Unseeing Empire: Photography, Representation, South Asian America 9781478012436

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un s e e i n g

e m p i re

A CAMERA OBSCURA BOOK

u n s e e PHOTOGRAPHY, REPRESENTATION, SOUTH ASIAN AMERICA

i n g empire B A K I R AT H I M A N I

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS  DURHAM AND LONDON  2020

© 2020 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-­f ree paper ∞ Designed by Aimee C. Harrison Typeset in SangBleu and Univers LT Std by Copperline Book Services Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­P ublication Data Names: Mani, Bakirathi, author. Title: Unseeing empire : photography, representation, South Asian America / Bakirathi Mani. Other titles: Camera obscura book. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2020. | Series: A camera obscura book | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020018442 (print) LCCN  2020018443

(ebook)

ISBN  9781478009849

(hardcover)

ISBN  9781478010890

(paperback)

ISBN  9781478012436

(ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: South Asian Americans—Cultural assimilation— United States. | South Asian Americans—Ethnic identity. | South Asian diaspora. Classification: LCC E 184.s69 M 365 2020 (print) | LCC E 184.s69

(ebook) | DDC 909/.04914—dc23

LC

record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018442

LC

ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018443

Cover art: Seher Shah, The Expansion Complex II, 2009. Archival giclée print, 137 × 81 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the Hungerford Faculty Support Fund at Swarthmore College, which provided funds toward the publication of this book.

FOR MARIO, AND FOR THE INFINITE LOVE WE SHARE WITH OUR SON, AMAR

List of Illustrations ix  Acknowledgments xi

o n e / 33

Uncanny Feelings: Diasporic Mimesis in Seher Shah’s Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force

t h r e e / 119

Exhibiting Immigrants: Visuality, Visibility, and Representation at Beyond Bollywood

e p i l o g u e / 205 Curating Photography, Seeing Community

CONTENTS

i nt ro d u c t io n / 1

The Work of Seeing: Photography and Representation in Diaspora

t w o / 70

Representation in the Colonial Archive: Annu Palakunnathu Matthew’s An Indian from India

f o u r / 159

Archives of Diaspora: Gauri Gill’s The Americans

Notes 215  Bibliography 245  Index 261

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ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES I.1 Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Fabricated Memories; installation at Fatal Love, Queens Museum of Art, 2005  2 I.2 Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Fabricated Memories; installation at Generations, Royal Ontario Museum, 2015  3 1.1 The City of Tents, 1903  52 1.2 The Duke and Duchess of Connaught Arrive at the Durbar Amphitheatre, 1903 56 1.3 Royal Pavilion, 1911 Delhi Durbar, December 12, 1911  57 1.4 Coronation Park, New Delhi, 2018  60 1.5 Coronation Park, New Delhi, 2018  60 1.6 UA Flight 175 Hits World Trade Center South Tower 9-­11, 2001  62 2.1 Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, “Types,” from An Indian from India series, 2007 71 2.2. Edward Curtis, The Clam Digger, c. 1898 – 1900  81 2.3 Edward Curtis, [Head-­and-­Shoulders Portrait of Navajo Woman, Facing Front], c. 1904  89 2.4 Edward Curtis, The Blanket Maker —  Navaho, c. 1904  89 2.5 Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Belles, from An Indian from India series, 2001  94 2.6 Plate 112, Pathans. Mahomedans. Shahjehanpore, from The People of India, vol. 3 (1868 – 1875)  100 2.7 Plate 73, Newar Group. Slave Population. Supposed Aboriginal. Nipal, from The People of India, vol. 2 (1868 – 1875)  102

2.8 Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, An Indian from India; installation at Generations, Royal Ontario Museum, 2015  109 2.9 Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, An Indian from India; installation at Generations, Royal Ontario Museum, 2015  113 3.1 Installation at Beyond Bollywood, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 2014  126 3.2 “Who Gets to Be a Citizen?” (detail), installation at Beyond Bollywood, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 2014  135 3.3 Dalip Singh Saund, installation at Beyond Bollywood, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 2014  137 3.4 “Groundbreakers,” installation at Beyond Bollywood, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 2014  139 3.5 “Groundbreakers” (detail), installation at Beyond Bollywood, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 2014 141 3.6 Nina Davuluri, installation at Beyond Bollywood, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 2014  143 3.7. Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, An Indian from India; installation at Beyond Bollywood, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 2014  149 3.8 “America Imagines India,” installation at Beyond Bollywood, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 2014 152

4.1 Gauri Gill, Praveen Bhai, school teacher from Baroda, and his wife run the Sportsman Inn so they can get their children Green Cards. Marion, South Carolina 2004, from The Americans, 2000 – 2 007  171 4.2 Gauri Gill, Bharatanatyam Arengatram performance, for family and friends, on the 16th birthday. Birmingham, Alabama 2004, from The Americans, 2000 – 2 007  173

4.3. Gauri Gill, Motel owner Dhansukh Dan Patel’s parents, in his new home. Nashville, Tennessee 2004, from The Americans, 2000 – 2 007  196 E.1 Gauri Gill, Ruined Rainbow Pictures, installation at Ruins and Fabrications, Twelve Gates Arts, 2015  210

P L AT E S ( F O L L O W IN G PA G E 3 2 ) Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Fabricated Memories (detail), edition 1, 1997 – 2 000  2 Seher Shah, Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force, 2009 3 Seher Shah, Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force (detail), 2009 4 Seher Shah, Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force (detail), 2009 5 Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Smiles, from An Indian from India series, 2001 6 Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Madonnas, from An Indian from India series, 2001 7 Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Noble/ Savage, from An Indian from India series, 2001 8 “Besting the Bee,” installation at Beyond Bollywood, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 2014 9 “Who Belongs in America?,” installation at Beyond Bollywood, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 2014 10 Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Tom & Annu Before, from An Indian from India series, 2001 11 Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Tom & Annu After, from An Indian from India series, 2001 1

12 Gauri Gill, Laljibhai and his wife Pushpa Ben Patel work as cleaners at Days Inn West. Knoxville, Mississippi 2004, from The Americans, 2000 – 2 007 13 Gauri Gill, Brahmin thread tying ceremony for Silicon Valley professionals in a local strip mall. Fremont, California 2002, from The Americans, 2000 – 2 007 14 Gauri Gill, Software engineer Alok Patel-­ Pareek; business owner, Sumati Patel-­ Pareek. Silicon Valley, California 2001, from The Americans, 2000 – 2 007 15 Gauri Gill, Yuba City, California 2001, from The Americans, 2000 – 2 007 16 Gauri Gill, Taxi driver Prem Kumar Walekar, 54 was shot dead at a gas station in Rockville, Montgomery by a sniper. Seen at right is his son. Maryland 2002, from The Americans, 2000 – 2 007 17 Gauri Gill, Bonnie Singh at home, Bonnie is a cook at Taste of lndia restaurant. Nashville, Tennessee 2004, from The Americans, 2000 – 2 007 18 Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Fabricated Memories; installation at Ruins and Fabrications, Twelve Gates Arts, 2015 19 Viewers at Ruins and Fabrications, Twelve Gates Arts, 2015

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book began in 2009 with a series of visual art exhibitions that prompted me to think about the relationship between race, representation, and formations of diasporic community. In the decade since, Gauri Gill, Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, and Seher Shah have been generous beyond words in sharing their creative work and process with me. I’m privileged to know all three as artists, and even more to know them as friends. My thanks go to the artists and curators with whom I have discussed this project: Jaishri Abichandani, Samanta Batra, Kaushik Bhowmik, Baseera Khan, Naeem Mohaiemen, Sa’dia Rehman, Schandra Singh, Jodi Throckmorton, and Jaret Vadera. Uzma Rizvi, Murtaza Valli, Miriam Ticktin, Patrick Dodd, and Rajiv Vrudhula were trusted companions during a restorative year in Brooklyn. At Columbia University, where I was a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, Vidya Dehejia kindly invited me to participate in her seminar on South Asian art history, and Gary Okihiro lent his encouragement. Eungie Joo introduced me to Independent Curators International; I learned greatly from the critics and curators I collaborated with at ICI ’s first Curatorial Intensive in 2010. I’m grateful as well to the galleries and museums where my formal and informal research began: in New Delhi, Nature Morte Gallery, Tasveer Gallery, the National Gallery of Modern Art, and Devi Art Foundation; in Mumbai, Guild Art Gallery, Volte Art Gallery, Chatterjee and Lall, Gallerie Mirchandani + Steinbruecke; in New York, sepia­ EYE, Bose Pacia, Queens Museum, Asia Society Museum, New Museum, Thomas Erben Gallery, Aicon Gallery, Rubin Museum of Art, BRIC , Hofstra University Museum, Bodhi Art Gallery, and Cue Art Foundation; and elsewhere, the Field Museum, Chicago; the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC; Pennsylvania Academy

of the Fine Arts; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I thank Arani and Shumita Bose of Bose Pacia Gallery, Projal Dutta of Aicon Gallery, and Esa Epstein of sepiaEYE for sharing their knowledge of modern and contemporary South Asian art. In Philadelphia, Aisha Zia Khan and Atif Sheikh at Twelve Gates Arts have warmly supported my work. It was a real privilege to curate Ruins and Fabrications at Twelve Gates in November – December 2015. At Swarthmore, my wonderful colleagues in the Department of English Literature have aided and abetted my teaching and writing for the past eighteen years. I am lucky to count Nora Johnson, Peter Schmidt, and Betsy Bolton along with Nathalie Anderson, Craig Williamson, Anthony Foy, Eric Song, Sangina Patnaik, Rachel Sagner Buurma, and Lara Langer Cohen as friends. Rachel showed me that it was possible to build a career at Swarthmore and a life outside it, without compromising both: I’m so grateful to her. Though she left our department to build her own, Patricia White’s commitment to writing, teaching, and mentoring in global feminist visual cultures inspires me continuously. I have the deepest respect for Patty and Lara, who have been ace readers of my manuscript through the writing group we share. They read every chapter multiple times, with keen critical eyes and the enthusiasm of cheerxii

leaders, helping me to name and claim my method of seeing. Thank you both for putting your time and energy into the spirit of this book. I owe no less to my colleagues in the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program and in the Asian Studies Program at Swarthmore for their camaraderie across disciplinary lines, and to colleagues at Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and the University of Pennsylvania who participated in the two Tri-­College Mellon Faculty Groups that I chaired, Futures of South Asian Studies and New Directions in Asian American Studies. A Hungerford Grant for Faculty Development and a George Becker Faculty Fellowship provided research support and a crucial year of sabbatical; grants from the Provost’s Office enabled me to travel to exhibitions. I thank as well the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility at Swarthmore, which provided a curricular grant that allowed me to link my curatorial initiatives to my pedagogy. My students’ enthusiasm for discussing the relation between race and representation has been central to my writing process. I thank in particular the students who learned alongside me in “What Is Cultural Studies?,” “In/Visible: Asian American Cultural Critique,” “Asian American Literature,” and “South Asians in America.” My wonderful research assistant, Spriha Dhanuka, kept my archives organized on-­and off-­line. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’m immensely grateful to Michael Berry for his wise counsel, and to Tom Stephenson for his support. Outside Swarthmore, my thanks go to the Parent-­Infant Center, whose consistent care for my child made it possible for me to go to work, and to Dennis Debiak, for creating an environment of warmth and trust that enabled me to write this book. Several friends and colleagues, all powerful feminist thinkers, gave unstintingly of their time in support of this project. Celine Parreñas Shimizu read each chapter with critical acumen and with her characteristic embrace of life: as she continues to write through her own immeasurable loss, she reminds me of the power of writing, and of friendship. Lisa Arellano is peerless as a reader and as a thinker: she brought to the manuscript her powers of perception and insight. Gayatri Gopinath and Nicole Fleetwood revealed themselves to be ideal readers: their intellectual generosity and exceptional care for the project enabled me to hone the arguments I make. Through their scholarship and friendship, Kandice Chuh and David Eng demonstrate what it means to create and care for the work we do in Asian American studies. Sumathi Ramaswamy and Inderpal Grewal are mentors; they both show me how a life of the mind can be part of a full and embodied feminist life. I’ve learned so much from my conversations and collaborations over the years with Anita Mannur, Susette Min, and Sarita See, each of whom has shared their own remarkable work. Thanks go as well to Anna McCarthy, Nilanjana Bhattacharya, and Ranjit Arab, who commented on initial versions of my chapters. Falu Bakrania and Sameer Pandya have always been the best people to text with; I am so glad we continue our conversations still. I am grateful to those who worked to create venues where I presented my research: my dear friend Jisha Menon at Stanford University; Josephine Park at the University of Pennsylvania; Homay King at Bryn Mawr College; Judy Wu, then at Ohio State University; Kimberly Juanita Brown and the Dark Room; Yoon Sun Lee and Joseph Jeon with the AALAC workshop at Wellesley College; and audiences at the Center for New Racial Studies, UC–Santa Barbara, as well as the Duke University India Initiative. I thank as well my copanelists at a number of conferences that shaped the project: Susette Min, Gayatri Gopinath, Sarita See, and Kandice Chuh at the 2010 ASA; Falu Bakrania, Sameer Pandya, Ronak Kapadia, and Vanita Reddy at the 2014 and 2018

AAAS ;

Chi-­m ing Yang, Kavita Daiya, and

Richard Fung at the 2016 ASA; and Thy Phu and Deepali Dewan with the Toronto Photography Seminar, whose 2017 conference “Reframing Family Photography” came at an important juncture in my writing. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xiii

A preliminary version of chapter 1 was published as “Archives of Empire: Seher Shah’s Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force,” in Social Text 29, no. 3 (2011): 127 – 138. An early version of chapter 3 was published as “Beyond Bollywood: Exhibiting South Asian America,” in Journal of Asian American Studies 18, no. 2 (June 2015): 193 – 217. An initial version of chapter 4 was published as “Viewing South Asia, Seeing America: Gauri Gill’s The Americans,” American Quarterly 16, no. 1 (2010): 135 – 150. Many thanks to Anitra Grisales, who helped pull together the conceptual threads of this manuscript. At Duke University Press, Elizabeth Ault’s keen editorial eye, her enthusiasm, and her remarkable ability to keep things moving have been crucial to bringing this book into the world. Kate Herman, Aimee Harrison, and Liz Smith have been a great help with the production process. It is a privilege to have this work be part of feminist scholarship produced by the Camera Obscura collective. I have been nourished by the women who joined me from preschool through high school at the International School of the Sacred Heart, Tokyo, and I want to acknowledge two in particular here. While writing and revisiting the events of chapter 1, I could not forget the irrepressible energy and laughter of my classmate Rahma Salie, who died on Septemxiv

ber 11, 2001. In all our years together, Marlisa Okamoto Butler lifted me up with her strength, intelligence, and poise. Her death on August 16, 2018, came just as I finished a draft of this book. I cherish and deeply mourn the forty years of friendship that Marlisa and I shared. Lisa Arellano gave me her hand to hold on our very first day of graduate school; I continue to hold her tight. Arati Karnik’s care and straightforwardness in every aspect of our friendship grounds me. Ania Loomba and Suvir Kaul are teachers and mentors who have given me the precious gift of their lifelong friendship. Dilly and Manek Daver embraced me as a daughter; the Daver family’s generosity and affection have shaped my entire career. Because this is also a project about archives, I record here the lives of my grandmothers, both named Bhagheerathy. Both of my grandmothers had an elementary school education; both were married as young girls, my maternal grandmother at age nine and my paternal grandmother at sixteen; and both my grandmothers lived their entire lives in rural Kerala, raising nine children each in the decades before and after independence. Neither of them left behind an archive of any kind, save for a few photographs that are held close by my extended family. Though I knew ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

one grandmother for just a few months and the other for twenty years, I miss them both. It is a deep and abiding privilege to be their namesake. I honor as well my mother-­i n-­law, Rojelia Ruiz, whose formal schooling ended in fourth grade but whose compassion runs so vast that it is truly an education to learn from her. My mother and father, Pushkala and A. P. S. Mani, have modeled ways of being that I could not otherwise conceive of. My father’s enthusiasm for being photographed resulted in thousands of family photos, taken in cities and studios across Asia. My mother worked with these images to create an extraordinary collection of bound albums, numbering over one hundred. These photographs are the only documented archive of our family’s life in Tokyo between 1976 and 2010. My parents’ joint investment in photography is how I came to understand the ways in which we create narratives of identity, memory, and history through images. The photos and videos of my sweet niece, Amita Ohyabu, are the latest addition to this family story. To my mother, I owe everything. Her unshakable belief in me is why I have been able to live three continents apart from her; her deep faith in the value of the work I do is what love looks like. This book is for two people whom I love. Mario Martín Ruiz is my partner in this life and in the next. He has seen this book through with his passion, his grace, and his intellect. In his unflinching commitment to seeing the world with truth and empathy, he has shared with me his extraordinary vision. Our son Amar Mani Ruiz is my heart. To watch him create his own understanding of the world is my biggest pleasure. I don’t get to photograph Mario or Amar often enough, but the life that the three of us create together each day is a thing of great beauty and fills me with joy.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xv

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Plate 1  Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Fabricated Memories (detail), edition 1, 1997 – 2 000. Polaroid transfer on paper in artist book with metal box (4.75 × 5.5 inches), 6 × 4.5 × 220 inches at full length. © ANNU PAL AKUNNATHU MAT THE W, COUR TESY SEPIAE YE.

Plate 2  Seher Shah, Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force, 2009. Archival giclée print, 58 × 119¾ inches, edition of 3. IMAGE COUR TESY OF THE AR TIST.

Plate 3  Seher Shah, Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force (detail), 2009. Archival giclée print, 58 × 119¾ inches. IMAGE COUR TESY OF THE AR TIST.

Plate 4  Seher Shah, Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force (detail), 2009. Archival giclée print, 58 × 119¾ inches. IMAGE COUR TESY OF THE AR TIST.

Plate 5  Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Smiles, from An Indian from India series, 2001. Portfolio 1, 24 × 30 inches, archival pigment print. © ANNU PAL AKUNNATHU MAT THE W, COUR TESY SEPIAE Y E.

Plate 6  Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Madonnas, from An Indian from India series, 2001. Portfolio 1, 24 × 30 inches, archival pigment print. © ANNU PAL AKUNNATHU MAT THE W, COUR TESY SEPIAE Y E.

Plate 7  Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Noble/Savage, from An Indian from India series, 2001. Portfolio 1, 24 × 30 inches, archival pigment print. © ANNU PAL AKUNNATHU MAT THE W, COUR TESY SEPIAE YE.

Plate 8  “Besting the Bee.” Installation at Beyond Bollywood, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 2014. PHOTOGR APH BY AUTHOR.

Plate 9 “Who Belongs in America?” Installation at Beyond Bollywood, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 2014. PHOTOGR APH BY AUTHOR.

Plate 10  Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Tom & Annu Before, from An Indian from India series, 2001. Portfolio 2, 24 × 30 inches, archival pigment print. © ANNU PAL AKUNNATHU MAT THE W, COUR TESY SEPIAE YE.

Plate 11  Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Tom & Annu After, from An Indian from India series, 2001. Portfolio 2, 24 × 30 inches, archival pigment print. © ANNU PAL AKUNNATHU MAT THE W, COUR TESY SEPIAE YE.

Plate 12  Gauri Gill, Laljibhai and his wife Pushpa Ben Patel work as cleaners at Days Inn West. Knoxville, Mississippi 2004, from The Americans, 2000 – 2 007. Archival pigment print, 16.5 × 50 inches, edition of 7 + 1. AP. COPY RIGHT GAURI GIL L .

Plate 13  Gauri Gill, Brahmin thread tying ceremony for Silicon Valley professionals in a local strip mall. Fremont, California 2002, from The Americans, 2000 – 2 007. Archival pigment print, 16.5 × 50 inches, edition of 7 + 1. AP. COPY RIGHT GAURI GIL L .

Plate 14  Gauri Gill, Software engineer Alok Patel-­Pareek; business owner, Sumati Patel-­Pareek. Silicon Valley, California 2001, from The Americans, 2000 – 2 007. Archival pigment print, 27 × 40 inches, edition of 7 + 1. AP. COPY RIGHT GAURI GIL L .

Plate 15  Gauri Gill, Yuba City, California 2001, from The Americans, 2000 – 2 007. Archival pigment print, 16.5 × 50 inches, edition of 7 + 1. AP. COPY RIGHT GAURI GIL L .

Plate 16  Gauri Gill, Taxi driver Prem Kumar Walekar, 54 was shot dead at a gas station in Rockville, Montgomery by a sniper. Seen at right is his son. Maryland 2002, from The Americans, 2000 – 2 007. Archival pigment print, 16.5 × 50 inches, edition of 7 + 1. AP. COPY RIGHT GAURI GIL L .

Plate 17  Gauri Gill, Bonnie Singh at home, Bonnie is a cook at Taste of lndia restaurant. Nashville, Tennessee 2004, from The Americans, 2000 – 2 007. Archival pigment print, 16 × 24 inches, edition of 7 + 1. AP. COPY RIGHT GAURI GIL L .

Plate 18  Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Fabricated Memories. Installation at Ruins and Fabrications, Twelve Gates Arts, 2015. © ANNU PAL AKUNNATHU MAT THE W, COUR TESY SEPIAE YE. PHOTOGR APH BY STE VEN M. FAL K .

Plate 19  Viewers at Ruins and Fabrications, Twelve Gates Arts, 2015. PHOTOGR APH BY STE VEN M. FAL K .

INTRODUCTION The Work of Seeing: Photography and Representation in Diaspora

I

n the spring of 2005, I walked down the worn wooden off-­ramp of a subway station in Queens, New York, through the leafy boulevards

of a public park, to reach Fatal Love: South Asian American Art Now,

an exhibition on view at the Queens Museum. In a sunlit space on the mezzanine floor, I came across a low tabletop encased in glass. Within that rectangular vitrine was a series of faded snapshot photographs, featuring a cherubic little girl standing in a verdant garden; a husband and wife facing the camera wearing stylish sunglasses; the girl wrapped in the arms of her father, ensconced in a carousel ride. Opened out as an accordion-­folded book, the images were embedded in a pile of loose tobacco that, despite the glass case, gave off a powerfully smoky scent in the hallway (figure I.1). This was my first encounter with Fabricated Memories, by the artist Annu Palakunnathu Matthew. Glancing at her birth date and birthplace, I assumed the installation was autobiographical, a narrative of her family’s experience as Indian immigrants in En­ gland in the 1960s. The photographs took on the quality of snapshots that filled my own family albums: faded, in parts overexposed, each image depicting a cherished child and a loving family. I hovered over the glass box trying to make out the words inscribed alongside the photos, but the glare of sunlight obscured much of the text. Distracted by the profusion of artworks within the gallery space, I turned away from the

I.1  Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Fabricated Memories. Installation at Fatal Love, Queens Museum of Art, 2005. © ANNU PAL AKUNNATHU MAT THE W, COUR TESY SEPIAE YE. PHOTOGR APH COUR TESY OF QUEENS MUSEUM.

installation to see life-­size portrait photographs of South Asian immigrants that hung from the ceilings; digital animations of Muslim and Hindu mythology; figurative and landscape paintings; and plastic lotas that created soundscapes by the bathroom. Standing on the scuffed hardwood floors, I was captivated by the visuality of each of these aesthetic forms, which in turn made real and visible my own experience as a diasporic subject. A decade later, in the fall of 2015, I once again came across Matthew’s photo-­based art, this time at a solo exhibition of her work at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada (figure I.2). Within this elegant and spacious setting, inhaling the scent of tobacco leaves demurely collected in a separate vitrine, I realized with a start that the images were not autobiographical but generated entirely through Matthew’s digital assemblage. As I moved alongside the glass case, following the stream of text that threaded across the creased pages, I saw how Fabricated Memories INTRODUCTION

I.2  Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Fabricated Memories. Installation at Generations, Royal Ontario Museum, 2015. © ANNU PAL AKUNNATHU MAT THE W, COUR TESY SEPIAE YE. PHOTOGR APH © DAVID H. W EL L S.

3 narrated a story of grief and loss, detailing the departure of Matthew’s family from England to Bangalore eleven years after her birth, as well as the rupture caused by the sudden death of her father from smoking-­ related illnesses a year later. Creating new photographs through reproducing and splicing portrait and landscape images from personal albums, Matthew’s installation was not about the charming, middle-­class immigrant family I initially assumed it to be. Instead, as I contemplated the gossamer-­thin pages of this album, I saw how the color photographs increasingly became obscured by sunspots; peered at another image of the little girl, who appeared to eerily jump into her father’s reflection; and recognized her elegant mother, whose visage fades away from this family story (see plate 1). Surrounded by schoolchildren who breezed in and out of the gallery, on their way to find a dinosaur skeleton on the main floor, I was suddenly disoriented by what I saw. No longer did Fabricated Memories produce a visual narrative of immigration that mapped onto and affirmed my childhood memories. Instead, the installation demanded to be read as a narrative of mourning rather than of celebration, as a representation of loss rather than as a documentation of arrival. THE WORK OF SEEING

I was unmoored when I saw these images a second time, compelled to double back on what I had seen ten years earlier: a set of photographs that had appeared to reflect the diasporic trajectories of my own life in fact belied the promise of such representation. At my initial viewing at the Queens Museum, I had approached Matthew’s art as if these photographs were a record of my immigrant experience. In the absence of public documentation of my family’s history as Indian immigrants in Japan over thirty-­five years, I had taken this series of snapshots of a South Asian family in rural England as a mirror of my childhood in Tokyo. Her digital production of family photos — worn and frayed at the edges, serially organized like old Polaroids that tumble out of shoeboxes —  re-­created the sensory experience of seeing images in a long-­forgotten album. I cathected my identity as a South Asian diasporic subject to the photographic representations produced by the artist, so much so that even as the album explicitly narrated Matthew’s profound grief over losing her father, I had taken this series of images as a reflection of my own life. The intensity of my attachment to the installation — an identification coupled with misrecognition, which had persisted without my knowing during the intervening years — meant that the very act of seeing these photographs was haunted by the possibility of loss: that no matter how 4

much I kept looking at these images, I would never be able to see myself. In this book I examine how and why South Asian Americans desire to identify with photographic representations of diaspora. Aligning myself with viewers who see themselves as racialized diasporic subjects in relation to the photographic image, I consider how we establish a mimetic relation of identity to the visual object in order to claim the image as an affirmation of ourselves. We commonly understand our desire for visual affirmation through our invisibility in U.S. public culture, an absence that (we assume) can be rectified by the greater visibility of minoritized subjects. I propose instead that our orientation toward visual representation is rooted in the uses of photography as a form of documentation and surveillance. Photography’s own mimetic qualities here serve a double purpose: first, as a record of the real, that is, its function as visual documentation of the lived experience of racialized subjects; and second, as an aesthetic form that has historically captured the discipline and display of racialized subjects. We enact our claims to the photograph as proof of our belonging even as we know these histories, and we do so in tandem with diasporic artists whose creative processes refashion the same histories. Working across public and personal archives, the artists whom I disINTRODUCTION

cuss reimagine the uses of photography to produce contemporary representations of racialized subjectivity and community, representations that affirm, contest, or deny the image of ourselves that we are looking for. I define the visual and affective relation forged between diasporic viewers, artists, and photographic representations of immigrant subjects as diasporic mimesis. If mimesis is “the faculty to copy, imitate, make models,” diasporic mimesis binds together images that appear to represent the lived experience of racialized subjects, with the viewer’s desire to be represented in the public sphere as a racialized immigrant.1 As artists incorporate and disseminate images from national and personal archives through their depictions of immigrant subjects, the viewer sees the work on display and recalls other image archives that surface under the photographic object. Like my encounters with Matthew’s Fabricated Memories, these alternate image archives can be real or imagined, emerging from times and places far removed from the exhibition context. When viewers establish a likeness or association between their own archival memories and the artist’s creation, they are racialized through their identification with the artwork. The experience of seeing in diaspora is centered on this dynamic exchange between viewer, image, and artist. As a strategy of aesthetic production, as a method of viewing, and as a practice of consumption, diasporic mimesis is how we claim visual images as representative of our racialized selves. The intimate relations of identification that South Asian viewing subjects establish with visual representations of diaspora are produced through the circulation of archival photographs in the work of South Asian diasporic artists, as well as through the consumption of such photographic representations in specific exhibition sites. When I initially encountered Fabricated Memories at Fatal Love, my desire to identify with this repertoire of photographic images was amplified by the curatorial premise of the exhibition. Bringing together twenty-­eight South Asian American artists practicing in a wide range of media forms, who themselves represented diverse experiences of gender, religion, class, and sexuality, Fatal Love was lauded for making visible the long-­established presence of South Asian Americans in New York City.2 The display and consumption of visual art, in other words, stood in for the visibility of a heterogeneous immigrant group. 3 The stakes of South Asian American visibility were particularly high given that Fatal Love aimed to counter dominant media representations of South Asian and Muslim Americans after September 11, 2001.4 To see and identify with Matthew’s artwork THE WORK OF SEEING

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at Fatal Love, therefore, was not only an affirmation of my own belonging. As I walked through an exhibition space that was populated with a handful of younger and older South Asian American viewers, all of us exchanging brief smiles, nods, and snatches of conversation, Fatal Love enabled me to produce and inhabit a lived sense of racialized community. We were named South Asian American through the visual and thematic narrative of the exhibition, and it was through our navigation of the artworks on display in this exhibition space that we could enact the conditions of our own visibility as South Asian Americans. Whereas this inaugural viewing of Fabricated Memories evoked an intensely personal feeling of belonging to the experience of diaspora, a decade later at the Royal Ontario Museum my experience of the same installation was disoriented by the fact that the images I saw were situated just a few floors away from replicas of skeletons and fossils. There, instead of identifying with the racially diverse group of viewers who filtered through the museum space, I experienced the exhibition as one in a series of displays of world cultures within a natural history museum, an institution whose extensive collection includes the display of human beings as objects. Even when South Asian American art is displayed as part of curatorial projects that promise greater visibility in the public sphere, the institutional his6

tories of the museum shape how much of ourselves we can see. Framing artworks within the social life of the exhibition, I locate my readings of South Asian diasporic photography within spaces of display that range from upscale commercial galleries in New Delhi that hang prints without titles or prices to public institutions like the Smithsonian museums in Washington, DC. 5 Across these diverse exhibition sites, artworks evoke particular embodied sensations of viewing and invite the participation of different groups of viewers: those who identify as South Asian Americans as well as those who do not; connoisseurs of contemporary art as well as tourists and students; middle-­class as well as upper-­ middle-­class viewers. Weaving together visual analysis of fine art photography with ethnographic and experiential studies of museum cultures, I examine how diasporic viewers engage with photograph-­based works by three South Asian women artists: Gauri Gill, Seher Shah, and Annu Palakunnathu Matthew. From Shah’s incorporation of landscape photography commemorating British imperial rule in India, to Gill’s references to the seminal photographs of Black and white Americans by the artist Robert Frank, to Matthew’s uses of photographic documentation of Native INTRODUCTION

peoples in the Americas, these artists intervene in a range of colonial, settler colonial, and imperial archives. Their photograph-­based works, which take the form of drawings, diptychs, and self-­portraits, rely on generating likenesses between the archival image and contemporary representations of racialized subjects and communities. Through the dissemination and reconfiguration of these images, each artwork in turn provokes us, as diasporic viewing subjects, to remember alternate image archives that are generated by our acts of seeing. These include online photographic and video footage of the decimation of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001; nineteenth-­century ethnographic portraiture of “natives” on the subcontinent; and biometric surveillance images of immigrants in the early twenty-­fi rst century.6 Read together, I contend that this body of fine art photography runs counter to demands for the greater visibility of immigrant subjects. Instead, these photo-­based drawings, diptychs, and installations urge the viewer to look elsewhere, at objects other than the immigrant subjects we want to see. Refusing to provide the solace of identification, such artworks question our desire to be represented. Across the book, I mobilize a collective viewing position, aligning my own engagement with the artworks on display with those of other South Asian diasporic viewers who encounter these works alongside me: inside and outside the gallery space, as well as through the pages of this book. Naming my orientation toward the artworks in relation to a heterogeneous group of viewers, I denote a collaborative practice of seeing through the use of plural pronouns including “we,” “us,” and “our.” My use of such shared terms of identification is both contingent and partial. I do not assume that South Asian diasporic viewers and readers — differentiated by class and gender, race and sexuality, and national origin — share an identical affective relation to the photographic image, or indeed that we consume the aesthetic and archival elements of artworks in the same way. There can be no singular diasporic viewing position, nor can there be stability or coherence across what, as racialized immigrants, we see and desire in the images that we encounter. And yet I insist on demarcating the act of seeing visual representations of racialized subjects as a form of collective social work, produced through the intimate relations of identification embodied by viewers in relation to specific artworks and artists, as well as by the unexpected forms of racialized community that emerge through the curatorial projects of exhibition sites. It is in relation to other viewers (including Asian American, Black, Latinx, and THE WORK OF SEEING

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white viewers) within the framework of the exhibition that we create and sustain our identifications as racialized subjects. By marking multiple, overlapping acts of seeing — my own viewing experiences and those of other South Asian American viewers, as well as the responses of racialized viewers more broadly — I explore how diasporic mimesis is central to the ways in which racialized immigrants see themselves. In claiming my affinity to viewers both visible and not, I build on what Kandice Chuh insightfully defines as “the relationality of the felt, often wordless connectivity that occurs among minoritarian subjects because of misrecognition, and precipitates the sociality of being with, of entanglement; it is that commonality necessary to persist, to thrive.” 7 With an eye to these deeply felt forms of “connectivity,” I consistently use the term “South Asian” to denote photographic subjects within artworks and exhibitions that claim to represent a single national, religious, or ethnic group (such as Indian Americans, Sikhs, or Malayalees), even as that term engenders broader questions about identity and representation that encompass a wide range of racialized subjects, including but not limited to immigrants from across the subcontinent and its diasporas. As the experiences of seeing that I gather under the pronoun “we” shift, move, and disaggregate across exhibition sites, I also maintain an unfixed “we” that is 8

authorized by the ways in which racialized subjects are haunted by imperial archives that circulate through the production and consumption of visual art. Avery Gordon writes that haunting is “an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known.”8 In my view, haunting is a way of seeing inhabited by racialized subjects that is saturated by the unresolved violence of empire, including empires not of our own time. This has at least three implications. First, the aesthetic forms and modalities of display that shape photographic representations of South Asians in diaspora are deeply tied to archives of empire in the United States, South Asia, and Europe. Such histories of the taxonomic documentation and exhibition of racialized and gendered subjects, from the nineteenth through twenty-­first centuries, are central to how we understand the form and content of contemporary diasporic visual culture. Second, for racialized immigrant viewers who want to see more fulfilling, authentic, and restorative forms of aesthetic representation, our very desire for such artworks emerges out of our intimate familiarity with another set of images: those that debase, degrade, and dehumanize racialized subjects. In this context, what we want to see is deeply forged by INTRODUCTION

what we already know as images of ourselves. Third, attending to viewers’ complex affective responses, I demonstrate how viewer experiences are structured by the exhibition of these works, and specifically by curatorial narratives and institutional frameworks that emphasize the visibility and authenticity of racialized subjects. In museum settings across North America, such curatorial projects frequently come at the cost of representing other minoritized subjects, including indigenous peoples and communities. The ways in which we see South Asian diasporic visual cultures are also haunted by the rising prominence of contemporary art from South Asia, artworks that reflect and contest nationalist narratives of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. The years that frame this book, 2005 – 2018, are marked by the profuse production and circulation of fine art by South Asian diasporic artists, but also by the mobilization of South Asian fine art as a currency of global exchange by the Indian and Pakistani states. Since the late 1980s, several South Asian diasporic artist/activist collectives in the U.S. have organized film festivals, conferences, and exhibitions: first as a progressive expression of queer diasporic identity and community and then, after September 11, 2001, as a means of resisting public narratives of South Asians and Muslim Americans as terrorists and as noncitizens. As I have argued previously, these art/activist festivals were integral to establishing a South Asian diasporic public culture in North America, and became sites where first-­and second-­generation immigrants embodied transnational forms of locality as South Asians.9 At the same time, such exhibitions of diasporic art have been supplanted in the past decade by the rapid growth of commercial galleries, biennales, and major museum shows dedicated to contemporary art from South Asia.10 In these latter contexts, fine art — including painting, sculpture, and video installations, but most specifically photography for its relatively low cost and its aesthetic of mimetic reproduction — indexed the rising cultural and capital value of South Asia and its citizen-­subjects.11 For example, at the Queens Museum in 2005, Fatal Love ran concurrently with another exhibition titled Edge of Desire: Recent Art from India. While Fatal Love was framed as a local exhibition showcasing artwork by and about South Asian immigrants, Edge of Desire, in partnership with the prestigious Asia Society Museum in Manhattan, featured sculpture, painting, and photography by India’s most prominent modern and contemporary artists, using art to display the expansive reach of a global India at the turn of the twenty-­fi rst century.12 For South Asian AmeriTHE WORK OF SEEING

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can viewers who came to the Queens Museum to see Fatal Love, their prospective engagement with diasporic visual culture came belatedly, as seeing those artworks required first walking through the sprawling visual display of Edge of Desire that dominated the museum space. Our representation as a heterogeneous group of immigrants in the former show thus meant contending with our erasure — as diasporic artists and as diasporic viewers — from the nationalist narrative of the latter. But by 2017, Jaishri Abichandani, who had curated Fatal Love, curated a major exhibition of South Asian diasporic art titled Lucid Dreams and Distant Visions, this time at the Asia Society Museum, precisely where Edge of Desire had originated.13 At an opening weekend conference sponsored by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, South Asian American artists and academics were invited to reflect on the relationship between Fatal Love and Lucid Dreams and Distant Visions.14 In the intervening years, many of the artists had achieved global prominence; the Queens Museum, once viewed as a remote outer-­borough museum, had undergone a striking $69 million renovation, doubling in size; and several of the original participants in Fatal Love had gone on to establish careers as cultural critics, queer theorists, and art historians.15 In many ways, the last decade has seen the arrival of South Asian diasporic art and artists, 10

as well as a vibrant body of scholarship on South Asian diasporic visual cultures. Yet the question of representation in diaspora — what it means to create an aesthetic object that captures who we are as racialized immigrants and, equally, what it means to see ourselves reflected in these objects — remains unresolved, for the very ways in which diasporic visual cultures are curated and exhibited continue to be in relation to nationalist frameworks of collecting, displaying, and consuming art. As a South Asian diasporic viewer whose own subjectivity is forged in relation to aesthetic representations of racialized and gendered subjects, I take seriously the desire for visual representation of and by minoritized subjects in the public sphere. But I also work with the knowledge that representation is not enough. Even as diasporic viewers, curators, and artists approach the photographic image as if it makes visible the reality of their lived experience, we already know that the image itself cannot substitute for the absence of public documentation and acknowledgment of our lives. Our sense of loss, which anticipates our desire to see ourselves made whole through the image, is generated by the necessarily incomplete fact of representation. Even as the photograph promises mimetic reflection, it is also an aesthetic object that can betray our desire to INTRODUCTION

be represented. Whether it is the archival histories that are resurrected by the photographic image, or the curatorial narratives that frame the photographic object, or the exhibition spaces that shape its display, the photograph can fail to represent us. Such a failure to see ourselves is particularly acute when the photograph on display evokes archival images that are far removed from the viewers’ own experience. Matthew’s digital fabrication of archival snapshots, for instance, initially appeared to model the contents of my own family albums. Yet when I was finally able to see the same photographs in relation to the narrative imprinted onto the work itself, I realized that the installation could no longer accommodate or affirm my desire to be represented within its images. Each of my encounters with Fabricated Memories, first at the Queens Museum and then at the Royal Ontario Museum, produced a relation with the photograph that grew further and further estranged, such that a photographic image that initially appeared to offer a documentation of the self eventually became a visual object that abjured my desire for representation. My repeated attempts to see myself in the visual object refracted against the surface of the photograph, which no longer remained a mirror object — instead, the photograph rejected and evaded my desire for identification. To encounter a partial, fragmentary, and incomplete visual document of the racialized self means that we must also be able to inhabit another way of seeing, what I call a nonmimetic identification with the photographic image.16 Creating archives of diaspora not out of images from the past but through alternate frameworks of exhibition and affective engagement, nonmimetic identification takes many forms. It includes creating curatorial narratives that reject encyclopedic displays of racialized communities; displaying and consuming photograph-­based works that foreground material objects rather than immigrant subjects; and developing practices of seeing that look elsewhere, outside the colonial archives that shape our very desire to see ourselves. Such nonmimetic ways of seeing can produce narratives of diasporic selfhood and community that are unexpected, even dissatisfying. But the practice of moving away from a desire for mimetic identification acknowledges that the problem of representation cannot be resolved through the greater visibility of the racialized subject, whether in the context of an art exhibition or in the public sphere at large. Instead, we come to recognize how representation itself is constituted by colonial histories of documentation and surveillance, which inflect the aesthetic practices of those artists who create THE WORK OF SEEING

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photograph-­based images of South Asians in America, as well as the ways in which South Asian diasporic viewers see and claim such representations. For the diasporic viewer who comes close to the photograph to see her own reflection, our nonmimetic identification with the image re­ directs us, instead, to confront the limits of representation.

