting earth/body work with mud, Dead Tree Area, Iowa City, Iowa, from the series Silueta works in Iowa and Oaxaca, Mexico, 1976–78.

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• Ana Mendieta, color photograph documenting earth/body work with mud, Dead Tree Area, Iowa City, Iowa, from the series Silueta works in Iowa and Oaxaca, Mexico, 1976–78. • Ana Mendieta, Volcán, 1979, Super 8 film (film still), color, silent.

11. Buckberrough, “Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series,” 147–61. 12. Alicia Grullon, The Rule Is Love #2 (Say Her Name), 2018, video, https://aliciagrullon.com/artwork/4458515-­T he-­R ule-­i s-­L ove-­2 -­ Say-­Her-­Name.html. 13. Ibid. 14. Carolyn Finney, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 15. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). 16. Stephanie Simon, “Artists Demand Social Justice for Victims of Police Violence,” Spectrum News 1NY, June 4, 2020, Arts, https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-­b oroughs/news/2020/06/04/ artists-­demand-­social-­justice-­for-­victims-­of-­police-­violence. 17. Susan Best, “The Serial Spaces of Ana Mendieta,” Art History 30, no. 1 (2007): 57–82. 18. Blocker, Where Is Ana Mendieta?, 53.

CHAPTER 7

Gendering Decoloniality

American photographer Carrie Mae Weems deploys lucid, oneiric images in The Louisiana Project, suggesting spectrality while subverting ways that spectrality carries a racially coded presence in the United States.1 The premise of the partial presence, the partial erasure and invisibility of African Americans in the landscape of the United States, is explored with pain and subtlety in Weems’s The Louisiana Project photographs, images in which African American presence is emphatically articulated in social space.2 The series is based on architectural photography expanded temporally by the continual presence of a spectral witness figure, performed by Weems, that stands before and witnesses the scenes of architecture in and around New Orleans, Louisiana.3 And yet this witness figure, wearing period clothes of nineteenth-century working women, is not a disembodied ghost but an embodied revenant.4 She figures the act of looking at the not-so-ruined remnants of Southern culture. The timeframe of The Louisiana Project is both nineteenth century and contemporary. It’s gaze elongates time. For Weems’s The Louisiana Project architectural photographs work through a process of implicit comparison, contrasting the highly well-maintained residue of White supremacy that is Greek-Revival, Neoclassical plantation architecture with the industrial, impoverished neighborhoods of New Orleans that are predominantly African American. Architectures express and shape embodied experience in space. Built space is also stable across time, a slow-exposure record of what—and who—a society values.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Raymond, Photography and Resistance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96158-9_7

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Carrie Mae Weems’s Diasporic Haunts Built space forcibly shapes cognition, as Sarah Williams Goldhagen recognizes in Welcome to Your World: “To navigate our bodies through space, our brains nonconsciously imagine a hexagonal lattice of points, and locate the place of our body with reference to two objects in space, forming triangles within their hexagonal grid.”5 Weems’s Louisiana Project’s architectural images, by dint of their use of the artist as witness figure, emplace the viewer’s body uncannily in the photographic space. Seeing her seeing the architectural edifices on which the photographs focus, we empathically experience ourselves in the space. Through Weems’s embodied act of haunting antebellum architecture and damaged urban landscapes we, the viewers of The Louisiana Project, also come to feel that we are in place in these places and that we are ghosts in these architectural spaces. The force of the project is to bend the viewer’s experience of embodiment, subtly, so that without realizing it we are being changed; the experience of looking at the photographs alters our bodily relationship to the built space that signifies White supremacy in the Deep South. Weems’s use of her own body in staging emblems of witnessing racism in The Louisiana Project, art historian Deborah Willis describes as a “muse” figure. Muse to herself, Weems stares down, faces down, the stability of racial oppression across time.6 For The Louisiana Project shows, in quiet pain, how architectural edifices are maintained expressions of social power. The pivot or hinge of this revelation is the reappearance, after implied erasure and disappearance, of a woman of African descent, in a servant’s nineteenth-century period garments, who surveys—witnesses—the ongoing architectural presence of racial oppression in and around New Orleans.7 This witnessing act is always double, in the photographs, as the woman who witnesses is also a guide, guiding the viewer to see as if through the point of view, the gaze, of the witness figure. This triangulated gaze is the crucial mechanism of the series. When we look at antebellum buildings kept pristine contrasting with industrial African American neighborhoods surrounding these Neoclassical edifices of New Orleans, we see manifested racial hierarchy as architectural and preservationist practice. To whom money is allowed to flow is reflected in the built space inhabited by different races and classes in New Orleans. The clarity of this vision of oppressive racist structures occurs through the triangulation of the witness figure with the buildings she surveys and the viewer who watches her watching. The witness figure draws our attention

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to where to look and also makes us aware of the need to look critically at buildings we might otherwise accept as just “there.” The forceful and never inert quality of built space, the way that we are accustomed to absorbing its presence without questioning it, Weems’s witness figure challenges. Notably, this figure imaged in The Louisiana Project is not “Carrie Mae Weems” (though performed by the artist herself) but instead a muse/witness figure, created by Weems, invoking a nineteenth-century woman of the African diaspora, a mixed-race woman who may be enslaved or may be a free person of color (as such were a key part of the New Orleans social fabric) or may shift between these. She suggests, with this witnessing character, a revenant, someone whose presence and name has been erased from the record but who returns to survey, judge, critique, see, bear witness to the enduring structures of racism that have erased her memorial presence. Among tombs of the wealthy of New Orleans, she walks as if possessed, but it is by vision—visionary lucidity—that she is possessed.

Waltzing Weems’s triptych photographic series A Single’s Waltz in Time and photograph Sorrow’s Bed are particularly illustrative of this play of the erased figure who returns to witness and bear judgment against the social system and its architectural edifices that erased her. The series is not only about the act of witnessing but also about the act of return, of claiming presence in the very spaces where one was denied presence. In Sorrow’s Bed, a woman in nineteenth-century period costume stands in the historic Beauregard-Keyes House in New Orleans next to a bed, looking out a window (Fig. 7.1).8 The photograph with its evocative side lighting suggests regret, and the woman’s stance, as she gazes out the window, indicates entrapment, a longing to be released from the space. The room is ornately lovely, decorated (carefully preserved by New Orleans preservationists) in the period style of the antebellum, but the woman’s place (in Weems’s photograph) in the room is sorrowful. In the clothes of a servant her sorrow is, perhaps, that of being in a position of servitude surrounded by luxury that she cannot enjoy. The luxury and beauty of the space are not intended for her pleasure or comfort; rather, on the contrary, it is she who is expected to maintain the cleanliness and beauty of the space, through her labor, so that the White dominant class (the so-called planter aristocracy) can enjoy the space.

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Fig. 7.1  Carrie Mae Weems, Sorrow’s Bed, from the series The Louisiana Project, 2003, gelatin silver print, 20 × 20ʺ. Copyright Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

And yet, the grief of Sorrow’s Bed seems to go beyond even the grief of the one who is exposed daily to luxury and beauty that are not hers to access, but rather only hers to, by her labor, preserve for and offer to others. Through subtly suggestive bodily position, this evocative photograph signifies the commonplace and tragic rape of enslaved women during America’s period of enslavement. Beyond this, the system of plaçage was entrenched in New Orleans society, a system wherein women of the African diaspora were taken by White men as mistresses. The cliché that ran deeply through the fabric of the mythology of the traditional South of the “tragic mulatta” (a derogatory term describing a woman of mixed

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African and European ancestry) reflected the viciously unjust sexual use and abuse of the bodies of women of the African diaspora by White men.9 Women of African descent who were mixed race were purchased as slaves by White men for the express purpose of having sexual relations with them, while free women of color, of mixed-race ancestry, were lured into concubinage by racially based material constraints. Sorrow’s Bed, then, references the specter of the rape, nonconsensual liaison, of women of the African diaspora by White men. The sorrowful bed, then, is in a beautiful room, but to be the object of sexual use and abuse is never a privilege regardless of how beautiful are the spaces into which this abuse may bring the inhabitant. This inhabitation of space, then, in Sorrow’s Bed, appears to be the sorrow of the woman whose life is a series of rapes at the hands of a White man or a series of White men. Here, the bed becomes deeply sorrowful, a scene of violation that the woman cannot escape. Her servitude is in the bed. The erasure of the sexually violated, from “proper” social space, is an erasure based not only on race but also on the status of a peculiar voicelessness that circumscribes the social position of the one known by others to be a victim of sexual violation. This social death is the erasing of the violated person’s right to occupy public space in any way legitimately visible to others.10 Their presence in the writing of the world is effaced. Sorrow’s Bed, then, not only is a photograph restaging the return of the enslaved woman to witness the enduring legacy pain of the system of enslavement in the traditional South; it also presents the scene of the spectral witness who was once a victim returning to mourn and claim the very space in which she was harmed. She becomes a witness here rather than a victim. She witnesses her own suffering and survival. The sexual victimization of the woman of mixed-race descent is a kind of cascading trauma, for her very inheritance, as a woman of mixed-race descent, almost certainly reflects the sexual victimization of her mother, as the overwhelming majority of people of mixed-race descent in the traditional South were children of a woman of African descent and a man of European descent.11 The systematic rape of women of the African diaspora was a key component of establishing White domination. As Rachel Feinstein argues in When Rape Was Legal, the cultural permission to force women of African descent into nonconsensual sexual relations with White men (typically slave owners) not only shaped intense trauma for African American culture but also sickened and distorted White culture in the South.12 To rape women of the African diaspora was a key violative trope

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and act of White masculinity in the South; in particular, it was the domain, the mode of domination, of the White slave-owning class. Notably, only about one-third of all White Southerners owned enslaved people. In New Orleans, in particular, the practice of purchasing mixed-race enslaved women specifically for sexual use was a key trope of White male performance of masculinity. The belief of White Southerners was that so long as White men expressed their sexual urges through rape of women of the African diaspora, White women could remain pure.13 This created the illusory belief that White women were not sexual beings while women of the African diaspora were seen—falsely—as hypersexual. White women participated in the subjugation of women of African descent, choosing to preserve their own position of racial dominance rather than protect and empower other women. This created a system of domination and skewed gender typologies that persists even now in the traditional South.

Gender’s Harms Notably, the very violence of White masculinity that was honed and inculcated through the systematic rape of enslaved women also fed a culture of extreme gender social dimorphism wherein the more wealthy White women were significantly less powerful (socially and economically) in contrast to their husbands, fathers, and brothers. The extreme submissiveness and silencing of White women was enforced by the culture of rape of women of African descent and also the sociality of White Southern women as submissive served to hold in place the cultural acceptance of the rape of women of the African diaspora, stripping White women their ability to object to the sexual violence of their husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons. Socially trained to accept excessively passive familial positions, White women in the South, particularly those of the slave-holding class, lacked the social capacity to object to the behavior of the men of their families. The pervasive violence of enslavement reached its worst depth in the systematic rape of women of the African diaspora, inasmuch as rape enacts an erasure of a person’s autonomy. Short of murder, rape is the closest it gets to erasing the human being as an agentic autonomous actor. And White women, of the slave-holding class, were trained and inculcated in the cruel art of looking the other way, not “seeing” what was done to Black women, and certainly not speaking of it. Weems’s subtle, haunting photograph of Sorrow’s Bed suggests the interiority of the suffering of the victim of systemic sexual violence and also

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stages the return of the victimized to claim agency.14 It is she (performed by Weems) who is the collective body of women of the African diaspora violated by men of European descent, she who persists, she who comes back to witness and to claim the space in which she was once erased. The triptych A Single’s Waltz in Time dramatizes this return and reclaiming. Here Weems enters the sacrosanct space of the Beauregard-Keyes House parlor. In its utterly White world, with no shoes on her feet, she begins an eerie dance (Fig. 7.2). The dance, in A Single’s Waltz in Time, gives embodied figural form and expression to the multifarious ways that, as Lisa Ze Winter rightly argues, “[B]lack subjects, in order to envision the possibility of freedom and agency, must inhabit multiple imaginative and physical landscapes simultaneously.”15 What are these imaginative spaces and figural places that Weems, performing as an enslaved or free—but under duress of plaçage—woman of color in nineteenth-century New Orleans, inhabits? The imaginative landscape of A Single’s Waltz in Time is one of expressive pain. Here, the witness figure, performed by Weems, evokes a woman whose body has been made use of. Strikingly, Ze Winters suggests that, because of the erasure of the voices of women of the African diaspora in historical records, the place to find their authentic reflection is in religious practices, particularly voudon.16 Whereas Weems’s waltz does not directly signify voudon practices, it performs evocatively (and indeed the entire series of photographs of The Louisiana Project can be read through this rubric) a kind of ritual or ceremony of witnessing and reinhabitation. My own

Fig. 7.2  Carrie Mae Weems, A Single’s Waltz in Time (triptych), from the series The Louisiana Project, 2003, gelatin silver prints, each 20 × 20ʺ. Copyright Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

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neologism, “reinhabitation” signifies the symbolically loaded and potent act of return, return to spaces wherein one’s ancestors (here, broadly speaking, those of the African diaspora) were silenced and erased (Fig. 7.3). In A Single’s Waltz in Time, the dance, the waltz, Weems performs significantly and imagistically fills the space of the parlor. The parlor’s architecture signifies White dominance, in its evocation of Neoclassical, Greek-Revival forms; it tells the inhabitant that the owner of this house inherits, as it were, the aristocratic position of the revered Western tradition. Paradoxically, the agrarian South was structured much more like an

Fig. 7.3  Carrie Mae Weems, A Single’s Waltz in Time (frame 1), from the series The Louisiana Project, 2003, gelatin silver print, 20 × 20ʺ. Copyright Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

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aristocracy than the industrial North. Planters, enslaved people, and farmers converged into a bitter triptych society in which the landed aristocracy, the planters, held sway over enslaved people and also controlled the sociality, to a significant extent, of nonslaveholder Whites.17 Within this cruel structure, perhaps the most erased populace was that of women of the African diaspora who were used for sex by White men. Ze Winters succinctly notes that sexualized violence is “ubiquitous in a slave society.”18 This sexualized violence worked as a form of deep and shallow silencing of the women of the African diaspora who were raped. When Weems performs the waltz, she performs the mourning for all these women, and importantly she performs the dance in the space— social, architectural, and eidetic—of their exclusion. For Sorrow’s Bed performs the ritual of reinhabitation in the space of the rape, the bed, the bedchamber, the room of sex; but the waltz, in A Single’s Waltz in Time, is an eerier, stranger, look. Here, the so-called concubine moves into the formal parlor space, a space wherein she, as a figure of perpetual sexual violation, would not have been welcomed. The formal parlor was the domain of the putatively unraped White mistress; it was not the domain of the so-called mulatta concubine. Writes Emily Clark, “The plaçage complex was delineated in nonfiction with a repertoire of standard elements. Foremost among them was a belief that New Orleans free women of color did not marry but instead formed relationships with White men on a contractual or quasi-contractual basis.”19 The placée was seen as a figure who gave sexual pleasure to men; she was not “of the parlor” so to speak. She was silenced except as a giver of pleasure to others, her own subjectivity effaced, erased, within the public domain (Fig. 7.4). Weems’s dance frees the placée, granting her bodily freedom of movement. In dancing, her body fills the space of the parlor from which she (that is, the victim of racist sexual violence whom Weems performs) was shamefully cast out. In dancing, she performs the proud return of the body, the revenant, to the space of her former erasure, and also she performs this figure’s mourning, the deep and painful mourning of the violated and silenced. The dance purges the space, ritually, of its unjust and unjustifiable cruelty in excluding and silencing the African diasporic woman of mixed race who was used for sex by White men. In this dance she reclaims her body and signifies the space of the formal parlor, that epicenter of White feminine propriety, as her space. It may not be a dance that directly invokes voudon, but elliptically this ceremonial practice is marked.

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Fig. 7.4  Carrie Mae Weems, A Single’s Waltz in Time (frame 2), from the series The Louisiana Project, 2003, gelatin silver print, 20 × 20ʺ. Copyright Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

The Parlor Just as Mendieta drew symbolically from Santeria even as she was not a practitioner, so also Weems, not a practitioner of voudon, draws from the subversive ideas and movements by which women of the African diaspora insisted on and achieved some form of symbolic power in the context of overwhelming White male racist dominance and sexual violation. The ritual dance of A Single’s Waltz in Time insists on and performs the woman’s right to be in the space of the parlor and is also a form of magical visual conjuring. As a child, I remember my grandmother’s parlor in Georgia

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(United States) as a frightfully constraining space where the proper woman held domain and cast aspersion on improper women. In the Deep South, the improper woman was she who had been sexually violated; it was and is a social structure built to cast out women of the African diaspora as always already improper, as well as submerge those White women who were unlucky enough to be raped or molested.20 Notably, during work on Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, the room of the enslaved woman whom he kept in concubinage (or, more accurately put, serial rape) Sally Hemings was recently uncovered or recovered. The room had no windows and was only 14 feet and 8 inches wide and 13 feet long.21 A mixed-race woman of predominantly European descent, Hemings was the granddaughter of a woman abducted from Africa. She was also half sister to Jefferson’s wife, Martha Jefferson. In uncovering the basement rooms in which she resided, a stark reminder of the architecture of coloniality was revealed. Hemings, the mother of six of Thomas Jefferson’s children, was not given place in the “proper” upstairs realms of the house. She was not situated in the parlor. Instead, she was forced (because of her enslaved condition) to occupy these nether rooms, below the grade of ground (Fig. 7.5). Weems’s A Single’s Waltz in Time breaks the architectural and social barrier of the parlor, instating in the parlor the presence of the putatively improper woman (the so-called mulatta concubine portrayed by Weems in period costume). By dancing her body fills this reclaimed space, this space from which women of the African diaspora historically were erased. By dancing she refuses to be held still, held at the corner. She centers the space of the parlor with her body. Through her dance, the architecture of the parlor is rendered uncanny, eerie. Suddenly, we see the architectural space of the parlor as coldly violent rather than prestigious and beautiful. The dancing body is the figure that anchors the visual space of the parlor in these triptych photographs. Weems’s waltzing dance curves in an estranged evocation of the waltzes that populated and still populate formal New Orleans balls. They are European dances, brought from Europe by settler colonialists and deployed, in the context of the Americas, to assert European cultural dominance. She dances with no partner and appears to enact the waltz steps of both male and female dancers. Dancing alone, she refuses a partner, refuses the systems of plaçage and rape within enslavement that were offered to women of the African diaspora in New Orleans. The dance is somber and haunting. It makes the space of the parlor appear improper, with its insistence of excluding the body of the woman of the African

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Fig. 7.5  Carrie Mae Weems, A Single’s Waltz in Time (frame 3), from the series The Louisiana Project, 2003, gelatin silver print, 20 × 20ʺ. Copyright Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

diaspora. The dance is one of anguish but also of reclamation, of making a claim of oneself in the very space where one has been erased. To dance insists on a refusal to be still, a refusal to occupy this racist social space in a rigidly constrained way. The bending of the formal dance, the waltz, that Weems enacts in A Single’s Waltz in Time critiques the European dance but also joins this dance, insisting on the fully embodied presence of the woman of African descent in the precise antebellum spaces where she has been silenced and constrained. From the enforced silence of the sexually abused emerges also the null zone of embodied disappearance. To be sexually abused is to be erased as an agentic subject. Weems’s

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dance returns agency to the erased figure of the “tragic mulatta” where that figure of the “mulatta concubine” merges in subjectivity with the enslaved woman purchased for sexual abuse.22 The dance fills the space where the woman has been silenced, cast out, and in filling this architectural space expressive of White, male domination, Weems alters the meaning of the architecture, making it radically a space in which the embodied presence of the African diaspora is seen, felt, and vividly honored. Sarah Williams Goldhagen persuasively argues that built space affects cognition, that “cognition is the product of a three-way collaboration of mind, body, and environment … the physical environment that a body inhabits greatly influences human cognitions.”23 The oppressive message of the parlor, of Beauregard-Keyes House, works to shore up White feelings of dominance. Not only does it express White male dominance but also this domestic space allows White women to share in the feeling of dominating others. Since the intensely patriarchal system of the traditional South did not allow White women a voice with regard to the men of their families, their domination came from dominating people of African descent, in particular women of the African diaspora. On the one hand, the parlor is a pleasant architectural space in that it features high ceilings, plenteous light from numerous tall and wide windows, a curved space making the inhabitant feel softly protected in its interiority. On the other hand, it is also a coldly dominating interior, projecting motifs of Neoclassical space in the context of domesticity, whereas Classical architecture of, for example, the Parthenon was intended for purposes of public discourse and worship, veneration. The message of bringing this architectural style to the domestic implies that even within the domestic sphere the public rules of White domination must be fulfilled; it also suggests that the space of veneration and worship is the very locale of White society’s insistence on its own dominance. It suggests, shockingly and horrifyingly, that White supremacy should be worshiped. It is precisely this implication of the architecture that Weems’s dance, in A Single’s Waltz in Time, rejects and refutes, forcefully and elegantly. Williams Goldhagen argues compellingly for the way that architectural space—built worlds—shapes consciousness implicitly. Her project is in some sense a continuation of Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. Memorably, Bachelard argues, “It is better to live in a space of impermanence than in one of finality.”24 Weems’s deployment of the witness figure in Sorrow’s Bed and A Single’s Waltz in Time, as in all the black-and-white

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architectural photographs of The Louisiana Project, contends with the threat of the “final” house—that is, the house that closes in the inhabitant, shutting down and shutting up her possible life—and in contending with this threat the artist asserts the movement and agency of the witness figure who transcends time and place, who moves between times and places, always moving, never trapped.

Interiorities Sorrow’s Bed and A Single’s Waltz in Time are interior images, whereas other photographs in Weems’s Louisiana Project look at architectural edifices either from outside or from vistas that are partially outside (doors, columns) looking to the space beyond the house, recording and interrogating place beyond built space. The interiority of the images of A Single’s Waltz in Time places them inside the house, inside that space that Bachelard argues is archetypally of the imagination, of the dream.25 The interior is, strikingly, the space where Weems most directly confronts the problematic of the long and multifarious history of the sexual abuse and rape of women of the African diaspora at the hands of White men. Here, the witness figure is not observing the house from outside, nor is she within the house but at a threshold of egress (as in other Louisiana Project images). Instead, here, she is within the bedroom, within the parlor, these rooms typologically feminine. The bedroom is the place where the mistress/concubine is used for pleasure, the wife for procreation, and also where the wife is considered (though assuredly does not always experience so being) protected, ensconced within the marital domain. The mistress/ concubine, in the bedroom, is of course the opposite of safe. The witness figure is being used, made use of. That is the sorrow of Sorrow’s Bed, abuse, that strips the abused of agency. But in the parlor, in the dance of A Single’s Waltz in Time, an eerie agency is reestablished. Here, the “final” house, the house where the witness figure—that figure which provides the point of view through which we see the entire series of photographs—is in danger and at risk of being stopped, held still, rendered nonagentic, begins to move, lays claim to impermanence, the impermanence of the dance. It is through the dance that the witness figure, she who both performs and witnesses the disappearance-­by-sexual violation of the “mulatta concubine,” claims the agency of movement, pushing back against the frozen architectural space of White supremacy. As Bachelard notes, “In the theatre of the past that is

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constituted by memory, the stage setting maintains the characters in their dominant roles.”26 To resist, protest, and overturn these entrenched patterns of dominance, wherein White men of the planter class and their wives engage in the pretense of being paternal and parental figures to the very women and girls whom those same men sexually violate, Weems’s photographs of the dance portrays, and enacts, the way that movement within the house changes the house. It is no longer the “final” house where no dreams are possible because of the violated condition of the women of the African diaspora. Instead, it becomes a house through which the witness figure moves, witnessing but not succumbing to the violence of White supremacy. The dance is somber, then, for it must be somber to contend with the violation under the cloak of propriety and the Southern gallant that has happened in this domestic space.