S E E I N G B E Y O N D T H E N AT I O N

The photograph, as Lisa Lowe presciently notes, is “an object of cathexis that is born out of displacement and hardship.” 17 But as a visual text, photography is not simply one of many available forms of representation for diasporic subjects. Instead, the photograph is what queer theorist David Eng calls the “privileged archival document of the modern era,” an aesthetic form that comes to stand in for the material fact of representation.18 The historical and contemporary photograph can be used to constitute an archive of the self, especially when other forms of legal and visual documentation (such as administrative records, paintings, and artifacts) are unavailable or inaccessible. For diasporic viewers like myself, photographic images become our archival texts, even as our response to such images is informed by past experience with other taxonomic collec12

tions of photography. These other image archives, from the nineteenth century to the present, document histories of racial oppression, such that the very presence of a racialized subject within the archival image becomes a measure of human viability. Black visual studies scholar Leigh Raiford suggests that photography is a dominant cultural form in diaspora: “Photography’s capacity to build or envision community across geographical location, its capacity to engage its viewers on both critical and expressive or emotional registers, would seem well-­suited to just this sort of mobilization. . . . We can begin to uncover how photography can shape diasporic imaginings of the individual and collective self, to trace ‘the relationship between visual affect and transnational effect.’ ”19 Photography thus becomes a genealogical document of diasporic community, one that displays how the racialized subject — and, by extension, the self who identifies with this visual subject — is enumerated and codified within and outside the nation. The promise of representation offered by photography means that it is through the visuality of the image that we can begin to think of ourselves as full citizen-­subjects: that is, the aesthetics of visuality is how we consider the possibility that our subjugation as racialized, gendered, and INTRODUCTION

sexualized subjects can be lifted. As such, photography is not just a form of racial representation but also a mode of racial restitution. In Unruly Visions, Gayatri Gopinath contends that visual representations of race, gender, and sexuality are how diasporic subjects make sense of our place in the world, or how we come to know ourselves. When Gopinath encounters an archival image of a young Lebanese person from the 1950s at an art exhibition, she immediately sutures the subject of that photograph to her own moving recollection of the “femme aesthetic of the young queers of color I remember seeing . . . during my young adulthood in New York City,” a memory that sharply diverges, in terms of both place and time, from the archival context where the image was first found. 20 Such intimate acts of affective identification with the photograph, despite the visible differences between the viewer and the photographic subject that are indexed within the image itself, demonstrate how keenly diasporic subjects turn toward the photograph as an archive of our own lives. Photography is the aesthetic object that, precisely for its mimetic qualities, we produce and consume to see ourselves represented: in better and less painful ways, in forms and styles that authenticate our lived experience. 21 As racialized immigrants who desire to see ourselves represented in the public sphere, the photograph becomes the object of our desire and demand.

13

Here I am indebted to the expansive imagination of Black feminist visual cultural theorists, whose scholarship on a range of photographic matter — portraits of enslaved and free subjects, family albums, discarded studio prints, contemporary fine art, and photojournalism — has shaped the material, archival, and affective configurations of how we see the relation between race and representation. Scholars including Tina Campt, Kimberly Juanita Brown, and Nicole Fleetwood have traced the shifting configurations of Blackness as a lived and representational experience from the late nineteenth through the twenty-­first centuries, via the production and consumption of photographic texts. 22 The photograph, in their hands, becomes the material object through which we understand how race is embodied, performed, refracted, and contested. I expand on their work by examining how and why photography matters to South Asian Americans, whose different experiences of racialization — as postcolonial and as immigrant subjects — reconfigure forms of diasporic visuality. What Campt defines as the “shifting sensory and affective relations that structure the dynamics of viewing and being viewed” is central to how I understand the intimate social and political relations of idenTHE WORK OF SEEING

tity that are forged between immigrant viewers and photographic images that document the visual and material density of race.23 Instead of recuperating documentary and fine art photography as texts that make visible the lived experience of racialized subjects, however, I suggest that the act of excavating photographic material from colonial archives, and seeing contemporary re-­presentations of these imperial images, exhumes something more disconcerting: the fact that we are haunted by the images we gather to affirm ourselves. Seeing photographs of those who are racially codified as South Asian engenders a complex set of affective responses. On the one hand, such images elicit my desire to produce an affirmative correlation between the image that I see and the person I am, as if photographs of South Asians that are distant from my own specific experience of immigration are part of a family album. My consumption of these photographic images becomes akin to an expression of kinship, as with my responses to Matthew’s installation of Fabricated Memories at the Queens Museum. Such “affective correspondences,” Eng notes, “provide the means of (re)connecting disconnected words and things through unexpected pairings, unconscious links through which identity and history might come to be refined in psychic and social life.”24 These “unexpected pairings” include 14

what I describe as the intimacy produced between viewer and artist, both of whom identify as diasporic subjects in relation to the artwork. On the other hand, concurrent to such affirmations of racial identity and community runs a feeling of deep shame, a shame that emerges out of sighting the racialized self (inside/outside the photographic print), and an embarrassing sense that I have claimed this photograph out of a paucity of archival images through which I can render my own history. That sense of shame, in turn, prompts me to search for an alternate genealogy of representation, one that does not hinge on the subjection of my body and of bodies like mine but recuperates, instead, photographic documentation of self-­actualization. This was my experience in the Royal Ontario Museum, where I saw the distance between my imagined memories of childhood and Matthew’s, and where I also recognized to my horror that I had claimed Matthew’s fabricated photographs as my own in the absence of historical narratives and images that documented my family’s trajectory of migration. And yet to search for another image of representation is to confront failure, to come to terms with the knowledge that there is no other set of images that can adequately capture my desire to be something or someone else. INTRODUCTION

What as minoritized viewers we consistently confront, despite our attempts to procure different and better representations, is the failure of the visual image to restore a sense of selfhood to ourselves. Images of racialized subjects, whether in photography or other forms of visual media such as film and television, fail to provide more than a partial, fleeting glimpse of affective kinship, and so we tend to look at such images constantly, even obsessively. In our desire to make representation matter, we take the accumulated fact of racial representation as “a sign of success and progress,” even when the affective relations we craft to such images leave us feeling lacking, or wanting more. 25 In critiquing the visual image for its inability to produce a constant vision of the racialized subject, we locate the site of failure within the image (the limits of the photographer’s gaze, the visible objectification of the racialized subject), or in the modes of production and consumption that shape how these images circulate (in mainstream media or in commercial galleries, online or underground).26 But what we think is the failure of the image is in fact an indictment of the very apparatus of representation itself. As Jack Halberstam has proposed, failure is more than the mark of being unsuccessful. Instead, it is “a way of refusing to acquiesce to dominant logics of power and discipline and as a form of critique.”27 To contend with the failure of the image, therefore, is to come to terms with the breakdown of the technology, modes, and purpose of representation itself. Indeed, it is the very fact that we must be represented (in this form, in this framework, through this visual rhetoric) that is the problem. Even as we already know this, as racialized subjects we continue to participate in the production of visual culture that makes ourselves matter — as a figurative body and as a material presence — again and again. We look for images that either grant us a sense of subjectivity or allow us to read existing visual archives differently, to route through our collective consumption of the image a different narrative of the self. Yet it is also worth dwelling on images that fail to do so, that produce affective encounters that are uneasy, uncomfortable, or difficult to forget. For failure — a long with its accomplices, “losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing” — offers us what Halberstam calls “more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.”28 By emphasizing the failure of the image, and by extension the failure of the project of representation, in no way do I want to deny the need for representation in diasporic communities. Stuart Hall reminds us that “it THE WORK OF SEEING

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is only through the way in which we represent and imagine ourselves that we come to know how we are constituted and who we are. There is no escape from the politics of representation.”29 Representation is vital to minoritized subjects who imagine themselves, through the production, consumption, and dissemination of visual culture, as full human beings. What I am emphasizing is Hall’s critique of our desire for new, better, or more authentic forms of representation. For racialized immigrants, representation is an obsessive desire, one that we cannot do without. It is through representation in state and national archives that we can see ourselves as a people with a past, and it is also through visual representation that we respond to the state’s demand to identify ourselves. For South Asian Americans in particular, representation is how we come to terms with the fragmentary evidence of our past in the British colonial archive, and it is how we craft who we are within the racial logic of the U.S. state. But what happens when representation begins to break down, erode, or haunt? How might our attraction to visual representations of race be subverted, challenged, or rejected? Building on the work of transnational feminist and queer scholars, I demonstrate how our acts of nonmimetic identification with the visual image, our ability to court a failure of representation, is one way that, as 16

racialized and gendered immigrant subjects, we can refuse to inhabit the dominant modes of identification that are demanded of us by the neoliberal state. 30 I argue for ways of seeing visual representations of diaspora that build on what Chuh describes as “social formations characterized by neither identity nor consensus, and instead by not only shared recognition and apprehension of the damage resulting from such potent fictions, but also a fundamental refusal to be defined or disciplined by them.”31 The acts of nonmimetic identification that I delineate are one way in which we can embody ways of seeing that refuse to be “defined or disciplined” by dominant social formations of race and by the fiction of identity.

WORK ING IN T HE COLONIA L A RCHIV E

I argue in this book that the very desire for representation in our contemporary moment is haunted by imperial ways of seeing. Such haunting is directly evoked by the colonial and settler colonial photography that is incorporated within the artworks that I discuss, which includes late nineteenth-­century photography of indigenous peoples on the subcontiINTRODUCTION

nent, early twentieth-­century portraits of Native peoples, and landscape photography commemorating British rule in South Asia. Encompassing a range of aesthetic styles, these images are sourced from national as well as familial archives and are shaped by what Mary Louise Pratt called “the imperial eye.”32 Yet the colonial gaze that structures these photographic images is neither identical, nor total, nor static. What distinguishes, for example, nineteenth-­century British photographs of indigenous subjects in South Asia from twentieth-­century settler colonial portraiture of indigenous peoples across the Americas are the disparate contexts of empire that shape histories of photographic production and consumption. Photography was a critical tool for the formalization of British administrative rule on the subcontinent in the latter half of the nineteenth century, as military, government, and commercial photographers documented populations that were always in excess, always beyond the camera’s grasp. By contrast, the privately funded endeavors of photographers like Curtis were central to the expansion of U.S. empire in the early twentieth century. Curtis’s documentation of Native peoples in elegiac prints rendered entire populations out of time, as if their very presence in the photograph constituted the fact of their demise in the archive. Even as the camera, in the hands of colonial and settler colonial photographers, documented the presence of “native” lives, in India these lives were in excess of the state’s control, and in the United States indigenous subjects were violently eliminated from representative portraits of modern citizens. As Lowe shows us, reading across diverse imperial archives “unsettles the discretely bounded objects, methods, and temporal frameworks canonized by a national history.”33 For viewers of South Asian diasporic visual culture, the very means by which we can see ourselves in representations of racialized immigrants is through our consumption of multiple image archives: in South Asia, the U.S., and Europe, across the nineteenth century and into the present. Yet instead of operating “as a site of recovery and legitimacy,” the colonial archive itself is an epistemological formation of empire, a repository as well as a site for the display of photographic images that remain volatile for the artist and for the viewer. 34 Reflecting on the accumulation of written documents held in the metropolitan archives of former imperial powers, Ann Laura Stoler notes that archives “are records of uncertainty and doubt in how people imagined they could and might make the rubrics of rule correspond with a changing imperial world.”35 To think of the archive not as a collection of imTHE WORK OF SEEING

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ages and documents that hold certain power, but rather as a corpus with a “pulse,” belies the facticity of the image. 36 More important, it helps us to understand in what ways archival images work to shape which photographs appear to visually document racial difference; why we remember certain forms of visual representation; and how we carry forward elements from our experience with the archival image — a certain look, an arrangement of objects — as we identify with contemporary visual representations of ourselves. The imperial archive, in other words, is never singular, nor can it contain the images and documents that compose it. 37 Instead, through the act of seeing, images from the archive reverberate through their circulation and accumulation, producing meanings that shift, move, and always remain unstable. Framed by the diverse uses of photographic technology in colonial and settler colonial states, archival photographic images carry an acute burden of representation for viewers who themselves identify as racialized subjects. Viewed as an ethnographic document or a family portrait, collected as a souvenir, or held as an image on a postcard, the colonial photograph occupies multiple registers of representation. 38 Once singularly denounced as a manifestation of imperialist ideology, the colonial archival photograph has become, through the work of feminist visual 18

studies scholars, a representation of anticolonial nationalism and feminist agency; and a means of rethinking visualizations of race, gender, and sexuality. 39 Writing on early twentieth-­century tourist photographs in the Caribbean, Krista Thompson has argued that the legacy of colonial photographs is central to “how local audiences imagine, represent, and define as representative their contemporary societies and histories.”40 Thompson’s emphasis on how British imperial photography continues to shape the ways in which “local audiences” view their own histories importantly draws attention to acts of consumption. I expand upon this body of work by delineating how images from the imperial archive circulate and are consumed transnationally, through the production of contemporary fine art by diasporic artists, as well as through the viewing practices of diasporic subjects. That the archive is an affective as well as epistemological formation of empire is manifest in the works of the artists I discuss, each of whom deploys and disrupts photographs from a wide variety of national, familial, colonial, and settler ­colonial archival repositories. Instead of being deployed as images of historical reference or creative inspiration, archival prints surface in their work as reproductions: as duplications, as forgery, INTRODUCTION

and as alterations. Using landscape and portrait images to create representations of South Asian Americans, Matthew, Shah, and Gill create image effects that are at times illegible: spectral negatives, ghostly marks, uncanny reproductions. In these artists’ hands, the archival photograph is never an intact object with an undisturbed history. Instead, through their work, photography’s mimetic relation to the past is already revealed as a fiction. In her large-­scale architectural drawings (chapter 1), the artist Seher Shah inverts and reconfigures early twentieth-­century photography of imperial monuments to British rule on the subcontinent to evoke the landscape of U.S. empire after September 11, 2001. The uses of photography as a tool of empire also emerges through my readings of Matthew’s work (chapter 2), which demonstrates how settler colonial photography of Native peoples is bound to colonial survey photography of “tribes” and “natives” on the subcontinent; and how, in turn, the colonial visual documentation of Indians in India becomes a palimpsest for the racial profiling of South Asians in America today. I emphasize that colonial and settler colonial photographic imagery filters into the act of producing representations of South Asian Americans not simply as a referential picture archive but as a method of documenting racial difference and racial presence. The circulation of archival images across these and other artworks generates alternate modes of looking at and identifying with visual representations of South Asian diasporas, ways of seeing that rupture dominant readings of photography as a representative text of the nation. The imperial archive also surfaces at museum sites and through curatorial narratives that structure how viewers consume photographic prints. At Beyond Bollywood, an exhibition held at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC (chapter 3), I demonstrate how family photographs and personal objects were crowdsourced and displayed alongside objects from the Smithsonian’s own collection to create a visual narrative of South Asian America. These images, in turn, were exhibited inside a natural history museum that itself functioned as an archive for the display of colonized peoples, animals, flora, and fauna. In contrast to artists like Fred Wilson who have practiced “mining the museum” as a means to excavate histories of race and racism within the museum and its collection of objects, here the curators located the representational project of a single immigrant community within the representational system of the imperial museum.41 In this THE WORK OF SEEING

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way, the archival project of Beyond Bollywood determined not only which South Asian Americans were represented, but also how these representations were displayed and consumed as objects. In addition to identifying how the archive becomes visible through practices of photographic circulation and consumption, I am also drawn to the archive as a site of feeling. Building on the work of queer scholars who have argued for feeling in the archive, I narrate my own affective encounter with each artwork, as a viewer who is racialized in relation to the images she sees.42 In my reading of the artist Gauri Gill’s photographic series The Americans (chapter 4), I delineate the intimate sense of community that South Asian diasporic viewers forge in relation to the prints, with each other, and with the artist at exhibition sites across South Asia and North America. For racialized subjects who encounter these prints and see themselves named as Americans, viewing Gill’s work is a powerful act of identification: a means of memorializing “the minor histories (personal, familial, collective, regional) that stand outside of official nation-­ centered narratives.”43 However, it is precisely through the feelings of proximity that the series generates — v ia the intimate connection between the viewer and the image, between the artist and the archive, between one photograph of South Asians in America and another — that The Americans 20

comes to stand in for the very community it aspires to represent. For South Asian American artists as well as viewers, diasporic mimesis is central to how we make sense of our experience in and with the imperial archive. For artists, their work in the archives produces associative linkages between colonial epistemologies that define the representation of archival photographic subjects, and our current political moment that generates its own desires for representation on the part of racialized subjects. As viewers, our immersion in the photographic images produced by diasporic artists binds together a diverse set of temporalities as well as spatialities. These include the time of seeing the photographic image within the artwork, the time recalled by the alternate image archives that we remember when we see the artwork, and the institutional and social histories of the museum sites where we encounter the work. Diasporic mimesis is how artists and viewers construct relational identities to the archival image, but such identifications are haunted by visual histories of empire across three continents. We cannot make our way toward creating or consuming new forms of representation unless we contend with the multiplicity of imperial frameworks that haunt what we see, and how we desire what we see. INTRODUCTION

M A K I N G E M P I R E V I S IB L E

As a scholar of Asian American studies and postcolonial studies, the intimacy of feeling that ties me to South Asian American art is central to my understanding of how visual histories of empire map onto our present experience of racialization. The problem lies in making these imperial genealogies visible through the aesthetic object, especially when that object is recuperated as a figurative representation of South Asian immigrants in the United States. For Asian Americanists, the work of representation is tied up with a politics of racial visibility: an epistemological orientation toward the revelation of minoritized subjects in the public sphere. Exhibitions of Asian American art from the 1990s to the present have consistently been framed by curatorial arguments about aesthetic form and value, but also contend with popular and scholarly views on the utility of Asian American art as a form of visible representation: of an immigrant group, of a minoritized subject, of the artists themselves.44 That is, even as we critique particular aesthetic modes of representation as failures, as Asian Americanists we continue to be invested in each of these representational forms as a means of creating a vision of ourselves. The persistence of visibility as rhetoric for the political objective of securing equal rights and representation inflects the arguments made for, against, and in relation to Asian American visual culture.

45

As Elaine

Kim has presciently argued, “The questions of who can make art and what can be seen remain as important as ever in an American art world where whiteness remains unmarked and Asian American artists are still seen as not American.”46 Such questions of identity gave rise to local exhibitions like Fatal Love at the Queens Museum, and, over a decade later, the same questions — who makes art, whose art is exhibited, who comes to see it, and what such exhibitions mean — continue to shape public dialogue around contemporary South Asian American art, as was evident at Lucid Dreams, Distant Visions at the Asia Society. But even as the demand for racial representation and visibility in the art world remains pressing for South Asian Americans, among other racialized groups, I am curious about histories of representation that remain outside domestic exhibition frameworks, ways of seeing South Asian diasporic art that move away from the United States as the primary site of aesthetic production and racial meaning. What happens when the artworks that we look at tell us to look elsewhere, to other places and other times? Joining U.S. race and ethnic studies with postcolonial studies of South THE WORK OF SEEING

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Asia, I create a more expansive geographic and historical framework for seeing diasporic visual cultures, one that foregrounds the visual, historical, and political ties that bind the subcontinent to the United States. As I see it, there are two major frameworks through which scholars of Asian American visual culture locate the aesthetic object in relation to narratives of nationhood and empire. On the one hand, Asian American art has consistently been read as symptomatic of the changing racial formation of the United States. Here the visuality of art forms (painting and sculpture, as well as installation and photography) becomes conflated with the visibility of minoritized subjects, such that Asian American visual culture comes to represent the diverse racial, gender, sexual, and class experiences of Asian American immigrant groups, often in direct relation to the artists’ own background.47 Likewise, historians have mobilized Asian American art and artists as an index for the political emergence of Asian American communities, creating teleological narratives that move from the marginalization of early Asian immigrant artists to the global circulation of Asian American visual cultures today.48 By identifying and creating archives of Asian American racial presence in a range of different visual media, these scholars produce narratives of 22

racial visibility for minoritized subjects. Yet in this framework, Asian American visual culture is consistently posited in relation to the national body of the United States; that is, the representative capacities of the aesthetic object to produce narratives of race, gender, sexuality, and class are ultimately consolidated into forms of American citizenship. By contrast, my objective is not to accumulate a better or more diverse series of visual objects that clearly produce immigrant visibility. Instead, it is to unbind visual cultural representations of diaspora from a single national framework of racial representation. On the other hand, cultural studies theorists have argued for the diasporic localities of Asian American visual culture, with particular attention to the expansive parameters of U.S. empire. Linking contemporary narratives of racialization to histories of militarization, conquest, and war in Asia, these scholars draw our attention to aesthetic form (as well as thematic content), and to the experience of consuming visual art (alongside the singular act of producing artwork). For example, Celine Parreñas Shimizu has emphasized the phenomenological experience of race as constituted between viewer and moving image, delineating transnational formations of Asian American subjectivity through movINTRODUCTION

ing images of sex and gender that index U.S. militarism in Southeast and East Asia.49 In the different context of psychoanalysis, David Eng’s readings of Asian American photography and film demonstrate how racial identification is forged through acts of memory, forgetting, and reembodiment that are routed through histories of the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and Japanese American internment that shape Asian immigrant lives. 50 Shifting our gaze from East and Southeast Asia westward toward the Middle East, Ronak Kapadia argues for viewing artworks by diasporic artists — particularly South Asian, Muslim, and Arab American artists — as “a transnational constellation of visual art and aesthetics that together have animated new ways to think, feel, sense and map the world.”51 Moving between Asian American artworks and the exhibitions that frame them, Sarita See elucidates what she calls the “mimetic aesthetic” of contemporary Filipino American art, foregrounding how a focus on artists’ aesthetic processes challenges “the singularity of both the artist-­genius and the art object, and thus reflects on and potentially reshapes the imperial art museum.”52 See’s emphasis on the abstraction practiced by Filipino American artists productively captures the disintegration of U.S. empire and redirects our attention to exhibitionary forms that deny the identification and recuperation of racialized bodies. 53 The curator and critic Susette Min attends to the project of creating Asian American art exhibitions by challenging “the idea of recruiting Asian American artists as agents of representation.”54 Instead, Min delineates modes of reading Asian American art that unbind artists and their works from what she describes as “neoliberal multiculturalism’s deleterious promise of representational visibility.”55 I build on the capacity of Asian American fine art to produce and represent transnational experiences of racialization among Asian Americans, and I am equally compelled by the sociality of the exhibition site, where racialized viewers create horizontal ties of affinity to each other, alongside the vertical relation that viewers craft with artworks on display. But I depart significantly from existing scholarship in Asian American visual cultural studies via my orientation toward South Asia, with its distinct history of colonialism and empire that remains unattached to the United States. Each of the scholarly approaches that I have described, whether narratives of Asian American representation that move from racial invisibility to visibility, or narratives of Asian American visual production and consumption, is anchored in the continental United States and its empires in Southeast and East Asia and the Middle East. In my THE WORK OF SEEING

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view, reconstituting the global parameters of U.S. empire as the proper site for the production and consumption of Asian American art limits what we can see and how we can make meaning out of what we see. Existing frameworks of looking at Asian American art reinforce a narrative of visual exceptionalism, where the U.S. becomes the primary place from which we view artworks, and also the place where these artworks make the most sense. Despite the powerful anticolonial orientations of many scholars, taking the United States as the geographic locus of Asian American art constrains both the methods of analysis for Asian American visual cultural studies and the potential for new narrative forms to emerge out of visual texts. Our work, then, must be to begin elsewhere, to divest the United States of the kind of exceptionalism that Asian Americanist scholars otherwise consistently dismantle. As I construct an alternative genealogy of empire for South Asian American visual culture, I turn to postcolonial visual studies of nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century South Asia. Historians such as Sumathi Ramaswamy and art historians including Saloni Mathur and Kajri Jain show us how a range of visual cultural texts — from national maps to cabinet cards, tourist postcards to chromolithographic prints of religious deities — a re central to the political and social formation of the Indian 24

and Pakistani states. 56 As these scholars, among others, have argued, photographs do not simply represent the state; as a technology of representation, photographs produce and circulate colonial ideologies of nationhood, anticolonial imaginations of the national body, and postcolonial ideologies of modern selfhood. 57 Moving from the project of colonial documentation (“picture-­taking”) to acts of “picture-­making” by subaltern subjects who remake and transform photographic images into representations of their own desires, the anthropologist Christopher Pinney highlights the transformation of photography as a “technical practice,” foregrounding both “the acts of making the photograph and of viewing the image which ensues.”58 In his attention to processes of consumption, Pinney outlines the liberatory possibilities of photography for postcolonial Indians who use the camera to fashion representations of themselves as modern subjects and as national citizens. 59 In contrast, Zahid Chaudhary has demonstrated how the representational apparatus of photography itself is saturated with imperial ways of seeing. Chaudhary’s reading of nineteenth-­century British landscape photography in India demonstrates how by “enframing colonial space as versions of metropolitan spaces,” such forms of photographic documentation “become INTRODUCTION

part and parcel of a colonial will to power and of its missions of improvement that render the colony in the metropole’s image.”60 Returning to many of the portrait and landscape photographic archives that Pinney discusses, Chaudhary narrates instead an anticolonial phenomenology of visual consumption. I take up these readings of South Asian visual culture in order to trace the diverse geographic and political networks through which photography comes to function as a dominant form of representation for South Asian Americans today. We recognize our own likeness in images that draw upon the uses of photography for colonial projects of ethnographic documentation in South Asia, and as a technology of visual surveillance in the United States. As racialized immigrants, our deep familiarity with these disparate regimes of visual documentation means that it is through fine art photography which conjures a likeness to being surveilled that we claim to be represented. I emphasize that what appears to be a mimetic relation between two distinct histories of photography, in South Asia and in the United States, is in fact generated through the aesthetic processes of diasporic artists, as well as through the viewing acts of diasporic subjects: for the experiences of being racialized in colonial South Asia and in the contemporary U.S. are resolutely nonidentical. For diasporic artists, photography’s relation to race and empire in nineteenth-­ century South Asia filters into portraits of South Asian Americans through the postures, gestures, and styles embodied by immigrant subjects. For diasporic viewers, their acute recognition that what it means to be a racialized subject exceeds the veracity of the photographic document links together histories of photography on the subcontinent and in the United States. To be clear, as I align my readings of South Asian diasporic visual culture in relation to the scholarly interventions produced by art historians, curators, and cultural theorists of South Asia, my interest is not in securing South Asia as the proper site of origin for South Asian diasporic visual culture. Nor do I suggest that South Asian diasporic visual culture is derivative of the formal innovations, thematic concerns, and global circulation of contemporary South Asian art. Instead, I suture the act of seeing diasporic visual culture with the ways in which race is linked to empire and nation in Asian American studies and in South Asian studies. Indeed, if Asian American cultural studies is organized by its concern with representations of diasporic subjectivity within the nation, in South Asian studies the location of diaspora is rendered absent through THE WORK OF SEEING

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the expansive domain of the state. We see this in the fact that over the past decade, while South Asian diasporic artists have been celebrated in Asian American art exhibitions devoted to making immigrants public and visible, many of the same artists are excluded from or rendered invisible in major museum shows of contemporary South Asian art, even as South Asian Americans act as funders, donors, reviewers, and museum board members for the same shows.61 The difference that diaspora makes, as an analytic construct for Asian American and South Asian visual cultural studies, is to alert us to the material experience of race and the aesthetic reach of empire across geographic and temporal boundaries. The colonial and settler colonial histories mobilized within fine art works by South Asian diasporic artists — as well as the affective sensation of recalling other, dissimilar imperial image archives on the part of South Asian diasporic viewers — means that representation itself cannot be contained in a single national framework for racial formation. Instead, our vocabularies for representation — what it means to be made visible in a work of art, what it means to see ourselves in the artwork, and how it feels to claim a work of art as our own — must expand to account for the multiple, overlapping imperial histories that shape how South Asian diasporic subjects are racialized. As I consider 26

my own experience with the artworks and exhibition sites that frame this book, I develop a transhistorical reading of South Asian diasporic visual cultures, one that is necessarily triangulated between the legacy of British colonialism, decolonization movements on the subcontinent, and the consolidation of the U.S. as a settler colonial global power. These are the imperial histories that haunt us as South Asian Americans in the early decades of the twenty-­fi rst century, and these are the legacies of representation that shape how we produce, circulate, and consume South Asian diasporic art.

C U R AT IN G U NS EEIN G EM PI R E

In the years since Fatal Love, I have participated as a viewer and critic at over 130 displays of art by South Asian diasporic artists, in cities including New Delhi, New York, Mumbai, Toronto, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, Kochi, and Washington, DC. I engaged with solo and group exhibitions specifically focused on South Asian American art, as well as with major survey shows of Asian American art and large-­scale exhibitions of modern and contemporary Indian and Pakistani art. The sites of INTRODUCTION

my research encompassed commercial and nonprofit galleries; local and national museums; biennales; artist talks; curator lectures; studio visits; community forums; educational programming associated with large museum shows; fine art auctions; and conversations with gallery owners, dealers, collectors, and art advisors. As my field of ethnographic research broadened, I increasingly became compelled by curation as a scholarly and pedagogical practice. In 2010 I trained in curatorial theory and practice with Independent Curators International, a nonprofit organization based in New York, and in 2015 I curated my own show of contemporary South Asian photography at a gallery in Philadelphia, an experience that I discuss in the epilogue.62 Curation — which I understand as a material practice (the organized display of visual cultural works) and as a theory of experience (the experience of viewing and interacting with objects in space) — is essential to how viewers, paraphrasing feminist scholars Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu, “feel photography,” in addition to seeing photography.63 Curation mediates the relation between the art object and the viewer, both as a regime of organized spatial experience within the museum and as a narrative framework that shapes public interpretation of works of art. Curation structures the display of artworks and the viewer’s proximity to the image, and determines the order, number, and kind of images that the viewer sees. However, viewers also intervene in carefully planned curatorial experiences by entering and exiting the gallery at will; walking through other sections of the museum and making unexpected cross connections; and by uploading images, commenting on and critiquing their own experiences in print and over social media. As racialized immigrant viewers incorporate art objects into their worldview, their feelings toward the aesthetic object exceed, disrupt, and shift the representational framework of the exhibition. In this sense, Unseeing Empire is also a curatorial enterprise. I discuss a series of artworks by a select number of South Asian women artists, but these artists do not stand in for the field of South Asian diasporic visual culture as a whole. Likewise, while I read the artists’ archival interventions as feminist practice and highlight how their works represent South Asian diasporic subjectivities and communities, the artists themselves do not always self-­identify as South Asian, or as diasporic subjects, or as feminists. Because I also situate my readings of artworks in relation to archival image collections that are far removed from those that the artists themselves work in, I generate ways of seeing that are distinct from THE WORK OF SEEING

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artists’ statements about their work, and that are centered in my experience as a viewer. In my orientation toward curation as a way of seeing and writing about South Asian diasporic visual culture, I take seriously what Min describes as “the ethicopolitical task of the curator and the scholar,” namely, “the ability to learn how to hear the call of the other in and through one’s encounter with art — to be attentive and present to the ways these artists create otherly worlds that enable us to see our world differently.”64 Across the diverse photographic texts and archives I bring into view, my objective as a scholar is to curate an experience of seeing that moves between readings of aesthetic form and artistic technique, historical analyses of contemporary and archival images, and an ethnographic study of the display and consumption of art. But as a curator of these artists, my own investment in the project of seeing South Asian diasporic visual culture occurs on another register, perhaps a more personal one. It is because I take seriously our desire, as racialized diasporic subjects, to see ourselves represented that I bring together the artworks in this book. The work of the curator, in my view, is also to produce through the artworks on display a sense of community. Community emerges in the glances that viewers direct toward the artworks, toward the galleries where these works are shown, and toward viewers who share 28

the space of seeing with them. However fleeting or fragile that sense of community may be, the feeling of belonging to works of art that represent one’s own subjectivity — and to those who may be sharing that experience in the same space — is real and powerful. Curatorial practice becomes central to understanding why we insist on identifying with artworks as a mimetic reflection of our lives, and why our desire for visual representation and visible communities persists, even when the work of developing nonmimetic modes of seeing remains vital and necessary. I begin in chapter 1 by delineating how, as racialized immigrant subjects, we are haunted by empire through our desire to identify with the photographic image. Theorizing diasporic mimesis as a relational practice enacted between artist and viewer in relation to the artwork, I focus on a single large-­scale drawing, Seher Shah’s Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force. In this work Shah reproduces early twentieth-­ century photographs depicting the elaborate ceremonies held to commemorate the formalization of British imperial rule on the subcontinent. Nesting these photographs of palatial monuments and vast military parade grounds within a hand-­drawn landscape of her own creation, Shah creates skyscrapers and monuments to war that mirror the architecture INTRODUCTION

of the European and American cities in which she has lived. In my first encounter with this drawing in New Delhi, I grasped the archival photographic reproductions as a representation of colonial South Asia, a recognition that enabled me to identify in turn as South Asian. Yet months later, encountering Geometric Landscapes in New York City, I was overcome by the uncanny feeling that the drawing evoked another archive of images: the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and the ongoing decimation of human lives by the U.S. military in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the aftermath of that event. As I recall this alternate set of image archives, the temporal scope of empire becomes unmoored from a set of duplicated archival images and extends, instead, into the time and place that we inhabit now. Such archives of empire are also a primary space for diasporic self-­ representation, as I argue in chapter 2. Moving from landscape to portrait images, I examine Annu Palakunnathu Matthew’s series, An Indian from India. Reproducing Edward Curtis’s elegiac photographs of Native peoples alongside her own self-­portraits, which duplicate the costumes, postures, and captions of the archival images, Matthew’s diptychs initially appear to replace the indigenous with the immigrant subject. I contend instead that the series makes visible the contentious relation between two imperial projects of representation: nineteenth-­century British photographic documentation of Indians in India, and a U.S. settler colonial project on what Curtis called a “vanishing race.” Seeing Matthew’s and Curtis’s works alongside each other recalls earlier colonial photographic publications such as The People of India (1868), which sought to enumerate and classify indigenous tribes as well as caste and religious groups for the British imperial administration. Such imperial projects of photographic surveillance in South Asia are uncannily similar to Curtis’s project of documenting indigenous communities and peoples: not simply in terms of aesthetic form or style, but more precisely in terms of administrative scope and scale. In turn, colonial and settler colonial photographic technologies precede and precipitate the mass biometric surveillance of South Asians and Muslim Americans in the United States today. As I name these mimetic convergences across a transnational set of imperial photographic archives, I demonstrate how empire continues to haunt how we see Matthew’s work on display. At the Royal Ontario Museum, An Indian from India was exhibited in close proximity to original photographic prints from Curtis’s collection, but kept at a spatial and narrative remove from the museum’s long-­standing representation THE WORK OF SEEING

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of First Nations peoples as images and as objects in its permanent collection. As much as I desired to identify with Matthew’s representations of what it means to be South Asian American, within the museum such acts of racial identification are made impossible by curatorial projects that attempt to define who and what we know as an “Indian,” and that effectively displace those indigenous subjects whose visual representations occupied the same name. In chapter 3 I expand upon the effect of seeing colonial technologies of representation in the contemporary museum. Beyond Bollywood: Indian Americans Shape the Nation, an exhibition held at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, was the first national exhibition about a single Asian immigrant community to be staged at the Smithsonian Institution, and was curated as well as funded primarily by South Asian Americans. Bringing together family photos and archival documentary images, as well as photo-­based artworks, Beyond Bollywood created a sweeping visual narrative of immigration from the subcontinent to the United States. Foregrounding our investments as racialized immigrant subjects and as viewers in museological narratives of representation and display, I argue for the limits of visibility as a representational form of Asian American politics. Through site-­specific eth30

nography and close readings of installations, I reflect on what it means for South Asian Americans to see representations of ourselves as agents of our own history and as objects on view. What I describe as the abject feelings that result from these acts of diasporic mimesis are amplified by the institutional legacies of the natural history museum, which functions as a repository for the display of racialized bodies in the nation’s capital. As we encounter photographic images of ourselves at the Smithsonian, our subjection to colonial histories of representation is redoubled, for the museum itself operates as an imperial space of display. Seeing photographs of South Asian Americans, we feel not only exuberance and pride at the upwardly mobile immigrant narrative mapped by the photographs, but also shame, anxiety, and loss — feelings that lend themselves to new ways of thinking through the relation between visuality and racial identity. In chapter 4, I create a pathway out of archives of empire by delineating nonmimetic forms of identifying with the photographic image. In her photographic series The Americans, the artist Gauri Gill trains her camera on South Asian Americans ranging from engineers in Silicon Valley and lobbyists on Capitol Hill to shift workers in restaurant kitchens INTRODUCTION

and factory sites, creating a heterogeneous portrait of South Asian immigrants in the early twenty-­first century. Circulating through galleries in Mumbai, New Delhi, Chicago, and New York, for large numbers of South Asian diasporic viewers The Americans is an aspirational collection, one that reflects their own desire to belong. At first glance, the collection appears to mimetically reference the scale and scope of the photographer Robert Frank’s iconic 1958 series, also titled The Americans. Yet rather than reproduce thematic or formal elements from Frank’s series, which documents changing domestic configurations of race and class at a time when the U.S. was expanding its imperialist ambitions abroad, Gill’s diptychs and triptychs refract our gaze. In photographic compositions that are fragmented and mirrored, that obscure the photographer as much as the immigrant subjects she photographs, I see Gill’s The Americans as a series of images that refuse to grant us representation. In this refusal, I link Gill’s collection with that of photographers Sunil Gupta and Pablo Bartholomew to create what I call an archive of diaspora, a partial and incomplete documentation of what it means to be living, working, and feeling in diaspora today. Such archives of diaspora compel us to develop nonmimetic ways of seeing that shift our gaze from immigrant subjects to material objects within the prints, and that circumvent exhibitionary narratives that rely on the ethnographic display of South Asian immigrants. To identify as Americans, in this instance, is to loosen our claims to representation. For South Asian diasporic viewers and artists, our desire to see ourselves is central to how we make sense of who we are. As racialized immigrants, our collective experiences have been eroded from the visual domain of the state, and so we take it upon ourselves to rehabilitate our own image. As we craft and lay claim to photographic representations of diaspora, the practice of diasporic mimesis enables us to feel affirmed in relation to the image, resolving the conditions of visibility within the aesthetic parameters of the photograph and the exhibition. But the very experience of being made visible, however complete it may make us feel, is structured through colonial and postcolonial regimes of surveillance. Working toward nonmimetic ways of seeing, on the other hand, means that we turn away from feelings of belonging and contend, instead, with the failure of representation. As we come to terms with the possibility that there is no single image that can capture who we are, we remain in the time and space of haunting.

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one UNCANNY FEELINGS Diasporic Mimesis in Seher Shah’s Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force

We are haunted by somethings we have been involved in, even if they appear foreign, alien, far away, doubly other.  — Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

I

n her large-­scale drawing Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force, the artist Seher Shah reproduces archival photographs to de-

lineate a fantastical vision of the past and of the future (see plates 2 – 4). A series of landscape photographs taken in the early years of the twentieth century dominates the center line of the drawing: these images document the elaborate architectural monuments that marked the Delhi Durbars, the public ceremonies held in 1903 and again in 1911 to commemorate the coronation of the British king and queen as emperor and empress of India.1 The photographs record massive ornamental canopies, a neoclassical amphitheater, and military parade grounds. Appearing as reverse negative prints, a ghostly white on black, the images multiply rapidly: replicated right side up and upside down, the monuments become mirror images within the print. Creating a strong horizontal line, more photographic reproductions emerge: silhouetted images of cavalrymen holding flags, troops standing at attention, a lone turbaned soldier floating on the lower foreground of the drawing. Alongside these duplicated images, Shah draws structures of her own imagination: skyscrapers, pillars adorned with winged creatures, obelisks, and minarets. On the far left of the drawing is another hand-­d rawn creation, a tall building with crescent-­shaped gashes ripping through it, as well as a flat structure covered in stripes. In the background, intricate geometric pat-

terns expand and contract in great waves that ripple across the entire canvas. Creating her own powerful monuments in relation to the architectural forms that manifest British rule on the subcontinent, Geometric Landscapes produces a spectral landscape of imperial violence that binds together colonial South Asia with the United States in the twenty-­fi rst century. But the experience of seeing Shah’s work also generates something else: a feeling of empire, an uneasy sensation of being suffused by what I had thought was the photographic representation of a past time. I first encountered Shah’s art in 2009 at her solo show, From Paper to Monument, at Nature Morte Gallery in New Delhi. 2 Born in Pakistan, raised in Brussels and London, and at the time based in Brooklyn, Shah was already an acclaimed artist with exhibitions in New York, Paris, Dubai, and Sydney. She trained as an architect at the Rhode Island School of Design, and Shah’s practice includes drawing and sculpture, as well as collaborative projects with the photographer Randhir Singh. 3 In the mid-­ 2000s Shah’s drawings were frequently exhibited as an example of contemporary art that deploys “signs and symbols from Islamic cultures,” or in relation to her own presumed identity as a “Pakistani-­A merican, American, South Asian, Muslim” artist.4 These were the aesthetic and political representations that I had expected to see in an exhibition of 34

works on paper. But as I stood at length in front of Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force, I was suddenly disoriented. As one of India’s foremost commercial galleries, Nature Morte is ensconced in an upscale residential neighborhood, its cool and expansive interiors opening out to a jewel box of a garden, deep green in Delhi’s winter sun. The garden was the only thing I could see that anchored me to the present, for viewing Shah’s work produced something that felt like nostalgia, an attachment to a memory that was not my own. Every wall of the gallery displayed a profuse number of black-­and-­white drawings, varying in size and scale. Whereas the entryway was lined with a series of charcoal drawings delineating precise lines and shapes, the exhibition quickly progressed to large-­scale works produced through drawing by hand onscreen, several of which incorporated archival photographs. As I walked through Nature Morte — feeling strangely alone, though an employee worked quietly on the upper level of the gallery — I recognized that several drawings included images that were casually familiar to me, including photographs of buildings, monuments, and troops that appeared to be sourced from government archives. Placed within the imaginative architectural terrains created by Shah’s drawings, these landscape photographs spilled CHAPTER ONE

across my sight line, reproduced not once or twice but up to ten times in a single work. Standing in close proximity to Geometric Landscapes, I recognized these buildings as representations of one place, colonial South Asia, even as I stood in an art gallery that was itself emblematic of another place, neoliberal India. In the photographs of troops carrying flags that swept across the canvas, I saw not only the expansive military domain of the British Empire in South Asia, but also the steady invasion of U.S. troops in Pakistan and in Afghanistan in the early twenty-­first century. And in the hand-­drawn skyscrapers that punctuated the drawing, I was reminded of still another place, the United States. Keenly aware of my position as a solitary visitor, inside a gallery that itself appeared to be isolated from the city outside, I found myself in a place and time not removed from the drawing, but utterly immersed in it, as if the photographs within reflected the empires that shape my life now. In this chapter, I examine how the experience of seeing photograph-­ based works by South Asian diasporic artists extends the temporal scope of empire, such that empire begins to shape what we see as well as how we see ourselves in relation to what we see. This expansive temporality of empire emerges through our identification with works of art, particularly artworks that reproduce images from colonial archives. I call this mode of seeing diasporic mimesis, a form of identifying with the image that is situated in the racialized subjectivity of diasporic artists and viewers. Seen as imitation, repetition, or replication, mimesis defines the formal qualities of the artworks that I discuss, all of which duplicate in whole or in part photographic images from nineteenth-­and twentieth-­ century imperial archives across the U.K., South Asia, and the U.S. diasporic mimesis builds on the formal mimetic quality of the artwork to create an embodied experience that is produced through viewers’ recognition of themselves in relation to the archival image. “What is crucial,” as Michael Taussig points out in his seminal analysis of the mimetic encounter between colonizer and colonized, is “the two-­layered notion of mimesis that is involved — a copying or imitation, and a palpable, sensuous, connection between the very body of the perceiver and the perceived.”5 Diasporic mimesis amplifies the “palpable, sensuous” quality of seeing to delineate the affective connections forged between racialized viewing subjects and visual representations of race, as the archival image shuttles between the “body of the perceiver and perceived.” The effect of such sensuous connections is that the viewer comes to be haunted by her own representation, even as that image is the very thing she desires to UNCANNY FEELINGS

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see. As an experience of artistic production and consumption, diasporic mimesis structures the aesthetic practices of diasporic artists in relation to the archival image, as well as the relations of identification that the diasporic viewer establishes between herself and the archival object. This is a method of seeing and feeling empire that emerges through our multiple, repeated viewings of South Asian diasporic visual culture. To feel empire is not only to recognize its forms as documented in photographic images, but also to experience the disorienting sensation that particular elements from the visual image escape their archival constraints. Our identification of these aesthetic elements produces a sense of intimacy with the temporality of empire — not a nostalgic return to colonial aesthetics but a deeply unsettling feeling that these images come close to representing our current time. In this context, the visual object that we see always reminds us of something that we have seen before. Such proximity to image representations of empire elucidates the feeling that, as David Eng writes, for racialized immigrant viewers “history is not linear, progressive, or resolute; indeed, it is not even past.”6 As a framework of seeing, diasporic mimesis binds together the vexed relation between visual histories of South Asia and the visual economy of race and religion in the United States, generating a practice of view36

ing South Asian American visual culture that is necessarily triangulated between the legacy of British colonialism, decolonization movements on the subcontinent, and the emergence of the United States as a settler colonial global power. Creating narratives of temporality as much as spatiality, our identification with the photographic object zigzags across archival collections, aesthetic practices, and sites of exhibition and display. It is through the situated experience of seeing in diaspora that I can claim that a photographic image that represents British colonialism in South Asia reminds me of the expansive geographic contours of empire in the United States. To put it another way: as I view one reproduction of an imperial landscape, I am reminded of another, the empire in which I live now. In this repetitive experience of seeing, our feeling of identifying with the archival photograph is when we understand empire as a psychic experience and as an image archive, as an aesthetic encounter, and as a material object. Focusing on a single drawing from Shah’s extensive oeuvre, I examine how her reproduction of an iconic collection of early twentieth-­century colonial landscape photography produces a viewing experience of empire that exceeds the boundaries of a single print. I use diasporic mimeCHAPTER ONE

sis to capture points of identification with the photographic image that produce pleasure and attraction, as well as estrangement from the image that generates anxiety and compulsion. Here the aesthetic mode of mimesis enables diasporic artists to suture time and space; one landscape — for example, a parade ground in New Delhi built to commemorate British colonialists — comes to remind us of another place, a place that in my viewing looks like New York City. As I take up Shah’s incorporation of photography in a set of drawings that were created in Brooklyn and displayed in New Delhi, I move away from reading her drawing as a representation of colonial India. Instead, I foreground the relations of identification that diasporic viewers establish between the architectural monument and the photographic image; between the photographic image and the archival document; and, finally, between an aesthetic representation of colonial South Asia and our postcolonial experiences of racialization in the United States. Diasporic mimesis is also what enables me to create a through line between artworks that deploy diverse aesthetic forms and archives of photography. My immediate familiarity with, and recognition of, the colonial photographs reproduced in Shah’s Geometric Landscapes is another manifestation of the feelings of identification that drew me to Annu Palakunnathu Matthew’s Fabricated Memories (see introduction). As I engage with photographs sourced from colonial and national archives, as well as personal familial archives in artworks created by South Asian diasporic artists, what reverberates across my viewings of both sets of images are the deep feelings of intimacy that compel me to think of these representations as my own. If the intimate size of Matthew’s photo-­book installation reminded me of stray family photos tumbling out of shoeboxes, the large scale of Shah’s drawing allows me to come closer to understanding the monumental histories indexed by its photographs, images that are at once mundane and spectacular. It is the digital reproduction of photographic images in both artworks that produces the effect of mimetic identification, recognition, and attraction: but it is the specific form of the artwork that intervenes in the effect of the archival image on myself as a viewer. In this context, I see drawing as a means of reframing, rather than retaliating against, the imperial gaze of colonial photographic archives. Rather than degrade the archival print, for example, Shah’s insistence on reprinting a single archival image multiple times within the same drawing underscores how visual repetition can sustain the durability of imperial power. Drawing becomes the means through UNCANNY FEELINGS

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which the spatial reach of empire is interrupted and critiqued, as well as the medium through which empire is sustained. By expanding on the ways in which archival photographic images can continue to accumulate meaning within a single drawing, Shah’s work is an instance of what historian Antoinette Burton calls “dwelling in the archive,” a feminist reframing of the object(s) that constitute knowledge.7 Shah’s use of photographic images collected from a variety of different national archives, in relation to a number of hand-­drawn architectural shapes that are themselves multiply reproduced, doubles the uncanny effect of what it means to see and feel empire in our present time. Mimesis is what structures the aesthetic form of this drawing, the reproduction of the photographs within it, and the artist’s as well as my own identification with the archival images that give meaning to the work. Diasporic mimesis thus works at several levels to link together the artist’s aesthetic method with the viewer’s practice of seeing South Asian diasporic visual culture. First, Shah enacts a formal mimesis through reproducing archival photography in her work. But such photographic images are themselves characterized by their mimetic quality, for in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British photographers and their Indian counterparts likened South Asian landscapes to an idealized 38

vision of the English countryside. As military and commercial photographers surveyed battlegrounds, memorials, administrative buildings, forests, and gardens across the subcontinent, their resulting images reshaped an unruly landscape into a picturesque aesthetic form.8 The effect of such picturesque images on imperial viewers was a profound feeling of nostalgia, so much so that nostalgia became “the very mode of affective belonging to the colonial space.”9 Writing on colonial mimesis as a defining feature of early twentieth-­century portrait and landscape photography, postcolonial theorist Zahid Chaudhary considers how “the foreign is not converted into the familiar by means of aesthetic form . . . but rather the familiar is molded, through a subtle reorientation of vision, into a new kind of familiarity.” Such practices of seeing the picturesque highlight “the sensuous, bodily, sensate aspect of mimetic experience.”10 I build upon Chaudhary’s emphasis on the “sensate” practices of viewing demanded by the colonial photograph, but turn our attention to how such images are reproduced and consumed in diaspora. Shah’s insistence on replicating archival photographs is central to how, as diasporic viewers, we come to experience such images as “familiar” rather than foreign. But rather than being comforted by the nostalgia evoked by such familCHAPTER ONE

iarity, the incessant reproduction of the colonial photograph, or the “reorientation of vision” that it demands, generates an uncanny feeling of disorientation. One of the effects of diasporic mimesis, I contend, is that Freud’s notion of the uncanny operates for diasporic viewing subjects as an affective condition of spatial disorientation and racialized abjection that centers on our repetitive encounters with the image. Second, diasporic mimesis structures our simultaneous recognition of the colonial monuments in the drawing as imperial and as indigenous images. The buildings erected for the Delhi Durbars, including the amphitheater, canopies, and parade grounds reproduced in Shah’s drawing, replicate the architecture of another, earlier empire in South Asia — that of Mughal rulers in northern and western India. The art historian Natasha Eaton, writing on the convergence between British and Mughal painting practices in the late eighteenth through nineteenth centuries, has argued eloquently for a “multifaceted, multidirectional mimesis,” noting that “when we think about mimesis as being in flux, we can begin to connect its operations in unexpected directions, to explore uncharted and eccentric networks of artworks and their implications in relation to politics, aesthetics, economics, empire building, and empire destruction.”11 I expand upon Eaton’s reading to consider how mimesis operates multidirectionally in space and time via architectural landmarks. As the British sought to create an architectural form that conveyed both their absolute authority and their claim that they were natural successors to Mughal rule on the subcontinent, I suggest, the “Indo-­Saracenic” style that they established in Delhi and elsewhere is an instance of a formal and flexible mimesis, as colonial rulers created built environments that deliberately reproduced elements from Mughal forts, as well as from Islamic mosques and Hindu temples. When such architectural reproductions are captured in the colonial photograph, their visual effect on viewers like myself exceeds the frame of the drawing: for my identification of such monuments as, first, British and then as Indian becomes central to my identification with these monuments as a South Asian in diaspora. Third, diasporic mimesis shapes our affective relation to the skyscrapers, pillars, and other monuments that Shah draws across the canvas, creating built environments that are distinct in form from the colonial landscapes reproduced in the photographs. Despite their originality, despite the fact that these alternate monuments are created entirely out of Shah’s imagination, I argue that for South Asian diasporic viewing subjects who encounter Shah’s work there is in fact yet another archive UNCANNY FEELINGS

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of landscape images that surfaces beneath the drawing, a set of images that is not reproduced by the artist but that shapes our responses to the rectangular buildings struck by lightning, the flat surfaces covered with flags, and the skyscrapers cut through by large gashes. This is the online photographic archive of September 11, 2001: a media archive of crumbling towers, burned landscapes, and memorials to the dead that flares up as memory in my consumption of this drawing. Reading South Asian diasporic visual culture through a framework of diasporic mimesis enables us to understand how our demand for representation is profoundly shaped by how we see and recognize the past. We cannot see the visual object without acknowledging how colonial photographic archives continue to haunt our knowledge of the here and now, past and present, nation and diaspora. In this back-­a nd-­forth between the diasporic viewer and the archival image, as well as between the artist and the archives she intervenes in, our shared memory takes mimetic form. The incessant repetition in form, in content, and in feeling between the visual object we see and the visual archives that we draw upon means that representations of diaspora are never new. For even as Shah’s drawing reframes the built environment of imperial rule through her own imaginative monuments, what we come to see is how empire 40

repeats itself differently. In the towers and amphitheaters, and above all through the amassed troops that create the through line of this drawing, diasporic viewers experience empire as a historical narrative of the past and as a singular psychic and material experience in the present. By mining the relation between our situated and experiential viewing practices, and the archival photographs that are reproduced in and evoked by South Asian diasporic visual culture, we “come to terms with the monumentality of power, as well as the need for commemoration of its costs.”12 As an experience of seeing and as a method of representation, diasporic mimesis provokes an uncanny feeling of empire, a feeling that binds together the artist and the viewer with images of imperial rule across space and time.

SEEING T HE UNCA NN Y

In his reading of Shah’s early drawings, art historian Iftikhar Dadi emphasizes how Shah layers “hand-­drawn calligraphy and ornament on the historic monumental archival images to suggest a dreamscape of imbricated pasts of Muslim, British, and Sikh South Asia that persists in the CHAPTER ONE

present as a sequence of uncanny afterimages.” 13 Such “dreamscapes” are the imaginative worlds that bind together distinct national and religious histories: Mughal monuments, British parade grounds, and Sikh soldiers, landscapes, and figures that are iconic representations of the subcontinent’s imperial past. But in describing the persistence of these representations as “uncanny afterimages,” Dadi also points to the ways in which the viewer is drawn to Shah’s work as something familiar and, in its very familiarity, terrifying. Looking at Shah’s drawings reminds us of something that we have seen before. Our disorientation in seeing these images is a measure of how close we are — indeed, how we might already inhabit — the physical and psychic spaces that are mapped in the drawings.14 The uncanny, or unheimlich, is frequently read as a mark of the return of the repressed, or as a feeling of dread in relation to human-­like figures, such as automatons or androids.15 By contrast, I define the uncanny as a sense of spatial disorientation and racial abjection in space that emerges out of the subjects’ failure to see. As Sigmund Freud notes, “He [the psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch] ascribes the essential factor in the production of the feeling of uncanniness to intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always be that in which one does not know where one is, as it were. The better orientated in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it.” 16 I mark here the distinction Freud makes between the uncanny as a measure of intellectual uncertainty, and the uncanny as a (dis)orientation in space.17 Freud narrates his own experience of the uncanny via an anecdote about spatial disorientation and describes walking through “the deserted streets of a provincial town in Italy which was strange to [him].” Noticing that “nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses,” Freud proceeds as follows: “I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a while without being directed, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried away once more but only to arrive yet another time by devious paths in the same place. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to abandon my exploratory walk and get straight back to the piazza I had left a short while before.” 18 In this short walk, Freud attempts to leave a particular street but finds himself back where he began, again and again. Importantly, Freud rejects the option of orienting UNCANNY FEELINGS

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himself around the “painted women” who occupy the same “deserted street” that he walks on; instead he renders these sex workers abject, just short of “nothing.” Freud’s inability to see these sex workers, coupled with his heightened sense of being seen by them (“my presence was now beginning to excite attention”) enhances his own sense of isolation: what begins as a pleasant “exploratory walk” instead becomes a suffocating, unbearable sensation that is relieved only when he makes his way back to the piazza. As Freud emphasizes, what makes this experience uncanny is the “factor of involuntary repetition” that makes an otherwise ordinary place appear strange.19 But what also contributes to his sense of anxiety are the intersecting sight lines between his perception of the sex workers in the houses and his knowledge that he can be seen by them. That is, the uncanny hinges on the relationship between the apparent invisibility of a pathway through a foreign space and the traveler’s perception of his own hypervisibility in that same space. The conflux of these sight lines creates a momentary sensation of being trapped in a perpetual state of surveillance. Importantly, this experience of the uncanny is coupled with the traveler’s keen sense of becoming abject, which Freud projects onto the “painted women” and “small houses” that surround him. Here, my use 42

of abjection as an affective condition that transforms the subject-­out-­ of-­place into an object-­t hat-­is-­looked-­at builds on Karen Shimakawa’s seminal work on Asian American racial abjection. Shimakawa defines abjection as “a process . . . an attempt to circumscribe and radically differentiate something that, although deemed repulsively other is, paradoxically, at some fundamental level, an undifferentiable part of the whole.”20 By conceptualizing abjection as a “movement” that traverses a “dynamic and unstable” boundary, Shimakawa contends that it is through the process of abjection that Asian Americans become both central to and erased from the national/cultural imaginary of America. 21 I take up the shifting, sliding spatial boundaries of abjection to examine how and when the viewing subject becomes the object that is viewed, and to consider why the experience of being seen, for racialized subjects, uncannily conjures an earlier experience of being looked at. Later in the same essay Freud offers another example that highlights how the uncanny links the problem of spatial orientation to the experience of abjection. He describes wandering around “a dark, strange room, looking for the door or for the electric switch” and colliding repeatedly with the same piece of furniture. 22 In contrast to the first example that CHAPTER ONE

takes place abroad in broad daylight, in a place where everything is rendered visible, this second example takes place within the interior domain of a house, where the dark room renders the domestic space unfamiliar, or “strange.” I emphasize how Freud’s narrative of bumping into furniture (with the bodily impressions that such collisions may leave) underscores the felt sensation of disorientation: what Sara Ahmed, in her analysis of our bodies’ orientations toward objects, describes as a queer phenomenology. 23 In both the public piazza and the domestic space, the uncanny emerges in that moment of disorientation where the subject is unable to see or feel a pathway out of a defined space and becomes keenly aware of their hypervisibility — as foreign, as other, as abject — w ithin that space. In both of Freud’s examples, that feeling of abjection is projected onto the space itself — the small houses, the “painted ladies,” the piece of furniture that is always blocking the way toward the door or light switch. The uncanny as an aesthetic form thus does not only elicit feelings of disgust or repulsion in relation to the android, automaton, or stereotype. Instead, the uncanny can also be an aesthetic experience marked by compulsion rather than revulsion, an experience of hypervisibility as well as invisibility, and an experience of abjection rather than estrangement. My viewings of Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force produce precisely this effect of the uncanny. In my initial viewing of the drawing, I was compelled by the strangely familiar silhouettes of the architectural monuments that create a firm horizontal line across the canvas: the archways of the amphitheaters, the fullness of domes and the elaborate canopies, none of which I had actually seen (each of these structures was built expressly for the Delhi Durbars, and most were torn down later), but all of which remind me of so many Mughal and British imperial monuments that I have seen in Delhi and Mumbai. Alongside the silhouetted photographic images of two different turbaned men on the upper right and center foreground of the drawing, each of the photographic images reproduced in Shah’s work secured my initial reading of the drawing as a representation of India. My identification of the drawing (the drawing is India) cathects to my identification with the drawing (because I know this drawing is India, it secures my identity as a South Asian). But as my eyes travel repeatedly across the same structures, from left to right and back again, that representational narrative of the self in relation to the drawing becomes slippery. As the reproduced photographs of the Durbar’s amphitheater command the viewer’s sight line, so UNCANNY FEELINGS

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too do the hand-­d rawn ornamentations that expand and contract, like sound waves, across the drawing. These fainter, more intricate lines of repeating geometric patterns trail off on the extreme right of the drawing into a black expanse, depositing the viewer into space. In subsequent viewings of this drawing, I attempt to enter the print once more from the left side, but I realize that there is no clear exit from it. So I traverse the structural outlines of the amphitheater repeatedly, wandering through the empty buildings as if searching for a way out; my eyes follow the geometric patterns that cast an intricate web behind the photographs of architectural monuments. In these later viewings of the drawing, I find myself trapped, even helpless, within the insistently repetitive, structural expanse of monuments to empire. The collapse between a representation of empire (a representation, I want to emphasize, that is not limited to the photographic image) and the viewer’s sensation of her own embodiment in a space also marked as empire is rendered in my viewing as the absence of a spatial boundary: the absence of proper critical distance between myself as a spectator of the image, and the image itself. Such a collapse of spatial and epistemological distance is effected through the panoramic scale of the drawing, as well as of the archival photographs reproduced within it. The “immersive 44

aesthetic of the panorama,” as Eaton notes, is characterized by “a combination of media and military history that sought to place the observer in the picture . . . with the aim of trapping and immersing the viewer in the real.”24 Stretching ten feet across and nearly five feet in height, Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force produces a panoramic vision for the viewer. Our ability to look at the drawing and claim to see everything — a king and queen sitting on a domed stage, bedecked in regalia, as well as the parade grounds filled with horses and troops — means that we are deposited, through the reproduction of photographs within the drawing, into the realm of the real, as if the photographs capture what actually happened. As Roland Barthes reminds us, however, the panorama invites the viewer into an aesthetic scene that “fascinates, anesthetizes suffering, suppresses contradictions, induces a feeling of supreme understanding, a kind of supernatural state of awareness.”25 As we encounter the spectacle animated by the scale of Shah’s drawing, the uncanny emerges through one’s familiarity with a visual scene that “fascinates,” that appears to suppress “the contradiction” between one’s location in an imperial time and the historical fact of empire mapped across the drawing. But in our immersion into this panorama, we also come uncomfortably CHAPTER ONE

close to what lies behind the image, the thing that we repeatedly bump into, like a piece of furniture in a dark room. For South Asian diasporic viewers who encounter spectacular visual representations of empire, the experience of seeing is both deeply familiar and terrifyingly disorienting. For what we keep colliding with while looking for Freud’s proverbial “electric switch,” the thing that refuses to be dislodged as we navigate our way through the visual text, is the condition of our postcoloniality.26 For those diasporic subjects who view reproductions of colonial photography as if these are visual objects of the past, as if empire was a narrative of a place held in a past time and, most important, as if they themselves have left the scene of empire, the feeling of the uncanny is a reminder that we inhabit empire now. Empire is the scene of power that shapes the conditions of our subjectivity as immigrants. As postcolonial subjects, our familiarity with, or more pointedly our identification with, the colonial photograph means that we remain subject to the psychic and material domain of empire. I stress that for the postcolonial diasporic viewer, empire takes different forms, and therefore that we are differently subject to it over time: empire is never static or unchanging. As empire shifts and moves, our inability to see how the conditions of our postcoloniality shape our experience as viewers means we continue to collide with the object in the dark and that we can never find the switch to illuminate our pathway. Precipitated by the materiality of the colonial photograph, the feeling of the uncanny does not result in the viewer’s rejection of the colonizing image but produces instead a fascinated desire to repeatedly see the scene of empire. In the process of seeing, the viewer risks her own racial abjection, what she experiences as her hypervisibility within the image. Our compulsion to repeat this experience of seeing is symptomatic of the heterogeneous formation of empire across the twentieth century and into the twenty-­first. As a scene of power, empire constitutes who we are as racialized subjects, and it disciplines our own localities as postcolonial immigrants.

DW EL L ING IN T HE A RCHIV E

While my reading of Geometric Landscapes emphasizes the phenomenological experience of seeing photography, the title of Shah’s exhibition, From Paper to Monument, begins elsewhere, emphasizing the historiographical narrative that starts with the mark the artist first makes on UNCANNY FEELINGS

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paper. In New Delhi, the exhibition’s curatorial focus established a progressive temporal trajectory, evolving from graphite lines on paper to the monumental scale of digitally and hand-­produced drawings. Beginning “with her own detailed drawings and then combin[ing] these with found imagery,” the gallery statement noted, Shah’s drawings “explore the dimensions and incarnations of various iconographies: architectural, historical, personal, and political.”27 Given that Shah is a trained architect, however, I also read her work as concerned with another kind of monument: the architectural history of urban spaces in South Asia, North America, and Europe, specifically the reification of power, authority, and rule that are codified in the built environment of these landscapes. The “monument” of Shah’s exhibition title refers to notable urban sites (such as mausoleums, gardens, and administrative buildings), but it can also include the monumental archives that emerge out of the drafts, notes, photographs, sketches, and maps of site plans. “Monument” can further refer to the narrative of urban space itself: for example, the ways in which New Delhi is enumerated as a monumental (capital) city of postindependence India, even as its official government buildings and wide boulevards were constructed via an imperial architectural imagination. As Shah notes, “I have long been interested in obsolescence, the architectural object as 46

relic or ruin, a quality epitomized in memorials and monuments. While monuments might function as markers of specific moments of historical significance they are inherently ambiguous structures; though experienced in the present, they commemorate the past and project into the future.”28 I examine Shah’s engagement with the “relic or ruin” through the ambiguity of her own diasporic locations, as one who has lived among architectural monuments in Lahore, New Delhi, New York, and Brussels. Moving between the viewer’s experience of the artwork and the artist’s aesthetic process, I consider how the mimetic reproduction of monumental archival images extends the historiographical scope of narratives of empire and, in so doing, remaps the place and time of diaspora. For her drawings and prints in From Paper to Monument, Shah conducted research at the Birmingham Photographic Archives, the British Library, the Royal Geographic Society, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, “appropriating images of people as well as monuments.”29 Her interest was in the degraded quality of colonial photographs, as well as in methods of photographic preservation and organization within the institutional apparatus of the library. In retrieving the archival object as an artifact, Shah aimed to “use public archival memory as a process to CHAPTER ONE

build on the ideas, on the aesthetics of imperial power and monument building.”30 However, her ability to retrieve and deploy “public archival memory” was delimited by nationalist projects of archival monitoring that surfaced in the artist’s access to the photographic object itself. While Shah is a U.S. citizen, she is also Pakistani, and so she could not gain access to these archival documents in India (consequently, she traveled to Britain for research). The images of the Durbars that Shah subsequently incorporated into her drawings remap the same nationalist boundaries. Not only do these found objects, held within the national archives of postimperial Britain, document colonial India; they also operate as archival evidence of a pre-­Partition India, a place and time that, as Jisha Menon elucidates in her analysis of the mimetic relation between India and Pakistan, is itself a “spectral memory.”31 In Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force, reverse negative reproductions of landscape photographs from the 1903 and 1911 Durbars surface at multiple points in the drawing (see plate 4). The viewer’s sight line is held by a print of the arched gateways that identify the massive amphitheater built for the 1903 Durbar, which is reproduced ten times on the top and bottom halves of the drawing; the elaborate cupolas that denote the canopied structure occupied by King George V and Queen Mary during the 1911 Durbars, reproduced nine times in the drawing adjacent to the images of the amphitheater; and processionals of imperial cavalrymen, horses, and elephants, constantly replicated across the strong horizontal line of the drawing and as mirror images on the bottom half of the canvas. Even as these photographic reproductions compel the viewer, what interrupts the sequential multiplication of archival images are tall towers of varying heights and other monuments of Shah’s own creation. These include a skyscraper struck by a bolt of lightning, a tall white column with no windows, and a black rectangular shape marked by a white cross, all of which sit at varying heights in relation to the photographic images. There is no written text on the drawing with the exception of a black cube on the lower center right: a qaaba encircled with an inscription in Urdu. What is replicated, however, are images of winged creatures that hold in their hand a crescent and a star: these figures of angels are perched on top of monumental pillars, their weight an unimaginable burden for the slender column underneath. Against the backdrop of each of these architectural motifs, Shah draws vertical lines in the shape of three rhombuses that expand and contract across the length of the drawUNCANNY FEELINGS

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ing, filled with repeating geometric patterns, creating vistas alternative to the central historical event. As Gayatri Gopinath comments in her analysis of Shah’s later work, “While the images deflate and demonumentalize the archetypal structures of colonial and state power, they also suggest alternative modes of archiving and remembering these converging historical violences.”32 Extending the negative print reproductions of the Durbar at the center of the drawing (and its mirror image immediately underneath), these intricate geometric patterns give a kinetic energy to the archival photographic image, enabling us to read the drawing transversely. The imperial monument — the Durbar amphitheater, arched gateways, and canopied structures archived through the photographic reproductions — becomes central to the production in Geometric Landscapes of a visual narrative that refutes the authority of empire and disseminates its spatial and temporal effects. Art historian Santhi Kavuri-­Bauer notes that the architectural monument in nineteenth-­century India was the site where “the subjects of empire, both Indian and British, were to be interpellated by the monument and identify with the idea of British rule and Indian subjection.”33 But instead of sedimenting what the feminist scholar Saidiya Hartman has called, in the context of Black enslavement, 48

“scenes of subjection,” the reproduction and dissemination of imperial monuments within the drawing deconstructs the monumentalization of multiple historical events. 34 These include not only the 1903 and 1911 Durbars but more broadly the long history of the British Empire on the subcontinent and the emergence of U.S. empire in South Asia. It is precisely through the reproduction of the archival photograph as reverse negative print that the monument exceeds its place as a staging ground for colonial rule and becomes, as I contend below, the scene of mimetic identification and representation in diaspora. Creating a disorienting picture that imagines the future even as it draws upon landscape photographs from the past, Shah’s drawings induce the viewer to look backward, then forward, then backward again. In that double take, the diasporic viewer comes to experience the uncanny sensation that the past is lived in the space of our present. For myself, in looking at Shah’s monumental landscape, I am overcome by the sensation of inhabiting the real and imagined imperial landscapes that her drawing brings to life. The photographic reproductions do not illuminate a past event so much as speculate on the present and the future. My affective engagement with the drawing is haunted by the afterlife of a set of archiCHAPTER ONE

val photographs that, rather than illuminating the scale of colonial conquest in the past, comes to represent the empire to which I now belong.