Notes 1. Philip Roth, The Human Stain (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000). See also Sam Greenlee, The Spook Who Sat by the Door (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989). The word spook during World War II became derogatory slang for African Americans. 2. This history goes back to the first attempts to justify enslavement and was codified into law in the so-called three-fifths compromise decision. See Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Three-Fifths Compromise,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed February 5, 2021, https://www.britannica.com/topic/three-­fifths-­compromise. 3. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, “The Wandering Gaze of Carrie Mae Weems’s The Louisiana Project,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 4, no. 1 (Spring 2018), https://editions.lib.umn.edu/ panorama/article/riff-­african-­american-­artists/the-­wandering-­gaze/. 4. Claire Raymond and Jacqueline Taylor, “Something That Must Be Faced: Carrie Mae Weems and the Architecture of Colonization in the ‘Louisiana Project,’” Southern Cultures 27, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 98–109. 5. Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 67–69. 6. Andrea Liss, “The Poetics of Carrie Mae Weems’s Documentary Portraits Past and Present: Explorations of Grace, Love, and Justice,” Afterimage: Journal of Fine Arts and Cultural Criticism 46, no. 4 (December 1, 2019): 57–73; and Deborah Willis, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000), 183–84. 7. DuBois Shaw, “Carrie Mae Weems’s The Louisiana Project.”

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8. See Beauregard-Keyes Historic House and Garden (website), accessed November 16, 2021, https://www.bkhouse.org/. 9. Lisa Ze Winters, The Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2016); and Emily Clark, The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 10. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 38–51. 11. Rachel Feinstein, When Rape Was Legal: The Untold History of Sexual Violence during Slavery (New York: Routledge, 2019), 2. See also Edward E.  Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014). 12. Feinstein, When Rape Was Legal, 18–21. 13. Allison M.  Johnson “Columbia and Her Sisters: Personifying the Civil War.” American Studies 55, no. 1 (2016): 31–57; Claire Raymond, “Southern Poetry: Antebellum to Contemporary” Oxford Research Encyclopedia. https://oxfordre.com/literature/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-­9 780190201098-­e -­3 01. Accessed November 27, 2021. 14. Jeffrey J. Pokorak, “Rape as a Badge of Slavery: The Legal History of, and Remedies for, Prosecutorial Race-of-Victim Charging Disparities,” Nevada Law Journal 7, no. 1 (2006): 54. 15. Ze Winters, Mulatta Concubine, 21. 16. Ibid., 20–39. 17. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Vintage Books, 1969). 18. Ze Winters, Mulatta Concubine, 42. 19. Clark, History of the American Quadroon, 170. 20. Jennifer L.  Palmer, Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 21. Hemings and Jefferson’s son Madison uses the word concubine to describe his mother’s relationship with his father. Jason Daley, “Sally Hemings Gets Her Own Room at Monticello,” Smithsonian Magazine, July 5, 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-­news/sally-­hemings-­gets-­her-­ own-­room-­monticello-­180963944/. See also “The Life of Sally Hemings,” Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, accessed November 4, 2021, https:// www.monticello.org/sallyhemings/?ef_id=Cj0KCQjw9O6HBhCr ARIsADx5qCQ9e0ALI6ilZ6cOc0vQBuaej8NSFBdNdkFN6 DtFt4sXLt6eJGnCBs4aAqQQEALw_wcB:G:s&gclid=Cj0KCQjw9O6 HBhCrARIsADx5qCQ9e0ALI6ilZ6cOc0vQBuaej8NSFBdNdkFN6DtFt 4sXLt6eJGnCBs4aAqQQEALw_wcB.

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22. Palmer, Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic. 23. Williams Goldhagen, How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives, 47. 24. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), 61. 25. Ibid., 3. 26. Ibid., 8.

CHAPTER 8

Algorithms of Resistance

From the deep nexus of history and presence that Weems forges in The Louisiana Project, I turn to engage questions of coloniality and virtual representation. Indigenous American women’s self-representation, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, confronts the algorithmic gaze. The mass transitus of photographically based images to the disciplinary gaze of online media, including Google, puts in place a novel code of looking, one dominated by artificial intelligence (AI), or an algorithmic gaze. Posts of visual content appear to be generated by human beings (mainly) and intended for human eyes, but the prime viewer of all internet content is AI, algorithms that sort visual content for the profitability of media platforms—Google, Facebook, Instagram, and the like.1 For Indigenous North American women photographers, the politics of representing their work and themselves online is particularly fraught. The relatively new vector of omnipresent online watching predominantly (though not entirely) serves to replicate in virtual space what Walter Mignolo and Aníbal Quijano call coloniality/modernity, with AI enforcing silencing and social burial for those who do not comply with its colonialist terms of visibility.2 The history of violence, genocidal and multivariate, against Indigenous Americans makes the visual landscape controlled by AI—controlled by Big Tech—a terrain that feminist Indigenous photographers navigate warily. Shelley Niro, Cara Romero, and Matika Wilbur, contemporary Indigenous North American photographers, approach this space of digitized visibility with variation. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Raymond, Photography and Resistance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96158-9_8

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In this chapter, I think through—in the manner of interrogation that Rancière calls rearrangement—the modes of presence and visibility that Niro, Romero, and Wilbur deploy in bringing their work to the public.3 Inasmuch as each of these Indigenous women has emerged into art-world visibility through the already marginalized position of being called Indigenous in the nomenclature of coloniality, my emphasis in interpreting the interface between their work and the internet is the photographers’ self-representation. I trace modes of visibility by which they navigate the threat of erasure that White America brings to bear against Indigenous American women. As feminist philosopher Johanna Oksala argues, language cannot describe the metaphysical because it is the metaphysical.4 So also, the internet cannot effectively critique itself. But unlike language, we can step somewhat outside of the algorithmic gaze and critique a metaphysics of internet visibility. What are, then, the metaphysics of internet visibility, this realm governed by AI that generally and in the main expresses a capitalist, masculinist gaze?5 The ways that Indigenous women photographers navigate this space of visibility lay bare the medium’s metaphysics, its essence not as transparent purveyor of all things visible but, on the contrary, its pattern of hiding, suppressing, erasing that which does not flow with masculinist White capitalist ideologies. Here emphatically I do not posit that Indigenous Americans are in any sense outside of fluency with computer technology, any more so than almost all inhabitants of this planet—including myself—who are not directly involved with the companies that control the apparatus of the internet.6 Rather I note that the metaphysics of online visibility is at once contrary to Indigenous sociality that rejects coloniality and also necessary for Indigenous artists to navigate and to claim presence in despite the pressure of this colonized visual space, the online, the internet.7 Generational differences between Niro, Romero, and Wilbur are of some note. Shelley Niro was born in 1954, Cara Romero in 1977, Matika Wilbur in 1984. The distinction between Gen X, Romero’s generation, and millennial, Wilbur’s generation, occurs around 1980. The distinction matters because millennials came of age with emerging technologies that Gen Xers, including this author, learned in adulthood. I begin with Shelley Niro, Mohawk Bay of Quinte, of the baby boomer generation, though not without first reflecting that the categories I have noted here are part of coloniality/modernity, part of what Michel Foucault terms the supervisory structure of governmentality and Mignolo and Quijano define as a

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tool of colonization.8 Are these generational categories relevant to Indigenous Americans? Seminole scholar Susan Miller would argue that they are not: for her, Indigeneity is defined strictly in resistance to and moving beyond—in the sense of preceding and superseding—nation-state supervisory and disciplinary practices.9 And yet, inasmuch as Niro, Romero, and Wilbur participate in internet visibility, they place themselves at an intersection of Indigeneity and coloniality/modernity, a social space not exclusively Indigenous, indeed a social space propagated and maintained by White, largely male, capitalist interests.10

Shelley Niro’s Self-Reflections Shelley Niro’s self-portrait photograph triptych, Abnormally Aboriginal, appears on the artist’s website.11 These three images have also been widely and variously displayed on billboards and in galleries. They can be found in Niro’s Steidl book, commissioned after she was awarded the Scotiabank Photography Award.12 On her website, images are presented by the artist in a nonexplanatory format. Visiting the website, one sees an assemblage of photographic images that can be enlarged by clicking twice, indicating the year in which the work was made. The self-portraits, titled Abnormally Aboriginal (2014), confront colonialist ideologies of origin and cultural memory. The wordplay of this self-portrait subverts ideologies of normalcy and origin in the context of colonization. Niro playfully links the term origin with White people’s colonialist word aboriginal, applied to Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia. The word original, of course, is included in the term aboriginal, or from the origin. Niro’s self-­ portrait plays on the idea of Whites having the hubris to assign to Indigenous peoples the term origin, evoking the long history of terms Whites have applied to Indigenous Americans, most of which are derogatory, all of which express and enact White social violence. In place of White nomenclature, she forwards an Indigenous idea of origin, as inheritance from ancestors. The idea of naming Indigenous Americans as the original peoples of the Americas ironically is itself a fold of colonization. It indicates that someone took possession away from the original. The idea of origin bleeds into the nonrecuperable time before the origin was seen as origin, before its ending gave it the name of origin. Niro’s triptych self-portrait, then, is not merely commenting on racist nomenclature for Indigenous Americans but goes deeper. Her use of word and visual text is entwined, as is the

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symbol for human DNA that articulates the group’s final frame, when she’s removed her glasses. Niro visually deconstructs the mytheme of origin in this self-portrait triptych, interrogating colonialist notions of origin in the frame of genocide.13 She points to the idea of an “aboriginal” person as a fabrication of White racist violence and naming. Every human being is aboriginal to somewhere. The offensive colonialist idea that “aboriginal” peoples are “abnormal” Niro draws from deep reserves of White “research” fabricating theories of the minds, bodies, and societies of colonized Indigenous peoples.14 The “aboriginal” and the “abnormal” were fused in colonization’s discursive violence as well as its physical violence.15 Niro takes apart this ideological fusion, presenting instead herself as a Normal Original, wearing dark glasses, looking askance at White nomenclature, with its hubristic belief in deciding who is normal and who is not. The use of glasses, prosthetics of vision, is crucial to Niro’s self-portrait triptych. She asks, What does it mean to see oneself through lenses given to one by one’s violators? What does it mean to reject those lenses and see oneself anew? The archive of colonialist violence is a history of colonization that Niro deconstructs. For her, the origin is the bodies, minds, and spiritual practices of Indigenous Americans, including herself, her own body. Niro’s selfportrait, then, is an act of visual decolonization, deploying the still photograph’s capacity to frame identity in time. Her representation of self in the context of internet exposure is carefully couched. There is no definitive website space where one “meets” Niro. This self-­portrait triptych does not announce itself as such. One has to know of the artist to know it is her face. One has to seek each individual image via multiple clicks, and even when images are accessed they appear with a watermark. A few years ago, when Niro spoke at the University of Virginia, a White faculty member purporting to help Niro manage the images absconded with a plethora of high-resolution files belonging to Niro’s portfolio without asking the artist’s permission. This trauma led the artist to be wary of allowing her work, in high-resolution images, to be circulated outside of her control. The website’s handling of this positionality, the vulnerability of being coopted by a White audience, is evident in the layered approach Niro uses for her website. It is a website in some sense intended for those already familiar with the artist’s work.

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Cara Romero’s Indigeneity Chemehuevi Cara Romero’s website does not appear to show a self-­ portrait of the artist; however, on the site’s “About” page is a finely executed black-and-white portrait of the photographer, unattributed.16 This image stands as the artist’s self-representation in the context of the website. The website presents this portrait significantly smaller than the displayed images of her work, and it is featured on a page dense with language where Romero makes an elegant statement about her role as an Indigenous artist. The opening sentences of this statement read as follows: As an Indigenous photographer, I embrace photography as my tool to resist Eurocentric narratives and as a means for opening audiences’ perspectives to the fascinating diversity of living Indigenous peoples. My approach fuses time-honored and culturally specific symbols with 21st-century ideas. This strategy reinforces the ways we exist as contemporary Native Americans, all the while affirming that Indigenous culture is continually evolving and imminently permanent.17

Romero’s online presence is a balancing act. The artist acknowledges the twenty-first-century nature of her enterprise (she posts on Instagram, where her account is scrupulously focused on her work) and indicates her refusal to be coopted by coloniality, even as her statement occurs in a space—that of online visibility—where the risk of White surveillance is high. For the internet at present (in 2021) is still a colonialist space. The ontology of online visibility is algorithmic, the way that AI patterns of seeing discern relevance of the appearance of images and sources of information. There is nothing absolute about this patterning; instead, it reflects centuries-old hierarchical structures instituted by Linnaeus and Kant.18 In algorithmic gazing, what matters is to be discerned through what has already mattered, or, put another way, numbers drive algorithmic gazing, which in turn manifests numerically. The shadows of algorithmic gazing are flat. Its rubric for seeing emerges from the numerical gaze that aggregates and tracks patterns of clicks, feeding into the mechanism of visibility the patterns of past desire, as social power’s production becomes its reproduction. Yet, the artist’s need to be visible in this landscape of coloniality that is the internet is paramount. To be erased, in this context, is to be shut out of discourse that has the power to accept or reject an artist’s claim to be an artist. As Erving Goffman

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makes clear, the act of creating art is insufficient to make a person an artist in the colonialist sense of the word: dominant mainstream society has to recognize the work created as valuable before the creator is socially deemed an artist.19 Goffman is—of course—describing the social world of coloniality/modernity.20 This social field contrasts to Indigenous sociality, in which creation is seen as part of a set of sacred acts, the meanings of which emerge from the acts rather than from monetary or social power gained through the creation of the work. And yet, as Romero notes, when Indigenous Americans create art, they—to use her word—“Indigenize” the work. Hence, visibility for Indigenous women artists is a strategy within Indigeneity that navigates, with caution, White coloniality. The algorithmic gaze epitomizes colonization’s drive to extract monetary value from human resources. For the internet is a social-visual field in which—in colonialist fashion—monetary value is extracted from human beings. The algorithmic gaze is the function by which the internet scours patterns of human seeing and then responds by controlling visibility.21 Indigenous artists’ relationship with this field of coloniality is an intrepid negotiation, as Romero’s and Niro’s online presences indicate, between the need of an artist to have a broad commendation from the social field— to define herself in coloniality/modernity’s terms as an artist—and the need of Indigenous artists to maintain identity and sociality outside this oppressive frame. When Cara Romero spoke to my class in the fall of 2019, she showed a short series of self-portraits that she had taken together with her father—Romero is biracial, her father Indigenous American, her mother White. The beautiful images were shown full screen, covering a large wall, and in the cavernous lecture hall the wall-sized projections of Romero and her father were deeply moving and haunting. Her father struggles after serving in the United States military, and the wear shows on his face. The daughter’s love and devotion, and shared pain, also show in these portraits. But the artist said she does not market these images. They were not for sale, and they did not—at the time—appear on her website. An image on Romero’s website suggests this fraught relationship to visibility and the market. In the Last Indian Market Romero photographs 12 notable Indigenous artists in a pointed reference to the Last Supper of Christ and the apostles. In the Christian New Testament, the Last Supper is a fixture of belief. Here the eucharist, the sacrament of communion, was created. The scene of the Last Supper is a staple of European art, with Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of the scene a kind of holy object itself. In remaking the Last Supper, Indigenizing it, Romero meditates on and

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critiques the hold that coloniality/modernity has on Indigenous artists, the more famous and visible, the more ensnared perhaps. In the place of Christ is Marcus Amerman, a Choctaw artist, wearing the buffalo head, a wry reference to the White practice of killing buffalo to starve Indigenous people. In other photographs that critique White culture, Romero uses this buffalo figure as a trickster, a savior and devil figure. Here, the buffalo is in the traditional place of Christ as Christianity was used to suppress and to murder Indigenous Americans, who were considered by White settlers not to have souls because they were not Christian. The violence of Christianity is exposed in the multilayered photograph, merged with the violence of capitalism. The Indian Market held on the plaza of Santa Fe, New Mexico, is the oldest juried competition among Indigenous American artists, begun in 1922 as part of the Fiestas de Santa Fe. It signifies the merging of Indigenous artists and the colonialist imprimatur of Modernism, which came to the Southwest to take ideas from Indigenous people and also to reciprocate, after a fashion, by choosing a small number of Indigenous artists to canonize in Western Modernism of the early to mid-twentieth century. Romero’s photograph revisits this place, for Indigenous artists, of challenge, as a site of negotiation with coloniality. The artists have a seat at the table, but this is also the table where, in the Biblical tradition, Christ is betrayed because Satan tempts Judas with money. The market, the bringing to bear of money on Indigenous artists and art, is a fraught space. Whereas the photograph is beautifully polished, a collage that Romero photo edited into one seamless high-resolution digital image, it is also a reckoning with the negotiations of visibility through coloniality. Likewise, the algorithmic gaze of AI emerges from earlier colonialist patterns of surveillance and acquisition. It is not a new marketplace even if algorithms make the work of manipulating marketing numerically precise. Also featured on her website, Romero’s Water Memory similarly contests the numerical valuation of human beings. Shot under water, Water Memory’s digitally colored landscape envisions two young Indigenous Californians falling and rising in a river. The woman, closest to the edge of the picture plane, grasps a Sitka spruce as the man, in the background, wears Weeping spruce around his head, signifying plants indigenous to the Chemehuevi’s ancestral land. Water Memory is an image of limbo, of people cast out but returning, of people erased from their ancestral land but dreaming and through dreaming coming home. The oneiric quality of the image makes it one in which past, present, and future merge, an image of

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rebirth, in which the Indigenous people of California return to claim their land; but here the young models are also adrift, caught in the “no-man’s-­ land” into which coloniality continues to press Indigenous peoples. The stunningly gorgeous image is presented on Romero’s website as an object for sale, an activist work uneasily offered for online consumption.

Matika Wilbur’s Map For Matika Wilbur, a millennial, online presence is the origin story of her work’s emergence into the public eye. The effort to create this massive work is extraordinary, as the artist indicates: “While I’ve attempted to ‘change the way we see Native America,’ I’ve been changed. This road life is a labor of love. It’s ripped everything from me that I knew. It took the love of my life. It took all of my belief systems. It took my comfort. But the truth is, I gave it freely. I welcomed the opportunity to feel alive—to feel all of it—the struggle—the sadness—the joy—and as a result, I feel blessed.”22 In 2012, when she began Project 562—a landmark photographic series in which Wilbur documents her travels, that is, driving her van across the United States taking photographic portraits of members of every federally recognized Indigenous North American tribe—the young photographer began posting her images on her website, along with an ongoing blog describing her journey and the people she meets and photographs. The collaborative nature of her work cannot be overemphasized: Wilbur’s journey is, as her website states, “to unveil the true essence of contemporary Native issues, the beauty of Native culture, the magnitude of tradition, and expose her vitality.”23 Each portrait is made through conversation with the tribe, the subject imaged, and through implicit alliance between Wilbur’s tribes—Tulalip and Swinomish—and those she photographs. Wilbur contends that only an Indigenous American photographer can accurately photograph Indigenous Americans. Project 562 is a project of reseeing, reenvisioning, and erasing colonialist ways of photographing Indigenous Americans. Beneath the quote by Wilbur that I’ve just mentioned, Wilbur’s website displays a striking photograph of the photographer (one that Wilbur directed to be taken of her) standing on a ledge of rock above an ocean—an edge, then, of America, the northwest coast— while holding her camera next to her van. The land and ocean are balanced here, the photographer poised on a boundary, the horizon line behind her. The camper van, a trope of American nomadism, here is rescripted to stand for Indigenous resistance to being

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forced into place on government-allocated lands. Wilbur moves beyond these confines in the van she calls “the big girl,” joining through the thread of her photography the cultures of Indigenous America that have been suppressed, misread, genocided, displaced, and torn apart by coloniality. Her photography then is a mending thread—as Anishinaabe artist Lisa Myers describes, “an imaginary topography or horizon line … [of] the stories [that] need to be traced, retold.”24 This mending thread, of the public visibility of Wilbur’s photography, has its genesis in the photographer’s deployment of her online presence. Her website is canny, savvy, and a highly effective vehicle for her photography’s visibility. Yet the work’s visibility, in part, occurs through colonialist culture seeing and privileging it, as Wilbur’s mending thread is not only known in Indigenous American communities but also shown recognition by White cultural signifiers of authority (likewise, Niro and Romero have been awarded grants and prizes by White-controlled foundations). For this navigation Wilbur leverages nomadism. The blog that Wilbur meticulously keeps, recording her journey through tribes recognized by the United States’ federal government, binds the site. A recent post extols the need for Indigenous women to reconnect with the American land, stating the following: They say when you’re lost you should come home Come home to your mother’s heartbeat Come home to your father’s days Come home from the moon to remember how you’re made.25

For Wilbur, reconnecting with the land happens through displacement responded to by nomadism, the ability of the young, Indigenous woman to be mobile on this earth. In one sense, coloniality is accepted as a given; that is, the social vistas of online presence and the mobility of twenty-first-­ century travel are accepted, even as the Indigenous artist’s presence is articulated as Indigenous by defining her ability to cross beyond and transcend territorial structures enforced by colonialist violence on the land and the Indigenous people of that land. The coloniality of the internet is held as somewhat immaterial to the Indigenous artist’s resistance. She can use this virtual social space to claim visibility so as to strengthen her ability to lay claim to the social space of the land, which is the place, the body’s emplacement thereon, that really matters to Indigenous culture. In the photograph Wilbur chooses for her website’s presentation of Project 562

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we are faced by a Diné (Navajo) couple, Fannie and Robert Mitchell.26 They present us with their land, formally articulating not only their full right but their properness of being on this land. The emphasis on land in Wilbur’s Project 562 indicates her appraisal of online visibility, her skillful deployment of and concurrent unconcern with the force of the supervisory gaze of AI. Wilbur’s online presence may not as overtly signal wariness and ambivalence as Niro’s and Romero’s measured approaches to visibility in the gaze of AI. For Wilbur, AI’s gaze—which draws her into visibility—is not as great a risk because it is seen as a means to regain claim to the grounding space of the land itself. Here, AI’s thoughtlessness, its algorithmic function, makes it less threatening to Indigenous presence and visibility—inasmuch as the practices of AI can be contested not by refusing the gaze of AI but by moving mentally, psychologically, and, ultimately, physically beyond its confines. Whether that strategy is sustainable, whether the totalizing gaze of AI and the totalizing force of internet visibility can be held at bay as colonialist forces, whether their disciplinary force can be transmuted into access to social power for Indigenous women are all open questions. The inflexibility of AI as the engine of the internet is clear. No one and nothing is known, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, outside this rubric. And yet, as feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous suggests, it is in finding the gaps, the lacunae, of totalizing systems and moving through them toward what women need that we foment feminist action. This need for visibility is a need to claim voice, to be a nonerased presence in and despite the dominant landscape of coloniality. It is through understanding AI’s function—that it takes the visible and compacts it into the numerical—that the system may be leveraged for the work of visual decolonization.

Notes 1. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (London: Profile Books, 2019). 2. Aníbal Quijano, “Modernity, Identity, and Utopia in Latin America,” Boundary 2 20, no. 3 (1993): 140–55; Bridie McCarthy, “Identity as Radical Alterity: Critiques of Eurocentrism, Coloniality and Subjectivity in Contemporary Australian and Latin American Poetry,” Antipodes 24, no. 2 (2010): 189–97; and Linda Martín Alcoff, “Mignolo’s Epistemology of Coloniality,” CR: The New Centennial Review 7, no. 3 (2007): 79–101.

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3. Mark Robson, “Jacques Rancière and Time: ‘Le temps d’après,’” Paragraph 38, no. 3 (2015): 297–311; and Bert Olivier, “Rancière and the Recuperation of Politics,” Phronimon 16, no. 1 (2015), 1–17. 4. Johanna Oksala, “In Defense of Experience,” Hypatia 29, no. 2 (2014): 388–403. 5. William F. Clocksin, “Artificial Intelligence and the Future,” Philosophical Transactions: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 361, no. 1809 (2003): 1721–48; and J.  David Bolter, “Artificial Intelligence,” Daedalus 113, no. 3 (1984): 1–18. 6. Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism. 7. Vine Deloria Jr., The Metaphysics of Modern Existence (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1979). 8. Michel Foucault, “‘Panopticism’ from ‘Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison,’” Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts 2, no. 1 (2008): 1–12; Clocksin, “Artificial Intelligence and the Future”; and Bolter, “Artificial Intelligence.” 9. Susan Miller, “Native Historians Write Back: The Indigenous Paradigm in American Indian Historiography,” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 1 (2009): 25–45. 10. William Lehr et al., “Whither the Public Internet?,” Journal of Information Policy 9 (2019): 1–42. 11. Given the nature of the discussion in this chapter, which expounds on consumption of images online, all artworks discussed in this chapter are viewable on the artists’ respective websites. 12. Shelley Niro, Ryan Rice, and Wanda Nanibush, Shelley Niro: Scotiabank Award (Göttingen: Steidl, 2018). See also Ryerson Image Centre, accessed November 23, 2021, “Scotiabank Photography Award: Shelley Niro,” Ryerson Image Centre, 2018, https://ryersonimagecentre.ca/exhibition/scotiabank-­photography-­award-­shelley-­niro/. 13. Benjamin Madley, “California’s Yuki Indians: Defining Genocide in Native American History,” Western Historical Quarterly 39, no. 3 (2008): 303–32; and Jeffrey Ostler, “‘To Extirpate the Indians’: An Indigenous Consciousness of Genocide in the Ohio Valley and Lower Great Lakes, 1750s–1810,” William and Mary Quarterly 72, no. 4 (2015): 587–622. 14. Julian Carter, The Heart of Whiteness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 15. Brian Noble, “Tripped up by Coloniality: Anthropologists as Instruments or Agents in Indigenous–Settler Political Relations?,” Anthropologica 57, no. 2 (2015): 427–43; and Michael Asch, “Anthropology, Colonialism and the Reflexive Turn: Finding a Place to Stand,” Anthropologica 57, no. 2 (2015): 481–89.

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16. As I write in early 2021, this is the case for this website. 17. “About” page, Cara Romero Photography (website), accessed February 1, 2021, Cara Romero, “About,” Cara Romero Photography, https://www.cararomerophotography.com/about. 18. Sally Hatch Gray, “Kant’s Race Theory, Forster’s Counter, and the Metaphysics of Color,” Eighteenth Century 53, no. 4 (2012): 393–412. 19. Frances Chaput Waksler, “Erving Goffman’s Sociology: An Introductory Essay,” Human Studies 12, no. 1/2 (1989): 1–18. 20. Phil Manning, “Drama as Life: The Significance of Goffman’s Changing Use of the Theatrical Metaphor,” Sociological Theory 9, no. 1 (1991): 70–86. 21. Jaron Lanier, “Science Saturday, Dreaming of an Artificial Intelligence,” interview by Eliezer Yudkowsky, November 1, 2008, https://bloggingheads.tv/videos/1849; and Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013). 22. States Wilbur: I’ve always left my own personal feelings out of these blog posts and newsletters because I’ve wanted to be a good messenger. I’d decided that a good messenger doesn’t weigh down the receiver with her own struggle in the journey; she tries her best to transmit the transcendent love, beauty, wisdom, soulfulness and promise of this subject, rather than promote “poverty porn” and sensationalized struggle. That being said, I want you to know that while I’ve attempted to “change the way we see Native America,” I’ve been changed. This road life is a labor of love. It’s ripped everything from me that I knew. It took the love of my life. It took all of my belief systems. It took my comfort. But the truth is, I gave it freely. I welcomed the opportunity to feel alive—to feel all of it—the struggle—the sadness—the joy—and as a result, I feel blessed. My faith in humanity, and the goodness in our relatives, at times, overwhelms me. My God has gotten bigger. I’m stronger. I feel as though this experience has been one of the greatest blessings I’ve known. See Matika Wilbur, “A Friendly & Wordy Project 562 Catch-Up,” Project 562 (blog), accessed November 1, 2021, http://www.project562.com/ blog/a-­friendly-­wordy-­project-­562-­catch-­up/. 23. Matika Wilbur, “About Project 562,” Project 562 (blog), 2012, http://www.project562.com/blog/about-­project-­562/. 24. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3, no. 3 (2014): 1–25.

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25. Tazbah Chavez, “Hiking the Nüümü Poyo: An Act of Love by Indigenous Women,” Project 562 (blog), accessed November 17, 2021, http:// www.project562.com/blog/hiking-­t he-­n ueuemue-­p oyo-­a n-­a ct-­ of-­love-­by-­indigenous-­women/. 26. Matika Wilbur, “Project 562,” Facebook, November 3, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/Project562/photos/day-­t hreerobert-­ and-­f annie-­m itchell-­n avajoray-­a nd-­f annie-­a re-­8 2-­a nd-­8 3-­y ears-­ old/10153860042831402/. See also Wilbur’s website for Project 562, http://www.project562.com/.

CHAPTER 9

Reclaiming History

In 2021, as we move into the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, photographer Cara Romero (Chemehuevi) is deeply engaged in a public works project in the greater Los Angeles area, a project designed to clarify and articulate the presence of Indigenous peoples in California. This activist project emerges from Romero’s artistic praxis.1

Coyote and Other Tales Her photographic work Coyote Tales No. 1 shows two Indigenous American young women, dressed for a night on the town, next to the bar Saints and Sinners, being wooed by Coyote, the trickster. Coyote is not a devil figure; instead he plays both sides of good and evil, generative and destructive. The Chemehuevi believe that Coyote discovered the first horse and brought water and fire to the people.2 But he also commits violence. The young women in Romero’s photograph are enchanted by Coyote, not knowing that he is who they are facing. He turns from the viewer, hiding both flowers and his tail, his flirtation and his trickster identity twinned.3 Romero, discussing the photograph as part of the Heard Museum’s series of artists, spoke of the “bad decisions” one sometimes makes (and the photographer recalls making) during youth.4 Here, the Chemehuevi myth of Coyote as a double figure, a trickster, capable of destructive and also constructive action emerges against the backdrop of Western culture, the bar.

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In the photograph, a color assemblage shot at dusk with construction lighting to mimic moonlight and individual stars added to the composition using photo editing, Indigenous youths inhabit the landscape of the culture that almost erased them—that is, European settler coloniality— and in staying, in remaining, in being contemporary and still there, still America (that is, Native America is America, still), the young women manifest presence in the American landscape, on American land (their land). But in this manifestation, struggle persists. Coyote, as a double figure, shows the persistence of Indigenous peoples in the contemporary American landscape, but also the threat, the risk, they face. States Romero, “Most Californians do not know this history, and do not understand modern Native struggles for recognition and cultural landscape preservation. We are literally invisible.”5 To stay on the land, and to stay visible, these presences are seamlessly merged. In Coyote Tales No. 1, the Saints and Sinners joint shapes a space at once expansive and constraining. In the photograph, the bar creates a horizon both visually and metaphorically, the boundary of above and below. The concrete building stretches at an oblique angle into the night sky. The lurid but also warm reddish light suggests a scene not of damnation but of liminality. Between pleasure and danger, at the edge of threat, the counternarrative to the disappearance of Indigenous America is this fight for resistance at the boundary. In showing Indigenous presence, Romero not only indigenizes the American landscape, showing Indigenous Americans persisting, surviving, still here, still at the heart of America, but also contemporizes ideas of Indigenous presence. Her landscape is uncannily both contemporary and traditional, a space where mythos of traditional beliefs emerges into the vistas of capitalist coloniality. It is not that capitalist coloniality is undone, in Romero’s image-world, but that it is not sanctioned; it is wryly critiqued, complicated, by the vivid presences of Indigenous Americans in scenes that merge the contemporary and the traditional, making clear that these registers must always be merged, that it is only settler-colonialist capitalism that tries to separate the old and the new. Romero creates real and mythic image-worlds in opposition to centuries of White settler-colonialist creation of false images of Indigenous Americans. Writes historian Robert Berkhofer in The White Man’s Indian, “The essence of the White image of the Indian has been the definition of Native Americas in fact and fancy as a separate and single other. Whether evaluated as noble or ignoble, whether seen as exotic or downgraded, the Indian as an image was always

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alien to the White.”6 This misreading persists today. Romero’s images redress the invisibility that attends the “always alien,” the idea that Indigenous Americans are entirely outside or beyond the knowable. Her trickster Coyote and the two young, vulnerable women are of the landscape, both the urban scene and the “land” of the landscape. It is theirs, for their dominion, in a wry and melancholy way, but one that unmistakably lays claim to the place, for Indigenous presence.

Water Memories Having written previously in this book about Romero’s photographic assemblage Water Memory, here I consider two related photographic works, Eufaula Girls and Oil Boom, both also taken under water by Romero. In these hypogeal images, the human body is submerged, liminal, between water and light, between place and no-place, floating, disappearing, and returning. In Eufaula Girls, two young women wearing flowing black garments curl and sway in sepia-tinted water. Eufaula, Alabama, is an original site of Muskogee land, but when the tribe was forced out through genocidal displacement in the 1830s, most tribal members (among those who survived) reestablished tribal lands in Oklahoma. These new lands were forced onto the tribes by the United States government; Oklahoma was not Muskogee ancestral land, but the Muskogee made the best of a brutally bad bargain and reestablished their culture in Oklahoma. Eufaula, Oklahoma, then, is already a displacement of Eufaula, Alabama, the place of the Muskogee’s ancestral homeland. The construction of Lake Eufaula, in Oklahoma, was approved in 1946 as the site of a hydroelectric dam. This dam flooded many of the lands onto which the already displaced Muskogee had moved. In other words, by Lake Eufaula, the Muskogee were doubly displaced. They were removed already from their ancestral homeland by the United States government in the 1830s, and a little more than 100 years later, in the 1940s, the Muskogee once more lost land when the government flooded the area they had named Eufaula, displacing Muskogee and Choctaw peoples yet again. Romero’s photograph presents the sense of anxious floating, submersion not as drowning but presenting drowning’s threat within which the young women stay afloat and survive. Shot under water and colored by Romero afterward (using photo-editing apps on the digital photograph) the image shows the presence of water as at once maternal material,

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sustaining, and also threatening. We humans cannot breathe water. The young women are afloat and adrift. Even as water buoys them they must find a way out of the water to survive. The image speaks eloquently, lucidly, about environmental erasure of human beings, environmental racism. Environmental erasure of animals and land, fauna and flora, is well-known, but Romero’s photographs show us how environmental racism—and the general violence with which American capitalism handles the earth—effectively erases Indigenous populations (or rather, seeks to erase Indigenous Americans). Romero’s photographic works are not about erasure but rather about resistance to erasure. The Eufaula Girls do not disappear; they persevere even though submerged in unbreathable water. Romero’s determination to shoot under water means that she and her models are also, literally, under water, submerged while the work is being created. They mythogogically enact the loss of land, which means the loss of self, suffered by the flooded, displaced Muskogee. Oil Boom shows a young man in Oklahoma drowning in oil. The photograph, like Water Memory and Eufaula Girls, was shot under water by Romero. These images of submersion move the viewer like a haunting dream; seeing them, we lose our footing, we float, submerged, lost. They are at once beautiful and terrifying images, poised on the boundary of death and rebirth, loss and refinding of ground and the possibility of reclaiming ground. Oil Boom stages activist artist Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota) as if he were drowning in oil, referencing both his tribe’s loss of ancestral land and also the controversial Keystone Pipeline that Indigenous Americans gathered to protest in 2016. Photographed under water, the image is toned sepia by Romero, who creates the look of oil, using photo editing, so that the figure appears to be at once drowning in and fighting against oily submersion. Above the bleak horizon line of the oil are derricks, pulling in and out of the earth. In this image, what has disappeared is the Indigenous American life and land; but it is not gone—rather, it is submerged beneath the visible surface of the settler-colonialist landscape of oil derricks. Importantly, the “big picture” of the image is not the settler-colonialist landscape of oil derricks but instead the vital and fought-for Indigenous life usually rendered invisible by White sightlines but made visible again by Romero’s visionary photograph. That is, what we see in this image is the reemergence of those disappeared, or rather suppressed, by coloniality. While the image shows, clearly, the threat of erasure under which Indigenous lands and peoples live in the United States, it also shows the

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enormity of Indigenous vitality and life. This vitality is the picture, which fills almost the entire frame as the landscape of coloniality is decentered, set as a punitive and oppressive limit to Indigenous vitality; but also the settler-colonialist landscape of oil derricks is shown as tiny, like little insects crawling along the surface of Indigenous vitality and depth of history in this place, this place of America. As comedian Charlie Hill joked, “We had a little real estate problem,” at once signifying the trauma of displacement and the loss of ancestral lands that defines Indigenous American experience in coloniality and also indicating the way that “indigenizing” the conceptualization of this experience casts a new view on White culture.7 It shrinks the force of White culture, making all the buildings and industries like little insects crawling along the still vital earth that is the ancestral space of Indigenous America. Writes Berkhofer in The White Man’s Indian, “Both popular and academic historians accepted … the necessity for the disappearance of Native Americans before the westward movement of White civilization.”8 Here, Berkhofer refers specifically to nineteenth-century discourse and yet the White belief in the necessity of the disappearing “Indian” is a commonality across virtually every phase of the colonization of the United States of America. Indeed, the concept of the United States of America is fundamentally structured around the erasure of Indigenous Americans. And yet, in Romero’s Oil Boom, the real story is that which is submerged, the real America is the vital Indigenous man, standing as a symbol for Indigenous Americans, submerged in coloniality’s capitalist urge to extract monetary value from the earth. The photograph exemplifies the reemergence, the reappearance of Indigenous Americans. To be sure, Indigenous Americans have never been invisible or unseen to themselves. Rather, in White settler-colonialist culture the need for erasure of Indigenous Americans spurs a purposeful looking away from Indigenous peoples’ continued presence, and also a simultaneous urge to contain Indigenous Americans in spaces separate from Whiteness or to forcibly assimilate Indigenous peoples out of existence. This was Thomas Jefferson’s egregious argument, regarding Indigenous Americans, in Notes on the State of Virginia. Jefferson argues that Indigenous Americans are noble and admirable but that for the United States of America to succeed as a yeoman-based society Whites must “interbreed” with America’s Indigenous people until there is no trace left of Indigenous peoples or cultures.9 Jefferson personally knew a great deal about so-called interbreeding, inasmuch as he effectively raped (how could she be considered

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to have given consent, given that he owned her?) Sally Hemings, starting when she was a young teenager and continuing across years, producing some six children, four of whom lived to adulthood.10 To see, in Charlottesville’s Monticello, the quarters in which Hemings lived and to compare these with Jefferson’s house above is to feel viscerally how much this kind of sexual exploitation was nothing but rape. Hemings’s son, Beverly, recounts the mode of Jefferson’s forcing his mother to succumb, when he was 44 years old and she was 14 years old. Jefferson, apparently, “to induce her to do so promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years.”11 This persuasion of a 14-year-old child, a girl descended in part from the African diaspora, premised on the freeing of her prospective children at the age of 21, is heartrending and sheds light on the casual brutality with which Jefferson espoused the genocide of Indigenous Americans. In effect, he suggested systemic erasure through assimilation of Indigenous peoples so that White settler-colonialist yeomen farmers would have all the land of America at their disposal. He also, apparently, considered his own mixed race children to be somewhat invisible, willing to grant them freedom in adulthood but never claiming paternity of them. Berkhofer argues that the complete genocide of Indigenous Americans was forestalled only because some segments of White settler-colonialist society were against it. But is it not rather that Indigenous Americans negotiated and navigated paths through the patchwork genocide of White settler-colonialist society in America, paths that allowed them and their cultures to survive.12 It is this process of negotiation and navigation that continues in Romero’s work.

Television Representations of Indigenous Americans on American television have hewn resoundingly toward clichéd depictions of Indigenous peoples as either overtly wild, overly sexual, or eerily “spiritual.”13 The creation of the clichés through which Indigenous Americans are viewed and shown began long before the advent of television. Discursive colonization allowed genocide to occur by creating images of Indigenous Americans as less than human; and in parallel, the acts of genocidal violence that were the actual way that Europeans “won” the land of the United States were discursively justified by the creation of such images.14 By images, here, I do not mean only images that exist as visual or verbal textual emblems but rather what

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Cornelius Castoriadis calls the imaginary society.15 The collective idea of what we are becomes what we are. But in the face of ideological violence, Indigenous Americans resisted and continue to resist the collective ideologies of settler colonialism and, in this resistance, insist on the continual reappearance, as vivid living presences in America, in response to each gesture of erasure enacted by White society. As Michel Foucault makes clear, power and resistance interact continually.16 The regime of “truth” settler colonialism attempts to put in place with codes of “power/knowledge.”17 These codes are, of course, not codes of actual truth or knowledge but rather reflect the socially manufactured terms of what appears as truth (Foucault terms this “truth-effect”) and what counts for knowledge. For example, Jefferson, Kant, and Buffon are all eighteenth-century authors whose theories of race were accepted at the time and for many years after their writing as “knowledge.” Even though we might now unmask some of their works on race and culture as simply racism, the men themselves retain the position in White settler-­colonialist society as foundational sources of knowledge.18 To read Kant, to read Jefferson, to read Buffon is to be a well-educated person in settler-­colonialist culture even now and, as I’ve argued in this book’s Introduction, knowledge of their works is part of the intellectual landscape we inhabit. Yet, in subversion of this socially codified belief in the knowledge adhering to White men, Indigenous photography performs another way of imaging America, and Americanness, and also a new way of seeing what it means to be a human being. That is, the press of coloniality is to create the illusion that through the knowledge of White men, an understanding of reality is reached. Photography is leveraged as a tool, by Indigenous photographers, to create new images displacing the “regime of truth” of coloniality. It is this work that contradicts the narrative of the vanishing colonized subject on which coloniality depends. For if the colonized subject does not vanish, does not disappear, coloniality is destabilized. Romero’s TV Indians (discussed briefly in the Introduction to this book) stages a witty and biting tableau contrasting living and vivid contemporary Indigenous Americans with clichéd representations of Native Americans on television. As Romero notes, there is some ambivalence among Indigenous Americans regarding the clichés of American television inasmuch as many figures became “beloved” because they gave at least some representation to Indigenous Americans.19 And yet, these figures were typically not acted by Indigenous Americans, or, when they were,

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these actors were pressured to perform Indigeneity in false and stereotyped terms. For the photograph TV Indians, Romero gathered television sets, set them in the middle of open Chemehuevi land, and used a generator to turn them on. Around the television sets are gathered friends of the photographer, actual Indigenous Americans, rather than television clichés.20 Romero photo edited the television images into the photograph after it was taken (with the televisions turned on, they showed only static). The contrast between the real and the fake is striking, haunting. Dramatic clouds pull the horizon toward a stunning denouement with the vanishing point. The center, the focus, of the image is the living, the visible, the real contemporary people who are Indigenous Americans. They command the image field, the picture plane. The clouds suggest temporal extension, connecting the past and present, while the televisions appear to be already moving toward becoming trash, the screen images uninteresting compared with the living, vivid presences of human beings, Indigenous Americans, commanding the field of vision.

Place/No-place In TV Indians, the facial expression of the woman holding a baby, she who stands closest to the implied viewer of the image, suggests the sense of wry balance that Romero intimates when, as part of the Heard Museum’s artist talk series, she describes the creation of the photograph. The image suggests transcendence, that is, a social space beyond the narrow parameters of the televisions. Notably, the place of the photograph is crucial. This is Chemehuevi land. The television land is nowhere, it is part of the capitalist-­colonialist “no-place,” space that hides history.21 As Elizabeth Solomon (Massachusett at Ponkapoag) rightly contends, everywhere in America is Indigenous land, with deeply social and familial meaning for Indigenous peoples who once occupied those spaces.22 These ancestral lands became masked as “no-place” by capitalist-colonialist practices. The work of Indigenizing photography is to strip away that mask of no-place and reveal the place that is there, always, this place America that is created of the erasing map of coloniality and the resistance to this erasing map, this resistance insisting on and—through photographic practice such as Romero’s—showing the place that is America. In TV Indians, placelessness is represented by the television screens, while the living people are very much in place. That is, they are in the place

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that is their own, as they stand on ancestral land and command the picture plane from that centeredness. It is not so much a critique of television as a wholesale revelation of the problematic of no-place in the vista of coloniality. No-place is represented by the assemblage of screens that look eerily flat and ready for discarding in the scene of dramatic sky and land; the faces on the screens, likewise, are literally two-dimensional, articulated without shadows or reality, while the embodied Indigenous people surrounding the television sets instate identity in real place and time. This photograph stages reappearance from the space of disappearance (the clichés of television). It shows Indigenous Americans stepping from the shadows of the televisions, claiming their embodied social and ancestral presence on their land. The opening vista of the clouds has the effect of pulling a curtain open across a large window. Suddenly, in this image, we see that the reappearance of Indigenous Americans is really the continued and unending presence of Indigenous Americans on this land. The no-place of American capitalist coloniality is the screen in the sense that it is the television’s flattened field, but also settler colonialism flattens landscape and the meaning of dwelling on the earth, so that America has become television screen-like in some of its lived spaces and its aspirations, its very imagination flat. In Romero’s TV Indians, the television screen-­ like spectrality of settler colonialism is contested and replaced with living, vivid Indigenous Americans. Here, it is not only that the enforced role of the disappeared that Indigenous Americans have endured is contested but also the eerie sense that settler-colonialist culture in the end promulgates erasure as such, that is, creates non-places, non-spaces, within which human beings of any origin or descent are flattened, devalued, effaced. Against this culture of erasure Romero positions Indigenous Americans whom her photograph sets as larger than life, heroic figures in an open and thrillingly living landscape of moving clouds and rustling grasses. It is a portrait of America returning to life. The idea of revivification runs throughout the photography of resistance. It is the work of the image to show both what has been lost and what can be regained through reimagining the real. Martine Gutiérrez, a trans woman of mixed Mayan and Anglo descent, reimagines the field of high-fashion photography, envisioning a magazine showcasing a beautiful, Indigenous American trans woman. This woman happens to be none other than Martine Gutiérrez herself, making the performance of the magazine Indigenous Woman an extraordinary, extended self-portrait.

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Indigenous Woman Photographer Martine Gutiérrez created the self-portrait magazine Indigenous Woman in response to her own double invisibility and erasure, as a biracial trans woman of Indigenous (Mayan) descent. Indigenous Woman gives place and space to Gutiérrez’s iconoclastic brand of Indigenous womanhood.23 In creating a magazine entirely herself, she takes on the multiple force fields of capitalist coloniality that converge in that shibboleth, the women’s fashion magazine.24 Strikingly, Indigenous Woman is not a tongue-in-cheek parodic performance, even as it is sharply critical of White privilege and the structures of settler-colonialist capitalism.25 The intricacy of the magazine is extraordinary. Gutiérrez played every role in creating the work, not only the photography but also the writing and creation of faux advertisements and other verbal texts. The magazine is not a group effort text but a text created by one woman, a trans woman of Indigenous (Mayan) descent, creating text that subverts mass-marketed fashion magazines made by groups of employees. The supplanting of the capitalist-brewed team is a mark of Gutiérrez’s taking back the field and position of visual sovereignty.26 In Indigenous Woman no one presents Martine Gutiérrez except the artist herself. In the image Demons, Xochiquetzal ‘Flower Quetzal Feather’27 from Indigenous Woman, Gutiérrez is almost hidden in the costume of Xochiquetzal, the Aztec goddess of sexual love and textiles, developed from the Mayan.28 As the goddess represents flowers, sexuality, and textiles, Gutiérrez covers her face with flowers and woven fabric; we can see only her eyes and her ornately braided hair. The sense of submersion of self is palpable here. Gutiérrez portrays the goddess in the way that (frequently White) women in standard fashion magazines submerge their own identities to portray whatever spectral idea of fashion is foisted onto them by the magazine’s editors and photographers. In fashion magazines, women do not play themselves and do not present as themselves. Instead, they give visual play to whatever notion of “sell-ability” the editors and photographers have for that particular advertisement or spread in the magazine. The erasure of the model is a given in fashion photography. But Gutiérrez extrapolates this gendered erasure to create images (in the Demons series in particular) that move far outside the fashionable chic of the glossy magazines she imitates (and honors and critiques) in Indigenous Woman.