THE A RCHIT EC T URE OF EMPIRE

The experience of seeing one landscape of empire and recalling another, quite different imperial landscape is centered on our dynamic relation as diasporic viewers to the mimetic quality of the archival image. However, in the specific context of photographs from the Delhi Durbars, diasporic mimesis operates at two further levels. First, diasporic mimesis indexes the fact that those architectural forms that I recognize as quintessentially Indian (what I earlier described as the elements of the image that cathect my identification with the photograph and confirm my identity as a South Asian) are themselves British reproductions of medieval built environments from the Mughal Empire. These include the ornate domes, canopies, and amphitheaters that are reproduced within the drawing, here appropriated and transformed by British colonial rulers to produce a new “Indo-­Saracenic” architectural style. Along with the performative rituals of the Mughal court, which inspired the ceremonial scale of the Durbars, these architectural forms were integral to the naturalization — indeed, the indigenization — of colonial rule in South Asia. Second, diasporic mimesis enables us to see the local and global dissemination of these architectural styles, both in South Asia (where reproductions of colonial architecture appear in a wide range of media, from stamps to school textbooks to letterheads) and beyond the subcontinent, as the British reproduced Indo-­Saracenic architecture in other outposts of empire such as South Africa. 35 What looks like images of an iconic colonial Indian built environment becomes, in this instance, a palimpsest of imperial landscapes that stretches from the Mughal to the British empires, from Asia to Africa, and that continues to circulate domestically on the subcontinent and globally, signifying the unlimited expansion of imperial rule. As Delhi became the capital city of British India via the Durbars, its physical, political, and aesthetic transformation made visible the fact that, as Eaton suggests (in the earlier and different context of Calcutta), “the dispersal of images from Britain to colonial contexts . . . did not so much reproduce metropolitan aesthetics, publics, and modes of display as create incessant disorientation as a kind of mirroring of mirrors.”36 Taking up such “incessant disorientation” as an affective sensation embodied by those colonized subjects who experienced the Durbars UNCANNY FEELINGS

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and, quite differently, by diasporic viewers who see visual representations of empire today, I emphasize how mimesis structures the ceremonial rituals of the Durbar, the architectural forms of the buildings that were erected for the event, and the urban public spaces in which the Durbars were held. The word “Durbar,” taken from the Urdu darbar, refers to the ceremonial ritual undertaken by Mughal emperors to affirm and enhance their ties to courtly office holders. During a darbar, court deputies would present themselves to the emperor and in return receive gifts and other tokens from him. Such a reciprocal engagement with the seat of power provided “a performative spectacle linking the ruler and his court with the people.”37 For the British, the performative aspects of the darbar were central to establishing a seamless transition between the Mughal and the colonial bureaucracies. 38 But whereas under the Mughals the emperor “displayed himself and his aura (darshan) to his people, and exchanged gifts to mark reciprocal relationships and obligations between the Indian monarch (raja) and his/her subjects,” the British “appropriated the durbar as a ritual of subordination.”39 Conducted three times over a fifty-­year period, in 1877, 1903, and 1911, the Durbars commemorated the successive coronations of Queen Victoria, King Edward VII, and King George 50

V. All three Durbars were held in Delhi, following the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 (also known as the Uprising or the First War of Independence). In 1903 and 1911, leaders of various princely states arrived in Delhi to offer gifts to the king; their allegiance and acts of obeisance to the Crown were documented in a range of visual forms, including photography, film, and painting. Perceived acts of insubordination at the Durbars (such as turning one’s back toward the king and queen) were also widely discussed and visually documented in the British popular and Indian nationalist press. Even as the Durbars publicly demanded the subjugation of Indian nationals, the events rhetorically conveyed a divine sanction for imperial rule. At the 1903 Durbar, Viceroy Lord Curzon (who in the absence of Edward VII took his place as king-­emperor), spoke of his sense of the union between the British and their Indian subjects: “We are ordained to walk here in the same track together for many a long day to come. You cannot do without us. We should be impotent without you. Let the Englishman and the Indian accept the consecration of a union so mysterious as to have in it something of the divine.”40 As a means of formalizing British imperial administration in India, the purposes of the Durbars were threefold. At one level, the Durbar CHAPTER ONE

consolidated the economic relationship between the English Crown and its colonial subjects. At another, the Durbar established the total administrative control of the viceroys, who (though deputies of the Crown) essentially conducted themselves as sovereign rulers in India.41 And at still another level, the Durbars were central to shifting the seat of administrative and political power from the British East India Company’s operations in Calcutta to the new capital city of Delhi. The 1903 and 1911 Durbars sought to secure each of these aspects of imperial rule: the symbolic value of the Crown, the administrative control of the British, and the building of a new imperial city. Together, the Durbars constitute what many historians describe as the “high noon of the British Raj in India.”42 On the historical and aesthetic relationship between nineteenth-­ century forms of European exhibition and the successive Durbars held on the subcontinent, John MacKenzie writes, “Empires cannot be self-­ effacing. Their rulers have always had a powerful need to exhibit themselves, to demonstrate the grandeur and power of their political creation, to overawe the populace (both the citizens at home and the subjects of conquered territories) as well as reveal to rivals just how significant they are.”43 Read in this context of public spectacle, the Durbars were akin to other monumental exhibitions of the time, such as world’s fairs and the revival of the Olympics in 1896 in Athens.44 In 1903, the Durbar was held in what was formerly a British military camp during the 1857 Mutiny. As villagers were forcibly evicted from what was ostensibly unoccupied land, nearly one-­quarter of Delhi was transformed into an elaborate tented city, complete with railways, post office, and telephone and telegraphic facilities (figure 1.1). In the absence of the king, the attendees paid homage to Viceroy Curzon, who declared that the Durbar would be “no mere pageant” but rather an “act of supreme public solemnity, demonstrating to ourselves our union, and to the world our strength.”45 The audience, composed of Indian royal families and their retinues from 556 princely states, offered gifts and participated in military parades, reviews, and exhibitions.46 These audience members became part of the performative nature of the event, showcasing through their presence a traditional structure of Indian society central to late nineteenth-­century British conceptions of empire, even as the princes “became increasingly creatures of the colonial order.”47 Indian invitees were corralled into a campground onsite that itself functioned as an exhibition of the royal families and principalities of northern India, which British guests toured at will.48 UNCANNY FEELINGS

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1.1  The City of Tents, 1903. Calcutta, Bombay, and Simla: Bourne & Shepherd. Platinum print, 12.9 × 28.3 cm. ROYAL COL L EC TION TRUST / © HER MA JEST Y QUEEN ELIZ ABE TH II 2 019.

The legacy of the Durbars was that Delhi was transformed from a city into a military camp.49 For the 1911 Durbar, eighty square miles of northern Delhi were relandscaped for the events, as this remote area was 52

“transformed into a temporary city with light rail, hundreds of tents for thousands of guests and their servants, dining areas, reception tents, arenas for sporting events and military reviews, communication centers for the press, extensive gardens, health facilities and pathways.”50 The Red Fort, the primary residence of Mughal emperors for nearly two hundred years, was strung up with electric lights, and a military cavalry parade wrapped around the Jama Masjid, one of the largest mosques in India built by the Mughals: the process of reconstructing Delhi for the Durbars has been described as a form of “miniature empire-­building.”51 In Shah’s drawing, the landscape photographs that are multiply reproduced across the canvas highlight the buildings commissioned by the British for the Durbars, buildings that were designed to reflect local architectural history, as well as powerfully signify the global ambition of colonial rule. Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force incorporates images of two buildings in particular: a bulbous dome-­shaped pavilion built for the 1911 Durbar and an amphitheater distinguished by arched gateways built for the 1903 Durbar. Both exemplify the Indo-­ Saracenic style, “a combination of Hindu, Saracenic, and Western architectural forms” that included Mughal architecture, Islamic art and CHAPTER ONE

architecture, Gothic and neoclassical Victorian architecture, and Hindu temple-­building traditions. 52 The principal British proponents of this style drew upon the characteristics of a wide range of built structures “from the twelfth to the eighteenth century, and from Delhi to Ahmeda­ bad.”53 The shape of the arch and the dome, specifically, were seen as central to the Saracenic style, praised for their beauty and economy. The historian Thomas Metcalf has argued that the appeal of the Saracenic style is seen in “the association of the arch and dome with early Christendom, with the Roman and Byzantine empires, and with Renaissance notions of ideal beauty.”54 Characterized by various forms of ornamentalism including turrets, open cupolas, canopied balconies, ornamental borders on doors and windows, and the use of structural elements (such as pillars) for decorative rather than functional purposes, the Indo-­Saracenic style combined disparate aesthetic histories as it became the signature architectural form of British rule in the late nineteenth century. 55 Taken up in various manifestations by British and Indian architects in Delhi, Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta, the Indo-­Saracenic style was an ideological aesthetic that portrayed the British as “legitimate successors to the Mughals — in other words as indigenous rather than foreign rulers.”56 Delhi was not the only city transformed in anticipation of the Durbars: in 1911 George V’s arrival on the subcontinent began with spectacular welcome ceremonies in Bombay, where the iconic archway known as the Gateway of India now stands. Though the current incarnation of the Gateway of India does not replicate what was constructed in 1911, “it is in the temporary Saracenic architecture of durbars and street decoration for royal visits such as this that the Raj came closest to projecting an image of themselves as indigenous rulers.”57 More recently, South Asian art historians have argued that rather than securing colonial claims to rule, such built environments also reveal their fundamental instability as hybrid spaces, shaped by competing claims to nation-making by colonial rulers and Indian subjects. 58 Other models of Indo-­Saracenic architecture continue be used as government offices in former outposts of the British Empire, including the Sultan Abdul Samad Building in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, as well as the Union Buildings in Pretoria, South Africa. 59 The architectural environments built for the Delhi Durbars are now largely archived through visual representations held in private and national archives, including photographs, paintings, and film footage. But what is also central to the visual history of empire in South Asia is the photographs that were produced and circulated at the Durbars themUNCANNY FEELINGS

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selves. As the art historian Julie Codell contends, photography was central to the joint production of “surveillance and spectacle — the durbars’ scopic regimes.”60 British military and government photographers were commissioned by colonial officials to create panoramic photographs of the Durbars’ amphitheaters that “captured effectively the totalizing vision of the Raj.”61 In contrast to these “totalizing” visions, Indian royal families also retained private photographers as part of their traveling retinues to document their participation in the Durbars. The resulting images were incorporated into voluminous albums for commercial sale, though, in at least one instance, a lack of public interest in such royal albums resulted in the bankruptcy of a prominent Indian photographic studio. 62 Equally significant is the fact that many British and Indian attendees brought their own Brownie cameras to the parade grounds, creating personal documentation of the events for family albums and archives. The proliferation of cameras at the Durbars meant that for spectators, whether British or Indian, their experience of the event was mediated by photography. As one newspaper reporter at the 1911 Durbar noted, “For a whole year India had been preparing for the great event. . . . As the appointed days grew near the tension grew to straining point. Then, suddenly, ‘click, click, click!’ Almost before you realised it, the ma54

chine was in motion, the panorama was being unfolded before your eyes. There was one sharp, quick rush of dazzling scenes, and then it was over, leaving you breathless, astonished, exhausted.”63 In this reporter’s account, the parades, processionals, and countless other events that made up the Durbar’s festivities are seen as if through a viewfinder or on a film screen: a panorama unfolds and the Durbar passes by in a blur of “dazzling scenes.” Importantly, the viewer is not held captive to this image; instead, they listen to and participate in the making of event-­as-­image-­ archive. Never mentioning the presence of a camera but referring to its audible work (“click, click, click!”), the reporter underscores the centrality of the camera to the aural and visual experience of the Durbar.64 Here, the Durbar is not simply a pageant that is seen belatedly, via the evidence of photographic images that record the buildings, the rituals, or the participants. Rather, the Durbar’s scale and scope are experienced through the presence of the camera, as an experience that produces affective and physical sensations of breathlessness, exhaustion, and astonishment. For the viewer-­who-­is-­the-­photographer, the Durbar is a transformative event, as the viewer becomes a participant, a documentarian, and an archivist of their own experience. CHAPTER ONE

I expand here on what the curator and art historian Deepali Dewan has described as a “shift in ocular epistemology” generated through the popularity of personal cameras in the early twentieth century.65 Dewan takes up the uses of the camera at the Durbars as evidence of “the democratization of photography, and a corresponding change in how people perceived their worlds and negotiated these perceptions.”66 In my view, the epistemological shift generated by the greater availability of photographic technology for state and private consumption is manifest in the multiple, even contradictory visions of empire that were generated at the Durbars. As the camera moves away from its singular designation as a tool of imperial power and surveillance, with its images read only as evidence of colonialism’s violent effects, the photograph begins to capture, instead, the phenomenological experience of empire. Constituted through the material and affective labor of the viewer, the photograph’s production, circulation, and consumption become part of the spectacle of the Durbar, much like the architecture itself. In Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force, Shah utilizes a landscape photograph of the vast horseshoe-­shaped amphitheater and dais built for the 1903 Durbar (figure 1.2).67 This prime example of Indo-­ Saracenic architecture hosted the Durbar’s most important events, accommodating 13,500 people, and was distinguished by its combination of delicate pillars, cupolas, and arches. The amphitheater featured a “ ‘canopy constructed in the shape of a Saracenic dome,’ while ‘the same feature, varied with small kiosks and ornaments borrowed from the Mogul architecture,’ was ‘reproduced in the embellishment’ of the amphitheater.”68 Although original plans for the amphitheater included “European” decorative elements, such as bunting and flags, Curzon eliminated such stylistic flourishes from the final structure.69 Within the amphitheater, seating plans of Indians and British officials “distinctly etched the cartographies of colonial order,” as invitees’ proximity to the midpoint of the horseshoe was arranged in order of their importance to the Crown.70 While major military ceremonies were staged in the Durbar’s amphitheater, the structure in turn housed another arena of imperial display: an art gallery curated by British officials who “scoured the whole of India and Burma for the finest artistic works, while the gallery (a notably Orientalist structure with gardens) was decorated and furnished by the art schools of Burma, Lahore, Madras, and Bombay.” 71 This single archival photograph of the 1903 amphitheater initiates an ocular shift in our viewing of Shah’s drawing, producing a visual effect UNCANNY FEELINGS

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1.2  The Duke and Duchess of Connaught Arrive at the Durbar Amphitheatre, 1903. Calcutta, Bombay, and Simla: Bourne & Shepherd. Platinum print, 14.5 × 28.4 cm. ROYAL COL L EC TION TRUST / © HER MA JEST Y QUEEN ELIZ ABE TH II 2 019.

that causes us to doubt the veracity of what we see, and to question our 56

own position as spectators in relation to the image. Shah was drawn to the half-­moon shape of the amphitheater, noting in a personal conversation that while most military processions form a straight line (such that parades occur directly in front of the audience at the intersection of horizontal and vertical visual planes), the amphitheater distorted perspective by organizing visual clarity by social rank and administrative power in proximity to the viceroy, who sat at its center. In Geometric Landscapes, the archival photograph of the amphitheater is multiplied ten times across the horizontal length of the drawing. Duplicated as a reverse negative print, the same image is flipped upside down and its dimensions reconfigured, such that the architectural frame of the amphitheater now warps the hierarchical relation of power that determined visual access to the pageantry of the Durbar. Within the drawing, the photograph at once provides a panoramic view of the amphitheater’s monumental architectural form and becomes a repetitive image that is flipped, reversed, and rescaled in order to decentralize the authority of the monument (see plate 3). The clarity of sight that was once achieved by spectators sitting at the midpoint of the amphitheater’s horseshoe is erased, and the military parade that passes in front of the amphitheater is also distorted, as CHAPTER ONE

1.3  Royal Pavilion, 1911 Delhi Durbar, December 12, 1911. Photographer unknown. Gelatin silver print, 15.8 × 28 cm. ROYAL COL L EC TION TRUST / © HER MA JEST Y QUEEN ELIZ ABE TH II 2 019.

57 reverse negative photographic images of cavalrymen hoisting flags are placed at multiple planes across the length of the drawing. These images are stacked on top of each other, right side up and upside down, periodically interrupted by the skyscrapers, pillars, and geometric patterns that the artist draws across the canvas. Adjacent to the photograph of the amphitheater built for the 1903 Durbar, the drawing also utilizes a photograph from the 1911 Durbar, which depicts the elaborate bulbous dome-­shaped canopy under which George V and Mary received Indian royal subjects at their coronation (figure 1.3). The king and queen are faintly visible in silhouetted profile seated on vast thrones, identifiable by their crowns and cloaks, as are silhouettes of the viceroy and his staff. Instead of effacing the colonial rulers who sit underneath the canopy, Shah reproduces the archival photograph of the domed architectural structure that houses them nine times across the midline of her canvas. In doing so, Shah disseminates the figures of imperial authority rather than enforcing their erasure. For the viewer who catches a glimpse of the Durbars — the transformation of Indian princely rulers into subjects of the British Crown — t he repetition of this single UNCANNY FEELINGS

photographic image also enables us to see how the act of colonization is literally overwhelmed by the architecture of empire: the domed building, the ornate roof, the finely wrought metalwork that decorates this scene of submission (see plate 4). As I confront the ceaseless reproduction of these monuments to empire, the uncanny resurfaces again as a feeling of spatial disorientation, precipitated by my inability as a viewer to move beyond the amphitheater and its endless archways, or to navigate around the submission to colonial rule demanded by those who sit under the canopy. Indeed, in my experience of seeing this drawing, the uncanny emerges as part and parcel of the mimetic quality of the Durbar itself. If the imperial architecture of the Durbar was meant to replicate Mughal and Hindu monuments, and its ceremonial rituals were meant to duplicate the intimate relationship between the Mughal emperor and his subjects — and if colonial Delhi itself was refashioned into a vision of the imperial metropole —  then mimesis is central to producing the visual effects of empire. Like the layers of cavalrymen replicated in the drawing, these various forms of mimesis operate at different registers: the Indo-­Saracenic built environment, the ceremonial pageantry, and the participation of British and Indian viewers as photographic documentarians of their own experience. 58

The uncanny seeps in through the viewer’s perception that the thing we see in the photograph, the narrative of colonial power we experience, replicates and distorts another, earlier transfer of power from Mughal ruler to subject, and that both performances reflect more closely on contemporary spectacles of power and authority that shape our ongoing relationship to the built environment of imperial rule.72 The architectural landscape of empire may erode over time, but its monumental legacy continues to influence how postcolonial subjects navigate spaces of power and authority. As one archivist noted of the 1903 Durbar, “The most impressive of all the buildings was the vast, horseshoe-­ shaped durbar amphitheatre. . . . What appeared to be pukka or masonry domes, were actually constructed of bamboo . . . and plaster of Paris on the outside. Similarly, the ornate twenty-­four-­foot pillars that held up the amphitheater were made up of pairs of railway tracks borrowed from the railway authorities. Bolted together and also encased in bamboo and plaster of Paris, they presented an air of strength and durability that was entirely illusory.” 73 Dismantled after the Durbar’s conclusion, the remnants of these architectural monuments continue to be haunted by the

CHAPTER ONE

aesthetic, political, and environmental dimensions of empire. When, in the aftermath of the 1911 Durbar, surveyors went to plot the foundation for the new capital city in Delhi, they discovered the soil was unsuitable for building.74 The proposed capital was subsequently shifted to a location south of old Delhi (what we know today as New Delhi) and ultimately became a functional capital after Partition and the independence of Pakistan and India. In the years thereafter, the original site of the Durbars became a dumping ground for statues of viceroys, governor-­generals, and other imperial administrators whose effigies littered the streets of independent India. For decades marked only by a “lone surviving obelisk built to commemorate the royals’ visit,” the Durbar grounds have more recently been restored as a tourist destination, marketing the city and the country toward tourists attracted to imperial nostalgia.75 However, as historians Aparna Balachandran and Deborah Sutton remark in their essay on what is now known as Coronation Park, the site has taken on distinctly local overtones. Designed by the Indian landscape architect Mohammed Shaheer to evoke the “sense of imperial grandeur” suggested by Indo-­ Saracenic architecture, many of the plinths beneath the statues remain unmarked, leaving only the statue of George V identified (figure 1.4). While Balachandran and Sutton note that the park “has fallen into early decrepitude,” as “monuments are covered with graffiti and the gardens are untended,” they also emphasize how “Coronation Park bristles with activities — yoga, badminton, running, the ubiquitous pastime of selfie-­ taking, romance and play.”76 For those local residents of north Delhi who inhabit the park, its histories, effigies, and monuments are utterly inconsequential. Instead, the park is now the site of a different battle, between the national government and the nonprofit Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage, with the latter aiming to preserve public space in the face of neoliberal government plans for economic development. On a global scale, Coronation Park takes on yet another historical resonance: the American Historical Association has cited Coronation Park as an exemplary model of how to memorialize contentious national monuments (such as statues of Confederate generals and other icons of white supremacy in the United States).77 From its origins as a British military base during the 1857 Mutiny, to its uses as a spectacular site for enacting colonial rule during the 1903 and 1911 Durbars, to its coronation as a decrepit local park in north Delhi, the grounds of the Durbars constitute a mausoleum to imperial power, an “epitaph for an empire” (figure 1.5).78

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1.4  Coronation Park, New Delhi, 2018. PHOTOGR APH COUR TESY OF APARNA BAL ACHANDR AN.

1.5  Coronation Park, New Delhi, 2018. PHOTOGR APH COUR TESY OF APARNA BAL ACHANDR AN.

A RCHIV ES OF MEMORY

A decade after its exhibition in New Delhi, Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force continues to compel me, as a diasporic viewing subject whose experience of belonging to South Asia and America is cathected to the lines of this drawing. What sutures the visual experience of seeing empire through photographs of buildings erected to commemorate British rule, with my experience of being subject to empire in the United States, are the alternate monuments that Shah has drawn. These include the four skyscrapers that accumulate horizontally across the center of the drawing, along with a cenotaph, obelisks, and numerous pillars mirrored on the top and bottom halves of the drawing (see plate 2). Formally and stylistically disjunct from the Durbar’s amphitheaters and canopies, these monuments create another experience of seeing. What I see in the buildings Shah draws is an uncanny reproduction of another image archive, one far removed from landscape photographs of early twentieth-­ century India. These are the photographic and video archives of September 11, 2001, a body of images resurrected through my own diasporic subjectivity, an archive that has been so thoroughly domesticated “that it has come to serve as a shorthand for memory.” 79 Writing on the visual archive created by September 11, 2001, the curator Okwui Enwezor suggests that it is difficult to come to terms artistically with this moment, in part because the images of the crumbling towers and exploding planes were repetitively broadcast around the world, with the effect that the “images became archival the instant the first footage surfaced and the need for documentary accounts grew” (figure 1.6). As Enwezor goes on to note, “September 11 created a new iconomy, a vast economy of the iconic linking archive to traumatic public memory. As the circulation of these images continues unabated, it is fair to ask what their status is beyond their initial documentary purpose as evidence of two incomprehensible acts of violence. Have the images become emblematic more of the aftermath than of the event itself?”80 The “traumatic public memory” that I have discussed thus far in relation to Geometric Landscapes is not of September 11, 2001, but of the Delhi Durbars: a manifestation of imperial power in another place, at another time. Unlike the television and video footage of the World Trade Center, these photographic images from the Durbar did not “[become] archival the instant the first footage surfaced.”81 Instead, the time between the Durbars

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1.6  UA Flight 175 Hits World Trade Center South Tower 9-­11, 2001. Wikimedia Commons. IMAGE SHARED UNDER CRE ATIVE COMMONS AT TRIBUTION-­S HARE ALIK E 2.0 GENERIC LICENSE.

and their reproduction as found images in Shah’s drawing spans over a century. However, as with the televisual images of September 11, these photographs of the Durbar have become more emblematic of what happened after the event than of the event itself. It is my memory of what Enwezor calls the “iconomy” of September 11, along with my knowledge of the iconicity of the Durbars, that flares up when I see Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force now, as a digital reproduction within the confines of my laptop. Its diminished scale mirrors my experience of watching the events of September 11 as a series of images repeatedly broadcast on the television screen.82 My attention now moves away from the images of the 1903 and 1911 Durbars and rests instead on the buildings that Shah has drawn, geometric shapes that bisect and interrupt the archival photographic reproductions. The four skyscrapers appear as rectangular objects, occupying disparate visual planes but nonetheless formally linked. Two of the buildings mirror each other: one is a translucent black, the other an opaque white, both CHAPTER ONE

marked with a small cross. A third structure is white with no windows, bearing what looks like a lightning bolt on its roof (see plate 3). And there is the fourth building that is marked by two half-­moon-­shaped gashes, one black and one white, creating a doubling effect within a single structure. Repetition is integral to the aesthetic form of the monuments that Shah draws, and repetition continues to shape our consumption of this drawing: the sensation of seeing the same archival photographs repeat across the drawing, the experience of seeing buildings replicated behind them, and above all the memory of seeing on television that what appeared to be permanent monuments to capital in New York City were in fact temporary, as the skyscrapers crumbled again and again. As I scan the surface of the drawing to find a way out of the picture plane, I begin to see objects that were dwarfed by the scale of photographic reproductions that initially commanded my attention. One such object is at the extreme left of the drawing, a flat rectangular surface covered with stripes (see plate 2). Positioned in front of the pixelated tower that has two open gashes, a tower that I see as mirroring the implosion of 2 World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, this object is hard to find. I read the flat surface of the object as a cenotaph, and the stripes that cover it as remnants of an American flag. If we scan the drawing from left to right, beginning with this cenotaph, the pageantry of the Durbar that unfolds across the canvas cannot be read solely as a depiction of nineteenth-­ century British colonialism on the subcontinent. Instead, the cenotaph denotes another theater of imperial violence in South Asia, a war that takes place in our present time. To focus on the cenotaph alongside the reprinted photographic negatives of the Durbars upends the place of these coronation ceremonies in teleological narratives of South Asian and Asian American history. If we begin with the cenotaph on the far left of the print, the aftermath of the Durbars cannot be a nationalist celebration of Indian anticolonial resistance, or the subsequent partition and independence of Pakistan and India. Instead, I chart a line of vision that begins with the invasion of Afghanistan and Pakistan by U.S. troops following September 11 — t he use of one terrorist attack to initiate the terrifying expansion of U.S. empire on the subcontinent — in order to radically alter the time scale of the drawing. By reading the cenotaph, the striped flag, and the skyscraper with gashes as an alternate architectural landscape of empire across two continents, my viewing binds together the legacy of British imperial authority with the presence of the U.S. military in South Asia in our present UNCANNY FEELINGS

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time. For outside of this drawing, there are no monuments to those civilian deaths caused by drone attacks, missiles, and combat in South Asia, just as there is no monument to the partition of the subcontinent beyond those photographs, paintings, and drawings archived as evidence of an undivided colonial India.83 As the flat lines of the cenotaph emerge from the parade grounds of the Durbar, and as skyscrapers nest into the silhouette of the Durbar’s amphitheater, my viewing demonstrates how a public memory of empire aggregates across time as well as space. To see Shah’s hand-­drawn architectural forms in relation to my memories of a visual archive of September 11, and to see both in relation to the photographic reproductions of plaster monuments that composed the Durbar, means that we must come to terms with the fact that photography records what Roland Barthes calls “a catastrophe which has already occurred.”84 Yet in my view the drawing does not simply record a single past catastrophe, whether the terror of colonial rule on the subcontinent or the decimation of a terrorist attack in New York City. Instead, the catastrophe that emerges out of the drawing, which exceeds every one of the iconic monuments that it archives, is the ongoing catastrophe of the U.S. as a global empire. The phenomenological experience of empire is captured by the dis64

parate, overlapping relations of identification that I establish between myself and Shah’s drawing, and between the drawing and the photographic objects that it reproduces and conjures. Diasporic mimesis captures the aesthetic forms by which imperial power is represented, as well as the affective modality (what Taussig called the “palpable, sensuous connection”) through which, as racialized subjects, we come to see and understand the imperial landscapes in which we live. What I see when I encounter Geometric Landscapes is already haunted by the online visual archive of September 11, a set of images that achieves the quality of the iconic not because of its scarcity or its singularity, but precisely because of its repetition and proliferation. It is this visual archive that gives meaning to the pixelated skyscrapers, the gashed roofs, the opaque black-­and-­white buildings that anchor the drawing. It is also this visual archive that most steadily anchors the spectacle of force that is at the heart of the drawing. The skyscrapers become the monument that gives form and meaning to another set of architectural monuments, that is the amphitheater and the canopy of the Durbars. As I view archival photographs of the Delhi Durbars alongside the online archive of still and moving images documenting the collapse of the CHAPTER ONE

World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, I am acutely aware that I am scrambling histories, insisting on a symmetry between real and imagined landscapes built a century apart. But if I insist on joining together these two image archives, even in a drawing that explicitly relies only on one such archive, it is to stress that when we encounter a new aesthetic object that represents a history of race and empire, our way of seeing that object is already saturated with what we have seen before. It is my familiarity with the commercial architecture of capitalism in New York City that alerts me to the fantasy of the pageantry of empire in Delhi. Or, to put it another way: the Durbars come alive to us because the photographic archive of 9/11 keeps another set of monuments resolutely alive, always crumbling, always on the brink of death. The performance theorist Peggy Phelan contends that the destruction that took place on September 11 is itself a kind of repetition, a historical event that contains its own mirror. “The [Twin] towers are themselves copies — doubles, if you will — that become the stage for the attack of two planes, the second shadowing the first. The repetition within the event, a repetition expressed both architecturally and geographically, was itself copied by photographs that circled the world.”85 The mimetic quality of the Twin Towers’ destruction, a repetition of the event within the event itself, as well as the reproduction of this event via photographic images that circulated globally, means that this historic event is always already doubled. Mapping this doubling quality of September 11 onto Shah’s drawing brings into relief the experience of diasporic mimesis. If the drawing reproduces the Indo-­Saracenic designs of the British Empire via the photographic images of two Durbars, it also reproduces the crumbling Twin Towers via the hand-­drawn skyscrapers that Shah plots across the print. The elaborate canopy and ornate amphitheater that were built to symbolize the apex of British rule on the subcontinent come to mirror the opaque skyscrapers that are a sign of late capitalism and, in what we know as its eventual destruction, also signify the expansive contours of U.S. empire. I want to stress that it is not that the shape or form of U.S. empire in the early twenty-­first century mimics the scale and scope of the British Empire in the twentieth century. Quite the contrary: it is the affective experience, the felt impact of viewing one archival photographic image in the shadow of the archive of another set of contemporary images that makes us see these built structures, one real and the other imagined, as doubles of each other. UNCANNY FEELINGS

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The uncanny creeps into this moment of repetition, which also acts as a moment of recognition. Freud notes that at the crux of the uncanny is the “involuntary” repetition — the act of coming across the same “painted women” on the street or bumping into the same piece of furniture in the dark. In my reading of the uncanny, I noted that such acts of repetition produced feelings of spatial disorientation, a perception of one’s own hypervisibility, and the experience of abjection. My identification with Geometric Landscapes is produced through the deliberate repetition of aesthetic forms within the drawing, as well as through my own repeated viewings of the drawing. Yet despite these profuse (and voluntary) forms of repetition, I continue to be disoriented by this work of art. I cannot claim to be represented through Geometric Landscapes, for each of my encounters with the drawing involuntarily recalls a diverse set of visual archives that haunt my acts of seeing. It is in relation to these transnational photographic archives — some reproduced within the drawing, and others that limn my viewing of it — t hat I am abjected by the expansive imperial landscape produced within the drawing. To see the skyscrapers, cenotaphs, and elaborate amphitheaters in Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force is to recognize that the drawing does not simply represent the (past) trauma of colonial rule. Rather, for 66

diasporic viewers the experience of seeing the drawing raises the specter of future violence: the threat of death to racialized immigrant subjects in the United States and to postcolonial subjects in South Asia, a heightened sense of speculation on the part of the viewer of her own precarity. But as the viewer speculates on what kind of future landscape the drawing portends, that future has already happened. The buildings have crumbled, the empire has been built, military brigades of armed men with flags spill across the world. And underneath a ghostly white structure, a man has crowned himself emperor.

A RCHIV ES OF THE F U T URE

Writing on the uses of history by Asian American visual artists, David Eng contends, “We do not bring the present into the past. Rather, we bring the past into the present. We keep the past alive in the present by signifying, and quickening through our desire, those creatures and things that conventional culture would disavow and bury.”86 As racialized subjects, our desire to see our own histories means that when we encounter the visual work of diasporic artists, our modes of seeing are CHAPTER ONE

already saturated with the affective charge of multiple image archives. In my encounters with Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force, the archives that my viewings evoked traveled as the work also moved in scale and in location: from its display at a prominent commercial gallery in New Delhi, to my conversation with the artist in her Brooklyn studio, to repeated and sustained viewings of the drawing within the confines of my computer, at home in Philadelphia. Across these distinct sites of engagement, the photographic images that surfaced through my viewings of the drawing included national archives of colonial landscape photography in Britain and India, as well as widely accessible online repositories of newsreel footage. Rather than “disavow or bury” these archival objects, Shah’s drawing explicitly reproduces one collection of images, that of the Delhi Durbars of 1903 and 1911. What is quickened through my desire to have this drawing make sense to me, as a South Asian diasporic subject based in the United States, is another archive far removed from Shah’s work, that is, the online photographic and moving image archive of September 11, 2001. If “the past [comes] alive in the present,” it does so through our viewing practices that signify empire’s durability and mutability across time and space. What we remember when we see Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force is the thing that we have seen before, as we recall an image seen elsewhere in what we see here. I have called the relations of identification forged through this practice of seeing diasporic mimesis, and I have located the site of diasporic mimesis in the affective encounter between racialized diasporic viewers and the artwork, an encounter that is structured by the formal repetition of archival objects within a single work of art. As we see the drawing, we contend with a profusion of repetition: between the likeness of one monument and another, one skyscraper and another, the production and celebration of one form of empire and the viewer’s experience of another. Repetition becomes the thing that, as viewers, we hit against again and again as we view this work, and the disorientation and abjection that we experience through these various modes of repetition take on the quality of the uncanny. That the experience of the uncanny seems so familiar to us, even as it remains terrifying, underscores how far we have domesticated a range of archival images, and how much these images have become our memories. But what comes as a surprise, in my viewing at least, is that our memories of these archives have the force to shape future narratives. Viewing this drawing in all its different scales — as a reproduction of scenes of coloUNCANNY FEELINGS

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nial subjection, as a panoramic landscape of nineteenth-­century imperial rule, as a documentation of war in the twenty-­first century — enables us to speculate on what it means to inhabit the domain of empire, a space that is now our own. Considering the uses of the archive as a medium for contemporary artistic practice, Enwezor writes, “Archives represent scenes of unbearable historic weight, and therefore open up a productive space for artists in the form of aesthetic, ethical, political, social, and cultural speculation.”87 In the hands of artists this can take a range of material forms: the reproduction of archival documents in photography or film; retrieving and installing found objects from a variety of archives; subjecting the archival object to destruction or degradation. Such interventions may work to ease the “unbearable” weight of archival material. But diasporic viewers are also central to the work of “cultural speculation” in the archive, not least through their situated experience of seeing that conjures memories of image archives beyond those represented in a single artwork. The unexpected linkages that we make through these acts of consuming visual culture — to photographic objects within and outside the artwork, as well as across the various sites and forms where we see the artwork — disorient us, generating a sense of place and time that far ex68

ceeds the representations we see. As we identify with archival photographs evoked by the artwork, we also come to embody the expansive temporal contours of empire. I return here to the domestic scene of the uncanny, and the sensation of bumping into furniture in Freud’s “strange room.” Inside another dark and strange room, Sara Ahmed offers the possibility of orienting our disorientation. She writes, “At the same time our intimacy with rooms, even dark ones, can allow us to navigate our way. We might reach out and feel a wall. That we know how a wall feels, or even what it does . . . makes the dark room already familiar. We might walk slowly, touching the wall, following it, until we reach a door. We know then what to do and which way to turn.”88 If the furniture that blocks our way is, as I have suggested, a metaphor for our postcoloniality, the room that we find ourselves in speaks to our deep familiarity with the architecture of racialization. To follow the walls inside this room, to find the door that we eventually reach and touch, is to recognize that we already know which direction to move in, and which way to turn. Our experience of seeing South Asian diasporic visual culture is also, in this instance, an experience of orienting ourselves. CHAPTER ONE

In chapter 2, I consider how imperial archives shape the ways in which we see and know ourselves as racialized immigrants. Taking up contemporary photographic portraits of South Asian Americans, I map the transnational genealogies of South Asian racialization via the circulation of portrait photography between colonial South Asia and settler colonial America. The incommensurability between these two imperial projects of documentation and surveillance is central to how, as viewers, we produce a mimetic relation between disparate image archives of racial subjection, including images that we see as well as those that we remember. Our affective proximity to such images of racial degradation —  our desire to identify with these images, despite their representations of violence — means that colonial archives become a primary space of diasporic (self-­)representation. As a technology of empire, colonial archives not only hold the photographic images that we most want to see; such archives also shape how we display and consume such images as representations of ourselves.