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In the photograph Tlazoteotl, the Aztec “deity of adulterers and sexual vices” is also the goddess of forgiveness and purification.29 As Gutiérrez performs and photographs the goddess, she has a darkened mouth from eating filth (traditionally the goddess consumes excrement, symbolic of her ability to transform suffering and pain into holiness and gold) and an expression of satisfaction and beckoning.30 She is painted gold, covered with jewelry, and from her eyes and mouth “dirt” (mascara) runs down. The eater of filth who transforms suffering and so-to-speak sin into gold and purity is a heavy deity; she is beautiful and terrifying. The “deity of dirt” absolved people of their sins; she was offered human excrement and was believed to swallow it to purify the sinner.31 In the context of Gutiérrez’s queer identity, the tension of “pure” and “impure” sexualities is critiqued. Our (Western) belief that the nonbinary, the queer, the gay are “dirty” sexualities Gutiérrez lays bare in this photograph.32 Moreover, covered as she is with gold, the photographer suggests, in Eater of Filth, that she takes the filth, the excrement, of colonization—typified by settler colonialists’ urge to extract wealth from the colonized land and its Indigenous people—and turns this filth into gold, that is, her art. Art as resistance, here, joins with Tlazoteotl to swallow the shit of coloniality and create gold—the work of art. In another image from the Demons series, Gutiérrez images herself as Yemaya, Yoruba goddess of the living ocean.33 Here, Gutiérrez indicates the mergence of Indigenous and African cultures in the frame of coloniality in the Americas, as Indigenous and African cultures create what is eerily termed Latinx, denoting the imprint of Spanish colonization on cultures that originally, as Indigenous American and African diasporic cultures, were decidedly not Latinate. The ocean deity is the gentlest of her demons. Gutiérrez indicates that she calls these deities “demons” in her work to reflect and contest the way that settler-colonialist society saw Indigenous American religions. As Berkhofer makes clear, the Spanish on encountering Indigenous religions believed they were encountering not religion but idolatry, paganism, barbarism.34 The settler colonialists so vehemently failed to see Indigenous deities as deities that they manufactured the idea that Indigenous Americans had no souls in order to feel guiltless in massacring them and taking their land. As Berkhofer (and as have many others after him) points out, this double turn is self-serving for settler-colonialist invaders of America. By believing that Indigenous Americans were “soulless heathens,” Europeans gave themselves permission to treat Indigenous Americans as

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something other than human; and by treating Indigenous Americans with the real barbarity of genocide, settler colonialists came to see the original Americans as deserving of this erasure.35 Of course, the ideation of genocide did not hold for every European who came to America, but the belief that Indigenous Americans’ deities were not gods but demons was a foundation of coloniality.36 As Inga Clendinnen notes, the burning of Mayan manuscripts, conducted for purportedly religious purposes by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, served to erase and efface vast tracts of information not only regarding the Maya but also regarding America itself; the burning of these texts was undertaken because the Spanish believed the texts were idolatrous.37 Through Gutiérrez, the “demons” are rendered at once gorgeous and vividly potent. She is especially investigative of the deities’ queer and transgender identities, finding in these precontact deities a compass that transcends Western ideologies of gender and identity. Using photography, Gutiérrez subverts the erasure of the deities, responds to the burning of Mayan manuscripts by recreating the gods’ images. Her photography, then, not only acts as a rebuttal to and refusal of settler-­colonialist erasures but also reembodies the erased texts of Indigenous American deities (of the Maya and the Aztec). Photography as the image of the body, even as we are shifting culturally to a landscape dominated by CGI (computer-generated imagery), yet retains the place of testimony, of embodied act. For Gutiérrez, the performance of reinstating the deities is part of the holistic self-creation and manifestation that is Indigenous Woman. Gutiérrez created every aspect of the magazine (she designed the advertisements, the features, the images, designed and created the costumes, the sets, and eminently she took all the photographs). Indigenous Woman is a one-woman show that took Gutiérrez several years, working alone, to complete. It is a process of a kind of radical self-portraiture whereby Gutiérrez recreates, by embodying with her own body, the refusal of coloniality’s erasure of Indigeneity in the Americas. Reaching from Mayan to Aztec, Gutiérrez eidetically codifies feminine Indigenousness as that which sets its own terms. The project is quintessentially photographic not only because it riffs on the theme of the high-fashion magazine but also because photography is the medium of embodiment marked into permanence (or near permanence). It translates performative body art to perceptual framed image. In this sense, Gutiérrez’s work engages what Shawn Wilson (Cree) describes as Indigenous methodology. Contends Wilson, “An integral part of Indigenous identity for many Indigenous people includes a distinct

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way of viewing the world … Indigenous people have come to realize that beyond control over the topic chosen for study, research methodology needs to incorporate their cosmology, worldview, epistemology, and ethical beliefs.”38 Gutiérrez, by creating Indigenous Woman entirely on her own, sustains and fosters and emblematizes and above all re-presents an Indigenous American cosmology, worldview, epistemology, and ethical belief. The ethos of her self-portrait magazine is the recreation of suppressed Indigeneity. It is an ethos of centering the visible on what the self can see and, through the body, say.

Notes 1. Anne Wallentine, “‘The World I Wish People Knew’: Photographer Cara Romero on Redefining Contemporary Native Art,” Hyperallergic, January 6, 2021, https://hyperallergic.com/612795/ cara-­romero-­ndn-­radical-­imagination-­grant/. 2. Carobeth Laird, “Chemehuevi Religious Beliefs and Practices,” Journal of California Anthropology 1, no. 1 (1974): 19–25. 3. Karen Kramer Russell, ed., Shapeshifting: Transformations in Native American Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 14–23. 4. Cara Romero and Will Wilson, “Members Only Virtual Art Talk: In Conversation with Cara Romero and Will Wilson” (interview, Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ, March 29, 2021). 5. Cara Romero, January 2021, quoted in Wallentine, “Photographer Cara Romero on Native Art.” 6. Robert F.  Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), xv. 7. Kliph Nesteroff, We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans and Comedy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021). 8. Berkhofer, White Man’s Indian, 108. 9. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1743–1826 (Philadelphia: Prichard and Hall, n.d.), 88–112 (electronic edition), accessed November 27, 2021, https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/jefferson/jefferson.html. 10. “Beverly Hemings,” Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (website), accessed November 4, 2021, https://www.monticello.org/site/research-­and-­ collections/beverly-­hemings. 11. Berkhofer, White Man’s Indian, 115. 12. Susan Miller and James Riding In, eds., Native Historians Write Back: Decolonizing American Indian History (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2011); See also, Peter Cozzens, Tecumseh and the Prophet: The Heroic Struggle for America’s Heartland (New York: Vintage, 2020).

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13. Michael Ray FitzGerald, Native Americans on Network TV: Stereotypes, Myths, and the “Good Indian” (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). 14. Renée L. Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College: University Press of New England, 2000). 15. David Curtis, ed. The Castoriadis Reader (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997), 196–217. 16. “Foucault: Power Is Everywhere,” Powercube, accessed November 4, 2021, https://www.powercube.net/other-­forms-­of-­power/foucault-­ power-­is-­everywhere/. 17. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 1995); and Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, The Will to Knowledge (London: Penguin Books, 1998). 18. Pauline Kleingeld, “Kant’s Second Thoughts on Race,” Philosophical Quarterly 57, no. 229 (2007): 573–92. 19. Romero and Wilson, “Members Only Virtual Talk” (Heard Museum). 20. Ashley Cope, “New to the Collection: Cara Romero’s TV Indians,” Weisman Art Museum, November 25, 2020, https://wam.umn. edu/2020/11/25/cararomero_tvindians_essay/. 21. Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives (New York: HarperCollins, 2017). 22. Elizabeth Solomon, “Native Americans and the National Consciousness: Virtual Reading and Conversation with Joy Harjo” (virtual lecture, presented by Harvard University Native American Program and Harvard Art Museums, April 5, 2021). 23. Nadiah Rivera Fellah, “Searching for an Indigenous Fashion Star, Martine Gutiérrez Casts Herself,” Aperture, September 28, 2020, https://aperture.org/editorial/martine-­Gutiérrez-­indigenous-­woman/. 24. Katy Donoghue, “Martine Gutiérrez’s Glittering, Glossy, and Gutsy ‘Indigenous Woman,’” Whitewall, October 11, 2018, https://whitewall. art/art/martine-­Gutiérrezs-­glittering-­glossy-­gutsy-­indigenous-­woman. 25. Barbara Calderón, “Demons and Deities: Martine Gutiérrez’s Indigenous Inspired Iconography,” Art21 Magazine, August 1, 2019, https://magazine.art21.org/2019/08/01/demons-­d eities-­m artine-­G utiérrez/#. YZeikL3MKZw. 26. Jolene Rickard, “Visualizing Sovereignty in the Time of Biometric Sensors,” South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 2 (April 1, 2011): 465–86. 27. Martine Gutiérrez, Indigenous Woman, 2018, artist magazine, photography, 16½ × 11″ (41.9 × 27.9 cm), RYAN LEE Gallery, New York, 95. 28. Lucy Rees, “See Works from Martine Gutiérrez’s ‘Indigenous Woman’ Project before It Closes,” Galerie, December 12, 2019, https://gal-

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eriemagazine.com/see-­w orks-­f rom-­m artine-­G utiérrezs-­i ndigenous-­ woman-­project-­before-­it-­closes/. 29. Martine Gutiérrez describes Tlazoteotl as “an Aztec deity of the underworld, adulterers and sexual vices. Also seen as the goddess of forgiveness and purification thought to transform pain and suffering into gold.” Tlazoteotl is often depicted with her mouth and chin darkened from consuming filth and sins, and here the artist paints her hands and mouth gold, her running eye makeup dramatizing her absorption of pain. The image is from Indigenous Woman, an artist’s book that takes the form of a high-end fashion magazine to question “how identity is formed, expressed, valued, and weighed as a woman, as a transwoman, as a latinx woman, as a woman of indigenous descent, as a femme artist and maker.” Gutiérrez, Demons, Tlazoteotl “Eater of Filth,” in Indigenous Woman, 92. Martine Gutierrez, “Demons, Tlazoteotle ‘Eater of Filth,’” in Indigenous Woman, by Martine Gutierrez and Ryan Lee Gallery (New York: Martine Gutierrez and Ryan Lee Gallery, 2018), 92. 30. Reid Mansur, “Tlazoteotl, Eater of Filth,” in Martine Gutiérrez’s “Demons” and the Queer Latinx Experience, December 15, 2019, https://scalar.usc. edu/works/martine-­Gutiérrezs-­demons-­and-­the-­trans-­latinx-­experience/ tlazoteotl-­eater-­of-­filth. 31. Ibid. 32. “Martine Gutiérrez: WE & THEM & ME,” CAM Raleigh, accessed November 4, 2021, https://camraleigh.org/we-­and-­them-­and-­me/. 33. Martine Gutierrez, “Demons, Yemaya ‘Goddess of the Living Ocean,’” in Indigenous Woman, by Martine Gutierrez and Ryan Lee Gallery (New York: Martine Gutierrez and Ryan Lee Gallery, 2018), 94. 34. Berkhofer, White Man’s Indian, 11. 35. Steve Talbot, “Spiritual Genocide: The Denial of American Indian Religious Freedom, from Conquest to 1934,” Wicazo Sa Review 21, no. 2 (2006): 7–39. 36. Walter Mignolo, “Decoloniality and Phenomenology: The Geopolitics of Knowing and Epistemic/Ontological Colonial Differences,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 32, no. 3 (2018): 360–87. 37. Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 38. Shawn Wilson, Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (Black Point, NS: Fernwood, 2008), 15.

CHAPTER 10

Nomads, Reterritorialization

Matika Wilbur (Swinomish and Tulalip) embarked on the momentous Project 562 in 2012. In this chapter, I explore the nomadism intrinsic to her project, drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of nomadism. Nomadism, as Deleuze and Guattari develop the term, contends with Immanuel Kant’s claim that those outside philosophy (by which Kant means those outside Enlightenment dictates of the supposedly rational) are purportedly only “nomads,” travelers beyond the boundaries of the goals of Enlightenment visions of the nation-state.1 Deleuze and Guattari take the term, nomad, and rehabilitate it from Kantian disparagement, finding in the praxis of deterritorialization the key mode of resistance to the imperialist nation-state. Whereas Matika Wilbur’s practice for the work of Project 562 to be sure diverges from Deleuze and Guattari’s project of nomadism as deterritorialization, in that her work and her practice are decidedly not despotic, yet, there are also crucial intersections between Wilbur’s artistic practice in creating Project 562 and the praxis of deterritorialization, and these intersections occur along the axis of nomadism. When I spoke with the photographer during the writing of this book, Matika Wilbur expressed an insightful concern that I also share regarding the risk of applying critical theory written by white, male philosophers to the art and social justice work of an Indigenous American woman.2 I offer the discussion of Wilbur’s nomadism in the context of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept because that frame offers a way to see the expansive political force of the photographer’s work. Wilbur’s Project 562 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Raymond, Photography and Resistance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96158-9_10

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photography is primarily created for Indigenous Americans. It is not created so that White people can enact surveillance over Indigenous Americans. The work is anticolonialist because its very center of being is indigeneity, not the performance of indigeneity but the experience. And yet, also, the work is anticolonialist in staging resistance to the historical and ongoing forces of colonization. It is this second aspect, this work of resistance against patterns of domination, that Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of nomadism illuminates. For the overturning of violative, oppressive, and erroneous Enlightenment categorizations, such as the faux-­ scientific category of race, is one of the crucial points of Wilbur’s activist art. It is important, then, in reading this chapter to read Project 562 not as a set of images but more broadly a set of ideas, an extensive argument about humanness, identity, and America. It is important, that is, to read the deep conceptual structures that go along with and undergird Wilbur’s practice of photography. The words that accompany her portraits, reflecting Wilbur’s interviews of her subjects, are essential to the images, intrinsic to Project 562.

Project 562, Nomadism, Finding Home The inspiration for Project 562 came to Wilbur from a dream in which her grandmother told her to create a photographic archive of the tribes in the United States. This massive undertaking, a project ongoing for years and still in process, involves Wilbur traveling all over the United States to meet with tribes and photograph their members.3 Indigenous Americans are everywhere in the United States because this nation-state is their homeland. The eerie verbiage (especially prominent in the Trump era) of nationalism, by which White settlers whose families all emigrated to America (that is, the only peoples with deep ancestral ties to the terrain of the United States of America are Indigenous Americans) lay claim to sole rightful ownership of the land flies in the face of the well-known but uncannily disavowed history of the continent.4 In the United States, nationalism imagines a landscape terrain that is believed to be only properly inhabited by White, Northern European-descended Christian settler colonialists. The rationale for this inhabitation is shockingly thin and insubstantial; it reflects a kind of fever of coloniality, a mis-knowing of the history of the land and its inhabitation. Wilbur’s nomadism is eminently practical. As a young artist with limited funds, she set out to photograph members of every tribe federally

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recognized by the United States. Driving between tribal lands, she becomes nomadic pursuing her project. And yet in this nomadism Wilbur also instates a response, implicit and forceful, to the United States’ coloniality that displaced Indigenous Americans as part of the process of creating the map of the United States. In coloniality’s ongoing conceptualization of land, space, and rights to land and space, a concurrent violation of ideas of humanness and human dwelling took and continues to take place, a violent discursive colonization, to the detriment of Indigenous Americans. The genocidal arc of settler-colonialist force in America manifests even now (as I write in late 2021) as a map of land and social space that at once erases or effaces the presence of Indigenous peoples and also enforces—as part of this erasure—concepts of land and human dwelling that are inimical and alien to Indigenous American ideas and values.

Processual Nomadism Nomadism, for Deleuze and Guattari, is a process of reterritorialization, that is, the remapping of terrains that have been considered culturally fixed. In Wilbur’s work in Project 562, reterritorialization emerges from the artist’s crossing of coloniality’s boundaries and maps literally, as she drives her van across America, but also figuratively, as her photographs for Project 562 recast—re-map—the human landscape of the United States in the cultural imagination. Each image forms a part of this new map that sharply contests the settler-colonialist vision of America as space entirely created by and owned by settler colonialists and their descendants. The materiality of travel, of crossing coloniality’s boundaries, merges with the spatioconceptual work of creating photographic images that contest the terms of coloniality’s mapping of people and identity. Wilbur crosses state boundaries in creating Project 562. As she crisscrosses the American continent, she questions and reframes the image and ontology of Indigenous American being. If Walter Mignolo argues that “events and political processes that attempt to counter the control of the State or of global forces are in need of macro-narratives from the perspective of coloniality,” it is imperative to ask to what extent, if at all, Wilbur’s work in Project 562 is bound up in macro-narratives of coloniality, even from a position of resistance.5 My argument will be that it is precisely her nomadism, in creating this project, that indicates just how far from being a “response” to coloniality is her work. By engaging her project as a continual process of meeting and crossing borders, a project enacted in border

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terrain, Wilbur establishes less a response to coloniality and more what Gloria Anzaldua calls “border” gnosis.6 Mariana Ortega makes the persuasive argument that philosophy and anticolonialism theory created and published by non-White, non-straight women is erased in the academy, and that this erasure leads to repetition of coloniality’s hallmarks: male dominance, White dominance. The border terrain that Wilbur traces, unlike Anzaldua’s, is not of mixed race but the edges of coloniality’s ideational, and enforcedly legal, map of Americanness. In other words, the borderlands that Wilbur’s nomadism crosses are both the effect of and the resistance to coloniality. The idea that decolonization can ever take place outside the context of coloniality is problematic. The history of coloniality in the United States marks and shapes the land, land on which Indigenous Americans lived for millennia before contact, and where Indigenous Americans still live. By creating a project that embeds the work of photography in the work of crossing the land to reach Indigenous photographic subjects, Wilbur creates a borderlands, a trope of nomadism, crossing between states, between “reservations,” these negatively mythical spaces created by coloniality to contain and control not only Indigenous people but also, perversely, the body politic as such. These, coloniality’s mapped designations, do not reflect ancestral patterns of land inhabitation; they are not sacred or reverential. It is not that Wilbur’s work has overt religious connotations. Rather, it is important to see that she creates images, through a praxis of nomadism, that are not merely responses to dominant narratives of coloniality but rather that skew, and rearrange, the narratives of coloniality, creating new narratives. The process of reterritorialization is her work in this still-in-process series of photographs. Photography as an act of reterritorialization is Wilbur’s practice. Working within, against, and, most important, transcending beyond the frame of 562 federally recognized United States Indigenous American tribes (the number of tribes federally recognized when Wilbur began the project, in 2012; that number has grown to 574, as of May 5, 2021), Wilbur’s nomadic project creates a visual map, a new visual map, of Indigenous Americans that is not simply a replacement for Edward Curtis’s earlier work, nor merely a rebuttal of nation-state line drawing around populations. Instead, what Ortega describes as “decolonial woes” Wilbur moves beyond by refusing the terms of coloniality’s spatiality and, hence, its sociality. Decolonial woes, as Ortega insightfully notes, emerge from decoloniality work in the academy that ends up

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reproducing patterns of coloniality. Ortega insightfully notes how endemic to decolonizing academic labor are “decolonial woes.” It is, however, Wilbur’s project’s difference from these repetitions that distinguishes the work. Here is not art burdened by coloniality’s narrative as rather nomadically deterritorializing the map of those concepts: redrawing the American map with Indigenous people, as seen by Wilbur’s camera. For this work, it is necessary that the photographer be Indigenous American, that is, necessary that she not create images from prurience but from political, aesthetic, and land-based solidarity with her photographic subjects. The land as template, land as tie, unifies Wilbur’s Project 562. The core goal of photographing Indigenous Americans on their land is the reason for her nomadism. She goes to the tribe and works with the tribe members to come up with ideas for the portraits to represent the tribe. Travel across America, for her project, disrupts the vision of “America” that Rick Santorum espouses, quoted in the opening of my introduction to this book, disrupts the White supremacist ideology that attempts to erase, conceptually and ultimately bodily, the force and presence of those not primarily of European descent. This act of consistently disrupting the settler-colonialist map of the United States does not mean that Wilbur’s work is merely a response to this map. For in bringing together disparate tribes through the photographic work of an Indigenous American woman, Wilbur reaches back and also forward toward an ulterior, alternate, alterior map, that is, a map that makes central the ontology of Indigenous Americans. As Shawn Wilson argues, Indigenous ontology is independent from coloniality.7 Indigenous ontology is not a response to coloniality, nor is it merely a weapon of decoloniality. Rather indigenous ontology is its own entity, preceding and superseding settler colonialism. The ontological framework of Wilbur’s Project 562 leverages nomadism and deterritorialization, yes, but more deeply is based on a recognition of shared land, shared ancestral land, that is, of the land we call America. The project reflects that Indigenous Americans have always, or almost always, been here (or since some 30,000 years ago), on this land.8 It is a way of bringing image to this fact of long inhabitation, the peopled landscape that Santorum, in his April 23, 2021, talk, erroneously referenced as a “blank slate.”9 With increasing evidence pointing to the Americas having been inhabited by Indigenous Americans for tens of thousands of years, the ancestral tie of Indigenous Americans to the land is comparable with that of indigenous

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Europeans in Europe.10 In other words, the ties of Indigenous Americans to the land of America have deep historical and ontological foundations. Rather than being merely a response to coloniality, Wilbur’s nomadic photographic project also expresses that which transcends coloniality, that is, the continued inhabitation of the land itself. And yet even in the context of resistance, one calls on the idea of reterritorialization, “History is made only by those who oppose history (not by those who insert themselves into it).”11 That is, resistance—opposition—to coloniality is not simply a following of the narrative of settler colonization. It is also an overturning of that narrative, a remaking of history. Consider Wilbur’s photograph of Michael Frank, Miccosukee, in the Everglades of Florida.12 An essential and crucial aspect of her work in creating the photographs for Project 562 is the depth of her relationship with the subjects. Displaying Frank’s portrait on her website, Wilbur quotes his particular connection with and concern for the land, as Frank states: “All our land is sacred … Respect our sovereignty, respect our home, respect our tradition. We know they will destroy our home if we walk and talk like the rest of the world.”13 The Miccosukee were originally part of the Creek (Muscogee) of Georgia, but under pressure of colonization they sought refuge in Florida, hiding in the Everglades to resist death and assimilation.14 The people lived off fish from the Everglades until the mid to late twentieth century, when mercury pollution made the fish dangerous to consume. The mercury pollution arose from industrial processes, primarily coal-fired power plants, and from pesticides used in settler-colonialist agriculture surrounding the region that ran off into the Everglades, making the fish and plants in the water toxic for consumption.15 Mercury and pesticide pollution desecrate the waterways in the Everglades and make it all but impossible for the Miccosukee to follow their traditional path of catching and eating fish from these waters. To rid or even significantly decrease the amount of mercury in the Everglades will take not only local but also global action. The Minamata Convention (2017) proposed worldwide diminishment of mercury pollution but has hardly dinted the release of airborne mercury from industrial processes; the Everglades receives mercury pollution not only from the immediate surrounding areas but also, through rainfall and weather patterns, from atmospheric mercury generated globally. For Michael Frank (Miccosukee), in Wilbur’s photograph, the urgent need to remain apart from the violent destructiveness of industrial culture is visible in the seer’s face. He stands immersed in the Everglades water.

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His gaze turns toward the photographer, Matika Wilbur (Swinomish-­ Tulalip) and also through her, through her camera, toward us, those who see the image. The sky and wetlands seem almost to breathe around him, delicately painted just off center in the black-and-white photograph. His gaze is searing, not pleading. But the position of the figure in the swampland, in the waterway, and the look of formidable strength in his stance and gaze suggest a contrast, ongoing, between the vulnerability of the Miccosukee and the strength and force of the tribe. The pervasive problem of mercury pollution in the Everglades is beyond a single actor’s remedy. It emerges from systemic national and even international patterns of waste incineration, mining, and above all the burning of coal in coal-fired power plants. It is a literal and metaphoric exemplar of how White, Anglo-European patterns of encroachment and industrialization shift both micro- and macroclimates and natural environments and of how Indigenous Americans are impacted by and resist the force of these shifts.16 The Miccosukee are originally a Georgia tribe, but they were pushed out during that state’s brutal relocation press, where Andrew Jackson forced the removal of the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Seminole, and Creek (Muscogee). The Indian Removal Act (1830) radically changed the peopled landscape of Georgia, displacing and effectively murdering thousands of Indigenous Americans to open the state for White settler colonists to grow cotton, a cash crop.17 This pushed the Miccosukee into Florida, ultimately to the Everglades, as a kind of refugium, where they hid from settler-colonialist acts of genocide. The Everglades, then, protected the Miccosukee, but without coloniality, they would likely have remained in Georgia. Hence, the singular microclimate of the Everglades that absorbs industrial pollution is a problem for the Miccosukee because of colonialist displacement. Coloniality’s displacement of the nineteenth century then became industrial capitalism’s erosive rearranging of the entire ecosystem of the continent by the mid twentieth century. Thus, the Everglades, which had been a safe refuge for the Miccosukee, became contaminated with mercury and industrial agricultural pollutants. Hence, coloniality (settler colonialism combined with industrial capitalism) creates a near impossibility for the Miccosukee. Having evaded capture in the nineteenth century, they were threatened by new forms of coloniality in the twentieth and continue to be threatened in the twenty-first. The portrait of Michael Frank is a collaboration between the seer and the photographer. As Wilbur describes her technique and process for creating the portraits of Project 562, the work is deeply immersed in

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relationality.18 The relational matrix, or social space created through and between the photographer and her subjects, is the text, context, and manifestation of the project. Michael Frank’s role as seer and protector of his people and of the Everglades becomes, for the time of the photograph’s creation, Wilbur’s role. “Whenever I am called to protect my home, I make myself available,” states Frank; the portrait itself is part of this ongoing act of protection.19 The “shimmering waters” of the Everglades expand behind, before, and around him in Wilbur’s portrait, and his face is the catalyst of the image’s expansive and compressive dialectic. Frank’s face and the Everglades “see” each other as Wilbur’s camera and Frank see each other. The process and event of mutual regard is the ontological foundation of the portrait. Wilbur is not voyeuristically observing Frank’s struggle with environmental degradation and the effects of displacement; she is not even empathically observing this. Rather she is with Frank, with the Everglades, part of the regard that the seer has for his people and his land. This being-with is the essential element of Project 562. It is not about observation but rather an act of ontological solidarity. Wilbur shares the gaze with her subjects, seeing them as they present themselves and also allowing them to see her. Seeing the photographs we can see this mutual exchange of vision. Hence, the vision that the seer, Michael Frank, has of the Everglades, and of his people there, is also what we see in Wilbur’s portrait of the man. He is almost centered in the image, slightly to the right in the frame; his feet appear to be in shallow water. The striped jacket and hat are bright, elegant, and both wrists wear gold (a watch and a heavy masculine bracelet). One hand curls slightly inward toward himself, while Frank’s hand nearest the viewer is open, almost unfurled, wearing a heavy gold ring. The ocean of sawgrass surrounds him. His expression is somber but not mournful, serious but not studied. He is at ease and in his zone of power where Wilbur photographs him. But the image does not convey hubris. Rather Frank seems the very image, the very picture, of alertness, awareness. He is a seer. He reflects and sees the environmental desecration of the Everglades, reflects and sees what he and others of the tribe will have to do to survive and, over the course of years and decades, rectify the harm that has been done to this ecosystem. His brow is slightly furrowed, his eyes drawn slightly up, as if he were posing an open-ended question to the viewer. How will we respond? How will we respond to the challenge that his photograph poses, in its acknowledgment that desecration of the land

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has come through the mechanisms of settler-colonialist industrial capitalism, a system embedded in which many viewers of the photograph live. A system from which many of us, including those supported by universities, profit. The image appears to have been taken in the morning, a time when commuters are roaring past the region on Florida highways. But the image of Michael Frank is still, held in equipoise. The connection of the subject with his land is beyond profound; it feels immutable in the photograph. The seriousness of the image, then, moves it both into and beyond the tradition of the portrait. The image is imbued with what Hegel terms the “magic of pure appearance.”20 The image is at once a portrait of Michael Frank and a portrait of the Everglades. As philosophy professor Erich Hatala Matthes writes, “Landscape portraiture presents opportunities for telling alternative stories about the character of place that can subvert dominant, traditional caricatures and interests.”21 Wilbur’s portrait, here, overturns dominant White, Anglo-European notions of the Everglades as tourist paradise. The idea that Indigenous Americans continue to inhabit and have long inhabited this land, and are the protectors and respecters of the land, flies in the face of dominant White concepts of Florida and the Everglades. Indeed, the understanding that all of America is land sacred to Indigenous Americans, that there is no part of this land that does not have meaning and history for Indigenous Americans, is a notion elusive to dominant White tropes, or imaginary ideas, of Americanness and America’s land. Precisely this contestatory space—wherein the idea of America flickers—is the symbolic space that dominant White ideas of Americanness use to exclude Indigenous presence. It is, then, the contestatory space of disappearance. By framing portraits in precisely this space, Wilbur’s Project 562 creates a genre of images that are portraits both of people and of lands. Landscape portraiture, as Matthes argues, contests the idea that landscapes are “lacking an ‘inner life.’”22 Whereas Matthes is not writing about Indigenous Americans and the American land, his argument in itself sheds light on dominant Anglo-European ways of viewing land: that is, as “lacking an ‘inner life.’” The idea that the land is inert rather than vital, passive rather than vivid, is contested in ecofeminist praxis and theory.23 Certainly one could interpret Wilbur’s Project 562 as part of this movement of ecofeminist resistance. And yet, as Jolene Rickard makes the persuasive case, there is something of appropriation in taking Indigenous feminist resistance practices, which are rooted in traditional sociality of Indigenous America,

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and claiming it for ecofeminism.24 Hence, rather than typifying Wilbur’s engagement with the land as ecofeminist, one may more accurately describe it, using Cara Romero’s term, as a practice of indigenization (see Chap. 9 on Romero in this book). Wilbur indigenizes the problematic of coloniality. Yes, her work responds to settler colonialism, obviously, given the title of the work is a response to the condition of Indigenous Americans being so designated as “Federally recognized tribes.” Federal capacity to designate people, by a process that Foucault calls governmentality, is the processual power of managing populations that governments of coloniality claim.25 Wilbur confronts this fact of coloniality immediately in her project’s title: Project 562. She engages, confronts, the condition of being subjugated, named, partitioned, and indeed numbered by the United States government. But from this confrontation she reclaims, reterritorializes, the social and geographic spaces of Indigenous America, which is to say the social and geographic spaces of America. The contested imaginary and geographical spaces of America are those in which many White, Anglo-­European Americans have erased Indigenous presence, policed and ghettoed African diasporic presence, and criminalized Latinx presence, while making Asian American presence fraught and continually under threat.26 To assert visibility and voice in the imaginary society that is America—that is, the social field that becomes the material nation we inhabit—is the work of Wilbur’s Project 562. The photographic double portrait of landscape and of people metabolically inserts the whole field of identity—of Americanness in the land of America—as an Indigenous American fact. Consider Wilbur’s portrait of Sinéad Talley (Karuk and Yurok). The focal point of the photograph is the subject’s eyes, which make direct contact with the viewer. It is she who sees us; yes, the viewer also sees her, but the gazes are exchanged. The photograph is not voyeuristic but instead confers equal power on the seer and the seen, indeed setting in place the visual logic that we are all both seer and seen. Sinéad Talley, in the caption that accompanies the image, discusses the problematic of blood quantum. Blood quantum laws were originally created by settler-­colonialist society during the time of the thirteen colonies, so that a racially hierarchical culture could be legally enforced.27 That is, blood quantum, as a concept, goes hand in hand with the settler-colonialist work of demarcating racial

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boundaries. In the early days of the colonies, intermarriage between Europeans, Indigenous Americans, and African diasporic subjects was common, and so the theory of blood quantum became a way to create the imaginary code of “Whiteness” as an uninfringeable category. From the 1705 Indian Blood Law to the 1924 Racial Integrity Act, the ideation of Whiteness depended, and still depends, conversely on tightly controlling the ideation of Indigeneity.28 Scientific racism not only shapes but indeed creates race, race itself a fabricated concept rather than a biological reality. And yet, the majority of tribes now leverage blood quantum requirements for membership. This requirement responds to White appropriation of “Indianness” as a pernicious form of racist coloniality. For Sinéad Talley, blood quantum ideation places her in a position of feeling less Indigenous than some of her community members. Beneath her portrait, she speaks out against this kind of racism, making a claim for her identity and presence as an Indigenous American woman who is also mixed race. The photograph puts in play the radical idea that Indigenous Americans are not defined by governmental stipulations but by self-­ sovereignty, including determining one’s navigation of tradition and inheritance. The eyes create the spark of the picture. It is a photograph about seeing, about determining how one sees and is seen. In the photograph, she is entering the scene, into visibility at the front of the picture plane, indicating her sovereignty of the land and of herself. The image shimmers with energy and precarity. The creation of future actions from the deep history of tradition is the subject of the portrait. Recalling Santorum’s egregious comment on what he believes (in his benightedness) is the absence of Indigenous American influence on the United States of America, with the discussion of which this book began (see introduction), one is struck by the force with which Michael Frank and Daygotleeyos are very much part of the erstwhile culture of the United States. Wilbur’s photographs both attest to this reality and also deepen it, bringing her photographic subjects into the cultural landscape of that always shifting and being-created imaginary entity, the sociality of the United States. In drawing on Cornelius Castoriadis’s term “the imaginary

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institution of society,” I use the word “imaginary” not in the vernacular sense of fabular but in the specified sense with which Castoriadis deploys the word: that social entity created through the processes of imagining each other. This is never a beneficent process, for racism and other social ills are created by the ways we imagine each other. As Castoriadis writes, “All societies make their own imaginaries (institutions, laws, traditions, beliefs, and behaviors).”29 Racism became a founding myth of the United States of America. It is the imaginary, in the sense that Castoriadis deploys the term, that erases materiality. Photography as the uncanny amalgam of the imaginary and the material—imaginary in Castoriadis’s sense of the word—is also the fiercest medium through which to contest and overturn society’s erasures. Wilbur’s ongoing Project 562 is, precisely, a project, much in the sense that Weems’s earlier (2003) The Louisiana Project (see Chap. 7, on Weems) is a project, that is, an activist work that extends revolutionary thought into the social imaginary through image and verbal text. These projects should not be read as protests but as something more far-reaching, acts that overturn and reenvision the social landscape of America.

Nomads and Women The nomad crosses borders not because she transgresses but because the ideology of the nation-state is not her map. The map of the nomad is that of reconnecting across the boundaries of the nation-state, reviving the dead nerve endings that coloniality creates on the American continent. In this sense, Wilbur’s project is not just an act of reterritorialization, nor either merely a redrawing of the map of Indigeneity, weaving together again the torn connections that coloniality manifested. It is both of these, but also Project 562 is a sublime act of merging movement and image, act and eidetic stasis. Here, the eidetic field is both in motion and still. The fabric of Project 562 is its constitutive and propelling act, that of Wilbur crossing America with her camera not according to states but by seeking and meeting with tribes. This motion is not simply the ground from which the work emerges. It is the work itself. The work is also, of course, the images that Wilbur creates, those that constitute the project. But unlike art as conceptualized in coloniality, which moves only toward the product in capitalist fashion, in Project 562, the scene of creation is part of the work and is not disavowed or turned from.

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A pivot of Project 562 is its double origin in gendered tropes. Wilbur expresses that she developed the series spurred by her desire to offer a corrective to Edward Curtis’s book, The North American Indian, and also because of a dream in which her grandmother told her to photograph every tribe in America.30 In other words, Wilbur’s nomadic work offers a feminist answer to Curtis’s sporadic travels and “collection” of Indigenous images. It offers this rebuttal through the nexus of the artist’s grandmother, a maternal source of wisdom. The gendering of nomadism here is profound and connects with other photographers studied in this book. The work of the photography of resistance depends on crossing nation-­ state boundaries. Shelley Niro crosses between Canada and the United States to create her Battlefields of My Ancestors series, showing North America through the lens of a woman who does not “stay put,” but instead re-moves through the terrain from which her ancestors were removed. Nomadism as a foundation for art then is a necessary response to coloniality, redrawing the map yielded by colonialist histories, indeed drawing a new map—a map that, of course, is not a return to the time before contact but also is not a concession to the violence of coloniality. Instead, the practice of crossing the boundaries of coloniality is an essential mark of anticolonialist art. If Thomas Birtchnell argues that digital nomads are privileged actors in the digitized capitalism of the twenty-first century, anticolonialist nomadic artworks challenge this assumption.31 The nomadism of Wilbur’s Project 562 is not about privilege but about claim, the claiming of vision as vision in place and of place. This work does not reject institutional systems as such; rather it pushes against the frontiers of the nationstate, contesting visually and actively (through act) those boundaries as rightful. This anticolonialist work redraws the map of coloniality. Consider Wilbur’s portrait of Mary Sanipass from Aroostook County, Maine (variant spelling, Mari).32 A member of the Micmac tribe, Sanipass exemplifies the violence problematic of nation-state boundaries. The Micmac are principally now in Canada but originally spanned the territories of both what we now call Maine and the Canadian Maritimes. Within Maine, the Micmac were excluded from the epochal Maine Indian Claims Settlement.33 They fought, then, separately, for federal recognition, now designated as the Aroostook band of Micmac. In Aroostook County, Sanipass has long labored in agriculture harvesting potatoes, the region’s main crop, and traveling each August to Cherryhill to rake blueberries. She is also a basketmaker, employing traditional techniques. In Wilbur’s photograph, we see the mixing of Catholic signifiers and Indigenous

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baskets. Jesus and the crucifixion share space in Sanipass’s tiny camp home with baskets she and other family members create, while eerily an Indigenous American doll is revered, an emblem of Indigeneity reclaimed without irony by the Sanipass family.34 Originally from Nova Scotia, Sanipass was a survivor of the Shubenacadie residential school—where she was forcibly brought into the Catholic faith. The Canadian government used such residential schools as a tool to strip Indigenous American children of their identity. Micmac language and culture were forbidden to be expressed at the Shubenacadie residential school, whereas corporal punishment was routine and malnutrition endemic. And yet in a tragic and also, perhaps, transformative response to the situation of being kidnapped by coloniality (inasmuch as Indigenous American children were taken against their will and without their parents’ consent by the state to be placed in these residential schools), Sanipass remained a devoted Catholic, a faith instilled in her through colonialist violence. Wilbur’s photograph portrait faithfully reflects this painful duality.35 When Sanipass died, in Presque Isle, Maine, in December 2020, she was given a Catholic mass and burial, at her request.36 The violation that Sanipass endured—a child stolen by the state from her parents, forbidden to speak her language, starved, and abusively treated at the residential school—shapes the photograph Wilbur creates. And also Sanipass’s resilience shines in the portrait. States Sanipass, Now I am a Catholic, I love Mary, she has a lot of my prayers and I will keep loving her until I die, I guess. I pray everywhere; if I go in the woods and look at a tree, that is a prayer; if I go to the lake and look at it, that is a prayer; if I go to the ocean, that is a prayer. God is a prayer. Everything I see is a prayer.37

In the portrait, we see Sanipass in the semidarkness of interiority. Unlike many and indeed most of her subjects who chose to be portrayed outdoors in healing natural spaces, Sanipass chooses her small home in the Maine woods as the place for her portrait. An elderly woman, mother to 6 children and great-grandmother to 32, her home is her safe space. Sanipass was an expert basketmaker, employing traditional Micmac techniques of basketmaking and earning her living through this work as she grew older. The confluence of Catholic and Indigenous American signifiers in the claustral, semidark parlor in which Wilbur creates Sanipass’s portrait is a concretization of the violative quality of colonialist boundaries. But also it

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is a celebration of Sanipass’s domestic nomadism. In her home, the place where she felt safe, Sanipass crosses the boundaries of coloniality, creating a room that is her history. This is the history of the survivor. The nomad is the survivor, always, in Wilbur’s Project 562.

The Inherency of Reterritorialization and Nomadism Harold E.  L. Prins and Bunny McBride of the Abbe Museum (of Indigenous art and culture) in Bar Harbor, Maine, suggest that nomadism—redrawing of boundaries—is intrinsically necessary as the Indigenous American response to coloniality “to indicate the proper boundary lines between individual tribes…. Not only is precise data wanting respecting the limits of land actually held or claimed by many tribes, but there are other tribes, which disappeared early in the history of [North America] … it will be readily understood that to determine tribal boundaries within accurately drawn lines is in the vast majority of cases quite impossible.”38 In other words, precisely the contestation of boundaries defines Indigenous resistance to coloniality. But also, the inherency of nomadism as response to despotism is intrinsic to resistance against abuse as such. The idea of the boundary, the border, controlled by unilateral unagreed-upon force is the crux of colonialist violation and violence. In the photography of resistance, this code of erasure is contested through visual maps that redraw, that draw again, what we might want and what we need to know about America. Turn again to Wilbur’s photograph of Sinéad Talley (Karuk and Yurok), who stands unsmiling and lipsticked, her face vivid, delicately tinted by Wilbur, against the grisaille-effect black-and-white background of mountain, lake, and floral grasses in Northern California near what is now called Six Rivers National Forest.39 Talley’s power is clear in Wilbur’s portrait. Talley is intact, forceful, graceful. She stands facing Wilbur, who holds the camera, and it is the connection between the women that enlivens the photograph.40 In response to cultural erasure, in Matika Wilbur’s portrait Sinéad Talley appears, she reappears, vital, bright, fully present. This is the transformative aspect of anticolonialist photography: to make what has been erased reappear. To bring to light all that has been suppressed in the social, historical, and geographical fabric of colonization. The fur tails that frame Talley’s face rhyme subtly with the Winged Victory (Nike, in the Louvre), suggest feminist power and wings spread. In this image, Sinéad Talley rises victorious.

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La Pieta I close with a consideration of Shelley Niro’s La Pieta (2007). Niro (Mohawk, Bay of Quinte) instates the textural presence of wampum beads to frame her series of photographs La Pieta. The series title alludes to the Christian sacrifice of Jesus Christ and his mother the Virgin Mary’s anguish, while the photographs supplant human figures of abject male death and female grief with images of environmental devastation. Obliquely referencing and, in a sense, correcting Michelangelo’s iconologically Christian Pietà, Niro’s series of photographs shows river water, high-tension power lines, wounded trees, and an enigmatically beautiful male torso, emblems of Indigenous American suffering and also, more broadly, of the suffering of the North American earth under coloniality and the sorrow of the endless wars of coloniality, the mothers who are made to weep by these wars (Figs. 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, and 10.4). The series enunciates the environmental suffering and sacrifice of North America so violated by colonization and the ongoing process of what Anibal Quijano and Walter Mignolo term “coloniality.” The female figure, the suffering mother, here is implicitly the earth and perhaps also the feminist photographer, Niro, herself, as her photographs hold the broken body of the North American continent. The photographer’s decision to frame her La Pieta’s photographs of river, trees, and torso with photographic images of wampum beads signifies her commitment to articulating the Indigenous American (Haudenosaunee) perspective.41 To prepare the photographs in this frame of wampum, Niro beaded a pattern she calls stair to heaven, which looks like a crucifix but is not Christian in origin. Rather it is a Haudenosaunee pattern depicting the vertical line of a human life as it intersects the horizontal earth. Having created the wampum frame, Niro then photographed it to create a photographic frame around her images in La Pieta, deploying both the negative and the positive of the film image.42 In photographing the beads and deploying them as frame, Niro “cradles” suffering America in the texture, haptically intimated, of Haudenosaunee peacemaking textiles. The beads are not merely framing devices but rather are the key to understanding Niro’s series La Pieta. They move the photographic images decisively away from European pictorial notions of perspectival geometry. The beads are straight lines, telling a story at once cryptic and direct. The layering of the implicitly nonphotographic beads with photographs, as the beads themselves become photographic image, challenges the trompe l’oeil

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Fig. 10.1  Shelley Niro, Trunk, from the series La Pieta, 2007, third image of seven color/black-and-white prints on beaded red cloths, 50 × 40″. Collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC.  Copyright Shelley Niro. Courtesy of the artist

expected of photography. They articulate the image as image, making us aware that we are seeing technologically created pictures, that we are not looking through a window of perspectival gaze. The beads are a quiet refusal to be subsumed into colonialist ways of seeing and showing the image. The fabric of the photographs in this series, then, is made indigenous through the deployment of textiles—beadwork—not typically associated with photography. The effect is not collage but clarity, the textile

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Fig. 10.2  Shelley Niro, Young Man’s Chest, from the series La Pieta, 2007, fourth image of seven color/black-and-white prints on beaded red cloths, 40 × 60″. Collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC. Copyright Shelley Niro. Courtesy of the artist

border one that invokes touch, history, tactile embodied presence into the always spectral field of the photographic. In this way, Niro draws on textile in the photographic to decolonize the image space of photography, making photography an entirely Indigenous American art. Merging symbolic images of war and environmental degradation, Niro’s La Pieta frames in textile the project of the photography of resistance. Niro shows us what we do not see. In the resistance to colonization’s erasures of peoples and landscapes, La Pieta mourns and protests the violent markings by which we live in twenty-first-century North America. Here, wampum, in its role as a language, is saliently instated. In the artist statement accompanying her La Pieta series of photographs, Niro articulates the process of mourning and renewal, of facing violence and returning to life, that the series encompasses.43 She writes that the images are “representative of war, motherhood, the destruction of the earth and the destruction of armies trained to move as a unit and

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Fig. 10.3  Shelley Niro, Gothic Landscape, from the series La Pieta, 2007, fifth image of seven color/black-and white-prints on beaded red cloths, 40  ×  60″. Collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC. Copyright Shelley Niro. Courtesy of the artist

ultimately die or succeed … the wampum (pattern) is a traditional symbol showing the spirit world and the earth. There was a line representing the earth and a shorter line continuing showing the sky world and the direction your spirit leaves once you pass on … I wanted to contain the photos (with wampum), to be seen as [a] Haudenosaunee comment of how we are aware of the outside world and we are affected by the activity of outside forces.” These photographs poise on the edge, representing what vanishes, the wars and destruction of earth, the human lives lost. And yet, as activist art resisting coloniality, the work is contained, held, within the Haudenosaunee frame. It is this frame that gives the work shelter and balance. Through this frame of Indigeneity the disappeared reappear.

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Fig. 10.4  Shelley Niro, At the Edge, from the series La Pieta, 2007, sixth image of seven color/black-and-white prints on beaded red cloths, 40 × 60″. Collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC.  Copyright Shelley Niro. Courtesy of the artist

Notes 1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 2. Matika Wilbur, artist, in conversation with the author, November 5, 2021. 3. Matika Wilbur, as represented on the artist’s Project 562 website, http://www.project562.com/about/. 4. John McCardell, The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830–1860 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979); and Sam Haselby, The Origins of American Religious Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 5. Mariana Ortega, “Decolonial Woes and Practices of Un-Knowing,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 31, no. 3 (2017): 504–16. 6. María Lugones, “On Borderlands/La Frontera: An Interpretive Essay,” Hypatia 7, no. 4 (1992): 31–37.