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UNCANNY FEELINGS

t wo REPRESENTATION IN THE COLONIAL ARCHIVE Annu Palakunnathu Matthew’s An Indian from India

By what “illusion” has the scale and scope of colonial processes been made into an apparently discrete and beautiful object?  — Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents

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ho is an Indian? In Annu Palakunnathu Matthew’s series An Indian from India (2001 – 2007), the problem of representation

comes to the surface of the photographic print. Taking images from Edward S. Curtis’s early twentieth-­century collection The North American Indian, Matthew re-­c reates the scene of the original photograph with herself as the subject. Faithfully adhering to the sepia-­toned printing, lighting, and setting that characterize archival photographs, her digital images bear an uncanny resemblance to the original. Looking across the diptychs that compose An Indian from India, from left to right and back again, we see the precise and systematic alignment between Matthew’s duplication of the archival prints and her self-­portrait; the ways in which she reproduces the poses held by Native portrait subjects through her own bodily gestures; and how the torn and ripped edges that mark the archival image are identically reflected in her contemporary photograph. Displayed as framed prints, and in the style popularized by Curtis, as orotones, the arresting difference that marks each diptych slowly comes into view. We begin to notice how Matthew incorporates subcontinental fabrics and jewelry in her clothing; how her stance positions her directly in front of the camera; and how she includes her own family members (her mother, husband, and stepdaughter) across several diptychs. Through a mimetic duplication of the aesthetic form as well as the

2.1  Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, “Types,” from An Indian from India series, 2007. Portfolio 1, 24 × 30 inches, archival pigment print. © ANNU PAL AKUNNATHU MAT THE W, COUR TESY SEPIAE YE.

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modes of ethnographic display that characterize The North American Indian, An Indian from India makes the objectification of the portrait subject, whether indigenous or immigrant, central to our encounter with the photographic image (figure 2.1). In this chapter, I examine how colonial archives operate as a space of self-­representation and racialization in diaspora. At the outset, Matthew’s work appears to be a revisionist portrayal of The North American Indian, melding digital technology with early twentieth-­century photography to locate racialized immigrants in the place of indigenous subjects. As Matthew notes in her artist’s statement, “In this portfolio I play on these stereotypes using photographs of Native Americans from the nineteenth century. I pair these with contemporary images of myself in clothes, poses, and environments that mimic these ‘older’ images. I am challenging the viewer’s assumption of then and now, us and them, exotic and local.” 1 By reframing Curtis’s photographic images of what he described as a “vanishing race” in relation to her own visible presence in the United States, the series appears to dislocate the ongoing impact of R E P R E S E N TAT I O N I N T H E C O L O N I A L A R C H I V E

settler colonialism to foreground, instead, an experience of Asian immigration. Yet reading An Indian from India within the singular framework of U.S. imperialism displaces a longer history of visual documentation that is evoked by our viewing of the series: namely, nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century British colonial portraiture of “native” subjects in South Asia. This other colonial archive not only precedes Curtis’s documentary project; more important, it shapes the diasporic artist’s and the diasporic viewer’s encounter with the settler colonial photography that Curtis and his peers produced. Through performance, citation, and documentation, the diptychs draw our attention to a complex visual genealogy that travels across disparate national archives. Citing nineteenth-­ century ethnographic photography in India through portraits of Native peoples and refracting both through her self-­representation as an “Indian,” Matthew produces a mimetic connection between two imperial projects: U.S. settler colonialism on Native land and British colonialism in South Asia. By exploring how these dissimilar forms of imperial rule converge across visual technologies of documentation, surveillance, and representation, I demonstrate how the act of viewing South Asian diasporic visual culture is, in Ann Laura Stoler’s phrase, “haunted by empire.”2 Whereas 72

in chapter 1 I examined such haunting as a temporal experience of empire produced through the act of seeing and identifying with the colonial photograph, here I consider how empire surfaces as a spatial experience through the transnational mobility of photographic archives, technologies, and forms of display. The colonial archive, I suggest, is critical to how we understand the expansive geography of empire: for the archive shapes how and where, as racialized subjects, we look for images of our own past, as well as the ways in which we create representational images of ourselves for the future. In their work with photographs from nineteenth-­century India, New Delhi – based Raqs Media Collective asks, “What does a photographic archive do to an artist when she enters the archive? What does the artist make of the accumulation of history that the archive represents? What work can contemporary art do in the archive?”3 An Indian from India is an exemplary instance of the diasporic artist at work in settler and colonial archives. To create An Indian from India, Matthew worked in a range of institutional contexts, including the Peabody Museum and the Library of Congress, selecting images from The North American Indian alongside other contemporaneous collections. In retrieving and reproCHAPTER TWO

ducing a series of portrait images of indigenous subjects, the artist occupies the space of the archivist: one who sources, organizes, and displays information, in the process producing its historical and aesthetic value. Her reproduction of these images renews our attention to the photograph as a historical document of racialization, and, in tandem with her self-­ portraits, generates a visual narrative of the relation between indigeneity and immigration in the Americas. But in borrowing from one set of national archives, the diptychs also reference another: the extensive repository of portrait photography of indigenous subjects created by British military and amateur photographers in nineteenth-­century India. Unlike Curtis’s portraits of Native peoples, this archive of colonial Indian photography is never reproduced within An Indian from India. Instead, Matthew invokes this alternate set of images through a range of formal aesthetic references: the frontal position and side profiles of her subjects, her use of costumes and accessories to style the portraits, as well as the ethnographic descriptions she employs in extended titles for her diptychs. Through her deliberate reenactment of a British colonial project of photographing “natives” via her replication of Curtis’s documentation of indigenous subjects, Matthew creates a transverse relationship between anonymous Indians photographed in the late nineteenth century and the many unidentified Native subjects who are surveyed in Curtis’s collection nearly fifty years later. For South Asian American artists like Matthew, who search imperial archives for evidence of self-­representation to find, instead, ethnographic portraits of Native peoples, “the real subject of the pictures becomes, in a sense, the artist’s critical scrutiny of this anthropological inheritance.”4 How then do South Asian diasporic viewers also scrutinize the effects of the transnational photographic histories brought to light in An Indian from India? As the archival images in An Indian from India travel from their original form as photogravures to their reproduction as digital prints, from their historical value as representations of ethnographic subjects to their commodity value as fine art portraits of immigrant subjects, the series as a whole highlights the vexed relation between visual histories of colonial and postcolonial South Asia, and the visual economy of race and empire in the United States. For viewers including myself, our experience of diasporic mimesis centers on the fact that both Matthew’s and Curtis’s photographic projects are invested in representing the so-­ called real and authentic Indian. Our identification with the diptychs (as a representation of our racialized experience as immigrants) is bound to R E P R E S E N TAT I O N I N T H E C O L O N I A L A R C H I V E

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the disorienting experience of seeing the diptychs as the mimetic reproduction of another, unduplicated set of image archives (within which we are also represented as “natives”). As I look and look again at this photographic series, what comes into view are not only the aesthetic and political relations between portraits of indigenous and immigrant subjects. Instead, what as racialized viewers we grasp most clearly are the imperial technologies of representation and display that shape how we know and see ourselves. In my reading of An Indian from India, I explore the ways in which the production and consumption of contemporary photographic images are immeasurably haunted by the presence of multiple colonial archives. Instead of comparing immigrant to indigenous subject, a comparison that is encouraged by the two-­part structure of each diptych, I place the series in dialogue with historical forms of ethnographic portraiture in the Americas and in South Asia. The assertion of these bodies of photography, both in the explicit reproduction of the Curtis images and through the implied presence of nineteenth-­century British photographs, demonstrates how diverse colonial technologies of documentation and surveillance shape the ways in which the diasporic artist sees herself. Equally important are the ways in which these technologies shape the image ar74

chives that diasporic viewers incorporate into the way they see themselves. The formal continuity that I emphasize through my readings of the archival and contemporary image in each diptych generates a discontinuous relationship between Native and immigrant subjects, as well as between the object of the photographic print and the subject positions embodied by the viewer. The dissonance that structures the series, in turn, engenders another way of seeing South Asian American representation, as a genealogy of racial presence bound to multiple imperial times. The mimetic reproduction of indigenous subjects in the diptychs demonstrates the overlapping but discontinuous histories of settler and colonial photographic documentation of “native” subjects in South Asia as well as the Americas. As I discuss below, Native scholars and artists have extensively reworked photographic portraits from The North American Indian in a range of visual forms: performance, film, and multimedia installations. Such critical interventions into the settler colonial archive emphasize the agentive capacities of Native subjects photographed in the collection, but also demonstrate the enduring legacy of settler colonial representations of indigenous peoples today. Matthew’s reproduction of Curtis’s work manifests this photographic history, but her insisCHAPTER TWO

tent duplication also evokes another archival collection, this time from South Asia: The People of India (1868 – 1875). 5 Like The North American Indian, The People of India incorporates narrative descriptions of its photographic subjects, collates multiple portraits of indigenous groups, and produces a taxonomic view of the subjects of empire. The photographs that constitute The People of India enter into my viewing of An Indian from India as a sense memory, an experience of being represented elsewhere, in another archive, in another place. Instead of seeing An Indian from India as a reproduction of a single archival image — a framework that maintains the asymmetric relation of power between the so-­called original image (the Curtis print) and its derivative (South Asian American photography) — I am compelled by the presence of those racialized subjects whom we cannot see, whose ghostly presence within these prints conjures the impossibility of seeing ourselves. As I bring indigenous and feminist critiques of settler colonial photography in North America into conversation with postcolonial visual cultural studies of nineteenth-­century South Asia, I emphasize how it is my own desire for representation as a South Asian diasporic subject that leads me to draw together these incommensurate histories of imagemaking. In my view, if we see An Indian from India as simply a visual representation of South Asian immigrants in the United States — as artwork that elucidates the immigrant’s claim to land in relation to and in the place of Native sovereignty — t hen we recast the series as solely an American story. By contrast, entering Matthew’s diptychs through the histories of colonial and settler colonial photography in South Asia and in North America compels us to look at multiple genealogies of indigenous and imperial presence within the photographic print. Such overlapping histories of empire are also evoked through the museological display of these prints. At a solo exhibition of Matthew’s work at the Royal Ontario Museum in 2015, An Indian from India was displayed alongside select prints from The North American Indian, making explicit the representational overlap between the racialization of indigenous and immigrant subjects. But Matthew’s exhibition as a whole was separate from the museum’s extensive holdings in modern and contemporary South Asian art, and several floors removed from the museum’s permanent collection of First Nations art. The spatial disjunctures enacted within the museum to shape the display of An Indian from India foreclosed the possibility for viewers to see across these collections, all of which operate as forms of (self-­)representation in an imperial time. I bind together R E P R E S E N TAT I O N I N T H E C O L O N I A L A R C H I V E

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these asymmetric modes of display within the museum space to create a way of seeing An Indian from India that rejects nationalist frameworks of aesthetic production and emphasizes instead transnational analyses of visual consumption. At stake is how we identify which genealogies of colonial visual production surface in contemporary South Asian American visual culture, as well as how these imperial legacies shape our own viewing of, and identification with, such photographs as racialized subjects. For example, as U.S.-­based scholars of critical race and ethnic studies working with Matthew’s prints, we may at the very least claim to see the settler colonial gaze that disciplines the bodies of unnamed Native subjects in Curtis’s prints, as well as the inadequacy of captions that reduce portrait subjects to tribal affiliation or gender (e.g., “Navajo Woman”). As feminist scholars, we may wish to emphasize how the artist’s work of duplicating and reembodying Curtis’s imagery is the means through which Matthew critiques the gendered and ethnographic lens of the camera. But throughout, it is precisely our familiarity with — a nd perhaps even our desire for — the settler and colonial photographic archive that leads us to name and claim the subjects of each diptych as Indians. That is, the fact that one can continue to see Curtis’s portrait subjects as “Indian,” as somehow 76

analogous to the differently racialized bodies of Matthew’s portraits, is a measure of our immersion in imperial archives of documentation and display. Concomitantly, it reveals our belief that these same technologies can disclose the truth of the photographic object.

R E P R E S E N T I N G T H E IN DI A N

Born in 1964 in Stourport-­on-­Severn, England, Matthew moved with her family to Bangalore, India, when she was eleven. Matthew immigrated to the United States in 1994 to pursue a master of fine arts degree in photography, and she is currently professor of art at the University of Rhode Island. Her body of work, ranging from photographs of Indian streetscapes taken with a Holga toy camera, to satirical Bollywood film posters, to digital animations that document the oral and visual history of Partition, the Vietnam War, and the Holocaust, consistently makes use of the personal, national, and family photograph, and is held in a variety of major museum collections.6 In her artist’s statement, Matthew frames the impetus for An Indian from India as a problem of representation. She writes, “As an immigrant, I am often questioned about where I CHAPTER TWO

am ‘really from.’ When I say that I am Indian, I often have to clarify that I am an Indian from India. It seems strange that all this confusion started because Christopher Columbus thought he had found the Indies and called the native people of America collectively as Indians.”7 Matthew’s description of her racial objectification here duplicates the rhetoric of belonging that displaces Native peoples from their sovereign territories (“I am often questioned about where I am ‘really from’ ”) and reproduces the objectification of Native subjects as other to settler colonial subjects, including Asian immigrants (“I often have to clarify that I am an Indian from India”). Through the claims of national belonging that she establishes in her artist’s statement, An Indian from India appears to codify the unequal relation of power between the indigenous subjects of Curtis’s series and Matthew. The problem of distinguishing the “Indian” from the “Indian from India” as two figures separated by the blank space at the center of each diptych is offered here as a problem of visual consumption. The viewer’s ability to recognize the similarities and differences within each diptych, between the archival print and Matthew’s self-­portrait, becomes the means of uncovering who is an Indian. Yet the rhetorical doubling of the series, the fact that one “Indian” replaces another, is rebutted by the fact that neither of the two photographic subjects in each diptych is, in fact, an “Indian.” As Shona Jackson argues in Creole Indigeneity: In this regard we should remember that the term native or Indian, was not only a mistake — what Gayatri Spivak refers to as a “hegemonic false category” — but never existed in any Native American language, just as black never initially existed to describe a group of people, and in the Caribbean, East Indian had to be invented for another. Despite, for instance, the acceptance of and even preference for the term by many Indigenous Peoples, including radical groups, the word Indian speaks to the long reinvention of autochthonous peoples in the Americas in languages, cultures, and juridical systems that socially and culturally produced them and maintained their subordination as Indian, as native, as other to (European) man.8 The invocation of the word “Indian” as what Spivak would call a “catachresis” speaks to how the term itself cannot be regarded as authentic, original, or as a proper noun to those who identify and are identified as indigenous, even as Jackson points out that many indigenous peoples use the term.9 In relation to this discursive history, within which an invented R E P R E S E N TAT I O N I N T H E C O L O N I A L A R C H I V E

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term of racial identification emerges out of the subordination of indigenous peoples in the Americas and in South Asia, the acts of duplication and reproduction that compose An Indian from India necessarily fail to show us the “Indian.” Instead, the series demonstrates how what and whom we know as the indigenous and immigrant subject is constituted through the mimetic circulation of settler and colonial photographic technologies: across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and into our present time. My work on the imperial archives that shape South Asian American representation builds on the seminal scholarship of indigenous studies scholars and Asian Americanists, who have underscored the asymmetric experiences of racialization, nationhood, and citizenship embodied by indigenous and immigrant subjects in settler colonial time. Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd points out that theorizations of indigeneity in the Americas are often assumed to be incompatible with discourses of indigenous subjectivity in postcolonial studies (particularly in South Asia), a difference attributed to the geographic distance between both fields.10 Offering queer diaspora studies as a critique of these fixed spatial boundaries, Gayatri Gopinath proposes that we “see diaspora and indigeneity as co-­constitutive categories, rather than as antithetical.” 11 I am in 78

alliance with this body of work, and yet in my ethnographic readings of South Asian diasporic visual culture I am insistently reminded that the affective experience of seeing and identifying with representations of South Asian Americans relies on the simultaneous visibility and erasure of indigenous subjects. Kanaka Maoli scholar J. Kēhaulani Kauanui incisively writes that the logic of settler colonialism is oriented toward “the elimination of the Native as Native”: such structures of elimination frame the very conditions of public exhibition within which we see contemporary South Asian American art.12 As I discuss in relation to the display of Matthew’s work in Toronto, the erasure of indigenous art from exhibitionary spaces for South Asian American art — even as these spaces incorporate settler colonial representations of indigenous subjects — is central to the ways in which Asian immigrants become recruited into the representational project of the neoliberal settler state. Iyko Day reminds us that “settler colonialism . . . is effectively immune to the process of decolonization.”13 It is precisely the fact that I can claim Matthew’s diptychs as a representation of my own immigrant experience despite their mimetic reproduction of settler colonial portraiture that demonstrates the inequality between whose histories of presence come to the foreCHAPTER TWO

ground in this series and whose do not. My identification with Matthew’s work is itself a symptom of my imbrication in the logic of settler colonialism, as well as the effect of another visual history of empire in South Asia, within which I am already named and seen as “native.” Instead of a teleological narrative that generates competing claims to arrival (the narrative that proceeds from the question “What kind of Indian are you?” that Matthew claims as a genesis of her project), I route my readings of Matthew’s works outside the visible framework of the diptych. I place the archival photograph and its reproductions at the center of an aesthetic practice that binds together the conditions of settler colonialism to the surveillance regime of the colonial state. At one level, Matthew’s artwork maps the uneven lines of affiliation between early twentieth-­century discourses of American exceptionalism and the British “civilizing mission” on the subcontinent, insofar as both regimes of imperialism were premised on the subjugation, if not elimination, of indigenous subjects. But rather than making a comparativist argument about diverse forms of colonial rule, my work is concerned with the mimetic effects of photographic technology deployed in the service of empire. By drawing Curtis’s images through an archive of late nineteenth-­century photography on the subcontinent — a body of work that includes portraits of indigenous peoples, itinerant workers, and bourgeois families — I excavate the ways in which early twentieth-­century American photographs of Native peoples are inflected by portrait photographs taken by British photographers on the subcontinent. My reading of these images does not rest on archival documentation of Curtis’s exposure to this earlier work. Rather, I emphasize how this aesthetic relation is produced through Matthew’s artistic process, as well as through the affective experiences of South Asian diasporic viewers. Attending to practices of visual production and consumption, I expand on what historian Manu Karuka describes as the “imperial continuum” that extends from the project of U.S. settler colonialism in the nineteenth century to the contemporary exercise of U.S. imperial power over the bodies of racialized immigrants.14 As I turn to repositories of colonial photography in the United States, Britain, and India to view the artist’s work, I widen the geographic and temporal parameters through which South Asian Americans see themselves as subjects of empire. By duplicating early twentieth-­c entury prints of Native peoples through her self-­portraits, Matthew reworks the tense relation between Native and immigrant, between ethnographic subject and aesthetic obR E P R E S E N TAT I O N I N T H E C O L O N I A L A R C H I V E

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ject, and between acts of picture taking and picture making.15 The haunting, or what Avery Gordon defines as the “unresolved social violence” animated by Matthew’s diptychs, includes the genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas; the brutal repression of indigenous communities across South Asia by the colonial and postcolonial state; and, as I argue below, the disappearance of South Asians in the United States after September 11, 2001.16 In the act of seeing these images, I examine how South Asian diasporic viewers continue to be haunted by —  indeed, how our very racialization as South Asian Americans is animated through — such discordant and irreconcileable forms of racial violence. For viewers who feel an affinity to Matthew’s self-­representation as a South Asian in the United States, encountering An Indian from India generates what Gordon calls an altered “experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present, and the future.” 17 This emerges from Matthew’s practice of diasporic mimesis in the colonial archive: what I see as her identification with and selection of photographic prints by Curtis and his peers; her reproduction of archival qualities in the self-­ portraits (such as erosion, fading, and ripping); and her invocation of ethnographic taxonomies through her captions. Suturing these aesthetic methods together, An Indian from India makes visible the violence of 80

photographic representation. And yet the fact that, as racialized viewers, we persist in seeing ourselves alongside the artist in this photographic series — as if we are also Indians, as if these reproduced and refurbished archival images confirm our own authenticity — makes clear the legacy of images of empire. As diasporic subjects, our insistent, collective desire for representation is itself an effect of imperial archives, a haunted vision of seeing oneself.

P H O T O G R A P H IN G IN DI A N S

The North American Indian is a twenty-­volume set composed of over forty thousand images of Native peoples, taken by Edward Sherriff Curtis (1868 – 1952) between 1900 and 1930. Based in Seattle, Curtis initially worked as a commercial studio photographer. He was widely regarded for his award-­w inning images of Native subjects, including Duwamish Princess Angeline, the aged daughter of Chief Seeathl, in Princess Angeline (c. 1895) and The Clam Digger (1898 – 1900) (figure 2.2). Her face cut by wrinkles, her skin aged by work along the coastal shore, in both images Angeline is photographed in splendid isolation. The photographs CHAPTER TWO

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2.2  Edward Curtis, The Clam Digger, c. 1898 – 1900. Gelatin silver print, 39.2 × 29.8 cm. DIGITAL IMAGE COUR TESY OF THE GE T T Y ’S OPEN CONTENT PROGR AM.

make no reference to Angeline’s economic or social dispossession, or that of her community: by the time the photographs were published, legal ordinances obstructed the work and residence of Native peoples within the city precincts of Seattle.18 These photogravures, already depicting Native peoples as figures of the past, built on an established history of settler colonial paintings of Native peoples.19 Curtis’s images generated a degree of local prominence and led to his photographing Native nations throughout the West, Southwest, and Pacific Northwest coast. Underwritten by J. P. Morgan, The North American Indian was supported and championed by the imperialist ambitions of President Theodore Roosevelt. As Roosevelt notes in his foreword to the first volume, Curtis’s project is “a good thing for the American people. . . . The Indian as he has hitherto been is on the point of passing away. His life has been lived under conditions thru which our own race passed so many ages ago that not a vestige of their memory remains.”20 Roosevelt’s teleological narrative of the “American people,” marching into modernity while “the Indian” fades away, establishes the temporal framework for The North American Indian as well as its elegiac aesthetic.21 Styled in the manner of ethnographic photographs, portraits in the series were also viewed as revealing the truth of indigenous peoples in the Americas. Established through the directive of the 82

federal government and funded by private capital, Curtis’s photographs, and later his wax cylinder recordings, became both a tool of settler colonialism and a representation of the settler colonial state. Curtis and his peers’ uses of photography to document Native peoples is another form of what the Ojibwe historian Jean M. O’Brien calls “scripts [that] inculcated particular stories about the Indian past, present, and future into their audiences.”22 As she contends, in these scripts “non-­ Indians held exclusive sway over modernity, denied modernity to Indians, and in the process created a narrative of Indian extinction that has stubbornly remained in the consciousness and unconsciousness of Americans.”23 What amplifies the claims of The North American Indian to tell a particular narrative about indigenous peoples is the fact that the collection is composed of elaborately staged images. To begin with, photogravure as an aesthetic form aspired to the qualities of fine art rather than ethnographic illustration. It “did not in the least resemble the popular silver chloride prints; gravures rather recalled the richness of mezzotints, the jet-­black inks of lithography, the delicacy and fine lines of etching, the decorative capabilities of aquatint.”24 As a process of image production, photogravure was a medium that allowed for extensive retouching CHAPTER TWO

and cropping: adding highlights, altering tonal qualities, engraving by hand. 25 Curators have also noted that objects that connoted modernity (clocks, blue jeans) were systematically eliminated from Curtis’s photographic negatives; that Curtis’s propensity to use a large aperture lent a soft focus to several images, heightening their romantic appeal; and that Curtis used the same material object (such as a headdress) across photographs of several different Native peoples to connote an essential sense of “Indianness.”26 Other critics have pointed out that “Curtis borrowed confiscated regalia from museums and government archives, bringing it to remote communities where he and his subjects created elaborately staged tableaus of battles and dances.”27 As many readers of Curtis’s work have made clear, in both his technology of production (photogravure) and his material reconstruction of tradition (through the indiscriminate use of regalia, accessories, and costumes), Curtis’s collection created and performed the very subjects that he wanted to see. Even as the narrative thrust of The North American Indian is premised on the temporal and spatial disjuncture between indigenous communities and the modern state, the collection itself is constituted precisely through visualizing the very categories of being (Indian or Native) that are produced through the ideological and capital expansion of the settler colonial state. To this day, dealers, collectors, and Curtis enthusiasts have elided the work of his photography in the service of settler colonialism, arguing instead that the collection reveals a “universal” humanism, even a shared nostalgia for an American past. 28 Despite numerous scholarly compilations that critique Curtis’s photographic practices and document his alignment with U.S. imperialist interests, images from The North American Indian — available in university and national archives, as well as in reproductions plastered onto posters and postcards, displayed in coffee-­table books and at museum exhibitions — continue to circulate in popular culture, dominating visual representations of Native peoples. Curtis’s photographs, as Aaron Glass and Brad Evans write, have “come to embody the quintessential Indian in the global imagination.”29 Native artists, scholars, and activists have crucially, and prolifically, produced literary and visual works that counter the widespread circulation of photographic images by Curtis and his peers. 30 Many have written on the original Curtis images themselves, identifying genealogical relationships to elders in the prints, deploying the images to interrupt or supplement oral history narratives, and producing biographies of photographic subjects in the collection that demonstrate the agency these men R E P R E S E N TAT I O N I N T H E C O L O N I A L A R C H I V E

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and women held over their own representations. 31 Urban Iroquois artist Jeff Thomas has created diptychs and triptychs that directly reference Curtis’s compilation, aligning archival images from the series with his own portraits of Native youth and family members. 32 In an instance of what Stephanie Nohelani Teves calls “defiant indigeneity,” Thomas uses his photographs to stage an imagined conversation with Curtis, posing questions to the photographer that Thomas answers by reproducing selections of narrative from The North American Indian. 33 Native artists have also worked to reclaim the form of photographic portraiture from the parameters of ethnographic documentation. Such methodological practices instantiate what Diné/Seminole/Muscogee scholar and artist Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie calls “photographic sovereignty” or the production of “a photographic album full of beautiful brown people, a photographic album of visual affirmation.”34 In her ongoing Project 562, Swinomish/Tulalip artist Matika Wilbur takes up the historical legacy of The North American Indian by traveling across 562 federally recognized tribes to photograph Native peoples and communities. Wilbur’s dramatically lit photographs focus on men, women, and nonbinary subjects; elders and children; rural and urban residents. Some of Wilbur’s photographic subjects are adorned in regalia and jewelry or 84

hold ritual objects; others are photographed after school, in their lacrosse and basketball uniforms. Project 562 solicits extensive viewer engagement via blog posts, online fund-­raising, and a variety of social media platforms, with the objective of creating “an unprecedented repository of imagery and oral histories that accurately portrays Native Americans.”35 Widely disseminated in national and international museums, to tribal communities as well as at academic conferences, Wilbur’s photography has been applauded for making visible how indigeneity is, as Kauanui contends, “a fluid source of dynamic power — molten, the very source of . . . sovereignty.”36 Across the visual density of its portrait images, the intimacy of accompanying oral narratives, and the participatory feelings of community generated by its display, Project 562 contravenes the static quality of Curtis’s collection. Representations of indigenous sovereignty are also central to Métis playwright Marie Clements’s multimedia work, The Edward Curtis Project, and her collaboration with the Canadian photographer Rita Leistner to create landscape and portrait photographs of First Nations territories and communities as part of that work. Countering the ghost of Princess Angeline invoked in Clements’s The Edward Curtis Project, LeistCHAPTER TWO

ner photographs youth and elders in Haida Gwaii; Navajo elders; and Cree, Kwakwaka’wakw, and Tsimshian residents living in fraying single-­ resident-­occupancy hotels in downtown Vancouver. One of the portrait subjects is a young woman whose great-­g reat-­g randfather was photographed by Curtis; another series of diptychs portrays Comanche war veterans in various forms of regalia and in their “street clothes costume.” Commenting on the beadwork worn by fellow members of the Comanche Indian Veterans Association, one participant in Clements and Leistner’s project noted, “We don’t know exactly what our Comanche warriors wore in the past, and what we do know comes largely from nineteenth-­ century paintings, and from Edward Curtis’s photographs.”37 In contrast to Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor’s argument that “the decorative features, beads, leathers, woven costumes, silver, turquoise, bone, native vesture, and indian simulations have turned humans into the mere objects that bear material culture in photographs,” this veteran sees Curtis’s photographs as an archive of indigenous cultural practice. 38 At the same time, The Edward Curtis Project demonstrates Leistner’s interlocutors’ assertion of agency over their own representations. Several subjects pose alongside their cars, trucks, and snowmobiles. These vehicles not only stand in for the elusive notion of modernity that remains absent in The North American Indian: more important, they index the mobility of the photographic subject herself. Such contemporary artworks counter the compendium of photographs of indigenous subjects that Curtis and his peers produced. And yet, in Wilbur’s aspiration to photograph every federally recognized Native nation, in Thomas’s use of Curtis’s ethnographic narrative to answer his own questions about the past, and in the Comanche war veteran who — e ven as he participated in creating his own self-­ representation — recuperated The North American Indian as an authoritative source of knowledge, these artworks demonstrate the persistent power of early settler colonial photography. It is the portrait images of Native subjects archived in Curtis’s collection, among others, that come to stand in for the very practice of documenting the lived experience of indigenous subjects; and it is these images that operate as a visual archive of indigenous spiritual and material practice. That The North American Indian continues to incite passionate defense and condemnation by collectors, curators, critics, and artists, both indigenous and not, exemplifies the ways in which the collection continues to limn photographic representations of Native lives. R E P R E S E N TAT I O N I N T H E C O L O N I A L A R C H I V E

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H AT I N G E M P I R E P R O P E R LY

The global circulation and consumption of The North American Indian over the past century generates what Sumathi Ramaswamy and Martin Jay have called, in the context of postcolonial Africa and Asia, “empires of vision.” Arguing that empire is an “organizing principle” of historical and contemporary visual culture, Ramaswamy contends that the problem for the postcolonial critic is how to bring together their hatred of empire with a love of its images. She argues, “This form of subtle inhabitation of antagonism and immersion, of hating and (tragic) loving at the same time, is especially true for our postcolonial encounter with empire’s images, many of which remain objects of great beauty and value, much sought after and collected, even (and possibly especially) in the post­ colonial world. . . . Paradoxically therefore, although as good postcolonial scholars we may hate empire and with a passion, we fall in love with its images, which we come to study with care and thought, indeed . . . with love.”39 As Ramaswamy points out, the “care and thought” that we lavish on our critique of images of empire — critiques that can take the form of producing art — is itself a symptom of our investment in these images. Even as scholars and artists write eloquently about their pain and sadness 86

in viewing Curtis’s images, their impassioned disavowal of the ethnographic photograph is itself a recognition of the pervasive aesthetic and political influence of The North American Indian and, with it, the collection’s impulse to record and document indigenous lives.40 As Rama­ swamy goes on to note, “This condition of desiring-­while-­disavowing and disavowing-­while-­desiring obliges us to hate empire’s images properly.”41 Matthew’s An Indian from India intervenes in this bind of desire and disavowal: it is a work that provokes us to think through what it means to love and hate images of empire. Even as the formal symmetry of the prints suggests a relation of identity between the Native subjects on the left side of the diptych, and Matthew and her family members on the right, I take up the form of the diptych as both an acknowledgment of and a mode of resistance to teleological narratives that replace the indigenous with the immigrant subject.42 At one level, Matthew’s diptychs join photographic collections that strike back at the settler colonial legacy of Curtis’s project, particularly through her incorporation of self-­portraits. But rather than rejecting Curtis’s collection entirely, Matthew chooses to reproduce select photographs in their entirety. In that act of reproduction, she returns to the image archive of U.S. empire and finds within CHAPTER TWO

it evidence of another, earlier legacy of colonial photography. It is this alternate set of ethnographic portraits, of Indians in India, that inflects both Matthew’s duplication of Curtis’s images and her bodily comportment in her self-­portraits. Diasporic mimesis works doubly here to structure Matthew’s identification with two distinct collections of imperial images, settler and colonial. Shaped by the mimetic reproduction of one set of archival photographs, the diptychs suggest the artist’s recuperation and remembrance of another, unseen set of archival images. An Indian from India is a reminder that part of the diasporic artists’ “anthropological inheritance” is the compendium of nineteenth-­century British photography in India and, specifically, the claims to “Indian” representation made by colonial ethnographic documentation.43 It is this colonial archive that haunts both Curtis’s portraiture and Matthew’s own. Describing her work for An Indian from India, Matthew details her aesthetic process as follows: I was initially shooting on film and had to set up multiple shoots before I got the pose and the expression right. . . . I would then scan the analog images and bring them into Photoshop and cut out my figure from the background. Then I would import the scanned image of the Native Americans that I would receive on CD ’s from the various collections, which I had contacted. I would then create a layout that had the original image on the left. I duplicated that image and moved it to the right and put the image of myself on top of that. The font used matches the font used by Curtis. So does the paper. In those days, because of the limited technology and printing ability, I replaced the color cartridges in my printer for cartridges that had different shades of brown which resulted in the rich brown tones in the prints.44 Initially shooting on film, using natural light and a self-­timer to create the self-­portraits, Matthew shifted to digital photography and editing as it became more accessible. Alongside images from The North American Indian, Matthew also incorporates in her diptychs portraits by B. A. Gifford, Case and Draper, Frank Albert Rinehart, and Frank La Roche, all of whom were Curtis’s peers.45 Together, this range of images constitutes a dynamic, rather than static, archive. The portrait images that Matthew received on CDs from various libraries, for example, are already reformatted and repro-

duced as digital files, loosened from their archival compilations and from their bound and printed form. If Curtis’s staged compositions cross the line between ethnography and performance, Matthew’s diptychs double R E P R E S E N TAT I O N I N T H E C O L O N I A L A R C H I V E

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this encounter. She underscores the labor of “multiple shoots before [she] got the pose and expression right,” the ways in which she disciplined her own body to create an ideal photographic subject, a subject that changes across multiple photographic exposures from which Matthew selects just one. As Matthew moves from photogravure to early forms of digital photography, the images continue to be highly pliable, as she crops, retouches, and alters the archival print. Alerting us to the performative possibilities within these early twentieth-­century portraits, Matthew extensively manipulates the lighting and tone as well as the posture and style of her own self-­portrait to duplicate the form of the early twentieth-­century photographs, including replicating the font of handwritten inscriptions found in the bottom corners of some images. Even though Matthew adheres to the style of these early portrait images, however, she brings us no closer to the original subject who was photographed. Instead, she literally overlays her own image across the body of the archival portrait subject. What remains unavailable to us, despite Matthew’s fidelity to the aesthetics of settler colonial photography, is the truth of the Indian. As Matthew focuses her camera upon herself and members of her family, she rescripts the ways in which we see photography as representation. In Navajo Smile/Malayalee Smile (also known as Smiles; see 88

plate 5), the left side of the diptych is an unpublished photograph from Curtis’s archives, titled A Navaho Smile (1904). The image features an unnamed woman draped in a blanket, resting her face in the palm of her right hand. Her body and her face are turned squarely toward the camera. Sunlight streams in from the left side of the picture frame, prominently framing the subject and bringing to light the distinctive textures of the blanket, her skirt, and her thickly braided hair. On the right side of the diptych is a self-­portrait of Matthew, who occupies the same frontal position as the subject of Curtis’s print. She is wrapped in an elaborately patterned sari, one that tonally reflects the patterned blanket in the adjacent image. Holding her face in her hand, her forearm exposed, Matthew wears a quizzical expression, her smile more akin to a wince. At first glance, both portrait subjects produce a relation of identity with each other: they occupy exactly the same backdrops and a similar amount of the picture frame, and their bodies are adorned in patterned textiles. It is precisely the uncanny feeling elicited by the similarity between the portrait images that compels the viewer to identify who is the original subject and who is the derivative. That task can only be completed if the viewer can name each element of the image (face, hair, dress, skin) that CHAPTER TWO

2.3  Edward Curtis, [Head-­and-­Shoulders Portrait of Navajo Woman, Facing Front], c. 1904. LIBR ARY OF CONGRESS, PRINTS AND PHOTOGR APHS DIVISION, EDWARD S. CUR TIS COL L EC TION, LC-­U SZ 62-­1 0 3 4 9 8.