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7. Shawn Wilson, Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (Black Point, NS: Fernwood, 2008), 15. 8. Ciprian F.  Ardelean et  al., “Evidence of Human Occupation in Mexico around the Last Glacial Maximum,” Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science 584, no. 7819 (2020): 87–92. 9. Jennifer Bendery, “Deb Haaland: ‘Unfortunate’ That Rick Santorum Doesn’t Know Native American History,” HuffPost, May 5, 2021, Politics, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/deb-­haaland-­rick-­santorum-­native-­ american-­history_n_609196bbe4b09cce6c23bbce. 10. John Noble Wilford, “Fossil Teeth Put Humans in Europe Earlier Than Thought,” New York Times, November 2, 2011, Science, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/science/fossil-­t eeth-­p ut-­ humans-­in-­europe-­earlier-­than-­thought.html. See also John Inge Svendsen, Pavel Pavlov, and Svein Indrelid, “Human Presence in the European Arctic Nearly 40,000 Years Ago,” Nature 413, no. 6851 (2001): 64–67. 11. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. 12. All artworks by Matika Wilbur discussed in this chapter are viewable on the artist’s Project 562 website/blog. See Matika Wilbur, Michael Frank, Miccosukee, Florida, photograph, accessed November 11, 2021, http://www.project562.com/gallery/. Michael Frank of Miccosukee, the Everglades, Florida, is a seer and guardian of his people and their natural home who in early life and now as an elder has been unshakably devoted to this extraordinary ancestral territory. In his childhood in the Everglades, Frank’s family and community enjoyed plentiful fish and hunted for deer, bear, and alligator. Now widespread toxic mercury levels in the Everglades prevent the tribe from fishing, compromising this crucial aspect of the culture along with many others, because of the overall wounded condition of their homeland. Frank shares his unfailing commitment to protect, restore, and celebrate the Everglades in face of such challenges: “All our land is sacred … Respect our sovereignty, respect our home, respect our tradition. We know they will destroy our home if we walk and talk like the rest of the world.” 13. Wilbur, Michael Frank, Miccosukee, Florida. 14. Miccosukee Tribe of Indians (tribal website), accessed August 12, 2021, https://www.miccosukee.com/history. 15. “Park Air Profiles—Everglades National Park,” National Park Service, November 19, 2019, https://www.nps.gov/articles/airprofiles-­ever.htm;

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and William H.  Orem, “Pollutants Threaten the Everglades’ Future,” EARTH: The Science Behind the Headlines, January 5, 2012. 16. Craig Pittman, “They Call It HOME,” Tampa Bay Times, September 28, 2005, https://www.tampabay.com/archive/1999/02/16/they-­call-­it-­ home/. 17. Brenden Rensink, “Genocide of Native Americans: Historical Facts and Historiographic Debates,” in Genocide of Indigenous Peoples, ed. Samuel Totten and Robert K. Hitchcock, vol. 8, Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2011), 15–36. 18. Matika Wilbur, From the Road: 562 Blog (artist website/blog), n.d., http://www.project562.com/blog/. 19. Wilbur, Michael Frank, Miccosukee, Florida. 20. Paul Guyer, “Portraits, Persons, and Poses,” in Portraits and Philosophy, ed. Hans Maes (New York: Routledge, 2020), 47–61, 58. 21. Erich Hatala Matthes, “Portraits of the Landscape,” in Portraits and Philosophy, ed. Hans Maes (New York: Routledge, 2020), 128–39. 22. Ibid., 128. 23. Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975); and Susan Buckingham, “Ecofeminism in the Twenty-First Century,” GEOJ Geographical Journal 170, no. 2 (June 2004): 146–54. 24. Dylan Robinson, “Public Writing, Sovereign Reading: Indigenous Language Art in Public Space,” Art Journal 76, no. 2 (2017): 85–99. 25. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality; With Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 26. Consider, for example, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. See Shih-­Shan Henry Tsai, The Chinese Experience in America (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986). 27. Bonita Lawrence, “Gender, Race, and the Regulation of Native Identity in Canada and the United States: An Overview,” Hypatia 18, no. 2 (2003): 3–31.  Matika Wilbur, Sinéad Talley, Karuk and Yurok. On the artist’s website, accompanying Talley’s portrait, we read the following quote from Talley: “It’s taken a long time for me to get outside of the blood quantum construct of thinking. I’m low blood quantum and my family was disconnected for a while before we came back to the river. It’s been a returning process and blood quantum has factored hugely in how I felt growing up. As a child I could feel the tension, that there was something about my identity, that I was being viewed differently. But you don’t understand why or how to combat it. In a lot of ways you have a hard time seeing that you can be Karuk and you can be low blood quantum. Learning more about history and the fact that blood quantum is a European concept and

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that’s not how Native people determined who was a community member and who was not helped. When it comes down to it blood quantum doesn’t mean anything. It’s your connection to place, it’s your kinship ties and how involved you are in the community. It has a lot to do with a lot of things but indigeneity doesn’t have to do with blood quantum. You can know that and you can feel that but they’re two different things. For me it’s taken a long time to feel that.” 28. Ryan W. Schmidt, “American Indian Identity and Blood Quantum in the 21st Century: A Critical Review,” Journal of Anthropology 2011 (2011). 29. Cornelius Castoriadis and Kathleen Blamey, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). 30. Kristen Williams, “Reimagining Native America: Matika Wilbur’s Project 562,” Cultural Survival Quarterly, June 2014, accessed August 20, 2021, https://www.culturalsur vival.org/publications/cultural-­s ur vival-­ quarterly/reimagining-­native-­america-­matika-­wilburs-­project-­562. 31. Thomas Birtchnell, “Digital Nomads and (Im)Mobile Identities,” in Routledge Handbook of Identity Studies, 2nd ed., ed. Anthony Elliott (London: Routledge, 2019), 274–82. 32. Matika Wilbur, Mari Sanipass, Aroostook Band of Micmacs, Maine, photograph, accessed November 11, 2021, http://www.project562.com/gallery/. On the artist’s website, accompanying Sanipass’s portrait, we read the following: Mary Sanipass, is a beloved Micmac basketmaker who embodies what is most traditional about Wabanaki basketry—a deep knowledge and respect for the northern woods of Maine and a love of sharing this knowledge with both her family and the entire Wabanaki community. Mary recounts her young life, strong faith, and introduction to basketry: “I went to boarding school in Canada … I was there for eight years, until the eighth grade, with nuns and priests. In a way, I liked it and in a way I didn’t. Half and half, I guess. I was mistreated. But it is all over now, I don’t worry about it any more. Now I am a Catholic, I love Mary, she has a lot of my prayers and I will keep loving her until I die, I guess. I pray everywhere; if I go in the woods and look at a tree, that is a prayer; if I go to the lake and look at it, that is a prayer; if I go to the ocean, that is a prayer. God is a prayer. Everything I see is a prayer. I wish my kids would do that, go in the woods, do things, and pray. I used to go alone in the woods; when I was little, I lived in the woods. I loved it. My daddy loved it, he was a woodsman, sometimes he worked in the city, but mostly in the woods, he was a carpenter, he made things, he’d sell them and that was how we made our money. I miss him, he’s been gone so long now. When I was eighteen I started, making wee little baskets. I used to watch my Grandparents. Grammy

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used to throw some baskets on the floor. I would go over there, and pick them up, she didn’t want them. That was how I started making baskets.” 33. Bunny McBride, “Micmac Basketmakers. Way up in Maine’s Aroostook County, Nimble Fingers Keep a Traditional Craft Alive,” Christian Science Monitor, December 19, 1986. 34. Mary Sanipass and her family are Aroostook Band of Micmac, which fought for recognition and reparations separately from the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act of 1980. See Aroostook Band of Micmacs (tribal website), accessed November 15, 2021, http://micmac-­nsn.gov/. 35. Harald E. L. Prins and Bunny McBride, Asticou’s Island Domain: Wabanaki Peoples at Mount Desert Island 1500–2000, vol. 1 (Boston: Northeast Region Ethnography Program, National Park Service, 2017), 40. 36. Gareth Hampshire, “Former Site of Shubenacadie Residential School Scanned for Human Remains,” CBC, May 31, 2021, News, https://www. cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-­s cotia/shubenacadie-­r esidential-­s chool-­ kamloops-­radar-­remains-­1.6047347. See https://obituaries.thecounty. me/obituary/dr-­mary-­sanipass-­1081303447 (accessed, July 5, 2021). 37. Wilbur, Mari Sanipass, Aroostook Band of Micmacs, Maine. 38. Suggesting and adumbrating the differences in Western and Indigenous American conceptualizations of space, write Prins and McBride, Not only is precise data wanting respecting the limits of land actually held or claimed by many tribes, but there are other tribes, which disappeared early in the history of [North America] … it will be readily understood that to determine tribal boundaries within accurately drawn lines is in the vast majority of cases quite impossible. See Prins and McBride, Asticou’s Island Domain, 40. Frank Speck and his colleague Wendell Hadlock of the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor put forth a similar conclusion in their cultural historical study of Maliseet Indians in the St. John River area of New Brunswick: In drawing a map of the area controlled or claimed by groups of Indians who were in a constant state of migration, such a map can at best only indicate probable limits of tribal territories at a given time in the history of the tribe…. It is not surprising to find family hunting territories outside of the recognized tribal bounds, for it is well known that certain tribes send hunters at various seasons of the year to traditional hunting grounds outside of their recognized tribal territory. See Frank Speck and Wendell Hadlock, “A Report on Tribal Boundaries and Hunting Areas of the Maliseet Indians of New Brunswick,” American Anthropologist 48, no. 3 (July–September 1946): 13, https://anthrosource. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1525/aa.1946.48.3.02a00020.

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39. Matika Wilbur, Sinéad Talley, Karuk and Yurok, photograph, accessed November 11, 2021, http://www.project562.com/gallery/. On the artist’s website, accompanying Talley’s portrait, we read the following: It’s taken a long time for me to get outside of the blood quantum construct of thinking. I’m low blood quantum and my family was disconnected for a while before we came back to the river. It’s been a returning process and blood quantum has factored hugely in how I felt growing up. As a child I could feel the tension, that there was something about my identity, that I was being viewed differently. But you don’t understand why or how to combat it. In a lot of ways you have a hard time seeing that you can be Karuk and you can be low blood quantum. Learning more about history and the fact that blood quantum is a European concept and that’s not how Native people determined who was a community member and who was not helped. When it comes down to it blood quantum doesn’t mean anything. It’s your connection to place, it’s your kinship ties and how involved you are in the community. It has a lot to do with a lot of things but indigeneity doesn’t have to do with blood quantum. You can know that and you can feel that but they’re two different things. For me it’s taken a long time to feel that. 40. Talley, an American woman of mixed Indigenous and European descent, suffered sexual assault at the hands of a non-Indigenous American man, like far too many Indigenous American women. She is a powerful survivor, and she heals in the space of this photograph. See Nicholas Midler, “Describing Her Assailant’s Two-Quarter Suspension, Alumna and Sexual Assault Survivor Critiques University’s ‘Moral Stature,’” Stanford Daily, August 13, 2018, https://www.stanforddaily.com/2018/08/13/describing-­her-­ assailants-­two-­quarter-­suspension-­alumna-­and-­sexual-­assault-­survivor-­ critiques-­universitys-­moral-­stature/. 41. Wampum beads, as Niro describes the two-canoe pattern, can act as visual peace treaties: two canoes side by side are represented by the pale purple and cream beads, suggesting the possibility of peaceful coexistence between Europeans and Indigenous Americans on the American continent. This treaty for peace and equitable access, of course, has never been realized in the violent program of colonization that continues to shape the physical structure and social map of North America. Artist in conversation with author, February 19, 2021. 42. Artist in conversation with author, August 15, 2021.

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43. Shelley Niro (Mohawk, Bay of Quinte), “Artist Statement for La Pieta,” 2001–2006, digitized photo inkjet prints on canvas, National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC. States Shelley Niro: Image #1, Image #7, Water The first and the seventh images are of water. I use this to symbolize the importance of an element essential for all living things. Without it we would die. The earth uses it to cleanse and heal itself after periods of chaos and turmoil. Water carries us for nine months in our mother’s womb and makes our journey into this world easier. Water promises a life of abundance, growth, safety and hope for the future. Image #2, The Mohawk Valley This infinite view represents what was lost in the Diaspora of Iroquois People when they were forced to leave the Mohawk Valley after the American Revolution. The natural beauty never to be returned to, takes my breath away. Again the landscape represents mother, a place always producing, always there, and a place that had to be defended and eventually lost. The maternal homeland still waits for the return of her people. Image #3, Trunk This image is a close-up of the resources, a single tree. The detail allows the viewer to see what would otherwise be ignored. We can examine each bark chunk, each shadow and crease. The knots act as invitations for us to listen and comment on the physicality of each tree as an individual. They have character and personality and can be cut down at the will of any man. Image #4, Young Man’s Chest This series of images are to represent the resources that are lost and damaged in times of war. The grand landscape is torn apart. Over time the earth will heal itself. The loss of young life leaves a definite scar on the world, no matter whose life, whose side of the battle that was fought. Mothers will cry forever. Image #5, Gothic Landscape

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I’ve returned to the landscape, a different type of landscape. This photo was taken in the winter. The leaves and the grass are gone. The bare limbs of the trees hang in anticipation of the spring. As a metaphor for sadness, this forest looks full but is empty at the same time. The bareness waits, never knowing when birds will sing again from its branches. Image #6, At The Edge This photo was taken at the edge of Caledonia. It was taken before the protests and land claims filled the front pages of the newspaper in the summer of 2005. These hydro towers look like they are sneaking up out of the landscape. They are also representative of the power this place holds, but it’s not a spiritual power but one of monetary value. A superficial power putting everyone on hold. Juxtaposed with the Grand River, I find these two connecting elements, catapults my imagination back to a time when our traditional ancestors tried to remain in their contemporary world, negotiating with politicians and businessmen. I feel like we have not moved on since that time. The Wampum Frame When I started to think about this series of images I wanted it to be an abstract slew of pictures, much like visual poetry, I wanted these images to blend together and form not a literal meaning but give an emotional sensation. I wondered how I could make the statement representative of war, motherhood, the destruction of the earth and the destruction of armies trained to move as a unit and ultimately die or succeed. I began by thinking of poppies and how they have become the symbol of past wars. We immediately know what their place is. I was going to put a representation of what a poppy might look like in wampum beads. I was also thinking about what Tom Porter had said as he explained a wampum belt he was holding at a gathering many years ago. The belt he held was held up and down, not sideways. There was something that looked like a cross. He said anthropologists say this design was influenced by the church. He said this symbol is confused with the Christian cross. But he went on to explain it is a traditional symbol showing the spirit world and the earth. There was a line representing the earth and

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a shorter line c­ ontinuing showing the sky world and the direction your spirit leaves once you pass on. Remembering that story I started to make a wampum belt representing war and keeping in mind a poppy. I wanted this belt to also have a balance of black and white. Good and bad. I’m not educated in the philosophy of war so I didn’t want to comment on it, I do know people are affected by it everywhere and [every day]. I wanted the red cloth behind the belt to be obvious about representing bloodshed. Together with the beads and the red broadcloth, I wanted to contain the photos, to be seen as [a] Haudenosaunee comment of how we are aware of the outside world and we are affected by the activity of outside forces.

CHAPTER 11

Conclusion: Photography, Reappearing

From its inception, with progenitor William Henry Fox Talbot calling his invention a way to fix the shadow, photography stands as emblem and memento of time’s elusion, image-object that suspends time, elongates times, seemingly almost holding time.1 A photograph taken 20 years ago, printed and framed, acts as a kind of visual Proustian Madeleine, as from the image emerges emotions from a place and time otherwise materially gone. Social media use exponentially multiplies this practice of photographically based images (digital images on social media are almost universally photo edited) as memory carriers, setting images in a digital landscape of screens (iPhone, iPad, computer, tablet), though as dematerialized code (rematerialized via various screens) it perhaps lacks ambient mnemonic pull. Even here, in a paradoxical turn, photography—as retainer of image, memory, trace—bears an integral relationship to loss and disappearance. Endemic to the medium is the category of what vanishes, that is, the material traces of nouns, embodied people, places, things. This paradox of photography’s disappearance functions on a material and conceptual level. Analog photographic prints are materially less stable than earlier memento mori objects, such as engraved and carved stone, painted wood, painted canvas, aquatint, woodblock, lithograph, and other intaglio prints. Light damages photographic prints; time and material conditions swallow the photograph that appears to swallow time’s material trace. Digital photographically based images, held in their fragile casement of algorithmic code appearing on our phantasmagorical © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Raymond, Photography and Resistance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96158-9_11

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multiscreens—iPhone, computer, tablet, iPad—represent modes of data storage that art historian Martin Kemp calls “far less stable than parchment,” eminently vulnerable to accidental or purposeful erasure, discard, deletion.2 Beyond the fallibility of digital storage and its conscription to capitalist platforms of social media companies, the paradox of image overload typifies the disappearance of the image in our era. So many images are uploaded to social media pages and to newsfeeds that images slip away into a relative invisibility in the densely overcrowded stream of visual data. Photography’s surface capacity to hold time’s image combined with the inherent fragility of the imprint of light creates a paradox: the photographic image erodes, encodes, rather than holds, time. The photograph is more a stopgap than an eternity of memory. And yet its dead-on mimicry draws photography closer than other modes of cultural memory storage to temporality’s uncanny connection to the material object world. Exceeding and circumscribing the material realities of print and digitized data is the force of the photographic image that Roland Barthes calls the “blind field,” all that is lost in the image, the unseen framing that surrounds the photographic image.3 The printed, framed photograph I mentioned previously, imagine it is an image of one’s now middle-aged sister as a teenager, imagine that time of her youth, the world of it, how the photograph evokes this past simply by recording how she once looked. Or imagine a photograph posted on Facebook 10 years ago. The photograph shows not the persistence of worlds but their evanescence. This larger scope of vanishing world (I use the term world in its phenomenological sense) is the nexus of photography and disappearance from which this book, Photography and Resistance, extends its understanding of political resistance through the photographic image. The processual elements of photography, its basis in relatively short exposures—whether the microfraction of a second of contemporary phonecams or Hiroshi Sugimoto’s hours-long exposures in experimental works—to light’s refraction and reflection off material substances composes a visual space that is at once hard and fixed and also elusive, transient, retreating. A photograph is intimate (in it, one sees so intricately the texture of the surface, as if one’s face were pressed to the surface of materiality) and abstract (the way a shadow fell at a particular hour in a particular room 50 years ago). A photograph carries the almost-illusion that one can hold onto what has materially in time ceased to exist or ceased to occur, but also the photographic image (if unretouched) carries

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irretrievable proof of time’s one-way arrow. Photography both resists disappearance and encodes disappearance. This aspect of the medium is recognized and deployed, extrapolated, thematically by the contemporary American women photographers studied in this book. They use photography as longue durée. It is through close readings of their works that this book develops a broader and encompassing argument for photography as a mode of vanishing and a point of contestation against erasure. Here, though, photography’s uncanny double-­temporality is harnessed for the purposes of political resistance and revolt. My study of photographic works by women artists of the Americas— Ana Mendieta, Paula Luttringer, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Carrie Mae Weems, Rebecca Belmore, Shelley Niro, An-My Lê, Martine Gutiérrez, Cara Romero, and Matika Wilbur—traces elusive threads of haunting, appearance as disappearance, in photographic works that invoke and allusively probe episodes of historical violence in the Americas. These photographic works are not documentary but instead densely allusive mnemonic texts. Spectral invocations in these works mobilize photography’s capacity to resist social erasure by restaging disappearance, bearing witness through symbolic image. As the world continues to face the COVID-19 pandemic that pushes against the stability of late-stage capitalist technological regimes, our collective faith in our archives, in the sacrosanct power of technological data of our histories and of ourselves, is shown to be hollow. The conceit of late-stage capitalist technologies that we—a collective and amorphous we woven of the diaphanous, nylon-like, ontological stuff of those who can afford computers, phones, tablets, of those who can afford to spend hours each day using these technologies—articulate ourselves in ways that will be lasting, stored in databases impregnable and impermeable. We live not so much a Cartesian split from the body as rather a pledge of allegiance to the ability of machine intelligence to preserve the myths of our time in algorithmic code-storing images. The realization that a pandemic virus could kill us, despite our continued proximity to machine intelligence—and again here I signify us as the well-fed, technology-owning, relatively wealthy—flies in the face of a collective belief in the capacity of photography and computers to remember us, to recall, to encode, to preserve us and our culture. We believe in the power of the photographically based image to keep us somehow disembodiedly alive. The floating signifier of the photographic image, at once object and imagined a-materiality, is the visible mark of the paradoxical

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capitalist desire to manipulate the object world, to remove—to disappear—the painful resistance of material existence, to transform the object into a transcendent ontology. But, as created by the artists studied in this book, the photograph exceeds and pushes against its own capitalist moorings. The disappearance with which this book particularly grapples is that of political oppressions and enforced silences, with histories of colonialist genocides, enslavements, and oppressions that are the underside, the elided historical presence, of late-stage capitalist technological society in the Americas. I trace ways that the photographers studied in this book use photography’s dense association with appearance as disappearance, or with disappearance as a telos leaving material traces, to create photographic works that contend with violent social and material erasures. The intertwined forces of capitalist expansion and colonization (and colonization’s earlier manifestation as mercantilism) shape a paradoxical duality of appearance and disappearance that the medium of photography investigates in the works of Mendieta, Luttringer, Frazier, Weems, Niro, Belmore, Romero, Lê, Gutiérrez, and Wilbur. The object of ownership is conjured, in capitalism (as Marx suggests through a kind of nefarious magic), and inevitably it is produced to be discarded, so that more can be purchased.4 Colonized, the land itself is imagined as an ultimate object (both an object and a space that produces other objects, the land is double-­ use, double-signifier) and Indigenous people inhabiting it are considered consumable subjects or sites for erasure. As in the regime of coloniality the land is more fully objectified, that is, built upon, and it proceeds to vanish. The forest becomes the farm becomes the housing development becomes the parking lot, and so on. Attempted erasure of Indigenous Americans stands at the heart of American colonization and remains an unresolved scene of disappearance that manifests as appearance (in the traces that remain of precontact cultures in the Americas and in the increasingly robust population numbers and cultures of Indigenous peoples who survived). Photographic practices that structure confrontations with these disappearances draw on the medium’s eerie consubstantiation of the visible and invisible. The photograph is a trace, literally, of light’s imprint bounced off material objects, and as such it is an uncanny mark of the way that material worlds vanish, as they irreparably change. As Roland Barthes suggests, it is the photograph’s imbrication with the mortality of our own bodies that makes it capable of wounding us.5 The photographies of Mendieta, Niro, Romero, Lê, Gutiérrez, Weems, Frazier, Belmore, and

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Wilbur conjure and evoke the non-White female body as a site of erasure in the embodied and symbolic discourses of colonization. Or, in Luttringer’s work, quotidian objects stand as memorials to victims of Argentina’s dirty war. How do they use materiality, objects, the visible world, and the body—the nouns of photography—to show what is disappeared, what is not there? Through close analysis of photographic works of Ana Mendieta, Carrie Mae Weems, Rebecca Belmore, Shelley Niro, Cara Romero, Martine Gutiérrez, An-My Lê, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Paula Luttringer, and Matika Wilbur, this book moves elliptically through histories of colonization in Cuba, the American Southeast, Canada, California, Argentina, and American neocolonialist wars in Asia. Following the thread of these women artists’ deployment of the theme of disappearance through the tactic of the photographic image, I lay bare the pattern of violence and survival that defines America. The works analyzed extend from the late 1970s to the immediate contemporary (year 2021) as my analysis pursues this question of how capitalism and colonization encode disappearance, and how that disappearance is resisted in feminist photographic art practices. As the COVID-19 pandemic raises the specter, haunting not only America but also the globally connected world of late-stage capitalism, of numerous forms of disappearance, including bodily death, the question of how photography and disappearance interact becomes pressing, urgent. Do we persist through images? Or do we dissolve into them, ceasing to fully exist in our embodied lives as all our time is spent watching screen images? The equation between embodied material experience (space-time) and the photographically based episteme is pressed in unprecedented ways during this pandemic crisis, when the limits of photographic time, with its hallucinatory persistence of the image, frame our daily life. Whereas this book does not address work made in response to COVID-19, it reads late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century works of photography and disappearance through the lens of this pandemic, inasmuch as the pandemic illuminates gaps and faults in the structure of late-stage capitalism in which we now live. And arguably the pandemic emerges as the result of coloniality, of entrenched systems of domination and capitalism that dystopically unify the world economy. The suppression of colonization’s deep history has created ghosts: never completely erased, the specters of violence of the past arise in images and violent realities in the present. This book studies how photography

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can critique disappearance, turning its integral relationship to what vanishes toward illumination. This books studies how photography can overturn disappearance. Ghosts emerge through photographic visuality, photography’s visceral connection to the sacrificial made clear.