2.4  Edward Curtis, The Blanket Maker — Navaho, c. 1904. LIBR ARY OF CONGRESS, PRINTS AND PHOTOGR APHS DIVISION, EDWARD S. CUR TIS COL L EC TION, LC-­U SZ 62-­1 2 0 9 2 5.

differentiates Matthew’s self-­portrait from the archival image. But if the result of such a reading is to differentiate, once again, between two ethnographic types — both named Indian — how and where can we see alterity within the diptych? The anthropologist James Faris has identified that the female subject of A Navaho Smile surfaces in at least two images subsequently published in The North American Indian: Navajo Woman and The Blanket Maker, both taken in 1904.46 In all three images, the subject of the photograph remains unnamed. In Navajo Woman, the subject directly faces the viewer (figure 2.3). One eye is slightly squinted, and the left-­side profile of her face is cast in shadow. She wears a woven blanket and multiple necklaces, as well as an ornate belt (Faris also identifies her jewelry as belonging to Curtis). In The Blanket Maker, the same subject is now lit from her right side: she looks slightly upward, away from the photographer (figure 2.4). Here her shoulders are covered in another blanket, and R E P R E S E N TAT I O N I N T H E C O L O N I A L A R C H I V E

her hands, foregrounded in the bottom center of the image, hold a neatly bundled skein of yarn. Moving from the subject’s face, framed by the thick blanket, to her hands, which hold the yarn, our eyes are guided to establish a correspondence between the woman and the product of her labor. But in the absence of other materials (a loom, a space to work, colleagues) the effect is of total alienation. Faris describes A Navaho Smile as an exception to these two published images: “This lovely image of the same woman . . . cannot show greater contrast. Indeed, her entire face changes, and years disappear. If this smile reflects Curtis’s relationship with his models, then he got on very well. Here there is no jewelry, no dark backdrop, no contrived pose. This grand photograph was never published.”47 In Faris’s view, A Navaho Smile produces a transparent reading of the unnamed sitter, a subject who is exceptional even in relation to her own published images in The North American Indian. The unpublished archival image’s beauty (that is, its aesthetic value) corresponds directly to its ethnographic value, for the authenticity of this image is located in the lack of borrowed jewelry, as well as the absence of a “dark backdrop” and “contrived pose.” But though Faris critiques the form of the studio portrait, he appears unable to see the fact that Curtis’s photography, published or not, is itself a performance of race and gender. In his 90

desire to affirm the authenticity of the smile that he sees on the woman’s face, Faris participates in the very terms of settler colonial representation that make up The North American Indian: for Faris claims that the smile worn by the Native subject of the print is not autonomous to her, but instead reflects Curtis’s relation to his models. In his final reading of A Navaho Smile, Faris too appends a racist stereotype to those whose images he wishes to salvage: Curtis could “simply not resist,” Faris writes, “the persistent warmth of ordinary Navajo.”48 My reading of Smiles works against Curtis’s use of an anonymous woman to document an ethnographic fact, and counters as well Faris’s attempts to recuperate an essential and visible identity for Curtis’s photographic subjects. Rather than presuming that there is an authentic, original, or stable referent behind the image, I take up the archival image as if it is already a performance, one that enables Matthew’s own. Instead of the singular ethnographic subject, what I see in An Indian from India is a doubling: once doubled, the subjects of the print are already in excess of the national and regional appellations (Navajo, Malayalee) appended to them. For racialized diasporic viewers, such doubling expands our expe-

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rience of diasporic mimesis and offers the possibility of reorienting our relation to the documentary photograph. As we work to see this diptych —  repeatedly, almost obsessively looking across Curtis’s photograph and Matthew’s self-­portrait — what we come to recognize is that neither the archival nor the contemporaneous image can represent the truth of an essential femininity, a representation that is ostensibly indexed by the smile of both subjects. Instead, the doubling effect of Smiles documents the performance of gendered docility by the portrait subjects, their affective subjugation, and the technological capacities through which racial difference is produced. Our experience of diasporic mimesis via a series of doubled images also initiates a powerful feminist critique of racial representation. In Oregon’s Indian Madonna/Indian Madonna (also known as Madonnas), the left side of the diptych features a 1901 photograph by B. A. Gifford, showing the profile of an unidentified Native woman swaddling a child in her arms (see plate 6).49 The archival photograph is defined by the careful symmetry that Gifford establishes between those parts of the woman’s body that are made visible to the viewer as objects of public consumption (her face, her hair, her shoulders, and her arm), and those parts of her body that are concealed and thus effectively become a canvas for displaying the intricately woven blanket that covers her left shoulder and torso. The baby, who is enveloped by the blanket, pokes one bare arm out of it. The textured pattern of the blanket occupies the center of the portrait image, and the blanket is artfully reversed toward the top of the woman’s chest, showcasing the fringe. While the woman’s gaze is directed toward the baby, the baby’s head is turned toward the photographer. It is the child’s eyes that return the viewer’s gaze, rather than the mother’s. But as we see the photograph, it is unclear whether the sitter is holding a child related to her, or whether the child is, like the blanket, another prop for the portrait image. As Nez Perce literary scholar Beth Piatote comments, in relation to an archival image of Ni:mi:pu: women from the late 1890s, “Every detail of this photograph — the girls in their school dresses, their fashioning of Indian domesticity, the very ground upon which they play — is a site to be surveyed, documented, measured, and changed under the terms of American assimilation.”50 The mimetic reproduction of Gifford’s image in Matthew’s diptych magnifies the uses of photography as a technology of “American assimilation,” within which the unnamed Native sitter is rendered into a vision of the Christian Madonna. 51

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Matthew’s self-­p ortrait, on the right sight of the diptych, ruptures the mirroring that informs much of her other work in the series. Unlike Smiles, this diptych does not hold two images, one duplicating the other. Instead, here Matthew’s self-­portrait becomes a parody of the archival image, a performance of motherhood that punctures Gifford’s claims to documenting Oregon’s Indian Madonna. Even as she replicates the lighting and color gradient of Gifford’s photograph, as well as the torn corner on the upper right of the image and paper cut on the bottom right, Matthew challenges “every detail of this [archival] photograph” that fashions what we know and see as “Indian domesticity.” Matthew redoubles the objectification of the unnamed female sitter in Gifford’s print not just by posing similarly with her face tilted forward and down, her shoulders loosely covered in a dupatta, but also by swaddling another objectified representation of femininity: the Indian Barbie. While the blond-­haired Barbie is an iconic emblem of beauty and female heterosexuality in the United States that is aggressively marketed to young consumers, the Indian Barbie is Mattel’s attempt to reach a middle-­class audience on the subcontinent. Inderpal Grewal argues that the Indian Barbie indexes the mobility of middle-­class South Asian consumers in the early twenty-­first century, particularly in terms of consum92

ers’ aspirational desires to be made modern through the consumption of global commodities. 52 Vanita Reddy further notes that the Indian Barbie became a “powerful signifier . . . in part because the dolls could be marketed as ‘Indian’ and ‘American’ at the same time.”53 Despite their uniformly pale skin tone, with their elaborate clothing styles, jewelry, and hair adornments, Indian Barbies are consumed widely, both by Indians on the subcontinent and among South Asians in diaspora. The plastic Barbie that Matthew holds, which retains the disproportionately small waist and large breasts of some of its U.S. versions, is dressed in red Hindu bridal clothes, wearing several ornaments on its head, arms, and neck. With her synthetic brunette hair cascading over Matthew’s arms, the doll is as authentically Indian as the portrait of the indigenous woman and child in Gifford’s photograph — which is to say, not at all. As with the child in Gifford’s photograph, Barbie’s head is turned toward us: her fixed, painted eyes are wide open, as is her lipsticked mouth. As Matthew looks toward her charge, her tender embrace of a plastic doll highlights the absurdity of “Indian Madonna” as an archetype of femininity, race, and motherhood. Given that a recent search for “Indian Barbie” on Mattel’s website

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shows multiple results for dolls meant to represent Native women (carrying infants in buckskin packs), as well as light-­skinned, sari-­clad Barbies, Matthew’s conflation of Madonnas in this diptych is uncannily prescient. At work in the settler colonial archive, Matthew creates diptychs that magnify her own racial subjugation as an immigrant, through performative and citational practices that reinscribe technologies of documentation and surveillance practiced by Curtis, Gifford, and their peers. In turn, the artwork she produces intensifies the viewer’s relation of identification with and estrangement from the archival and the contemporary image. We think we see, on the right side of the diptych, an Indian. But what we realize as we scan Matthew’s self-­portraits in relation to the reproduced archival images on the left is that those original photographs of Native subjects are also a performance. There is no Indian beyond the panoply of objects that frame both sitters, the poses in which they are made to sit, the accoutrements that suggest a landscape or a backdrop that is native to the portrait subject. In The Belle of the Yakimas/ The Belle of the Deccan Plateau (also known as Belles) Matthew pairs an archival image taken by Frank La Roche (c. 1899) with another self-­ portrait (figure 2.5). In both photographs, the portrait subject sits upright, in three-­quarter pose, directly facing the camera. La Roche’s luminously lit studio portrait features, like Gifford’s photo, an unnamed female subject. Her ears, neck, and wrists are adorned with beaded and metal jewelry; her waist is cinched with a woven belt. These material objects occupy an intimate relationship to the body of the sitter: the silver and beaded jewelry touch her skin; her shoulders are covered by a textured blanket; and her hair is ornamentally displayed in two perfectly symmetrical braids. What makes this woman an indigenous “belle of the Yakimas” is precisely the profusion of jewelry and clothing that she wears, for there is nothing within the studio portrait to suggest the location of this photographic subject in the Yakama nation, bordered by Washington state. Indeed, the sovereignty of the Yakama nation itself is erased by La Roche’s photograph, as he renders the land instead as “the Yakimas.” In her self-­portrait, Matthew also wears elaborate earrings and multiple necklaces, and ties a sash around her torso, which itself is encased by a printed cotton vest. Restraining her curly hair into two braids, Matthew looks somewhat discomfited by her identification as a belle from the Deccan Plateau. While that geographic region encompasses over eight states and several major cities in southern India, including one of Mat-

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2.5  Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Belles, from An Indian from India series, 2001. Portfolio 1, 24 × 30 inches, archival pigment print. © ANNU PAL AKUNNATHU MAT THE W, COUR TESY SEPIAE Y E.

thew’s hometowns, Bangalore, the Deccan Plateau cannot encompass Matthew’s diasporic locations in England and the United States. Further, the jewelry and clothing that Matthew wears in this image are not native to the Deccan: the sash she wears, for instance, is a bandhini print from Rajasthan in western India. Matthew’s use of a wide range of textiles and jewelry reflects back on La Roche’s abundant use of accessories to misidentify the unnamed Native subject as Yakima and more broadly demonstrates how racial identity and gender themselves become objects of visual consumption. As the diptych shows us, it is through forms of bodily adornment that both photographic subjects are visibly racialized as Indian and gendered female. Matthew’s strategic use of costumes and accessories to mirror the subject of La Roche’s print directly reflects Curtis’s well-­k nown practice of employing clothing and jewelry to identify his photographic subjects (as Apache, Navajo, Yoruk, and so on). Curtis’s work, in turn, expands upon the practice of nineteenth-­century European and American phoCHAPTER TWO

tographers working in Asia, who used props, costumes, and different studio backgrounds to create ethnic, gender, and class distinctions among their photographic subjects. The art historian Wu Hung, writing on Chinese studio portraits made by the American photographer Milton Miller in the late 1800s, demonstrates how Miller used the same costumes over several sitters to suggest different ranks and occupations (such as a military general or a high-­r anking imperial official). 54 Along with “close views of eyes and hair,” Miller and his peers’ use of large-­brimmed hats and palanquins were integral to presenting a “definitive portrait of a constructed people or race.”55 An Indian from India reframes the established practice of constructing race and gender by American photographers in Asia, and by settler colonial photographers in North America, through its strategic and profuse deployment of props, costumes, and accessories. The objects that Matthew uses to identify herself as an Indian — i ndeed, the very idea that what it means to be Indian can be represented through material objects — are central to the visual archive of another empire, at another time. This is the history of nineteenth-­century colonial photography on the subcontinent: the images created by amateur, commercial, and military British photographers, compiled in volumes such as The People of India. It is this genealogy of the Indian that haunts my reading of Matthew’s diptychs, and it is the asymmetry and convergence between colonial British and U.S. settler colonial histories of representing indigenous subjects that flashes up in the interstices of An Indian from India.

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When I interviewed Matthew about her interest in early photography on the subcontinent, she noted, “I was deliberate in bringing up the parallel between the colonial British ethnographic imagery of India, drawing similarity between the portrayal of Indians and the portrayal of American Indians.” Through her gallerist Esa Epstein, who previously curated the extensive private photographic collection of Ebrahim Alkazi at Sepia International, New York (now archived at the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, New Delhi), Matthew became familiar with these nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century photographic prints. She continued, “During research for a paper that I presented at the College Art Association, I visited Sepia International’s archive of old photographs from India, the Alkazi collection. That fascination grew . . . over the following deR E P R E S E N TAT I O N I N T H E C O L O N I A L A R C H I V E

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cade.”56 I take up Matthew’s fascination alongside my own absorption in archives of late nineteenth-­century Indian photography, for it frames both Matthew’s practice as a diasporic artist and my investment as a diasporic viewer in her artwork, as one who aspires to see myself in her representations. Among the holdings of the Alkazi Collection of Photography is The People of India (1868 – 1875), an eight-­volume set of images produced by British amateur, commercial, and military photographers on the subcontinent. 57 Containing 480 photographic portraits alongside descriptive and historical letterpress, the publication of this work created an encyclopedic compendium of caste, ethnicity, gender, class, religion, and linguistic groups. 58 Commissioned by the first viceroy of India, Charles Canning, the photographs were initially conceived as a private memento for Canning and his wife, Charlotte. As the preface to volume 1 states: “It was their wish to carry home with them, at the end of their sojourn in India, a collection, obtained by private means, of photographic illustrations, which might recall to their memory the peculiarities of Indian life.”59 Although the preface describes the collection as a private endeavor, the historian John Falconer has persuasively argued that the production of this multivolume set was consistently mediated through 96

multiple branches of colonial administrative and military control, in India and in England, during Canning’s administration. Memoranda distributed to all the provincial administrations of India listed “ ‘the more remarkable tribes to be found in India,’ and requested that ‘Photographic Likenesses’ be made ‘of a few characteristic specimens of such of them as exist within your jurisdiction.’ ” While the memorandum acknowledged that photographic images could not be standardized, given the different equipment of potential contributors, “the photographs should be large enough to exhibit the chief physical peculiarities and the distinctive costume of each race.”60 In 1861, a further circular was distributed requesting that photographers note “the height of figures in the photographs, and the colors of the dress with the exact tint of their complexion and eyes.”61 Falconer writes that “a number of photographers who contributed to The People of India also contributed written descriptions of dress and in some cases watercolor patches approximating to the skin tone of their subjects.”62 While the memorandum’s list of racial typologies for pictorial representation has important precedents in colonial painting, I read the photographers’ obsessive desire to capture the “skin tone of their subjects” as enabled through the technology of the camera, which, CHAPTER TWO

though it failed to produce color prints, could produce representation closely enough to be supplemented with watercolor.63 Such acute attention to the “physical peculiarities” of Indians was central to early proponents of photography in South Asia, who saw the verisimilitude of photography as instrumental to colonial administrative, military, and medical jurisprudence on the subcontinent. In England, military cadets were taught photography in the late nineteenth century, and cameras were distributed to army units, civil administrators, and engineers in preparation for their departure to the colonies.64 Individual and group portraiture became the dominant form of these early photographic images, as were landscape photographs. Writing on this early body of colonial photography, anthropologist Christopher Pinney argues that there were two distinct photographic idioms in nineteenth-­ century India, what he calls the “salvage” and “detective” paradigms. Whereas in the former “a scientific and curatorial imperative was dominant — ‘fragile’ and ‘disappearing’ cultures and communities had to be recorded (‘captured’) before their extinction,” the latter “stressed the value of anthropological depictions and physiognomic observations as future identificatory guides. India was often singled out as peculiar in this regard — whereas elsewhere native peoples died away before the eyes of the colonizer, in India they flourished.”65 What the “salvage” and “detective” paradigms underscore are the motivations of empire: its civilizing mission, particularly in relation to indigenous groups, and its juridical reach to identify, classify, and control diverse subjects of empire. But what these two classifications of photography obscure is the brutal force of empire in the subjugation of “native peoples” and the fact that rather than flourishing under imperial rule, these indigenous groups were often reinvented through photography (as primitive, naked, innocent but sexualized subjects) for public consumption.66 For J. Forbes Watson, who edited The People of India with William Kaye, the collected volumes promised to “furnish a permanent and more extensively available record of a most interesting and effective effort on the part of the Indian Government to extend our knowledge of our fellow subjects in the East — bringing us so to speak face to face with them.”67 Such a desire for intimacy with the subject populations of empire —  a “face to face” encounter that underscores the haptic desire of the viewer to reach out and touch the photographs — emerges directly out of the historical context that shaped The People of India: the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, also known as the First War of Independence. This uprising by R E P R E S E N TAT I O N I N T H E C O L O N I A L A R C H I V E

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Indian troops against East India Company rule, which in the aftermath of its brutal repression was followed by the formalization of rule by the Crown, produced some of the most spectacular images of empire (along with some of its most spectacular monuments, discussed in chapter 1). From paintings of mutinying troops to photographs of “native” skeletons artfully arranged on battlegrounds, and from cenotaphs commemorating British soldiers to ornate fountains and gardens that memorialized dead British men, women, and children, the visual legacy of the Mutiny was the spectacularization of the colonial landscape and the simultaneous erasure of Indian life and bodies in various image forms. 68 As the preface to The People of India notes, “The great convulsion of 1857 – 58, while it necessarily retarded for a time all scientific and artistic operations, imparted a new interest to the country which had been the scene of, and to the people who had been the actors in these remarkable events. When, therefore, the pacification of India had been accomplished, the officers of the Indian services, who had made themselves acquainted with the principles and practice of photography . . . traversed the land in search of interesting subjects.”69 In the initial years of its publication, copies of The People of India were sent to libraries as far afield as Berlin, Chicago, Melbourne, New York, and Ottawa. 70 In its totality, the 98

collection secured photography’s claims to scientific and ethnological truth, and its instrumentality to colonial administrative and military rule. Preceding The North American Indian by nearly forty years, the photographs collected in The People of India are distinct in several key respects from the images later produced by Curtis. First and foremost, this imperial archive is not intent on capturing what Curtis described as the “vanishing” Indian but aims to document instead a colonized subject population that proliferates beyond the camera’s eye. There are too many Indians to photograph: hence the need for a taxonomic compilation. The collection is also enhanced by letterpress descriptions that accompany select images. Whereas the volumes that compose The North American Indian are characterized by lengthy narrative descriptions of Native oral histories and spiritual practices, the abbreviated descriptions that accompany images in The People of India codify communities by phenotype, ascribing religious and caste affiliation, along with occupational and behavioral characteristics, to these phenotypical descriptions. Such rhetorical descriptions serve to organize and stratify a population that far exceeds the administrative apparatus of colonial rule. Formally CHAPTER TWO

speaking, the sign of excess in The People of India also emerges through the absence of standardized photographic technology to capture images of colonial subjects. Within and across the volumes, men and women are photographed individually, in the classic three-­quarter pose of ethnographic portraits, in group pictures that are silhouetted as vignettes, in studios and in natural landscape settings, and in prints in grayscale, sepia, and black-and-white.71 Despite the disparate quality of these photographic images, what is crucial to the editors’ intent is that the subjects of The People of India come to represent distinct tribal, caste, and religious groups. That is, photography becomes the primary mode of “represent[ing] the different varieties of the Indian races. . . . Although the work does not aspire to scientific eminence, it is hoped that, in an ethnological point of view, it will not be without interest and value.” 72 Thus volume 1 demonstrates a prurient interest in indigenous peoples including “Oraon Cole,” “Sonthals,” and “Nagas”; the same volume photographs communities whose national, religious, and ethnic affiliations are conflated, such as “Tibetans; Buddhist” and “Bhotanese; Chiefly of Tibetan Origin.” Other volumes depart from this haphazard collection of so-­called native types and portray, instead, elite subjects of empire who expressed their allegiance to the Crown.73 Across the collection, the photographs attempt to codify who is an Indian: Hindu or Muslim, caste or out of caste, tribal, pastoral, or urban subject.74 Much like the portraits of Native subjects in Curtis’s collection, these regional, linguistic, and religious differentiations are produced through the strategic deployment of material objects, specifically dress and jewelry. Pathans. Mahomedans. Shahjehanpore (vol. 3, plate 112; figure 2.6) is a group portrait featuring three unnamed men. Two men sit on a striped rug laid on the ground, and one stands upright in side profile, his hand on a sword. The subjects face left, right, and center; their gazes do not intersect, and only the central figure faces the camera. Behind them is a large wooden door with curtained glass frames. The door is the only indication that the men occupy an exterior world named Shahjehanpore (now the city of Shahjahanpur, Uttar Pradesh). The men are identified as “Pathans” and as “Mahomedans” solely through the lengthy beards on two of the male figures, the “Bhopali”-­style kurta that the third male figure wears, and the turbans worn by all three men. That is, whereas the caption codifies the image as a representation of Muslim masculinity, such claims to gender, religion, and region are generated entirely through a series of material objects. R E P R E S E N TAT I O N I N T H E C O L O N I A L A R C H I V E

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2.6  Plate 112, Pathans. Mahomedans. Shahjehanpore. From The People of India: A Series of Photographic Illustrations, with Descriptive Letterpress of the Races and Tribes of Hindustan, Originally Prepared under the Authority of the Government of India and Reproduced by Order of Secretary of State for India in Council, vol. 3 (1868 – 1875).

Material objects in The People of India do not only index the fact of racial difference: more specifically, such objects are central to representations of indigeneity on the subcontinent. The collection is characterized by a large number of photographs that claim to document tribes and aboriginal peoples in South Asia, including in Bhutan and Nepal. These include photographs of Adivasis (or original peoples, collating the Hindi terms adi, meaning “of earliest times,” and vasi, translated as “residents of”); economically, socially, and environmentally dispossessed groups currently identified in the postindependence Indian constitution as Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe (SC/ST); and Hindu caste groups that are educationally and socially marginalized, recognized by the postcolonial Indian government as Other Backward Classes (OBC).75 The People of India identifies several of these communities as tribes, affixing that political construct to peoples who are not necessarily indigenous, as well as delineating spatial boundaries for Adivasi communities whose practices of land, forest, and water usage occupy shifting geographic configurations. For example, in the table of contents to volume 2 of The People of India, a quarter of the documented populations are described as Aboriginal, Military Tribe, Slave Population, and Supposed Aboriginal. The images that accompany these descriptions consistently foreground the textiles, clothing, and accoutrements embodied by these photographic subjects. One such image, plate 72, depicts a young man looking directly at the camera.76 With no visible backdrop in sight, the viewer notices immediately the cap and kurta the young man wears: the latter far less embellished, but clearly resembling the style of the “Bhopali” kurta worn by the “Mahomedan” in volume 3. The plate is titled Newar or Niwar, and the accompanying text describes Newars as the “first inhabitants” of the Kathmandu valley, traces their physiognomy and language to Tibet and their traditions to India, and describes “about two-­thirds of the Newars as Buddhists, the remainder Brahminical Hindoos.” 77 A second photograph, Newar Group. Slave Population. Supposed Aboriginal. Nipal (plate 73), immediately follows this description, depicting a trio of three men sitting on their haunches (figure 2.7).78 Each man wears a cap; all of them have blankets or shawls draped over their shoulders and across their chests. On the far left is the same unidentified young man who was featured in plate 72. Arranged in a neat line for the camera, directly in front of the men, is a series of material objects: woven baskets, what appears to be a metal pan, and a dish with eggs arranged on it. To the far right R E P R E S E N TAT I O N I N T H E C O L O N I A L A R C H I V E

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2.7  Plate 73, Newar Group. Slave Population. Supposed Aboriginal. Nipal. From The People of India: A Series of Photographic Illustrations, with Descriptive Letterpress of the Races and Tribes of Hindustan, Originally Prepared under the Authority of the Government of India and Reproduced by Order of Secretary of State for India in Council, vol. 2 (1868 – 1875).

are still larger baskets, along with a ceramic urn. There is no caption that specifies whether these men made the baskets, wove their shawls, sculpted the urn, or gathered the eggs. Despite the copious material objects in this image, no single object identifies these men as Newar. Moreover, though the written text that accompanies this image aspires to fix the geographic boundaries of the Newars as a racialized group, it alludes instead to their transnational localities (in Tibet, India, and Nepal) and participation in dominant religious and social formations (Buddhism and Hinduism). As Sangeeta Dasgupta contends in her analysis of indigeneity in Indian historical archives, “ ‘Adivasi,’ as a category, is . . . embedded in a politics of representation.”79 In The People of India, the “politics of representation” that constitute the photographs and the written text aspire to index the aboriginal history of the Newars but in fact cannot secure CHAPTER TWO

such a narrative of indigeneity: neither through the mimetic repetition of photographic subjects across plates 72 and 73, nor through the abundant number of material objects across both images. Even as the written text codifies the affective value of Newars to the capitalist expansion of the colonial state — t he last sentence notes, “They are a cheerful and industrious race” — not one of the subjects is photographed smiling, either individually or in the group portrait.80 As a whole, The People of India documents the colonial subjugation of South Asia and South Asians. But as I see it, each of the volumes that constitute The People of India remains critical to how we see Indians: not only during the colonial era but also in our postcolonial times. It is the regime of the colonial photograph — its capacity to conjure place and time, a people and a culture — t hat continues to hold purchase on the ways in which we understand the political relation between aboriginal subjects of empire and Adivasis, and more broadly between modern and nonmodern subjects in the Indian state today. As the historian Prathama Banerjee has incisively argued, the very notion of Adivasis as an indigenous people reflects a colonial historiography, given that “the colonial-­ modern paradigm of aboriginality . . . derived from experiences of white conquest and settlement of the Americas and the Antipodes and the associated annihilation, dispossession and containment of peoples there.” If the settler colonial state in the Americas historically played out a “universal narrative of race” by constituting white settlers in opposition to indigenous subjects, in India such racial dynamics are complicated by multiple regionally specific social hierarchies of caste, ethnicity, class, language, and religion. The British colonial project of establishing a binary between caste and tribal subjects, Banerjee contends, was a means of replicating “the opposition between the modern and the indigene with which it sought to order the rest of the world.”81 It was an epistemological project that, in turn, was retained even as it was modified by the post­ independence state through the constitutional ordering of Adivasi and dispossessed communities. Thus within the current classificatory schema of the Indian constitution, the word “tribal” remains a legal construct (hence the term Scheduled Tribe): the Indian government names “705 different tribal groups,” which together constitute “104 million people or 8.6 percent of the country’s total population.”82 Within this context, Newars in India are currently classified not as an indigenous tribe but as part of “Other Backward Classes,” whereas in Nepal they constitute a dominant social group with internal caste hierarchies.83 What we R E P R E S E N TAT I O N I N T H E C O L O N I A L A R C H I V E

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see in The People of India, therefore, is the astonishing capacity of imperial photography to produce a visual and legal order for the (post)colonial state, within which representations of “tribals” are essential to denoting the difference between modern and nonmodern subjects, even as these same representations are impossible to secure within the image itself. If indigenous critique of U.S. settler colonial photography enables us to see the agency of Native subjects within and outside Curtis’s prints, postcolonial interventions into Adivasi historiography demonstrate how the construct of indigeneity is produced by the technological apparatus of the colonial state and irregularly reproduced within the constitution of the postcolonial state, which determines the legal representation and autonomy of Adivasi peoples today, among other dispossessed groups.84 In popular television and film, the visual tropes deployed to represent Adivasis are almost identical to what we see in The People of India: as individuals defined by how they look, what they wear, and what objects surround them, rather than through a historiographical narrative of violent environmental, political, and social dispossession.85 Despite its title, in no way can The People of India aspire to be a comprehensive representation of a subcontinent. But the volumes are crucial to understanding, as Zahid Chaudhary writes, how the power of photog104

raphy in nineteenth-­century India is manifest “not only as a technology of the colonial state but also as an instrument that extends and transforms sight for photographers and the body politic, British and Indian alike.”86 The use of the portrait photograph as ethnographic fact is central to the transformation of sight experienced by viewers of the collection — a viewership that I understand to include not only those British and Indian subjects who saw the volumes at the time of their publication but diasporic subjects like Matthew and myself who encounter the volumes now and grasp these images as a historical representation of ourselves. I turn to a final reading of The People of India, one that hinges on the affective responses of colonial Indian subjects who viewed the album shortly after its publication. Chaudhary directs us to a published letter written by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, the illustrious late nineteenth-­century Muslim social reformer, which relates his and his sons’ experience of coming across the volumes while visiting London in October 1869. Khan writes: In the India Office is a book in which the races of all India are depicted in pictures and in letterpress, giving the manners and customs of each

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race. Their photographs show that the pictures of the different manners and customs were taken on the spot, and the sight of them shows how savage they are — t he equals of animals. The young Englishmen who, after passing the preliminary Civil Service examination, have to pass examinations on special subjects for two years afterwards, come to the India Office preparatory to starting for India, and, desirous of knowing something of the land in which they are going, also look over this work. What can they think, after perusing this book and looking at its pictures, of the power and honour of the natives of India? One day Hamid, Mahmud [Khan’s sons], and I went to the India Office, and Mahmud commenced looking at the work. A young Englishman, probably a passed civilian, came up, and after a short time asked Mahmud if he was a Hindustani? Mahmud replied in the affirmative, but blushed as he did so, and hastened to explain that he was not one of the aborigines, but that his ancestors were formerly of another country. Reflect, therefore, that until Hindustanis remove this blot they shall never be held in honour by any civilized race.87 In Khan’s narration of how his son, Mahmud, was accosted by an Englishman, I note, first, that Mahmud was asked “if he was a Hindustani.” That question underscores the Englishman’s desire to impute veracity to the images that are collected in The People of India: that is, to confirm that a relationship exists between photographic representations of Indians and the young Indian whom he encounters, and, further, that this is a relationship that the Englishman can see. But I also turn to Mahmud’s response — h is blush, or what Chaudhary’s reading of the letter details as Mahmud feeling “deeply ashamed.”88 The sense of shame embodied by this young bourgeois colonial subject emerges out of his desire to distance himself from photographs of the “aborigines” collected in the volume, a desire that translates in turn to Mahmud’s hastening to explain “that his ancestors were formerly of another country,” that as a Muslim he traces his religious lineage to western Asia. It is telling, as well, that this experience occurs during Mahmud and his family’s visit to London — not in India, but when they are racialized as “Hindustanis” and therefore as “natives” in diaspora. Finally, it is an experience that occurs within the spatial confines of the India Office, which at the time was housed in the British Foreign Office building, itself dedicated to the surveillance, documentation, and colonization of Indians. Within this imperial space, the visiting members of Syed Ahmed Khan’s family are seen,

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in the course of their own viewing of The People of India, by a passing Englishman as part of the very archive whose ideological representation of Indians — as “savage” and as “animals” — they reject. But despite their progressive social and political beliefs, despite their vociferous rejection of this set of images, the young Mahmud Khan must also affirm that he is a “Hindustani,” that he belongs to this compendium of representations, a belonging that produces intense discomfort and shame. Such affective responses to the archival photographic image, in my view, are not just a historical anecdote. For contemporary viewers, particularly for South Asians in diaspora who view colonial images of South Asia, the desire to impute a lived relationship between a photographic representation and the “real” Indian come not just from unknown Englishmen but also from ourselves. Our affective expression of kinship to photographic representations of Indians encompasses a variety of lived experiences: the desire to produce an affirmative correlation between the archival image we see and the person we are; and, concurrently, a feeling of deep shame, a desire to create distance between ourselves and the images of these “natives,” an attempt to search for an alternate genealogy of representation that we can belong to. Encountering the images in The People of India via An Indian from India as a South Asian diasporic 106

viewer in the twenty-­fi rst century produces a surfeit of feelings. It is at once an experience of racial disidentification, as race and place are produced through the panoply of material objects. It is also, curiously, an experience of historical affirmation: what I know of India and of Indians in the late nineteenth century comes, in the absence of personal family archives, almost entirely from photographic collections like The People of India. And it is an experience of alienation produced through the racial disparity enacted between the colonial photographer and “native” subject, doubled by the temporal breach between the photographic object and the diasporic viewer. Viewing The People of India, now freely available as digital files online, produces feelings of recognition, disavowal, curiosity, enchantment, and repulsion. This excess of feelings — t his accumulation of value — defines our experience of viewing colonial ethnographic photography now. How then can this experience structure the ways in which we view a series like An Indian from India, which references one archive of photography while reproducing another? I have not come across historical documentation that confirms whether Curtis was formally influenced by The People of India. Indeed, giving the waning interest in the collection by the turn of the twentieth CHAPTER TWO

century, as well as its relative inaccessibility in the hands of private collectors and libraries, it is likely that Curtis never saw the actual work.89 However, by turning our attention to this collection of images as a means of understanding how and why Matthew created her work, we can begin to see the similarities as well as contradictions that shape the trans­ national genealogies of photographic representations of indigenous communities, both in North America and in South Asia. Curtis’s obsessive need to photograph “the Indian” echoes throughout our contemporary viewing of The People of India; likewise, the combination of written description and documentary photograph that organizes The People of India ripples through the multivolume structure of The North American Indian. In both, the imperial camera becomes a mode of ordering the world, the means through which historical knowledge and ethnographic fact is produced, disseminated, and consumed. It is the order that the imperial camera imposes on its subjects and on the landscapes that they occupy that comes to appear as ethnographic fact and as aesthetic beauty. It is these beautiful images that become the photographic matter of the archive. And it is within these imperial archives that diasporic viewers like myself look for traces of (self-­)representation. 107

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Between May and October 2015, An Indian from India was exhibited at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto, Canada, as part of a solo show of Matthew’s work titled Generations, curated by Deepali Dewan. Alongside selections from An Indian from India, the exhibition showcased Matthew’s digital animations of family portraits (ReGeneration); projections of Matthew’s photographic collaborations with families impacted by war, migration, and dispossession (Open Wounds and To Majority Minority); black-­and-­white prints of Indian streetscapes (Memories of India); and a photo book installation (Fabricated Memories). Ranging from single images to diptychs, from digital animations to digital orotones, from projections on screen to sculptural objects encased in vitrines, the exhibition brought to life successive forms of the photographic print. In much of her work on display, Matthew highlighted her own experience of immigration: her childhood in England, coming of age in India, her migration to the United States as an adult, and the family she has made with her husband and stepdaughter. She photographed as well stories of immigrants from across the Middle East, Southeast R E P R E S E N TAT I O N I N T H E C O L O N I A L A R C H I V E