Beyond the Sacrificial Economy The sacrificial structure of contemporary capitalism, with its roots in colonialist regimes, produces not by happenstance but by structural necessity sacrificial figures: those who do not have capital, who are prevented from acquiring it, and whose erasure and suppression are necessary for those who have capital, in the zero-sum game of contemporary North American capitalism. These figures so sacrificed are elided, suppressed, largely unseen in contemporary propaganda of right-wing regimes. The social erasure of the sacrificial figure at the heart of late-stage capitalism creates a haunting structure that emerges from colonialist discourses, sustained by the recurrent colonizing arc that is fundamental to capitalism’s need to constantly enunciate and expand markets. This elided figure—the disappeared—is a keynote in the photography of resistance. Unlike documentary photography recording suffering directly, instead the photography of resistance studied in this book deploys metaphors of erasure to indicate larger conditions of historical and social silencing and suppression. The sacrificial economy of late-stage capitalism, carrying the history of colonization, continuously structures America as a space of elided, suppressed, sacrificial figures. Indigenous peoples threatened with near erasure of their cultures, people of African descent pained with the history of enslavement and its aftermath, haunt the American cultural landscape, acknowledged in some instances but rarely acknowledged as the core of the story of the place, the foundational story. The family history of the Americas is genocide of Indigenous peoples and enslavement of African peoples. It is the family history of the Americas that produces photography as disappearance. Psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham theorizes the “phantom,” that is, a secret history that is passed through families not by what is explicitly spoken but what is rigorously not spoken, hence implicitly conveyed.6 While largely diverging from classic psychoanalytic theory, I take up this idea of the phantom trace to map the suppressed imagery of foundational violence that constitutes American identity. The phantom discourse of what has disappeared is not at the edge or margin of America but is its heart. As

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Herman Gray and Macarena Gómez-Barris argue, the “sociology of the trace” provides a rubric for unpacking these disappearances, and the paradoxical haunting recurrences, of sacrificial figures in American history.7 Deploying critical race theory, Photography and Resistance discerns a photography of resistance practiced in the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first century by Latinx, Indigenous American, African American, and Asian American women photographers. Photography is an apt medium for staging the terms of appearance and disappearance that simmer beneath the surface of America’s myth of identity. Photography’s terrain is memory, in the shortest and also longest sense, as its images present spectral traces that pull us between the present and the past. Beyond the figural, it is the material substance of photography that makes it a carrier of shadow traces, of suppressed sacrificial figures, that is, of cultural memory rather than merely personal memory. The spectral narrative of America’s family secret, the embodied selves, named and unnamed human beings, erased as ballast for capitalist and colonialist economies, are rematerialized by women photographers whose interaction with memory reaches beyond personal circumstances, drawing into visibility culturally submerged visual narratives. As I’ve shown, Cara Romero makes this press toward the surface literal in a haunting series of photographs taken under water of Indigenous people reenacting mythical scenes of threat and survival. Ana Mendieta stages one of her most powerful Silueta performances at the edge of water, the Gulf of Mexico, showing the figure vanishing as waves come to claim it. Paula Luttringer photographs everyday objects in places that once were prisons where survivors, like her, were tortured in Argentina’s Dirty War. Shelley Niro photographs battlefields where her Mohawk (Haudenosaunee) ancestors were slaughtered. Rebecca Belmore filmically performs calling the names of disappeared Indigenous American women, her body instating the place of the erased female Indigenous American body. Carrie Mae Weems performs as a witnessing revenant in the American Southeast, revisiting the spaces of enslavement of her ancestors. An-My Lê photographs battle reenactors who, in Virginia decades after the war against Vietnam, sentimentalize what was done to the country of Lê’s parents. Martine Gutiérrez creates vistas of self-portraiture in which she, an Indigenous trans woman, critiques the elision of Indigenous women in the contemporary national discourse of the United States. Matika Wilbur undertakes the massive project of photographing a representative from every federally recognized Indigenous American tribe, reinstating

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Indigenous vision of Indigenous peoples. LaToya Ruby Frazier’s haunting and now iconic work in The Notion of Family reveals the domestic home-­ making of love and sorrow in the context of broader environmental racism. These photographers work in various realms of the photographic: analog, film, digital, social media, gallery, museum, spaces. But all images now contend with the omnipresence of screen time as we move into the third decade of the twenty-first century. Screens are the way we see now: malleable, moveable, the screen (computer, phone, tablet) is the dominant image-frame of our time. The screen is itself a haunted frame, a constantly shifting visual plane with an oneiric kaleidoscope of pictures. The screen image both is a result of photographic practices and supersedes or displaces photography, in its analog form. The screen—that is, earlier manifestations of the movie screen and video screen—haunts late twentieth-century photography, while the digital screen—iPhone, iPad, and the like—frames twenty-first-century photography, which is invariably at some point posted online for one reason or another, even if the photography itself is analog print. The concept of the photograph as stasis, an image that holds memory, shifts in screen immersion delivery methods. For the screens we watch shift constantly, they do not hold still. They move toward the unseen, that which has been visible but has become invisible. Barthes definitively separates the movie from the photograph, arguing that the medias’ temporalities diverge along the fault line of the punctum.8 But in our culture of screen memory, practices converge: all photography is screen photography now, and in America much of our national cultural memory is screen memory, that is, a false front of national myth like veneer laid across the actual violence that begat the nation. Many of the photographs traced in this study, created in the late twentieth and early twenty-­ first century, reference or participate in analog film practices, and yet are also participatory by dint of being contemporary art in digitized screen seeing. Some are digital images from the outset. On the screen, images appear and disappear, they move away as we slide through. Still photographs on apparatuses, such as images on an iPhone, are brushed away (shaken off as it were) as new images are pulled through the user’s hands. As media theorists Kathleen Cumiskey and Larissa Hjorth argue in Haunting Hands, these tactile practices of image manipulation carry with them an inevitable condition of haunting.9 Screen images are at once part of us—our phones verging on bodily extensions—and of course are also not us, projections exteriorized beyond the mind’s eye. They are

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machine-­ produced visual phenomena, malleable, moving. As Rosalind Krauss long ago argued, the screen has no stable or fixed central point.10 The imagined space of the picture plane, in screen seeing, is amorphous, always already lost. Earlier and contemporary photographies alike, whether or not created for screen viewing, are nonetheless placed into the context of spectrality that is the incessant fact of our screens as our lenses on the world. Art historian David Summers suggests that what makes an image potent is how it manifests as “real space,” by which he means not necessarily habitable space but space that intervenes in the viewer’s perception.11 The photographic works studied in this book shape “real spaces” of photographic images, transmogrifying the photographic image plane through aesthetic force. Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series, part video series, part still photographic (principally slides) series, shifts from video format to still photograph format, oscillating between movement and stillness, presence and absence, recording her earthworks. She records her movement in creating earthworks. Mendieta’s slides record, importantly, also the way that winds, waves, and time dissolve the earthworks. Her use of slideshow format implies movement, as slides are clicked through the carousel. Slides, spectral on the projected surface (descendants of earlier magic lantern technology), disappear once the carousel moves forward and are diaphanous even when they are shown—so that an embodied viewer could walk between the projector and the image and carry the image on herself, on her skin as it were. The slideshow format that Mendieta favored in recording her earthworks is itself a materially transient and preserved form of image, a medium that appears and vanishes, persists, fills the surface of vision and with a click goes away. Similarly, Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe) merges filmic and photographic media to reconstruct and deconstruct histories of Indigenous erasure that she invokes. Belmore’s multimedia work, The Named and the Unnamed, invokes the ghosts of disappeared Indigenous women, whereas her filmic works, In a Wilderness Garden and Wounded Knee, conjure the ghosts, respectively, of the first Indigenous American captured by European colonists and brought to France to perform in a human zoo, and the dead of Wounded Knee. Shelley Niro (Mohawk, Bay of Quinte), both filmmaker and photographer, moves between mediums and genres. Her feature-­length film, Kissed by Lightning, centers on the reappearance and disappearance of the figure of Hiawatha, a pivotal emblem for the Haudenosaunee, bringing to screen time a code of vanishing and

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reappearing that her still photographs, in Battlefields of My Ancestors, Abnormally Aboriginal, and La Pieta, witness. Disappeared, or missing, Indigenous women are an elided American tragedy contemporary to our times, and Belmore, Romero, and Gutiérrez reflect this terrain of vulnerability in works emphasizing Indigenous women’s social histories and presences, a form of broad cultural dispossession that is ongoing now and to which contemporary politics pays scant (in Canada) or no (in the United States) attention. The re-presentation of those who have vanished is a form of photography-as-tragedy, catharsis, and correction, and my book’s goal has been to tease apart the strands of tragedy’s representation, in photography, as epiphenomena of narratives of disappearance and revivification. The ghost that is brought to light and revivified, in visual art, then, is always a double figure, revisiting sites of cultural, historical, and personal pain, exposing but also revivifying trauma. My analysis of the reinvocation of the disappeared, or the bringing to sight those who have been erased, attends to this question of the political work of the photographs, interpreting the photographic works studied through what Jacques Rancière contends is the political force of aesthetics. In this sense, the avowedly activist frame in which Mendieta, Luttringer, Belmore, Niro, Romero, Weems, Lê, Frazier, Gutiérrez, and Wilbur produce their works is crucial to my readings. Their photographs speak to, speak of, and speak for oppressed communities in America’s historical and present-day culture. Maurice Blanchot’s aesthetic theory limns an approach to trauma or what he calls “night” in which the work of art sacrifices itself by not seeking to be seen.12 This visible-invisible place of trauma surfaces in the works of Mendieta, Luttringer, Gutiérrez, Weems, Niro, Romero, Lê, Frazier, Belmore, and Wilbur as image constantly risking dissolution, risking “night” as Blanchot defines the term. The photograph, which is light’s imprint, is also light’s opposite contour. That which is photographed is marked by light, literally the mark of light. The photograph is not a shadow; it is the burned trace of light, a wound made visible. The wounds of the world that are the historical imprint of colonization and capitalist aggression are hidden in plain sight. They are the structures within which much of our daily lives in America are conducted, the land we walk on, live on, make use of, and use up. Responding to this history of North America’s genocidal colonization, photographic works of Niro, Mendieta, Gutiérrez, Romero, Weems, Luttringer, Lê, Frazier, Wilbur, and Belmore renegotiate history through

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photographic vision, revisiting through explicit and implicit visual discourses the lost and found knowledge of actions that have made America. Whereas the conjunction of photography and disappearance is endemic to the medium, and for material and technological reasons that photography is conjoined with disappearance, the larger arc of the book’s argument has had to do with photographic representation of cultural trauma. Photography, even in this era of easy and widespread use of photo-­ editing apps on digital images, is the medium of testimony. A photograph, or a video, stages appearance with a feeling of immediacy unlike that of other visual media. The revivification of that which is no longer present is the mode of the photographic. Photographs are ghosts even when they try not to be. In our era of social media, and especially during the pandemic conditions, that spectrality is increasingly uneasy, moving toward supplanting embodied discourse. This spectrality is the material effect of images that are based on light, and yet photography is part of coloniality’s urge to incessantly classify that in turn mobilizes silences and erasures endemic to capitalist expansions. The disappearances encoded into photography are endemic to the medium and also, paradoxically, must be fought through the medium. As Geoffrey Batchen writes in Forget Me Not, it is precisely the way that photographic subjects tend to become forgotten identities that makes these images so compelling.13 As in print photography, most images became floating faces of people unknown, so also on the internet the vast majority of faces “posted” quickly become in effect anonymous. The photographic image that seems to hold time, rather paradoxically, ultimately demonstrates the force of time, its capacity to erase. For the photographers studied in this book—Niro, Belmore, Romero, Gutiérrez, Weems, Luttringer, Lê, Frazier, and Mendieta, and Wilbur— photography’s inherent, medium-specific trait of staging disappearance is an opportunity to create activist art that resists historical erasures by restaging disappearance. In the ghostlier reach of photography, the dead and the silenced, the exiled and the colonized can be memorialized, not through literal representation of bodily harm but through figural evocation of historical oppressions and genocides. The capacity of photography to haunt us is often an unwanted side effect. But in the photography of the artists discussed in this book, disappearances that formed and continue to form the political, economic, and material fabric of the Americas are called back, given formal, material heft, and eidetic political articulation and

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elided presences in America’s history are revivified, revisualized. As Gerald Vizenor shows, survivance is antithetical to victimry.14 In visual works of resistance, women artists overturn the erasures of coloniality. Photography is the medium of this resistance because it is structurally intractable, at once in the realm of fine art and the vernacular, in the place of appearance and disappearance. More than trace, photography is the formal space wherein the always vanishing visual world returns. Photography is the medium of political disruption of hegemonic coloniality because its temporal field is now and not-now, extending through the long form of mourning’s permutation into revolt. The artists discussed in Photography and Resistance harness the medium’s inherent temporal estrangement, its capacity to elongate and make strange the visual experience of time, to make lucid political statements: statements about the polis, the sociality, of the Americas in all the tragedy from which this realm emerges. The works studied in this book create a revolution of seeing. Each work creates a moment of reappearing that extends through the momentum of seeing again to seeing anew. Photography is the medium of reappearance.

Notes 1. Bernard Richards, “William Fox Talbot and Thomas Carlyle: Connections,” Carlyle Studies Annual, no. 31 (2015): 85–108. 2. Martin Kemp, “Structural Intuitions: Seeing Shapes in Art and Science” (Page-Barbour Lecture, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, March 10, 2012); and Martin Kemp, Structural Intuitions: Seeing Shapes in Art and Science (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016). See also Martin Kemp, “Leonardo and the Visual Pyramid,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 40 (1977): 128–49. 3. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 56. 4. James Luchte, “Marx and the Sacred,” Journal of Church and State 51, no. 3 (2009): 413–37. 5. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 26. 6. Nicolas Abraham and Nicholas Rand, “The Phantom of Hamlet or the Sixth Act: Preceded by the Intermission of ‘Truth,’” Diacritics 18, no. 4 (1988): 2–19. 7. Herman Gray and Macarena Gómez-Barris, eds., Toward a Sociology of the Trace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 8. Elena Oxman, “Sensing the Image: Roland Barthes and the Affect of the Visual,” SubStance 39, no. 2 (2010): 71–90.

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9. Kathleen M.  Cumiskey and Larissa Hjorth, Haunting Hands: Mobile Media Practices and Loss (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 10. Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October 1 (1976): 51–64. 11. C.  Oliver O’Donnell, “Revisiting David Summers’ Real Spaces: A Neo-­ pragmatist Interpretation,” World Art 8, no. 1(2018): 21–38. 12. Herschel Farbman, “Blanchot on Dreams and Writing,” SubStance 34, no. 2 (2005): 118–40. 13. Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004). 14. Gerald Vizenor, ed. Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 1–61.

Index1

A Abbe Museum, 195, 204n38 Abjection, 43, 129 Aboriginal, 153, 154 Abraham, Nicolas, 214 Absence, 11, 24, 33–37, 39, 52, 76, 127, 191, 217 Activism, 11, 24, 98 Activist art, 11, 60, 117, 182, 199, 219 Aesthetics, political force of, 218 Affect, 16, 145 Afghanistan, U.S. war in, 112 African American music, 17 African Americans, disenfranchisement of, 55 African American women, 17, 19, 41 See also Black women African diaspora, 2, 5, 6, 15, 24, 135–143, 145–147, 170 Alabama, 20, 21, 167 Allison, John Bear, 6

Alterity, 75 American Girl doll, 19 Americanness, 2, 5, 73, 171, 184, 189, 190 The American South, 133–149 The American Southeast, 6, 213, 215 Amerman, Marcus, 157 Analogue photography, 10 Ancestors, 24, 28n42, 33–36, 50, 51, 60, 61, 65, 69, 70, 75, 78, 82, 89, 91, 104, 127, 140, 153, 193, 207n43, 215 Ancestral suffering, reencountering, 61 Anderson, Marian, 17 Animacy, 23 Anishinaabe people, 6, 52, 92, 110, 112, 121, 159, 217 Antebellum architecture, 36, 134 Anticolonialism, 12, 184 Ant coloniality, ecofeminism of, 9 Antilandscape, 91

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Raymond, Photography and Resistance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96158-9

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INDEX

Anzaldúa, Gloria, 184 Architectural photography, 133 Architecture, 36, 37, 98, 126, 133, 140, 143, 145 Argentina, 19, 24, 49, 51, 87–89, 91, 93–111, 213, 215 Aroostook County, Maine, 193 Art history theory, 21 Artificial intelligence (AI), 151, 152, 155, 157, 160 Art, public discourse and, 51 Art theory, 21 Asian Americans, 4–6, 8, 12, 25, 190, 215 Audain Gallery, Simon Fraser University, 116 Aura, 81 Authority, 52, 55, 159 Aztec culture, 174–176, 179n29 B Baby boomers, 152 Bachelard, Gaston, 145, 146 Bar Harbor, Maine, 195, 204n38 Barthes, Roland, 2, 4, 38, 127, 210, 212, 216 Batchen, Geoffrey, 219 Battlefields, 34, 35, 51, 59–83, 87, 89, 215 Battle of Beaver Dams, 67 Battle of Lundy’s Lane, 67 Baudrillard, Jean, 71 Beadwork, 197 Beauregard-Keyes House, 135, 139, 145 Bedrooms, 146 Belmore, Rebecca, 6, 15, 17–20, 23, 24, 50, 52, 53, 55, 56, 110, 112–117, 121, 122, 211–213, 215, 217–219 Bloodless, 112–114

Blood on the Snow, 112 Fountain, 112 Fringe, 112–116 In a Wilderness Garden, 217 Mixed Blessing, 113 The Named and the Unnamed, 19, 52, 112, 116, 217 sister, 116, 117 State of Grace, 52–54, 113 Vigil, 19, 52, 56, 112, 116 White Thread, 112–114 Wild, 113 Wounded Knee, 217 Benjamin, Walter, 48 Berger, John, 117 Berkhofer, Robert, 166, 169, 170, 175 Bianco, María Eugenia, 98 Biden, Joseph R., 54, 55 Big Tech, 151 Billboards, 50, 65, 66, 114, 153 Biraciality, 133–149, 155–158, 174 Black-and-white photography, 38–39, 87–104, 133–149 Black women, 138 Blanchot, Maurice, 218 Blood quantum laws, 190 The body colonized, 38, 49, 54, 125, 128, 129 gender and, 138–142, 176 photography as the image of, 176 race and, 126, 137, 141, 143, 184 Braddock, Pennsylvania, 41, 51 Brant, Joseph, 14 Buckberrough, Sherry, 121, 122, 125, 128 Buffalo, 157 Buffon (Georges-Louis Leclerc), 171 Built environment, of coloniality, 23 Bush, George W., 112 Butler, Judith, 22

 INDEX 

C California, 16, 19, 20, 47, 49, 158, 165, 213 Canada, 33, 49, 52–54, 59–61, 63–65, 78, 104, 116, 117, 193, 203n32, 213, 218 Canadian Maritimes, 193 Capitalism, 9, 14, 37, 43, 72, 79, 80, 117, 125, 157, 166, 168, 174, 187, 189, 193, 212–214 Careaga, Esther, 98 Carnegie, Andrew, 41 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 171, 191, 192 Catholicism, 121–131, 193, 194, 203n32 Charlottesville, Virginia, 170 Chemehuevi people, 6, 16, 19, 47, 48, 155, 157, 165, 172 Cherokee people, 187 Chickasaw people, 44n13, 187 Chin, Mel Y., 23 Choctaw people, 157, 167, 187 Christianity, 157 Cixous, Hélène, 160 Clark, Emily, 141 Class, 134, 135, 138, 147, 156 Classical architecture, 145 Claustrophobia, 87–104 Clendinnen, Inga, 176 Cognition, 134, 145 Cold War, 24, 98 Cold War aesthetics, 24 Colonialist memory, persistence of, 39–42 Colonialist space, 20, 125, 155 Coloniality built environment of, 23 macro-narratives of, 183 nomenclature of, 152 “regime of truth” of, 171 resistance to, 9, 48, 184, 195 violence of, 7, 8, 13, 69, 78, 113, 193 wars of, 112, 196

225

Colonization, psychological impact of, 76 Combustives, 124 Commemoration, 31–46 Computer-generated imagery (CGI), 2, 4, 10, 18, 21, 176 Concubinage, 137, 143 Confederacy, 62 Conquest, mythologies of, 79 Containment, 32 Contemplation, 59–86 Corboz, André, 80 Counterdiscourse, 3, 92 Counterinsemination, 12 Countermemory, 51 Counternarrative, 32, 104, 110, 115, 117, 166 COVID-19 pandemic, 11, 165, 211, 213 Coyote figure, 165, 166 Creek (Muskogee) peoples, 9, 20, 186, 187 Critical race theory, 215 Cuba, 19, 24, 39, 49, 123, 125–128, 213 Cultural erasure, 5, 16, 17, 42, 54, 116, 195 Cultural hauntings, 20 Cultural imaginary, 3, 49–51 Cultural memory, 6, 20, 25, 49, 51, 54, 153, 210, 215, 216 Cumiskey, Kathleen, 216 Curtis, Edward, 184, 193 D Dance, 124, 139–147 Davis, Jefferson, 35 Daygotleeyos, 191 Decolonialism, 5, 6, 10, 12, 39, 133–149, 184, 185, 198 Decoloniality, gender and, 133–147 Decolonization, visual, 154, 160

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INDEX

Deepfakes, 4, 18, 21 Dehumanization, 35, 114 Deleuze, Gilles, 181–192 Deloria, Phil, 12 Democracy, 56, 123 Deterritorialization, 181, 185 Diaspora, 2, 5, 6, 15, 24, 39, 45n15, 121–130, 135–147, 170 Dictatorship, 87, 88, 98 Digital photography, 18 Diné people, 160 Dirty War, 19, 49, 87–117 Disappearance, 2, 5, 15, 18, 68, 129, 171, 172, 210, 211, 215, 217, 220 as code of resistance, 22 photography and, 15, 22, 210, 213, 219 See also Ephemerality; Erasure The “disappeared,” 88, 90 Disembodiment, 11, 21, 39, 133 Displacement, 5, 7, 14, 21, 23, 33–35, 47, 49, 60, 63, 65, 67, 73, 78, 80, 82, 83, 159, 167, 169, 187, 188 Dispossession, 8, 39, 47, 218 Dissociation, 23 Documentary, 15–19, 21, 31, 33, 34, 38–40, 56, 64, 65, 70, 71, 75, 77, 83, 88, 124, 211, 214 Documentation, 15, 18, 35, 36, 43, 49, 50, 56, 73–75, 77, 89 Domesticity, 145 Domestic space, 145, 147 Dominance, 3, 7, 22, 36, 138, 140, 142, 143, 145, 147, 184 Dominion, 55, 72, 83, 167 Doubling, 43 Drowning, 19, 20, 43, 48, 167, 168 Drummond Hill Cemetery, 67 Duality, 90, 114, 115, 194, 212

E Earthworks, 30n65, 38, 39, 123, 124, 127–129, 217 Ecofeminism, of anticoloniality, 9 The eidetic, 3, 5, 49, 50, 90, 114, 141, 192, 219 Elkins, James, 21, 22 Embodiment, 49, 134, 176 Emerling, Jae, 4 Enlightenment, 181, 182 Enslavement, 15, 23, 24, 31, 36, 37, 45n15, 49, 55, 56, 76, 89, 136–138, 143, 147n2, 212, 214, 215 Entrapment, 88, 114, 135 Ephemerality, 123 Erasure code of, 2, 7, 195 protest against, 40, 123 rhetoric of, 3 ESMoA, 20 Everglades, 186–189, 201n12 Exile, 24, 39, 49, 121–130 Extraction, 5, 7, 126, 130 F Feinstein, Rachel, 137 The feminine, 78 Feminine Indigenousness, 176 Feminism, 9, 122–124, 127, 128 Feminist gaze, 78, 98–104 Filmic media, 123 Filth, 175, 179n29 Fire, 121, 124, 125, 129, 165 First Nations, 14 Florida, 186, 187, 189, 201n12 Forbes, Jack, 23 Foucault, Michel, 22, 152, 171, 190 Fox Talbot, William Henry, 10, 15, 209