Asia, and South Asia, documenting memories of dispossession and dislocation. Capturing personal as well as national histories, the exhibition was curated as an immersive aural and sensory experience. Across this twenty-­year retrospective of Matthew’s work, the exhibition showcased how a single photographic print can transmute into a fictional narrative, a historical document, and an aesthetic object. In one of my visits to the ROM in October 2015, I settled into a comfortable leather sofa on the gallery floor. As I took out my notebook, preparing to view one of Matthew’s projections, a group of teenage students burst into the gallery. Leaping from one display to another, hollering across to each other, this lively and multiracial group of viewers was nothing short of irreverent to the art objects on display. Their enthusiasm was contagious. Weaving their way through the gallery space, they loudly proclaimed that a man photographed in one of Matthew’s artworks looked like the actor Daniel Radcliffe; one of the students posed in front of that image and took a selfie. For the rest of that afternoon, and during the multiple visits I made later, the visitors that I encountered included tourists admiring the photographic installations, murmuring quietly; small children looking quizzically at the digital animations; and adolescents who entered the quiet space of the gallery, ignoring the artwork on the 108

walls to gossip among themselves (figure 2.8). Signs posted around the gallery advertised #ROMfamcam, a social media forum based on Twitter that encouraged viewers, particularly “families and descendants with some link to Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, or Vietnam, or Black communities in Canada” to upload archival family photographs.90 By soliciting the viewership of racialized immigrant subjects, #ROMfamcam expanded the representational capacities of the museum, as viewers were encouraged to see their own family photographs as an extension of the gallery space. Some visitors were also photographed by Matthew as part of a public workshop she conducted at the ROM . Framed within this expansive curatorial framework, the prints, projections, and installations that composed Generations were cast as a representation of a multicultural and multiracial Canadian national body, a representation that was constituted through the participation of diasporic viewers. As Canada’s largest museum of “natural history and world cultures,” the ROM was an extraordinary site to display Matthew’s artwork.91 Generations was held in a gallery steps away from the museum’s collection of ancient and contemporary South Asian art, the renowned Sir Christopher Ondaatje South Asian Gallery; the South Asian Gallery was, in turn, CHAPTER TWO

2.8  Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, An Indian from India. Installation at Generations, Royal Ontario Museum, 2015. © ANNU PAL AKUNNATHU MAT THE W, COUR TESY SEPIAE YE. PHOTOGR APH © DAVID H. W EL L S.

three levels above the museum’s main atrium, which is presided over by a life-­size dinosaur skeleton. In my initial visit to the ROM , Generations appeared to be wedged between these two contrasting forms of display: on the one hand, an exhibition of evolutionary biology that befits a natural history museum, and, on the other hand, a South Asian collection that includes Buddhist sculptures as well as contemporary art from the subcontinent and its diasporas. But there is also a third form of exhibition at the

ROM ,

one that in

my view is integral to our reading of Generations: the Daphne Cockwell Gallery dedicated to First Peoples art and culture, situated on the museum’s ground floor. Entered through a rotunda behind the main atrium, the Daphne Cockwell Gallery presents a collection of material objects: photographs, paintings, wooden sleighs, birch-­bark canoes, moccasins, sealskin coats, blankets, and spears. These images are hung on walls or encased in glass vitrines as art objects, alongside paintings by settler colonial artists such as Paul Kane. At the far end of the gallery is a small theater where visitors can listen to recordings of oral storytelling by Cree elders alongside intermittent screenings of the 1922 documentary Nanook of the North.92 The Daphne Cockwell Gallery is also suffused with text, including autobiographical narratives of indigenous artists, voice-­ R E P R E S E N TAT I O N I N T H E C O L O N I A L A R C H I V E

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over narratives projecting from interactive screens, and lengthy curatorial notes on the provenance of objects, as well as on the collaborative process of working with Haudenosaunee, Inuit, and Métis activists and educators that led to the selection of particular objects. At the center of the gallery space is a glass-­enclosed diorama that features the museum’s collection of life-­size wax sculptures of Haudenosaunee peoples. As if in direct response to Curtis’s erasure of jeans and clocks from photographs in The North American Indian, the three wax sculptures are outfitted in a variety of contemporary clothing and objects: one is adorned in a T-­ shirt, another figure operates a camera mounted on a tripod, and still another handles a power tool. Yet here, too, the profusion of material objects cannot compensate for the fact that within this diorama, indigenous peoples are represented as lifeless objects. The experience of seeing such objects within the gallery space brings to life the peculiar contradiction that Comanche curator Paul Chaat Smith points out: that “the Indian experience, contact in 1492, created the world we live in today. It was the biggest, most profound event in known human history, yet Indians are marginalized in this most amazing way. . . . Indians are everywhere and nowhere at the same time.”93 In its curatorial approach, the Daphne Cockwell Gallery attempts to locate indigenous cultural practice as cen110

tral to the area we know as Canada and as an integral component of the urban architecture and cultural life of Toronto. But for many visitors, the aural and visual narrative of the gallery continues to be permeated by representations of indigeneity as objects of a past time.94 Fully renovated in 2005, the Daphne Cockwell Gallery dedicated to First Peoples art and culture was more recently modified in 2018 following the publication of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report. In response, the

ROM

established free public access to the

gallery, widened its physical entrance, established a gathering space with a tobacco offering stand within the exhibit, and instituted an Indigenous Knowledge Resource Teacher to interact with viewers during peak visitor hours. In addition, the ROM has also developed a position for a new curator of Indigenous Art and Cultures, in order “to build community and ensure Indigenous knowledge and perspectives are reflected at the ROM .”95

When I visited the ROM in 2015, multiple interactive audio and vi-

sual representations within the gallery emphasized contemporary experiences of First Nations peoples, enacting what indigenous film studies scholar Michelle Raheja calls “visual sovereignty.”96 Yet this meticulous process of collaborative curation cannot erase the fact that all of the artCHAPTER TWO

work, including the tools for hunting and fishing, the wax sculptures, and the photographs of First Nations advisors who collaborated on the gallery display, are displayed in this space to be seen: that is, to be admired as objects. As Sarita See remarks, such objects become “an example of how indigenous cultures or first nations are made to ‘last’ for others, as Jean M. O’Brien has put it, an instance of what Gustavo Verdesio calls ‘epistemic violence.’ ”97 The display of indigenous life as a series of material objects, including photographs, in an exhibition that emerges out of the joint work of First Nations artists and curators, is central to understanding the larger contradictions that circumscribe the pedagogic and aesthetic project of the ROM . At the outset, the museum’s renovation of the Daphne Cockwell Gallery dedicated to First Peoples art and culture appears to exemplify the Canadian state’s commitment to pluralist multiculturalism.98 At the same time, it is precisely this multicultural display of indigenous lives that highlights the settler colonial project of the Canadian state, within which indigeneity is represented through archiving and exhibiting material objects for viewer consumption. As I walked up and down the stairs between the Daphne Cockwell Gallery and Generations, I was struck by how the representation of indigenous peoples as a series of material objects in this national museum was redoubled in Matthew’s solo show. At Generations, diptychs from An Indian from India took up an entire section of the gallery and were displayed as framed prints, digital orotones, and as loose portfolio prints on archival paper. The wall text introducing An Indian from India stated, “The artist’s performance in these images is meant to suggest the constructed nature of any ethnographic portrait, produced through the very act of photographing. The work also mimics the format of 19th-­ century photography — such as Edward Curtis’s famous portfolios and the gold-­tinted Orotones — to reflect the seeming authority conveyed in these bodies of knowledge.” Framing An Indian from India as a means of unraveling the authenticity of the “ethnographic portrait,” here the curatorial text explicitly guides the viewer to see Matthew’s mimetic duplication of nineteenth- and early twentieth-­century photography as a rejection of ethnographic documentary practices. Likewise, Matthew’s artist’s note on display states, “I find similarities in how Nineteenth century photographers of Native Americans looked at what they called the primitive natives, similar to the colonial gaze of Nineteenth century British photographers working in India. In every culture there is an ‘other’ outside of the dominant culture.” Binding settler colonial photography R E P R E S E N TAT I O N I N T H E C O L O N I A L A R C H I V E

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to the “colonial gaze” of British photographers in India, Matthew importantly highlights her engagement with two imperial visual projects, only one of which we can see in the diptychs. Despite the curatorial and artistic guidance within the gallery space, however, what remains unclear is how, as viewers, we should come to terms with our own relation as others to the “ ‘other’ outside of the dominant culture.” More precisely, the exhibition cannot tell us how to come to terms with the disparity between the museum’s representation of indigenous peoples under ongoing conditions of settler colonial rule and its simultaneous encouragement of immigrant self-­representation as a condition of neoliberal and multicultural state formation. It is particularly striking, then, that Matthew’s An Indian from India was exhibited for the first time alongside archival prints from Curtis’s The North American Indian at the

ROM .

Inside a glass vitrine, promi-

nently placed adjacent to Matthew’s portfolio prints, were two large plate images that supplement volume 6 of The North American Indian, an archival volume of photography that is also part of the

ROM ’s

permanent

collection. These images are plate no. 212, Cheyenne Girl (1905), and plate no. 213, Two Moons — Cheyenne (1910) (figure 2.9).99 Loosened from the archive, the large-­plate format of both prints emphasizes Curtis’s extreme 112

close-­up of an unnamed young woman, as well as the exaggerated attention that Curtis pays to Two Moons’s headdress as a mark of social rank and national identity. Duplicated and recaptioned as “Noble Savage” on the left side of Matthew’s diptych Noble/Savage, the image Two Moons — Cheyenne is displayed twice more in the exhibition: first as a framed diptych hung on the wall and again as one of the five orotones on display (see plate 7). As I moved through the exhibition space, seeing Two Moons — Cheyenne as a large-­plate archival print as well as within multiple digital reproductions of Noble/Savage disoriented my capacity to identify the difference between the archival print and its duplications. The uncanny repetition of Curtis’s photograph — as an original print enshrined in a glass vitrine, as well as a reproduction necessary to Matthew’s diptychs — made it impossible for me to see Two Moons — Cheyenne as something other than an object that reflected my own desire to be represented, an object that supplemented all the many representations of racialized diasporic subjects that proliferated across the exhibition. That is, pairing the single archival print with its digital duplications and mimetic reenactments meant that I could no longer see the diptychs as documenting the diverse effects of settler colonialism, empire, and immigraCHAPTER TWO

113 2.9  Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, An Indian from India. Installation at Generations, Royal Ontario Museum, 2015. © ANNU PAL AKUNNATHU MAT THE W, COUR TESY SEPIAE YE. PHOTOGR APH © DAVID H. W EL L S.

tion on indigenous and South Asian subjects. Instead, standing at length in front of the portraits titled Cheyenne Girl and Two Moons — Cheyenne, I realized that what could not be represented within this exhibition were the asymmetric relations of power that bind together indigenous and immigrant subjects. In my visits to the ROM , I noticed many viewers lingering and nodding appreciatively in front of the glass case that displayed the large plate images from The North American Indian, as if they recognized Matthew’s labor in creating her art, or the curator’s efforts in designing this public exhibition, or the centrality of both to reshaping our view of Curtis’s prints. And yet, despite my own exhilaration in seeing Matthew’s work on display, what haunted my experience of viewing the show was a sense of loss. What might we lose when we unmoor a photographic print from R E P R E S E N TAT I O N I N T H E C O L O N I A L A R C H I V E

its archive? In what ways does the very intimacy promised by the proximity between Curtis’s work and Matthew’s at Generations occlude or eclipse other ways of seeing? In its thematic focus and public outreach, Generations emphasized the power of photography as a form of racial self-­representation, and its accessibility as a contemporary aesthetic form that makes visible a broad range of racialized immigrant experiences. But precisely because it does so, the visual narrative of Generations cannot fully engage with what Matthew, in her introduction to the series, calls the “other” outside of the “dominant culture” of representation and exhibition: that is, the representation of indigenous subjectivities, histories, and narratives, both in South Asia and in the Americas. This visual limitation is mirrored in the spatial location of the exhibit itself. While Generations was held on the same floor as the museum’s permanent collection of South Asian art, the ties that bind An Indian from India to a longer history of colonial and postcolonial South Asian photography, and particularly to the ethnographic photography of indigenous subjects, were diminished in favor of emphasizing the more prominent (and visible) relationship to Curtis’s The North American Indian. While Generations incorporated archival prints from The North American Indian, the exhibition’s physical dis114

tance from the Daphne Cockwell Gallery dedicated to First Peoples art and culture on the ground floor of the ROM underscored its remove from the contested historical and representational space of the First Peoples exhibition. Seeing An Indian from India brought into relief the tangled visual histories of migration, dispossession, and empire that locate South Asian Americans as settler colonial subjects, immigrants who use modes of self-­representation that emerge out of early portrait photographs of Native and First Nations peoples. The form of these early twentieth-­century portraits is linked, in turn, to the ethnographic photography of indigenous communities in South Asia, the subjects of colonial documentation in another place and time. Walking backward from Generations through the permanent collection of ancient and contemporary South Asian art and downstairs to the Daphne Cockwell Gallery, dedicated to First Peoples art and culture, produces a disorienting spatial and temporal experience, something akin to jet lag. I had entered the ROM expecting to see my own racialized subjectivity mirrored through Matthew’s diptychs and installations, displayed in a major exhibition that was itself a cele­ bration of diasporic self-­representation. But what I came to experience CHAPTER TWO

within the curatorial project of the museum as a whole was the fact that the imperial archives that shape how I see An Indian from India were shut out of the viewing frame by the epistemological project of the museum itself. Those other material and photographic archives, which also claim to document “Indians,” were clustered elsewhere in the ROM ’s capacious museum space. Despite my repeated efforts to walk across multiple galleries in order to tie together these disjointed spaces of racial and national representation, my inability to navigate the museum brings to life how the desire to be represented is consistently enacted through the visual technologies of empire. For racialized viewing subjects, empire comes to life through the spaces of the museum, shaping our most intimate as well as our most public attempts at seeing ourselves.

T H E T I M E O F DI A S P O R A

In “The Uses of Diaspora,” Brent Hayes Edwards invokes the French word décalage and writes, “Translated as ‘gap,’ ‘discrepancy,’ ‘time lag,’ or ‘interval’; it is also the term . . . sometimes use[d] to translate ‘jet lag.’ In other words, a décalage is either a difference or gap in time (advancing or delaying a schedule) or in space (shifting or displacing an object). . . . It is a changing core of difference; it is the word of ‘differences within unity,’ an unidentifiable point that is incessantly touched and fingered and pressed.”100 The experience of seeing An Indian from India at Generations produces an effect of décalage: the jet lag that I sensed as I walked disorientedly between and across exhibition spaces within the museum and, more broadly, the kinds of hauntings that circulate throughout the photographic project of An Indian from India. As the aesthetic and political connections between images of Native peoples, colonized Indians, and South Asian Americans become the “unidentifiable point that is incessantly touched and fingered and pressed,” what emerges are disjointed visual and ethnographic readings of Matthew’s work. An Indian from India does not lend itself easily to a narrative of identification between the viewer and the archival image, or between the artist and the portrait subjects of the photograph; nor can it be recuperated into a political project of immigrant and indigenous solidarity; nor is it singularly a critique of multiculturalism. In my experience as a viewer and as a critic, holding the “changing core of difference” that ties together diverse colonial visual histories, from the nineteenth into the twenty-­first century, requires moving back and forth between the artist’s creative proR E P R E S E N TAT I O N I N T H E C O L O N I A L A R C H I V E

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duction and viewers’ disparate acts of consumption of the photographic image. Popular and scholarly reviews of An Indian from India have emphasized the oppositional quality of Matthew’s self-­portraits in relation to Curtis’s prints, situating her diptychs as a form of resistance to the domineering gaze of Curtis’s camera.101 Such analyses recuperate Matthew’s artwork into a familiar narrative in Asian American studies, one that moves from marginality to visibility, from racial abjection to the representation of a self-­realized racial subject. I have argued instead that Matthew’s diptychs necessitate a different mode of reading, one that follows the formal continuities and discontinuities between her photographs and Curtis’s archival images, as well as between Curtis’s collection and that of his British colonial predecessors. Rather than taking Curtis’s North American Indian as the original source material of Matthew’s diptychs, I have moved outside the geographic framework of the series to consider the ways in which Matthew’s work limns other archives of representation. By emphasizing how An Indian from India centers on the deliberate and productive aesthetic conflation between early settler colonial photography and the many images of indigenous subjects created by British photographers working in India, I show that the project of documenting 116

Indians — as colonial subjects, or as what Syed Ahmed Khan called the “equals of animals” — was concomitant with creating photographic images that were picturesque, ethnographically accurate, and, above all, representative of a “race.” Such preoccupations with representing who and what is “native” to the land is apparent not only in colonial and settler colonial photographic archives, but also in the styles and forms through which racial and religious minorities are documented by the U.S. state today. As Ronak Kapadia has shown in relation to Muslim American, Arab American, and South Asian American visual cultures, the expansion of biometric technologies after September 11, 2001, is central to the incessant surveillance of racialized immigrants by the U.S. state; diasporic artists have in turn incorporated these technologies in performance art, digital media, and site-­specific installations.102 Likewise, writers including Amitava Kumar have detailed how over the last twenty years South Asian Americans have been subjects of forced deportation, incarceration, and unexplained disappearance.103 Although Matthew rhetorically frames her series as a narrative of belonging to the United States, her portraits refract against the

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ongoing and violent absence of South Asian immigrants from the U.S. public sphere, particularly working-­class and Muslim South Asian Americans. Curtis’s preoccupation with the “vanishing Indian” acquires another meaning here, as the disappearance of immigrant subjects becomes integral to the political and visual histories of South Asian Americans after 9/11. Lisa Lowe poignantly writes, “What we might identify as residual within the histories of settler or colonial capitalism does not disappear. To the contrary it persists and endures, even if less legible within the obfuscations of a new dominant.”104 I began this chapter by emphasizing how, as Matthew mines a repository of early twentieth-­century American photography, the images that she incorporates into An Indian from India provoke us to think about the transnational mobility of photographic archives. From portraits of indigenous peoples in the Americas to the documentation of Adivasi communities in South Asia, across Matthew’s work the archive is never in one place, never singular, original, or authentic. But what is also central to my reading of An Indian from India is the viewer’s affective experience of these multiple archives. The fact that, as South Asian diasporic viewers, we see and conjure these disparate collections of images as we interface with Matthew’s diptychs demonstrates how the very desire for self-­representation is saturated by imperial ways of seeing. No matter how true to the archival image Matthew’s self-­portraits are, documentation cannot capture the truth of “Indian” experience, whether indigenous or immigrant. In chapter 3, I expand upon the ways in which South Asian American desires for self-­representation are enacted through the public space of the museum. At the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, I explore how South Asian American curators, funders, and viewers collaborated to produce an exhibition about South Asian immigration to the United States. Premised on the capacity of photography to represent the conditions of immigrant life, the exhibition deployed documentary photographs of all kinds, including archival images and family photographs. Such images operate as a call for recognition and as a demand for visibility by upper-­class South Asian immigrants, who feel that they are made invisible within the U.S. state. The display of these photographs, in turn, produces a narrative of racial belonging within a curatorial framework that emphasizes the diversity and heterogeneity of immigrant communities. But if as racialized immigrants we want to

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be seen, then we must also contend with the ways in which the museum itself functions as an imperial archive, one that profoundly shapes how and why we want to see ourselves. Within such museological frameworks of representation, our desire for visibility comes at the cost of seeing ourselves transformed into objects on display.

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t h re e E XHIBITING IMMIGR ANTS Visuality, Visibility, and Representation at Beyond Bollywood

The images we see, as a culture, help define and expand our dreams, our perceptions of what is possible. Pictures of who we are help us visualize who we can be.  — Tee Corinne It’s something I didn’t expect to find, and I honestly didn’t know too much about Indian American culture. It’s cool to mix things up. One moment I’m walking through the bones and whatnot, mummies. Next thing you know, I’m checking out Indian American culture.  — Museum visitor

I

n February 2014, I attended the opening of Beyond Bollywood: Indian Americans Shape the Nation. As I walked toward the Smithsonian Na-

tional Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, its monumental neoclassical pillars facing the National Mall, I was struck by the immense ambition and scale of this exhibition. As the first exhibition ever held at a national museum to represent a single Asian American community, Beyond Bollywood was no less than a major museological dis-

play of South Asian Americans: our stories of racialization, belonging, and community formation.1 The opening attracted hundreds of South Asian American donors, archivists, artists, writers, community members, and academic colleagues, many of us excited to recognize familiar faces in the crowd, and all of us eagerly anticipating what we might see inside. Entering the five-­t housand-­s quare-­foot gallery, opulently painted in shades of orange and magenta, that familiar sense of recognition — of seeing those who looked like myself — was redoubled, for the

first objects that I saw were photographs proliferating across the gallery walls. In crowd-­sourced digital family photographs, in archival newspaper images, in professional headshots, and in several of the artworks on display, photos of South Asian Americans appeared everywhere. These photographs appeared to bestow, on diasporic viewers like myself, the feeling of representation. But while the exhibition of these images proffered the hope of national belonging, the act of viewing the images produced an uncanny feeling, the feeling of having seen oneself on display before. Even as I saw my own experiences of racialization duplicated mimetically in this array of photographs depicting immigrant subjects, I also experienced the feeling of being seen as a racialized object, of becoming one among hundreds of objects on display at the Smithsonian, all of us indexing the visibility of South Asian immigrants in the United States. In this chapter, I move from examining imperial projects of photographing “Indians” toward considering how South Asian Americans are represented within imperial contexts of display. I focus on a single exhibition that brought together photography and fine art to explore how the social and aesthetic experience of racial representation alters within the terrain of the museum. Held in a preeminent natural history museum, 120

Beyond Bollywood amplifies the tense visual and historical relationship between objects that claim to represent racialized populations and those racialized subjects who enter the museum in an attempt to claim such objects as reflections of themselves. In my view, the epistemology of the natural history museum is central to understanding how visibility — t he very object that visitors to, and supporters of, Beyond Bollywood desire —  is wrapped up in imperial contexts of exhibition and display. Kobena Mercer notes, “The museum acts as a repository of cultural capital in which accumulated objects and artifacts are exhibited, ordered, classified and made meaningful as evidence of the sovereign and centered identity of Western man as the historical subject of knowledge whose certainties are staged, displayed, and returned in representation as the sum total ration of what it means to be human.”2 Taking up the museum as a “repository of cultural capital,” I contend that the natural history museum operates as an institutional form of an image archive, as a colonial archive of display that structures how racialized subjects are curated and consumed for and by a museumgoing public. Throughout this book, I have discussed how diasporic mimesis defines the visual and affective relation between racialized viewers and CHAPTER THREE

photographic representations of racialized subjects. As diasporic viewers encounter photographic images that we claim represent us, our claims to representation must also contend with image archives of subjection: settler colonial and imperial archives of indigenous peoples, and photographic documentations of colonial conquest and terror. The relations of identification that diasporic artists and viewers establish with images of empire are a form of haunting, an experience of seeing oneself in the image and recalling, at that very moment, how the representations we hold closest to us are those in which we have already been figured as objects. At Beyond Bollywood, diasporic mimesis acquires another cast: we see how viewers enact complex relations of identification to the photographic object through the visual ties that bind the colonial epistemology of the natural history museum with a multicultural exhibition that aims to represent immigrants as American citizens. As I demonstrate below, the imperial legacy of the natural history museum — in particular, the use of racialized subjects (dead and alive) to index foreign conquest in the nineteenth century as well as theories of scientific racism in the twentieth century — continues to shape narratives of human evolution that are at the heart of the museum. To stage a curatorial project like Beyond Bollywood at a natural history museum, therefore, is to grapple with an exhibitionary framework that already codifies racialized subjects as objects to be displayed. In order for Beyond Bollywood to succeed as a visual and pedagogic narrative of multiculturalism — for the exhibit to make its case that South Asians belong in the United States — t he curated images of immigrant subjects on view must be reconciled with the taxonomy of racial difference that structures the museum as a whole. Despite the imperial history of the museum and its alienating effects, many diasporic viewers at Beyond Bollywood redoubled their efforts to claim likeness with the images and objects on display, as if identity can be the only possible outcome of demanding visual representation as racialized subjects. As a curatorial project, a social experience, and a museological display, Beyond Bollywood draws our attention to the problem of visibility and visuality in Asian American studies. Black visual studies scholar Nicole Fleetwood points out that “visibility implies the state of being able to be seen, while visualization refers to the mediation of the field of vision and the production of visual objects/beings.”3 For over two decades, Asian American activists and curators have mounted major museum exhibitions across the United States that are premised on the centrality of visibility to the representation of Asian American communities.4 Across EXHIBITING IMMIGRANTS

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each of these curatorial and scholarly endeavors, the visibility of racial identity is indexed through the visual qualities of the aesthetic object, and the public display of such objects in turn visualizes Asian American identities and histories within the racial formation of the U.S. state. 5 Visibility is also central to the political objectives of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, whose curation of Beyond Bollywood alongside other themed exhibitions is directed toward visualizing Asian American histories, experiences, and communities.6 If, as Fleetwood suggests, visibility is “the state of being able to be seen,” the museum exhibition is a major platform for racialized immigrant groups to see themselves as “visual objects/beings.” Exhibitions like Beyond Bollywood are thus a primary site for the conflation of identity with visibility, and visibility with representation. Centering on our investments as racialized diasporic subjects and as viewers in museological narratives of representation and display, I argue for the limits of visibility as a primary objective of Asian American cultural politics. At Beyond Bollywood, the curators employ a series of photographs, of varying degrees of aesthetic and historic value, to collectively visualize and document one Asian immigrant community’s long presence in the United States. Here, the aesthetic object on display 122

acquires its value because it shows us something about the immigrant, whether that subject is figured within the display (such as in family photographs) or absent from it (as I detail below, in the display of material objects such as trophies, turbans, and tableware that accompany these images). A single photographic image on display, therefore, operates at several registers of visibility. First, the photograph, particularly the government portrait, provides official evidence of South Asian American contributions to U.S. public life; second, family photographs affirm the multigenerational visibility of this immigrant community within the U.S. public sphere; and third, crowd-­sourced photographs within the museum affirm the visibility of the life experience of the diasporic viewer herself.7 In each of these contexts, the photograph becomes worthy of exhibition because its significance as an aesthetic commodity is bound to its capacity for documenting immigrant life. The problem with this framework, however, is also threefold. First, by prioritizing visibility as the principal form of racial representation, we are moved to read visual objects as realist representations of the racialized self. Such forms of reading create an ethnographic relation to the aesthetic object, mining the object for its fidelity to the experience CHAPTER THREE

of racialization. Second, it makes representation incumbent on visibility, limiting our ability to consider aesthetic objects that abjure, deny, or refuse feelings of belonging. Within this context of display, diasporic art accrues ethnographic and sociological value as depictions of real life rather than as objects that require new forms of seeing and that produce unexpected feelings. Third, if aesthetic objects are rendered only as a means of making visible the racialized immigrant, we cannot account for viewers who, in their relation to the object, find that they cannot see themselves. As Anne Anlin Cheng writes, “It is the crisis of visuality, rather than the allocation of visibility, that constitutes one of the most profound challenges for American democratic recognition today.”8 Sponsored by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center with early support from the Indian American Heritage Project, Beyond Bollywood: Indian Americans Shape the Nation is a singular instance of how one exhibition attempted to resolve the “allocation of visibility” to Asian American communities through a curatorial project that mobilized the visuality of the photographic object. Initially curated by the sociologist Pawan Dhingra, and brought to completion by Masum Momaya, the exhibition was held at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History between February 27, 2014, and August 16, 2015. However, planning for the exhibition originated in 2007, when local Indian American immigrants approached the Smithsonian with their desire for public representation in a national museum.9 Along with support from the Smithsonian Institution, these upper-­and middle-­class immigrants funded the exhibition, giving between $1,000 and $100,000 per donor.10 While donors did not have curatorial oversight, they did make suggestions regarding the exhibition’s content.11 Consequently, while Beyond Bollywood was organized under the auspices of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, the exhibition itself emerged out of an elite group of immigrants’ private desire to see themselves publicly represented in a national museum. The exhibition was extensively covered by leading print and online news media during its run, and since its closure a modified version has traveled to a range of public venues across the United States, including community centers, universities, and natural history museums such as the Field Museum in Chicago.12 At the Smithsonian, Beyond Bollywood came to life through more than three hundred photographs, including head shots, reproductions of newspaper images, and digital snapshots, all of which were taken as representative of the “Indian Americans” in the exhibition’s title.13 Yet the EXHIBITING IMMIGRANTS

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images also included portraits of Indo-­Caribbean immigrants and families; Muslim Americans from pre-­Partition Punjab and Bengal; multi­ racial, queer, and trans immigrant subjects; and Sikh immigrants, who have been marginalized and persecuted by the Indian state. To call this group of immigrants Indian Americans, when they themselves may not identify as Indians, is to elide the profound differences of class, caste, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, and region that are central to transnational formations of diasporic subjectivity. Indeed, the curators struggled to articulate what made this group of images and objects specifically Indian American in the first place. Pawan Dhingra noted, “Although the culture displayed at Beyond Bollywood speaks to these countries [Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh] as well as India, the exhibition’s contributions come solely from Americans of Indian origin. For this reason, the exhibit does not presume to represent greater South Asia.”14 At the same time, the wall text at the beginning of the exhibition emphasized the heterogeneity of South Asian migration, tacitly acknowledging the various national origins of South Asian diasporic subjects: “Indian immigrants have taken many routes to America — some came directly from India, others from Guyana, Kenya, Malaysia, Uganda.” As I see it, the insistent use of the term “Indian American” to describe the peoples, objects, and 124

historical narratives visually represented in the exhibition in fact demonstrates a profound ambivalence around “India” as a postcolonial nationalist construct, one that cannot accommodate the diverse diasporic origins of immigrants rendered for display. In contrast to the curatorial narrative, I use the term “South Asian” to conceptualize the immigrant subjects who are on view in the exhibit, as well as the visual objects used to index these various histories of migration. By framing Beyond Bollywood as an exhibition about South Asians, my intent is not to reinscribe the hegemony of India in visual representations of South Asian America (a hegemonic aesthetic that is in fact reproduced within this exhibition’s framework). Rather, I draw our attention to the asymmetrical claims to identity established by the photographic objects on display; among the viewers who attend the show (including South Asians from a range of diasporic locations); and across the narratives of national belonging that emerge at this exhibition site. I demonstrate how photography is used to create a story of racial emergence and visibility that appears to be about a single ethnic group (Indian Americans), but that in fact engenders broader questions about identity and representation that encompass a wide range of racialized CHAPTER THREE

subjects, including but not limited to immigrants from South Asia and its diasporas. As Masum Momaya observes, the Smithsonian institutions are charged with telling an “American story.”15 Precisely because the images and objects gathered at this museum site tell a familiar story of immigrant arrival and adaptation, the exhibition reproduces, rather than refashions, dominant visual narratives of minority representation. Within the Smithsonian’s own curatorial logic, a collection of aesthetic objects can be spatially organized to reproduce a narrative logic that moves from invisibility to visibility, foregrounding a panoramic view of the multicultural national body. Just as the historical purview of Beyond Bollywood includes stories of both upper-­class and working-­class immigrants, the exhibition as a whole includes images of prominent figures in the sciences and the arts, straight and queer South Asians, Hindus and Muslims, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, and Christians. Throughout, the very accumulation of visual and material objects within the gallery space stands for the density of South Asian American history, producing an exhibition that culminates in South Asian Americans securing visibility and citizenship. By defining curation as a social experience of aesthetic objects in space, I examine the alternate narratives that are created as diasporic viewers walk through and around the exhibition, developing modes of seeing that encompass feelings of amusement, estrangement, and bafflement. Such creative encounters with the aesthetic object can contravene the mimetic relation between the multicultural exhibition and the imperial museum, leading viewers to demand more heterogeneous, more varied, and more authentic forms of representation. At the same time, the complex feelings evoked by visual objects on display also demonstrate how deeply colonial frameworks of representation continue to haunt us, and how far, as minoritized viewers, we engage with these imperial modes of seeing as a means of seeing ourselves.