 INDEX 

Frank, Michael, 186–189, 191, 201n12 Frantz, Fanon, 3, 8, 76 Frazier, John, 41 Frazier, LaToya Ruby, 6, 15, 17–20, 23, 24, 40–43, 50, 51, 55, 56, 211–213, 216, 218, 219 The Notion of Family, 40, 42, 43, 56, 216 Frishman, Richard, 37 G Gander, Catherine, 55 Gaps, 31, 160, 213 The gaze AI gaze, 157, 160 feminist, 78, 98–104 triangulated, 134 Gender, decoloniality and, 133–147 Gender social dimorphism, 138 Generational categories, 153 Genocide, 5, 15, 23, 31, 33–35, 47, 49, 51, 59, 60, 63, 64, 72, 74, 76, 78, 80, 82, 112–116, 154, 170, 176, 187, 212, 214, 219 Gen X, 152 Georgia, 20, 28n42, 142, 187 Gerrymandering, 55 Goffman, Erving, 155, 156 Goldhagen, Sarah Williams, 134, 145 Gómez-Barris, Macarena, 215 Governmentality, 55, 152, 190 Grand River, 60, 65, 207n43 Grandin, Greg, 72, 87, 90 Gray, Herman, 215 Greek Revival architecture, 36 Greendeer, Kendra, 9 Grullon, Alicia, 125, 126, 128 The Rule Is Love #2 (Say Her Name), 125, 128 Guattari, Félix, 181–183

227

Gulf of Mexico, 215 Gutiérre, Martine, 6, 15, 17–20, 23, 24, 51, 55, 56, 173–177, 179n29, 211–213, 215, 218, 219 Gutiérrez, Martine Demons, Xochiquetzal ‘Flower Quetzal Feather,’ 174 Eater of filth, 175 Indigenous Woman, 17, 56, 173, 174 Tlazoteotl, 175, 179n29 H Haldimand Treaty, 65 Hamill, Pete, 76 Harjo, Joy, 9 Haudenosaunee people, 79 Haunting, 8, 20, 21, 25, 32, 33, 36, 50, 52, 56, 59, 60, 64, 70, 72, 74, 75, 77, 78, 82, 90, 98, 113, 124, 126, 134, 138, 143, 156, 168, 172, 211, 213–216 Haynes, Frank Jay, 82 Heard Museum, 165, 172 Heller, Louis Herman, 35 Hemings, Sally, 143, 148n21, 170 Heritage, 66, 82 Heteronormative theory, 22 Heteropatriarchy, 98, 126 Hiawatha, 217 Hill, Charlie, 169 Historical trauma, 13, 50 History documentation of, 56 reclaiming, 165–177 Hjorth, Larissa, 216 Home, idea of, 14 Homeyness, 15, 67 Human rights, 36, 56, 89, 98 Hurricane Katrina, 36 Hypogeal images, 167

228 

INDEX

I Iconoclasm, 174 Iconology, 3 Identity, 5, 8, 11–14, 19, 54, 76, 113, 115, 122, 154, 156, 165, 173–176, 179n29, 182, 183, 190, 191, 194, 205n39, 214, 215, 219 Ideological violence, 171 Image manipulation, 216 Imagery, symbolic, 49 Image-words, 11 The imaginary, 4, 49, 171, 190–192 “Imaginary institution of society,” 191 Immediacy, 9, 21, 34, 75, 219 Immersion, 20, 21, 43, 216 Imperialism, 31, 32, 72 Impermanence, 145, 146 See also Ephemerality Imprisonment, 19, 87–90, 92, 98 Indian Blood Law, 191 Indian Removal Act, 187 Indigeneity, 6, 12, 49, 53, 60, 73, 75, 113, 116, 153, 155–158, 176, 177, 182, 191, 192, 194, 199, 205n39 “Indigenization,” 6, 10, 190 Indigenous Americans, 1, 2, 4–10, 12, 14–16, 19, 22–25, 31, 33, 35, 38, 39, 48, 50, 51, 55, 56, 59, 60, 66, 67, 73, 75, 78–80, 82, 83, 92, 104, 112–115, 121, 126, 127, 151–154, 156–159, 165–173, 175–177, 181–187, 189–191, 194–196, 198, 204n38, 205n41, 212, 215, 217 Indigenous American theory, 6 Indigenous American women, 9, 19, 20, 24, 114, 117, 151, 152, 205n40, 215 Indigenous Californians, 47, 157 Indigenous cultures, 19, 38, 73, 155, 159

Indigenous feminism, 9 Indigenous ontology, 6, 9, 185 Indigenous photography, 171 Indigenous space, 10 Indigenous women, murders of, 52, 116 Industrialization, 61, 64, 187 Industrial pollution, 37, 40, 187 Industrial violence, 40 Inheritance, 66, 137, 153, 191 Injustice, 35, 43, 49, 63 Installation art, as photography, 59 Interconnectedness, 53 Interiorities, 138, 145–147 The internet, 152 Internet visibility, 152, 153, 160 Invisibility, as code of resistance, 22 Invisible, theory of the, 21–25 Iowa, 38, 51, 123, 124, 126–129, 130–131n10 J Jackson, Andrew, 20, 187 Jackson, William Henry, 82 Jefferson, Thomas, 7, 8, 143, 169–171 Jesus Christ, 196 Jim Crow, 37 K Kant, Immanuel, 13, 155, 171, 181 Keystone Pipeline, 168 Kimmerer, Robin, 23 Knowing, ways of, 12 Knowledge, codes of, 171 Krauss, Rosalind, 217 L La Ventosa, Mexico, 122, 123, 128 Lacunae, 160 Lake Eufaula, 21, 167 Lakota people, 35, 168

 INDEX 

Land, 2, 3, 5, 7, 14–16, 21, 23–25, 33–36, 47, 48, 50, 59–62, 65–70, 72–75, 77, 79–83, 84n3, 104, 113, 124, 126, 127, 130, 157–160, 166–170, 172, 173, 175, 182–186, 188–191, 195, 201n12, 204n38, 207n43, 212, 218 Landscape photography, 77, 82, 83 Landscape portraiture, 189 Laruelle, Françoise, 17 Last Supper, 156 Latinx, 2, 4–6, 8, 12, 22–25, 55, 124, 126, 128, 129, 175, 179n29, 190, 215 Layering, 20, 43, 196 Lê, An-My, 6, 15, 17–20, 23, 32, 33, 51, 55, 56, 70–78, 80–83, 87, 89, 90, 104, 110, 211–213, 215, 218, 219 Rescue, 71 Small Wars, 19, 32, 33, 56, 70, 72, 75–78, 80–82, 104, 110 Leonardo da Vinci, 156 Liminality, 113, 115, 116, 166 Lindsay, Brendan, 47 Linfield, Susie, 77 Linnaeus, Carl, 155 Los Angeles, California, 165 Loss, mourning of, 60 Louisiana, 133 Louisiana Purchase, 8 Luger, Cannupa Hanska, 168 Luttringer, Paula, 6, 15, 16, 18–20, 23–25, 51, 55, 56, 87–111, 211–213, 215, 218, 219 El Lamento de los Muros/The Wailing of the Walls, 56, 87–97, 99–111 M Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, 98 Maine, 193–195, 203n32

229

Maine Indian Claims Settlement, 193 Male dominaiton, 110, 145 Marginality, 53 Marginalization, 7, 52, 152 Marketing, 157 Materiality, 9, 20, 36, 48, 76, 80, 92, 124, 183, 192, 210, 213 Matthes, Erich Hatala, 189 Mayan culture and people, 17, 18, 173–176 Mayan manuscripts, burning of, 176 McBride, Bunny, 195, 204n38 Media platforms, 151 Melancholy, 51, 60, 167 Memory photography and, 25, 209, 215, 216 return and, 25, 88–89 Mendieta, Ana, 6, 15, 16, 18–20, 23–25, 30n65, 38, 39, 49, 51, 55, 56, 121–130, 130–131n10, 142, 211–213, 215, 217–219 Imagen de Yagul, 121 Rape, 125 Silueta series, 38, 39, 56, 121, 122, 125–129, 217 Mercury pollution, 186, 187 Meta-image, 11 Methodology, 6, 11–14, 53, 176, 177 Métis, 52, 116 Mexico, 38, 51, 122, 126–128, 130–131n10 Miccosukee people, 186, 187 Micmac people, 193, 194, 203n32, 204n34 Mignolo, Walter, 2, 7, 13, 39, 80, 151, 152, 183, 196 Miller, Susan, 12, 53, 153 Minamata Convention, 186 Mitchell, Fannie, 160 Mitchell, Robert, 160 Mixed-race descent, 137 Mnemonic work, 70 Modernism, 157

230 

INDEX

Modernity, 39–41, 49, 50, 53–56, 64, 68, 70, 73, 75, 76, 78–80, 92, 151–153, 156, 157 Modoc people, 35 Mohawk people, 6, 14, 32, 33, 44n7, 59, 60, 65, 67, 196, 215, 217 Mohawk River, 60 Mohawk Valley, 60, 65, 74, 206n43 Monacan peoples, 8 Monticello, 143, 170 Monumentalism, 24 Monumentality, 63 Monuments, 14, 25, 36–37, 65 Morrison, Toni, 7, 61, 84n3 Mourning, 13, 16, 59, 60, 82, 88, 98, 113, 114, 141, 198, 220 Multidisciplinary art, 121 Mural art, 50 Muskogee people, 9, 20, 21, 28n42, 167, 168 Mutual regard, 188 Muybridge, Eadweard, 35 Myers, Lisa, 159 N Nakedness, 38, 39 Nationalism, 182 National progress, myth of, 31 Nation-state, 7, 24, 39, 52–54, 61, 153, 181, 182, 184, 192, 193 Natural world, 9, 10 Navajo people, 160 Neoclassical architecture, 145 New Mexico, 157 New Orleans, Louisiana, 36, 37, 49, 51, 133–136, 138, 139, 141, 143 New York State, 60, 104 Niépce, Joseph Nicephore, 10 Niro, Bunny, 59–61 Niro, Shelley, 6, 14, 15, 17–20, 23, 24, 32–36, 50, 51, 55, 56,

59–70, 72–83, 87, 89, 90, 104, 110, 151–154, 156, 159, 160, 193, 196–200, 205n41, 211–213, 215, 217–219 Abandoned Road across from Beaver Dams Site, 67, 69 Abnormally Aboriginal, 51, 153, 218 Battlefields of My Ancestors, 14, 19, 32–36, 51, 56, 59–70, 72, 74, 76, 78–80, 82, 104, 110, 193, 218 Fergus: Source of the Grand River, 14, 65, 66 Kissed by Lightning, 217 La Pieta, 196–200, 218 Lundy’s Lane, 67, 68 Steidl book, 153 Ten Pretty Little Indian Houses, 62–70 Nomadism, 158, 159, 181–183, 193, 195 Nomads, women and, 192–195 Non-White women, 123, 124, 130 Nova Scotia, 194 Now, 90, 218 O Oaxaca, Mexico, 122, 130–131n10 Oil derricks, 168, 169 Oklahoma, 20, 21, 167, 168 Oksala, Johanna, 110, 152 Ontario, Canada, 60, 65 Ontological solidarity, 188 Ontology, 6, 7, 9, 155, 183, 185, 212 Oppression, 4, 5, 20, 21, 24, 31, 36, 37, 40, 41, 50–52, 114, 125, 134, 212, 219 Original gap, 31 Ortega, Mariana, 184, 185 O’Sullivan, Timothy H., 82

 INDEX 

P Palimpsests, 52, 54, 56, 75, 80, 82 Panofsky, Erwin, 113, 116 Parlors, 139–146, 194 Patriarchy, 22, 24, 41, 145 Patriotism, 1 Performance, 30n65, 38, 52, 65, 110, 112, 125, 126, 128, 129, 138, 173, 174, 176, 182, 215 Performance art, 50, 52 Periphery, 7, 10 Persistence, 24, 37, 39–42, 52, 75, 77, 89, 124, 166, 210, 213 Phan Thi Kim Phúc, 71 The “phantom,” 214 Philosophy, 9, 24, 114, 181, 184, 189, 208n43 Photograph, as act, 9–11, 20, 176, 184 Photographers, role of, 20 Photographic gaze, 4, 60 Photographic image, 2–5, 9, 11, 17, 18, 26n6, 33, 52, 71, 90, 114, 123, 153, 183, 196, 210, 211, 213, 217, 219 Photographic imagination, decolonization of, 4–9 Photographic process, 10 Photographic vision, 219 Photography as act of reterritorialization, 184 analogue photography, 10 architectural, 133 as counterdiscourse, 3 digital photography, 18, 167, 209 disappearance and, 3, 5, 15–22, 51, 52, 209–211, 213–215, 219 documentary, 16, 19, 21, 31, 34, 38, 65, 75, 77, 214 fragility of, 18, 25, 39 as the image of the body, 176 Indigenous photography, 171

231

installation art as, 59 landscape photography, 77, 82, 83 as liquid theater, 4 as medium of political disruption, 220 as medium of reappearance, 220 as medium of testimony, 219 memory and, 25, 51, 77, 215, 216 object-work of, 89 print photography, 219 resistance and, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 17, 20, 21, 23–25, 31, 34–40, 43, 48–51, 54–56, 63, 74–77, 81, 83, 89, 173, 193, 195, 198, 214, 215 social space and, 50 tendency toward literalism, 35 as trace, 2, 15, 40, 209, 220 as tragedy, 218 war photography, 76–78 See also Black-and-white photography Pickton, Robert, 52 Plaçage, 136, 139, 141, 143 The placée, 141 Policing, 116, 117, 126 The polis, 50, 60, 220 Political activism, 4, 11, 18, 24, 25, 60, 83, 98, 117, 158, 165, 168, 182, 192, 199, 218, 219 Pollution, 21, 37, 40, 41, 186, 187 Popular media, 18 Post-structuralism, 21 Power, codes of, 171 Power structures, hegemonic, 51 Powhatan peoples, 8 Presence modes of, 152 voicing of, 4 Prins, Harold E. L., 195, 204n38 Print photography, 219 Productivity, 40

232 

INDEX

Progress, myth of, 31, 76 Prosser, Jay, 16 Public discourse, art and, 51 Public housing, 37 Public protest art, 50 Public space, 9, 50, 51, 55, 59, 60, 63, 65, 70, 126, 128, 129, 137 Q Queer identity, 175 Queer theory, 22 Quijano, Aníbal, 2, 151, 152, 162n22, 196 R Racial hierarchy, 134 Racial Integrity Act, 191 Racism economics of, 37 as founding myth of United States, 192 scientific, 191 Ranciére, Jacques, 4, 22, 31, 32, 48, 75, 76, 152, 218 Rape, systematic, 137, 138 “Real space,” 217 Reappearance, 18, 61, 127, 134, 169, 171, 173, 217, 220 Rearrangement, 152 Reclothing, 38 Recurrence, 128, 215 Redman, Samuel, 47 Reid’s Heritage Homes, 65 “Reinhabitation,” 139–141 Relationality, 188 Relational matrix, 188 Rememorization, 59–86, 165–179 “Rememory,” 61, 65, 84n3 “Rememorying,” 61

Replacement, code of, 7 Representation, 16, 20, 51, 70, 76, 113, 151, 154, 171, 207n43, 218, 219 Reseeing, 104, 158 Reséndez, Andrés, 47 Resistance aesthetics of, 25 algorithms of, 151–160 photography and, 3, 5, 7–11, 16, 17, 20, 21, 23–25, 31, 34–40, 43, 48–51, 54, 56, 63, 74–77, 81, 83, 89, 173, 193, 195, 198, 214, 215 politics of, 18 Reterritorialization, 181–200 Return eternal, 90, 125–127 memory and, 25, 88–89 staging, 47–56, 125 Returning, act of, 128 Revivification, 51, 124, 125, 173, 218, 219 Revolt, 211, 220 Reyes, Ana María, 98 Ricard, Jolene, 9, 12, 23, 116, 122, 189 “Right to look,” 50–54 Ritual, 139, 141, 142 Romero, Cara, 6, 15–21, 23, 24, 29n49, 47, 48, 50, 55, 56, 151–153, 155–160, 165–173, 190, 211–213, 215, 218, 219 Coyote Tales No. 1, 165, 166 Eufaula Girls, 20, 21, 167, 168 Indian Canyon, 47 Last Indian Market, 156 Oil Boom, 167–169 Spirits of Siwavaats, 47 TV Indians, 16, 170–173 Water Memory, 47, 157, 167–170 Ryerson Center, 60

 INDEX 

S Sacrificial economy, 214–220 Sanipass, Mary, 193–195, 203n32, 204n34 Santa Fe, Fiestas de, 157 Santa Fe, New Mexico, 157 Santeria, 142 Santorum, Rick, 1–3, 12, 25, 185, 191 Scientific racism, 191 Screens, 4, 10, 11, 16, 18, 156, 172, 173, 209, 213, 216, 217 Sedition, 54, 55 Seeing, revolution of, 220 Self-portraits, 17, 18, 37, 38, 51, 122, 123, 125, 128, 153–156, 173, 174, 177, 215 Self-representation, 18, 151, 152, 155 Self-sovereignty, 191 Seminole people, 53, 153, 187 Settler colonialism, 1, 4, 7, 23, 24, 32, 122, 123, 125, 127, 128, 171, 173, 185, 187, 190 Sexual violence, 19, 138, 141 Shubenacadie residential school, 194 Silencing, discourse of, 36 Simone, Nina, 17 Simpson, Audra, 12 Six Rivers National Forest, 195 Six Tribes, 63 Slave-owning class, 138 Sociality, 2, 3, 32, 66, 73, 117, 138, 141, 152, 156, 184, 189, 191, 220 Social media, 18, 209, 210, 216, 219 Social power, 17, 22, 49, 50, 54, 117, 128, 134, 155, 156, 160 Social space, photography and, 50 “Sociology of the trace,” 215 Solomon, Elizabeth, 10, 172 Space, colonialist, 20, 125, 155 Spanish colonization, 175 Spectacle, 35

233

Spectrality, 133, 173, 217, 219 Speech, 4, 81 Spotted Elk, 35 Stereotypes, 18, 115 Still photography, 112, 154, 216–218 Sublime art, 31, 32 Sublime, theory of, 13 Subversion, 50, 51, 83, 113, 171 Suffering ancestral, 61 embodied, 18, 92 Sugimoto, Hiroshi, 210 Sullivan, John, 63 Summers, David, 217 Supremum, 43 Surveillance, 49, 54–56, 74, 81, 126, 155, 157, 182 Survivance, 17, 75, 92, 114–116, 220 Survivors, 72, 80, 88–92, 98, 104, 114, 194, 195, 205n40, 215 Symbolic form, 113, 116, 117, 121–125, 128, 129 Symbolic imagery, 49 T Tagg, John, 4 Talley, Sinéad, 195, 205n39, 205n40 Taylor, Koko, 17 Technology, 4, 9, 10, 152, 211, 217 Television (TV), 16, 71, 77, 170–173 Temporality, 11, 16, 17, 34, 39, 43, 70, 72, 74, 75, 77, 90, 91, 125, 210, 216 Terror, poetics of, 89 Terrorism, state-sponsored, 87 Testimony, 15, 83, 88, 91, 104, 116, 176, 219 Textiles, 174, 196–198 Theory, 12, 13, 17, 21–23, 39, 53, 181, 182, 184, 189, 191, 214, 218

234 

INDEX

Time extension in, 81 of trauma, 90 truncating of, 91 visual experience of, 220 Toronto, Canada, 60 Torture, 44n13, 51, 76, 89, 91 Trace, dialogic, 128–130 Tragedy, 35, 218, 220 Trager, George (gustave), 35 “Tragic mulatta,” trope of, 136, 145 Trans women, 125–126 Trauma historical, 13, 50 time of, 90 Trump, Donald, 54, 55, 182 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 73 U Uncanniness, 15, 98 The uncanny, 91, 92, 192 United States federally recognized Indigenous American tribes in, 215 nationalism in, 182 racism as founding myth of, 192 support for right-wing regime in Argentina, 89 2020 presidential election, 54 (see also Specific locations) The “unrepresentable,” representation of, 76 U.S. Capitol insurrection, 54, 55 Ut, Nick, 71 V Vanishing, see Disappearance Variation, 151 “Victimry,” 114, 220 See also Survivance Video, 52, 216, 217, 219

Vietnam War, reenactors of, 32, 70, 104 Villanueva, Edgar, 6 Violation, 3, 12, 49, 65, 72, 73, 78, 82, 89, 90, 110, 116, 125, 137, 141, 142, 146, 147, 183, 194, 195 Violence of coloniality, 7, 8, 13, 69, 78, 113, 193 ideological violence, 171 masculinist, 78, 110 sexual violence, 19, 138, 141 Virginia, 8, 32, 70, 71, 77, 89, 104, 215 Virgin Mary, 196 Visibility digitized, 151 modes of, 152 Vision, photographic, 219 Vistas, 5, 23, 51, 60, 77–83, 92, 98, 146, 159, 166, 173, 215 Visual decolonization, 154, 160 “Visual sovereignty,” 23, 174 Vitality, 2, 158, 169 Vizenor, Gerald, 17, 92, 114, 220 Voudon, 139, 141, 142 Vulnerability, 38, 53, 154, 187, 218 W Walsh, Catherine, 2, 7 Wampum frame, 196, 207n43 War of 1812, 67 War photography, 76–78 Wars, 32, 33, 35, 49, 51, 56, 60, 70–78, 81, 82, 87, 89, 104, 112–114, 196, 198, 199, 206–208n43, 213, 215 Water, 20, 21, 48, 121, 124, 157, 165, 167, 168, 186, 188, 196, 206n43, 215 Watkins, Carleton E., 82

 INDEX 

Weems, Carrie Mae, 6, 15, 17–20, 23, 24, 36, 37, 49–51, 55, 56, 89, 133–136, 138–147, 151, 192, 211–213, 215, 218, 219 The Abyss, 37 The Louisiana Project, 19, 36, 37, 133–136, 139, 140, 142, 144, 146, 151, 192 Sea Islands Series, 56 A Single’s Waltz in Time, 135, 139–146 Sorrow’s Bed, 135–138, 141, 145, 146 Western discourse, frame of, 11 White feminism, 9, 122, 123, 127, 128 White male dominance, 145 White masculinity, 22, 138 Whiteness, 8, 55, 112, 169, 191 White settler colonialism, 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 14, 15, 23, 24, 32, 47, 54, 74, 75, 77–80, 82, 83, 87, 104, 112–117, 122–130, 143, 157, 166, 168–171, 173–176, 182, 183, 185–187, 189, 190 White social violence, 153 White supremacism, 2, 5, 185 White women, 124, 138, 143, 145 Wilbur, Matika, 6, 15, 17, 18, 20, 23, 24, 55, 151–153, 158–160, 181–195, 211–213, 215, 218, 219 Frank, Michael, Miccosukee Tribe, Florida, 186–189, 191, 201n12 Project 562, 158–160, 181–183, 185–190, 192, 193, 195 Sanipass, Mary, Aroostook Band of Micmac, Maine, 193–195, 203n32, 204n34

235

Talley, Sinéad, Karuk and Yurok Tribes, California, 190, 191, 195, 202n27, 205n39, 205n40 Williams Goldhagen, Sarah, 134, 145 Willis, Deborah, 134 Wilson, Shawn, 6, 176, 185 Witnesses, 5, 6, 10, 20, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37, 63, 74, 79, 116, 126, 129, 133–135, 137, 139, 145–147, 211, 218 See also Testimony Witnessing, 32, 36, 37, 49, 63, 74, 78, 79, 89, 91, 134, 135, 139, 147, 215 Women categorization of, 117 nomads and, 192–195 sexual violence against, 138 Women’s fashion magazines, 174 Woodman, Francesca, 13 “Workshop” of empire, 90 Wounded Knee massacre, 35 X Xochiquetzal, 174 Y Yagul, Mexico, 38 Yemaya, 175 Yoo, John, 35, 44n13 Yoruba culture, 175 Z Ze Winters, Lisa, 139, 141