T H E F E E L I N G O F R E P R E S E N TAT I O N

For many South Asian American viewers on opening night, it was precisely the excess of visual objects — a profusion of personal and archival photographs on every wall of the exhibition — t hat contributed to feelings of delight, glee, and pride (figure 3.1). Despite quibbles that I overheard from viewers about who and what was represented, the experiEXHIBITING IMMIGRANTS

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126 3.1  Installation at Beyond Bollywood, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 2014. PHOTOGR APH BY AUTHOR.

ence of many in the crowd (including fund-­raisers, donors, and friends of the exhibition organizers) was genuine exhilaration. As viewers walked through the collection of photographic objects — peering at the wall text, looking at themselves in the mirrors that dotted the exhibition, and taking photographs of various images — their experience of viewing came to acquire affective qualities. Simply being at the Smithsonian, where their own mirror images as well as photographs of other South Asians were prominently showcased, was central to how diasporic viewers engaged with the gallery space. As I walked among a crowd of viewers on opening night, what became immediately evident was how my desire to identify with the aesthetic object was in fact reflected by many of the South Asian Americans who viewed the exhibition alongside me. Unlike my previously solitary experiences of identifying with photographs in galleries and museums, at the Smithsonian the process of looking at images CHAPTER THREE

and talking about our desire for identification was a collective social experience. In the smiles, anecdotes, and brief commentaries that viewers shared with each other in the gallery space, I recognized how each of us worked to make these images relate to our everyday lives, no matter how far our actual experiences of migration and citizenship diverged from the exhibition’s central narrative of upward mobility and middle-­class citizenship. Indeed, it was precisely the curators’ ability to display these photographs as if they mirrored the lives of diasporic viewers, as if we were also part of the American story being told in the exhibition, that contributed to the popularity of Beyond Bollywood. Because Beyond Bollywood produces good feelings — helps us feel good about being South Asian — it is not useful, in my view, to evaluate the exhibition as a success or as a failure.16 Instead, I use the visual text of the exhibition to examine our collective desire for representation in the museum, as well as the limits of representation itself. Throughout the exhibition, visibility becomes a central means of establishing affective relations of identity with objects on display, evident in the ways that visitors intimately engaged with portrait photographs. Literally being able to see oneself in relation to these visual artifacts (and, in the case of the mirrors, seeing oneself as part of the visual artifacts on display) produces feelings of contentment and pleasure. As Sara Ahmed points out, such happy feelings are deeply implicated in neoliberal discourses of multiculturalism and in heteronormative formations of the national family.17 Across my visits to the Smithsonian I never encountered a dejected or disappointed visitor, only those who clamored for more representation: for more historical figures, more archival photographs, or a more diverse range of material artifacts. How then can we understand affective responses that run counter to this overwhelming desire for representation? In what ways can we feel differently about Beyond Bollywood, and how can such feelings create new forms of seeing? I draw upon recent cultural studies of photography in order to reframe the affective conditions generated by exhibitions like Beyond Bolly ­wood. Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu incisively argue for “feeling” rather than “thinking” photography, amplifying photography’s impact on us as viewers, as subjects whose emotions are produced in relation to the images we see.18 By considering the politics of viewing via the “rubric of feeling,” Brown and Phu call for linking “an older mode of photographic criticism’s attention to power and historical materialism with new questions concerning racial formation, colonialism, postindustrial economies, genEXHIBITING IMMIGRANTS

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der, and queer counterpublics.” 19 I take up Phu and Brown’s interventions on the affective consumption of photography but redirect our attention to what it means to feel photography in the imperial museum. By foregrounding the museum as a site of feeling, I delineate the intense affective relations forged between diasporic viewers, including myself, and photographic images that appear to reflect diasporic subjects. These modes of seeing photography in the museum create forms of racialized subjectivity and community that at once align with the uplifting narratives of multicultural citizenship on display and are estranged from the exhibitionary narrative of racialized bodies within the museum at large. Here, I also expand on Tina Campt’s call for a “haptic” mode of seeing photography. Campt situates photographic objects within the lifeworlds of documented subjects, but she also considers what feelings are conjured in minoritized viewers as we see, touch, and sense these images from the past. Discussing the affective engagement between Black diasporic viewers and archival images of enslaved Black subjects, she writes, “The visuality of race and the indexicality of the photograph have been powerful twin forces in the deployment of the racialized index to produce subjects to be seen, read, touched, and consumed as available and abjected 128

flesh objects and commodities, rather than as individual bodies, agents, or actors.”20 Campt reminds us of the historical uses of photography as evidence, its realist qualities translated into documentation for the fact of abject bodies. At Beyond Bollywood, the realist form of the documentary, archival, and family photograph comes to showcase the historical, cultural, and economic contributions of an immigrant group, as each photographic image takes on a representational quality that stands in for an individual life story and the racialized experience of a broader community. At the Smithsonian, viewers could touch some of the wall-­ mounted photographic reproductions, stand eye-­to-­eye with the images on display, and take photographs of themselves alongside installations. Likewise, during my visits I spent hours walking through the gallery surreptitiously fingering large-­format photographic reproductions, peering closely at old newspaper images of Bengali traders and American yogis, talking with other viewers, and creating my own archive of documentation for research, as I took multiple photographs of each object on the walls. However, in my experience the haptic is conjured not only through viewers’ ability to touch images on display; equally important is the feeling of not being able to touch, the viewers’ inability to feel those images CHAPTER THREE

and objects that document the life experiences of racialized subjects. As I detail below, the use of material objects such as turbans to record the violent death of South Asian immigrants, particularly in the section of the exhibit that documents race-­based hate crimes, produces intense feelings of proximity with and estrangement from the visual object. The presence and denial of the haptic, in this instance, shapes the ways in which diasporic viewers engage with the visual narrative of citizenship on display. Across these different modes of feeling photography in the museum, I emphasize photography’s ability to interpellate racialized diasporic subjects. I take up interpellation not in its strictly Althusserian sense, but through anticolonial readings of subject formation offered by Frantz Fanon. In Black Skin, White Masks, the Black man who hears the exclamation “Look, a Negro!” turns toward the white speaker despite his own disorientation, a disorientation that, as I argued in chapter 1, is embodied spatially — as he stumbles, turns, crawls, and flees — as much as it is experienced psychically through sensations such as shame and nausea. 21 As Fanon points out, for the listener who recognizes the term as constituting him, the word “Negro” is seen and heard immediately as an abject thing: not a person one wants to be or identify with, but an object that one is identified as. As the listener turns toward the speaker, Blackness is transformed from rhetoric to ontological fact, from a racist term of identification toward a form of racialized subjectivity: “a slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world.”22 Fanon emphasizes that the Black man who hears himself being called out as “a Negro” feels powerless, but it is in relation to this term, to this racialized construct of human life, that he is seen and must live in the West. Fanon’s discussion of Black abjection relies on the aural, rather than the visual, hailing of the racialized subject, through words that are uttered by a white speaking subject. The context of racial abjection for a colonized Black man in postwar France is significantly removed in place and time from those upper-­and middle-­class South Asian American viewers assembled at a contemporary museum exhibit in Washington, DC. But Fanon’s declarative statement is central to visualizing the force of the affective encounter between the photograph and immigrant viewers. It is through their intimate proximity with photographic images in this exhibition that South Asian diasporic viewers become racialized as minoritized subjects of the state, or what the wall text calls “Indian Americans.” The photographic image, which anchors an exhibition about multiculturalism, is central to how racialized subjects are named EXHIBITING IMMIGRANTS

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and seen, how diasporic viewers come to see themselves as part of a visual narrative of racial uplift, and how viewers perceive themselves to be seen in a story of American citizenship. Yet the possibility of representation offered by photography is neither total nor complete. Kobena Mercer writes, “Self-­perception is always alienated by the way in which one is perceived by others as the Other. This dilemma is at the heart of Fanon’s analysis of racializing interpellation: being objectified under the imperial gaze — ‘Look, a Negro!’ — to the point where the black self’s own body is fragmented, dismembered, and thrown back as ‘an object in the midst of other objects.’ ”23 That is, the effect of seeing oneself in the photographs that compose the exhibit is not necessarily the sensation of being represented as part of the national body, but its opposite: the feeling of abjection. By conceptualizing abjection as a mode of feeling photography, I draw attention to the sensation of what it means to look at an image and feel as if one is being made into an object. Karen Shimakawa reminds us that abjection is “at once a specular and affective process.”24 The experience of looking at photographs of immigrants from South Asia becomes, for South Asian diasporic viewers at the Smithsonian, simultaneously an affective experience of being looked at. Equally important, the process 130

of abjection is consistently repeated through the dynamic movement of viewers within the exhibition space, as South Asian American viewers encounter not just one photograph but multiple images, each one an attempt to insist on the legitimacy and visibility of this racialized immigrant group within the U.S. state. What emerges through our navigation of this exhibition site is the fact that what it means to be South Asian American “can only be represented (objectified) once it has been radically excluded; as ‘ordinary’ Americans, Asian Americans are often simply incomprehensible or invisible.”25 Shimakawa’s suturing of representation-­ with-­objectification here is prescient, for it illustrates how the feeling of abjection is central to, and simultaneous with, the experience of visibility for racialized subjects in the U.S. state. In contrast to the visible feelings of happiness that I saw and heard at the exhibition’s opening, it is this repeated experience of abjection that comes through most clearly in the many critiques of Beyond Bollywood that were published in print and on social media, frequently by reviewers who themselves identified as first-­and second-­generation South Asian Americans. These include critics who pointed out that there were only two photographs, tucked behind a pillar, depicting queer and trans South CHAPTER THREE

Asians; writers who brought up how working-­class South Asians were marginalized in a series of photographs that attested to South Asian immigrant success; and academics who pointed out that the fact that Islam is also a South Asian religion was erased from the version of Beyond Bollywood that traveled nationwide. 26 In these viewers’ eyes, the profusion of photographs did not and could not ensure the visibility of a heterogeneous diasporic community. Instead, they demonstrate how the very narrative of South Asian Americans as a cohesive immigrant group fails to be achieved by this curatorial project, as it is precisely through the proliferation of visual documentation that South Asian Americans become objects to be represented. Despite the “ugly feelings” of irritation and resentment that such reviews express, what is crucial to keep in mind is that the desire to be represented remains consistent across these online, print, and in-­person responses to Beyond Bollywood. 27 That is, even when the exhibition is faulted for its failure to produce an accurate portrayal of South Asians in America, the need for representation is constant; in fact, it intensifies. Indeed, if viewers point out what is lacking or misrepresented within the exhibit, such absences become symptomatic not of the exhibition’s failure per se, but of the exhibition’s failure to represent South Asian Americans. In this context, the affective exchange between diasporic viewers and the photographic objects on display — despite the feelings of abjection embodied by viewers themselves — a mplify what remains a strong and deep desire on the part of racialized immigrants: to be represented, and to have that form of representation made public, legible, and visible.

V I S IB I L I T Y I N T H E I M P E R I A L M U S E U M

If the representation of the racialized immigrant as a subject of the state drives the curatorial ambitions of Beyond Bollywood, I turn our attention to the exhibitionary contexts within which such representations are transformed into objects on display. 28 The natural history museum is, like the imperial and settler colonial archives discussed in previous chapters, an image archive that shapes how we see ourselves. The institutional role of the natural history museum, a museum form that came to prominence in the late nineteenth century, was to educate a wider metropolitan public about “foreign” (often colonized) peoples and territories, as well as to create narratives of human origin and evolution that redoubled as histories of imperial conquest and civilization.29 In my view, the coloEXHIBITING IMMIGRANTS

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nial epistemology of the natural history museum profoundly shapes the ways in which we see photographs of racialized subjects in Beyond Bollywood. In the natural history museum, every representation of an animal or human subject is ordered within a larger taxonomy of ecologies and civilizations, producing an exhibition experience that foregrounds how so-­c alled modern humans evolved out of their prehistoric ancestors. The art historian Annie Coombes has written extensively on the interrelationship between natural history and ethnography, demonstrating how material cultural objects as well as live human subjects, specifically indigenous peoples from Africa, Asia, and Australia, were brought to Europe to constitute a “spectacle . . . of racial difference” in the museum. 30 Others such as the anthropologist Monique Scott have discussed how natural history museums in countries as disparate as the U.S., U.K., and Kenya uniformly rely on the imagination of evolutionary narratives “out of Africa,” such that “many museum visitors interpret human evolution exhibitions as linear, teleological narratives of progress from bestial African prehistory to a civilized, European present.”31 These images of human evolution engage a variety of visual artifacts: dioramas, paintings, fossils, skulls, sculpted models of Neanderthals, fiberglass replicas of ocean creatures. Such linear narratives of evolution, braided with no132

tions of civilizational taxonomy, demonstrate how the natural history museum has historically operated as a site for the naturalization of the science of race. 32 The natural history museum has also been central to recent scholarship in Asian American studies on the colonial archive and its visual representations. In The Filipino Primitive, Sarita Echavez See astutely observes, “Nowhere can we appreciate so easily the intertwined nature of the triple forces of accumulation — capital, colonial, and racial — than in the imperial museum, where the objects of accumulation remain materially, visibly preserved.”33 Taking up the American museum as the site where colonial knowledge of the “primitive” is produced and disseminated, See reads the spatial organization of the natural history and anthropology museum as discursively accumulating and producing colonial knowledge through its display of objects, even as colonial histories resolutely remain outside the descriptive and informational text that organize the curation of these objects. She argues that “this lack of explanation indexes the museum’s larger crisis of representation about the politics of its collections, even as this lack also allows the racist and colonial ideology of the backward or disappeared primitive to occupy that CHAPTER THREE

space and thus become self-­evident, a form of unquestioned common sense.”34 Such colonial forms of “common sense” are integral to how, as racialized diasporic subjects, we approach objects on display in the contemporary museum: as representations of “primitives,” displays of not-­ quite-­humans whom we are nonetheless in intimate relationship with. Each artifact within the natural history museum, arranged in sequential progression (inside exhibition halls, alongside staircases, and gracing communal areas), reaffirms what we understand to be the natural order of things: an order that culminates in our daily lived experience, as viewing subjects who enter the museum to view relics of the past, and who, in that viewing, are safely distanced from the objects that we see, many of which we know to contain a faint resemblance to ourselves. However, if the natural history museum foregrounds the visuality of the material object and uses such objects to index the evolution of the modern human subject, it is also a place where the limitations of visibility as a mode of claiming representation for racialized subjects becomes clear. Within the museum, a single object (a skull replica, dioramas of Neanderthals) operates as documentation of historical fact, authenticating a narrative of common human origins that, paradoxically, serves to differentiate our present time and place from the times and places documented through these objects. The natural history museum exhibit establishes both the precise temporal and geographic difference of “other” subjects while also denoting through the visuality of these objects their racial difference, ranging from the burnished skin tone of human wax sculptures in dioramas to the “primitive” form of aesthetic objects. 35 In this colonial epistemology, the accumulated aesthetic objects that are meant to document our shared human past (often artifacts that end up in the museum as a result of imperial conquest) instead reify the racial and civilizational difference between the viewing subject and the exhibitionary object. In other words, the biological taxonomy that defines the natural history museum also houses the biopolitical project of multiculturalism. 36 If a single object within the museum stands in for a group of civilizational others, in relation to which the viewing subject defines herself, a group of such objects, such as the photographs on display in Beyond Bollywood, comes to index the racial difference of an entire ethnic group. Thus even as Beyond Bollywood aimed to be a definitive public exhibition that represented the heterogeneity of South Asian Americans, highlighting the contributions that this immigrant community makes to the U.S. state, EXHIBITING IMMIGRANTS

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the location of this exhibition within the epistemological framework of a natural history museum reproduces the marginalization of South Asians as racialized others on display, within an institutional taxonomy devoted to telling the story of the white, modern, universal human self. I want to sit with this dilemma of representing racial, cultural, and ethnic difference within the natural history museum, in order to consider the possibilities of seeing South Asian Americans as objects and as subjects in museum representations. Several artists of color, including the African American artist Fred Wilson, the Payómkawichum/Ipai artist James Luna, and the Latinx artists Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-­ Peña, have created site-­specific artworks in natural history museums, using archival objects from museum collections to reimagine exhibition narratives, as well as creating performance art that solicits viewer participation to challenge dominant curatorial frameworks of self and other, primitive and modern. 37 Together, these aesthetic interventions reveal histories of settler colonialism, imperial conquest, and slavery that are at the heart of the imperial museum. Beyond Bollywood, however, is not an artistic intervention but a sociological display of an immigrant community; its curators designed the exhibition to be housed anywhere within the Smithsonian group of institutions. In this context, the fact that Be134

yond Bollywood was staged for over a year at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History was largely a matter of available gallery space. However, the exhibit’s location inside this natural history museum is central to my reading, for the majority of visitors to Beyond Bollywood came across the exhibition by chance — after seeing the life-­size elephant that graces the museum rotunda, or while hunting for enormous dinosaur skeletons, or after rounding the corner from the Hope Diamond (an object that, incidentally, is also from South Asia). 38 Set alongside this diverse display of animal, fossil, and natural objects, the photos that make up Beyond Bollywood prompt a double take. South Asian Americans are displayed as one more (human) species to be viewed, an integral component of the narrative of common human origins at the museum. At the same time, the exhibition as a whole is meant to mark the difference of being South Asian, delineated through photographs and objects that are remarkable for their representation of racial difference, not sameness. On opening night at Beyond Bollywood, my experience of navigating the exhibition captured the disorientation of how to see these objects. With several other guests I crowded into an elevator that deposited us on the second floor of the museum, where small signposts directed us down CHAPTER THREE

135 3.2  “Who Gets to Be a Citizen?” (detail). Installation at Beyond Bollywood, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 2014. PHOTOGR APH BY AUTHOR.

the hallway to the exhibition. Once outside the glass doors of the gallery, my eyes were guided by the color-­saturated walls to the photographic objects on view. These objects told a story that, much like the human-­origins exhibits just one floor below, was linear and teleological, and resulted, finally, in the representation of immigrants as full human subjects —  as citizens. For example, one wall display was titled “Who Gets to Be a Citizen?” (figure 3.2). Accompanying portrait photographs of A. K. Mozumdar, Bhagat Singh Thind, and Kanta Chandra, the curatorial text noted that Mozumdar was the first South Asian immigrant to become a naturalized citizen; Thind, a U.S. Army veteran of World War I, applied for citizenship, but the Supreme Court rejected his case on account of his “race” (subsequently, Mozumdar was stripped of his citizenship as well); and Chandra was the first South Asian woman to apply for citizenship. 39 EXHIBITING IMMIGRANTS

Their photographs hang alongside a group portrait of the Ghadar Party in San Francisco, whose antiracist and anti-­imperialist struggles against British colonial rule on the subcontinent intersected with movements for racial justice in the United States.40 The curatorial text accounts for the transnational ties between South Asian immigrants in the United States, disenfranchised of citizenship, and Indians in India, subjugated to colonial rule. But the wall text also reifies U.S. citizenship as the measure of full subjectivity, noting, “These campaigners knew that victories on both continents would ensure for future generations the inalienable rights spoken of by America’s Declaration of Independence.” Confirming the “victory” of South Asian immigrants, the wall display culminates in an enormous photograph of Dalip Singh Saund, the first South Asian American elected to Congress, flanked by then-­Senator John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon Johnson (figure 3.3). Here, the array of portrait figures does not explicitly stand for racial types but is instead deployed to illustrate the challenges of overcoming racial difference in order to embody full citizenship. And yet the fact of race as a measure of difference is constant in every photograph that adorns this wall: in Thind’s long and full beard; in Chandra’s dark skin, enhanced by her necktie and the large bow on top of her head; in the turbans worn by many Ghadar 136

Party members; in the fact that Saund is flanked by two tall white men and that he is literally looking up toward them. Represented here as a visual difference, the fact of racial difference cannot be eclipsed within a curatorial narrative that culminates in the universality of citizenship for South Asian Americans. For many South Asian American viewers who gathered in front of these images on opening night, the photographs created a powerful sense of collective history. Encouraged by the curatorial narrative, diasporic viewers including myself can experience an intimate identification with photographs of immigrants on display. We can look at these photographic representations and imagine a shared story of departure from the subcontinent and arrival in America, a shared sense of racialization as immigrants, a shared struggle to be legitimated as residents and as citizens. By codifying a legislative history of South Asian movements for citizenship, culminating in Saund’s election, these photographs affirm the visibility of the racialized portrait subject as well as the political visibility of the diasporic viewer herself. However, precisely because the photograph displays the racial difference of the immigrant, the consumption of this object by diasporic viewers also works to affirm the CHAPTER THREE

3.3  Dalip Singh Saund. Installation at Beyond Bollywood, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 2014. PHOTOGR APH BY AUTHOR.

137 truth of the viewer’s own racial subjugation, a subjugation that cannot be eradicated by the eventual offer of citizenship. That is, the visual matter of the photographs (the racial difference that we see) is at odds with the historical narrative of national belonging that is crafted through these photographs. Despite the difference that race makes in each image, in this evolutionary story of immigrants becoming citizens there is no room for unbelonging, for alienation, or for ways of entering, living in, and exiting the United States that are incomplete. Following the exhibition opening, I gathered with other guests in the magnificent Beaux Arts rotunda of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. With the accumulated density of immigrant portrait photographs still circulating in my head, I found myself startled by the pink and green lights on the reception floor, the music reverberating across the hallways, the limitless mango martinis served at the bar. In its style and flair, the opening reception was much like a Bollywood-­ themed wedding. We were participants in this event, visible in our saris, salwar kameezes, and suits, speaking multiple languages that resonated across the hallways, commandeering the stage in enthusiastic speeches EXHIBITING IMMIGRANTS

that affirmed the difference of being South Asian. We were the subjects of the show, and we were now also the objects on display. As we gathered around the life-­size African elephant in the rotunda, I could not help but feel my proximity to this elephant — a taxidermy animal first displayed in 1959, named for the Hungarian hunter who donated its hide from an elephant he shot dead in Angola — and to the array of fiberglass heads of early humans on display in the adjacent Hall of Human Origins.41 From the long-­dead animal displayed as if it could still bellow in the rotunda, to the sculpted brown faces that make up the march of the anthropocene, to the black-­and-­white and color photographs in which I had glimpsed an image of immigrants like myself, this imperial archive both produced the representational conditions of my subjectivity as a South Asian American and, in turning me into an object of display, foreclosed the possibility of my embodiment of that same subjectivity.

THE IMMIGR ANT AS OBJEC T

The sensation of becoming one among many objects on display at Beyond Bollywood was amplified by the curators’ use of a range of material objects alongside the photographic displays. These included mundane 138

items such as tableware, film posters, and religious iconography, as well as spectacular displays of Olympic medals, sports jerseys, and spelling bee trophies. Laid out in relation to the photographs of immigrants who earned these objects, ranging from prominent athletes and physicians to unnamed motel owners, these material objects created a shift in aesthetic registers within the exhibit. Some objects such as medals and trophies were enshrined in glass vitrines with detailed historiographical labels, while others were laid out for any visitor to touch. The visuality of the object poses a conundrum about the visibility of the immigrant subject, for it is through the object that viewers are encouraged to imagine the lived experience of immigrants: but the proliferation of such objects also threatens to supplant the representational images of the immigrants on display. Instead of doubling the visibility of the immigrant, the uncanny effect of seeing a photographic image in relation to the material object is not the feeling of representation, but what I have described as its opposite, abjection. One particular section of Beyond Bollywood highlights the disjuncture between the immigrant subjects and material objects on display. In a section titled “Groundbreakers,” a thirty-­foot-­long wall showcased portraits CHAPTER THREE

3.4  “Groundbreakers.” Installation at Beyond Bollywood, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 2014. PHOTOGR APH BY AUTHOR.

of prominent South Asian Americans in the sciences, arts, and sports (figure 3.4). Displayed under the words “Spirit,” “Mind,” and “Body,” this series of photographs included writers such as Dhan Gopal Mukerji and Bharati Mukherjee, fashion designer Naeem Khan, the astronaut Kalpana Chawla and the Nobel Prize – w inning scientist Hargobind Khorana, MacArthur Grant winners such as Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Hollywood directors and writers including M. Night Shyamalan and Mindy Kaling, and concluded with portraits of athletes such as Olympic gymnast Mohini Bhardwaj and

NFL

player Brandon Chillar. Each of these

figures was displayed as a black-­and-­white or color photo mounted on a round steel-­r immed plate. One final photograph, however, stood apart from the rest: Nina Davuluri, Miss America 2014, was displayed as a life-­ size cardboard cutout in full color.42 Across my repeated visits to Beyond Bollywood, this lavishly curated series of photographs was a focal point of the exhibition. It was where viewers lingered to read wall text and talked animatedly with friends about who they knew and who they didn’t, and plenty of visitors took selfies alongside Miss America. Like the earlier set of archival images that forwarded legal claims to citizenship, the “Groundbreakers” section also underscored the public contributions of South Asian Americans. The wall text noted, “Since its first days America has been a land of spectacular achievement built on the shoulders of immigrants. Indian Americans are known for success in medicine, engineering, and business, but did you know that many have broken ground elsewhere? Here are just a few EXHIBITING IMMIGRANTS

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of the luminaries of (Indian) America’s amazing history.” Eclipsing the racialized difference of the “(Indian)” within “America’s amazing history,” this series of images of individual immigrants, known nationally and internationally for their contributions to media, sports, and science, codified the narrative of immigrant upward mobility already rendered in the previous gallery space. In a public lecture, curator Masum Momaya suggested that the “Groundbreakers” section was a response to donor pressure. Several donors wanted what she called a “hall of fame,” a section of the exhibit that would highlight the achievements of prominent South Asian Americans.43 The portrait photographs of immigrants chosen for display did not include images of any donors to the exhibit, but nor did the portraits simply represent an abstract narrative of struggles for citizenship. Instead, as I saw it, the selected images worked to cathect the material and affective relation between wealthy immigrant donors and those celebrities whose capital, cultural, and historical value are already archived in national public culture. “Groundbreakers” thus established a mimetic relation between those private immigrants who organized for, and donated to, the display of their own success, and the public citizen subjects whose portraits were selected for display. Importantly, despite the cu140

ratorial emphasis on political representation for immigrants across the entire exhibit, “Groundbreakers” omitted photographs of elected South Asian American politicians, including governors, congresspersons, and senators. Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan pointedly notes that the Smithsonian’s institutional mandate guards “against the perception of political endorsement. This is an ironic omission . . . because the ethnic collective is foremost a political collective.”44 At “Groundbreakers,” the ethnic political collective was made visible instead as an imagined social collective, as viewers photographed themselves in relation to the images on display, later uploading their photographs onto social media as if to say that they, too, were groundbreakers in this show. What compelled me to linger at “Groundbreakers” was the series of material objects exhibited adjacent to the photographic images, including objects created or earned by the immigrants on display. These objects conjured a form of visual doubling, reflecting the immigrants in the photographs once more through the material objects that defined their success. A glass vitrine held a lavishly detailed evening gown designed by Naeem Khan and worn by Michelle Obama; another case displayed the Olympic silver medal won by Mohini Bhardwaj; another held a copy of CHAPTER THREE

141 3.5  “Groundbreakers” (detail). Installation at Beyond Bollywood, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 2014. PHOTOGR APH BY AUTHOR.

Gay Neck: The Story of a Pigeon, a children’s book written by Dhan Gopal Mukerji; still another held the football helmet of NFL player Brandon Chillar (figure 3.5). At one level, the assortment of objects gathered here redoubles the viewers’ appreciation of the singularity of immigrants who are featured in this display, for the objects in themselves do not produce a coherent visual narrative. As Gay Neck (published in 1928 and readily available for resale online) is aligned with a one-­of-­a-­k ind embroidered dress that was never retailed to the public, which in turn is displayed alongside an Olympic medal that is officially priceless, it becomes impossible for the viewer to assess the relative value of these objects outside of the fact that they were owned and earned by South Asian immigrants. At another level, however, the transposition of visual representation from photograph to material object contests the mimetic relation of identity initially established between the viewer and the portrait image. It is as EXHIBITING IMMIGRANTS

if our first quick glance at the South Asian American depicted in the photograph is not enough to secure the value of that immigrant subject. Proceeding sequentially along the display, we then direct our glance to the object that this immigrant has created and earned; but the value of these objects is also unclear, and so we return again to the photograph. In this double take, our eyes move between the visual and the material object and back again. We try to see the figure of the immigrant, which we have already glimpsed in the portrait, within the works that they have created. But as our gaze rests with the density and weight of the object inside the vitrine, what we experience instead is a slow, diffuse sense of alienation from the photographic image, as if we would rather see the object on display than the immigrant subject that it is meant to represent. Even though the curatorial narrative attempts to represent immigrants doubly, as photograph and as material object, what we see instead is the weight, texture, and commercial value of the object, which dwarfs the accompanying portrait photographs. Indeed, the only object that succeeds in capturing to scale the portrait subject is the life-­size cutout of Nina Davuluri that culminates the display of “Groundbreakers” (figure 3.6). This crowning image of Davuluri as Miss America, resplendent in a yellow gown and gazing up at an imaginary crowd, becomes an iconic ob142

ject: not of Davuluri’s own achievement, but of those many South Asian American viewers who upload selfies of themselves alongside her, mapping their own aspirations for representation onto her beauty. We do this knowing that the closest we can come to a public acknowledgment of who we are is by circulating online a photograph of ourselves alongside a cutout of a photograph, creating an image where both Davuluri’s and our own bodies become objects to be seen. To see the material objects on view at Beyond Bollywood, therefore, is also to see how each object displays the limits of visibility for the immigrant subject. Although the visual organization of the exhibition relies on the material object to double the representational capacity of the immigrant subject, so that we see the immigrant first in the portrait photograph and again in the object that defines them, I emphasize how the repetition of these double acts, the constant back-and-forth between photographic print and material object, fails to secure the subjectivity of the immigrant who is represented in both. Instead, the objectification of immigrant lives through the array of material objects on display leads diasporic viewers to become objects themselves, as we see in an installation of the Scripps National Spelling Bee set adjacent to “GroundCHAPTER THREE

3.6  Nina Davuluri. Installation at Beyond Bollywood, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 2014. PHOTOGR APH BY AUTHOR.

breakers.” The spelling bee, won by South Asian American contestants each year since 2008, is, as Sameer Pandya puts it, “America’s Great Racial Freaks and Geeks” show. Aired on

ESPN ,

it has the appearance of

both a competitive sport and “pure meritocracy,” as the sole criterion for advancement is spelling a word correctly.45 What the spelling bee represents (to its viewers, producers, and participants) is the meritocratic promise of America, but, as Pandya also points out, this promise is displaced by the accumulation of young brown bodies who have won the contest, which has led commentators to either willfully ignore the racial difference of South Asian Americans or to claim that the spelling bee is no longer for “Americans.”46 The centrality of the spelling bee to representations of racialized citizenship is conjured at Beyond Bollywood by an elevated platform stage displaying individual photographs of thirteen young South Asian Americans, framed by the cross-­hatched pattern of a honeycomb (see plate 8). This display of photographs incorporates an audio recording of Nupur Lala, the 1999 winner of the bee, spelling out words. A microphone stands at the end of the platform, switched off and left unattended. At the Smithsonian, the installation draws in giggling teenagers who stand by the photographs, attempting to hear Lala’s clear and careful spell144

ing; young children who jump onstage and squeal into the microphone; and, in one of my later visits, a Latinx mother explaining to her daughter that “Indian Americans” win the spelling bee because “their culture values education.” In contrast to the earlier section of the exhibition titled “Who Gets to Be a Citizen?,” here South Asian Americans are displayed as already winners: not as aspirational subjects struggling to become American but as citizens who have already won the most democratic of contests. And yet here again the photograph, as a display of the immigrant self, is not enough. In Lala’s disembodied voice speaking overhead, in the defunct microphone onstage, in the large glass showcase that proudly displays the 1985 Scripps National Spelling Bee trophy won by Balu Natarajan, the immigrant subject is replicated, again and again, so much so that the subjectivity of the immigrant is displaced by the proliferation of objects that accumulate onstage. What does it mean to see oneself as an object? I discussed this feeling earlier in relation to my participation as a racialized viewer inside the natural history museum, enfolded within an institution whose epistemological authority is constituted through the collection, curation, and consumption of colonial objects for display. Walking through the photoCHAPTER THREE

graphs and material objects that constitute Beyond Bollywood folds back against this larger museum experience, as I see myself represented as one in a series of visual objects within the museum space. One photograph of South Asian immigrants quickly begets another and still another; each photograph supplants the one preceding it, pulling the viewer into a curatorial narrative that progresses toward the greater and broader visibility of South Asian Americans. Overlapping with this series of photographs is a disparate collection of material objects. These objects are deployed to supplement the representational parameters of the photograph, to enhance the representation of the immigrant subject as their work acquires a visual density, a weight and scale that surpass the photographic image. The moment where the photograph is surpassed by another object leads me to consider the failure of visibility within the photographic image itself. In Beyond Bollywood, the photograph operates as an archival record of the long presence of racialized immigrants in the United States and, through the documentation of their racial difference, offers the image as a representational object to diasporic viewers. As the viewer sees one photograph and then another, the accumulation of images creates something (or someone) that looks like themselves. It is this prospect of identifying with the image that propels viewers through the gallery space and that shapes the exhibition’s dominant narrative of South Asian Americans emerging out of invisibility and becoming visible subjects in the public sphere. But within the curatorial framework of Beyond Bollywood, the photograph is not enough. It is as if a photograph of an immigrant in and of itself cannot produce the full sense of citizenship that the exhibition wants to claim (what Momaya calls the Smithsonian’s mission to tell “an American story”): as if, left to its own devices, the racial difference of the immigrant captured within the photograph belies the possibility of citizenship. The material object enters the exhibit to buttress these images, to make them more real. We see the photographs, and our eyes move quickly to the objects on display, worn and held and won by those immigrants that we have just seen. Moving in sequence between photograph, material object, and photograph, the material object comes to accrue a different, greater weight, taking the place of the subject of the photograph itself. The collapse of the immigrant subject within the material objects on display becomes most vivid in the final section of Beyond Bollywood, titled “Who Belongs in America?” A glass display case is sandwiched beEXHIBITING IMMIGRANTS

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tween two group photographs depicting South Asian Americans protesting race-­based hate crimes (see plate 9). The case contains objects that commemorate Balbir Singh Sodhi. Sodhi was a gas station owner in Mesa, Arizona, who was shot five times in the back and killed on September 15, 2001, in what was the first documented murder in a series of hate crimes directed toward Sikh Americans, Muslim Americans, South Asians, and Arab Americans after 9/11. His assailant, who went on to attack a Lebanese American man and the Afghani immigrant family who bought his former house, shouted, “I am a patriot!” and “I stand for America all the way!” at the moment of his arrest.47 At Beyond Bollywood, Sodhi is not represented in a single portrait photograph. Instead, his life is memorialized through a number of disparate objects: a blue turban that he once wore, a flyer, and a graphic novel. I was overcome by the simultaneity of my feelings of proximity to, and distance from, this visual narrative of Sodhi’s life. As with the trophies and medals on display, I could not touch the materials in this glass case. Nor were the flyer or the graphic novel held or touched by Sodhi. Instead, the haptic quality of these objects was eroded by the physical barrier of the glass case and through the reproduction of Sodhi’s portrait within the objects on display. Both the flyer and the graphic novel, flanking Sodhi’s blue turban, re146

produce Sodhi’s portrait image as a means of posthumously visualizing him as an American subject. In the flyer, Sodhi’s photograph is accompanied by two separate images: an American flag and a public apology posted anonymously at the site of his death, which states, “Our sincerest apologies, sympathy and prayer to you, your family, and all those affected by misguided and evil men everywhere.” The graphic novel 9-­11: Artists Respond features a color rendition of Sodhi that accompanies a one-­page synopsis of his death. Above a sketch of Sodhi outside his gas station, giving glasses of milk to two children, is a grayscale visage of him rising like a ghost in the clouds. The text chronicles Sodhi’s death, describes him as a Sikh, and narrates, “Balbir, a gentle man who was loved by his community, was apparently targeted because of how he looked. The gunman believed he was a Middle Easterner.”48 Wedged next to the flyer and graphic novel is Sodhi’s turban. Crisply tied around the head of a fabric mannequin, the turban takes on a spectral quality. It indexes a man whose racialized body — not just his turban, but his skin, his facial hair, the way he talked, possibly even how he moved — became a target for elimination. The turban’s value relies on its haptic quality, on the fact that Sodhi handled this fabric, touching it as he tied it around his head CHAPTER THREE

and hair. Encased in the vitrine, displayed on a faceless sculpture, the haptic quality of the turban dissolves to produce not affective identification with the object but estrangement, a feeling of unbelonging. The turban is the single object that would have made Sodhi hypervisible to his assailant.49 However, in the aftermath of his death, the turban, alongside the flyer and the graphic novel, cannot make him more visible. Instead, these objects supplant him, or, more precisely, they conjure him. In the graphic novel Sodhi is a “gentle man” who is represented as both alive (pouring milk for the children) and already dead, a figure in the clouds. In the flyer, he is represented in a portrait photograph that shows him cheerfully smiling among photographs of objects (an American flag, a letter) that commemorate his own death. The turban is displayed here, too, as a sign of the life he lived as a racialized immigrant and the religious community his body is taken to represent. It is now placed on the faceless head of a mannequin, a fabric sculpture of no discernable race. None of these objects, separately or together, can visualize Sodhi outside of the scene of his death. Instead, the relentless use of Sodhi’s portrait image in the flyer and the graphic novel reproduce, again and again, the fact of his absence. I have often returned to contemplating the glass vitrine with Sodhi’s turban in it. In my initial reading of the exhibition, I had used the turban as a spatial endpoint for the exhibit, the hypervisible object that provides the most logical conclusion to the legal and political narrative of visibility and citizenship produced by Beyond Bollywood. 50 I had noted how the collection of objects on display, alongside the photographs, produces an exemplary visual record of South Asians in America that is committed to displaying the heterogeneity and diversity of religion, class, language, and region of origin in this immigrant community. But as I return to my memory of the objects in the glass vitrine, some years after the closure of the exhibit, I am convinced more than ever that the accumulation of visual objects, photographic and otherwise, cannot contravene the logic of racialization by the neoliberal state. Representation cannot be captured by the object, no matter how many objects are put forward for display, and no matter how much we invest the object with the ghost of its likeness. The object reminds us of the absence of the subject — in this case, the literal elimination of a racialized subject in a hate crime perpetrated by a white man who saw himself as a patriot in service to the United States. To stand in front of this glass vitrine is to recognize that no amount of visual material can push back against how we are read and EXHIBITING IMMIGRANTS

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racialized by the state. There is no series of photographs or material objects that can reflect us. Nor is there a curatorial vision that can supplant those representational forms that make visible how, as racialized subjects, we are always seen as objects: that we always encounter our own representations as something other to ourselves.

S E E IN G IN DI A N S

If doubling the photographic subject via the use of material objects takes us no closer to the representation of South Asian Americans, I turn to a final set of photographs on display at Beyond Bollywood, a portfolio of fine art prints that inscribes the racialized subject as always already lost to representation. Among a number of artworks created by South Asian American artists that are scattered across the exhibition is a series of four diptychs by the photographer Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, from her series An Indian from India (figure 3.7). As discussed in chapter 2, Matthew’s series reproduces archival portraits of First Nations and Native peoples from Edward Curtis’s The North American Indian, among other collections, in order to re-­create the scene of the photograph with herself as the subject. The visual similarity on both sides of the diptych, 148

enhanced by Matthew’s spatial framing of photographic subjects as well as her use of an identical caption font, produces a troubling sense of the uncanny, a question of exactly who and what is being represented. At Beyond Bollywood, the form and content of An Indian from India thematizes precisely the issues of racial representation and national belonging that are central to the curatorial objective of the exhibition. At the same time, encountering Matthew’s diptychs at the Smithsonian also alerts us to what I have described as the problem of visibility and visuality that defines each object on display: namely, how the racialized subject is made visible through the visual object, and how the viewer, in encountering the visual object, claims both identity and representation. The vexed relation between visibility and representation is exemplified by two diptychs on display: On Entry: Tom and Annu Before (also known as Tom & Annu Before) and Civilized: Tom and Annu After (also known as Tom & Annu After). In both diptychs Matthew reproduces photographs of a Diné man named Tom Torlino, a student at the federally funded Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania: a boarding school whose mission, as Mohawk scholar Louellyn White writes, “was to civilize, assimilate, and ‘kill the Indian to save the man.’ ”51 Torlino’s CHAPTER THREE

149 3.7  Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, An Indian from India. Installation at Beyond Bollywood, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 2014. © ANNU PAL AKUNNATHU MAT THE W, COUR TESY SEPIAE Y E. PHOTOGR APH BY AUTHOR.

studio portrait images were taken in 1885 by J. N. Choate, a predecessor of Curtis who worked as the principal photographer for the school. 52 In Tom & Annu Before (see plate 10), Torlino is depicted with long loose hair, prominent earrings, and necklaces, with a blanket arrayed over his left shoulder. Matthew likewise leaves her hair loose and curly in her self-­ portrait, wearing several silver chokers and an embroidered blouse. This accumulation of accessories (earrings, necklaces, fabric) are what mark Matthew and Torlino as “Indians” in the prints, as if their racial difference can only be enunciated through a proliferation of material objects. In Tom & Annu After (see plate 11), ostensibly taken three years after the first print, Torlino’s skin is noticeably several shades lighter: his hair is cut and combed, and he wears a vest, overcoat, and tie. Matthew’s body is likewise encased in a suit, her hair combed back. Across both diptychs, EXHIBITING IMMIGRANTS

Matthew replicates Torlino’s static pose, his refusal to look directly at the photographer. At first glance, both Torlino’s and Matthew’s photographs in Tom & Annu After make visible the effects of racial assimilation: as Torlino is brutally “civilized” by his enrollment in the carceral pedagogic structure of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, so too is Matthew, nine years after arriving in the U.S. But this similarity of gesture, clothing, and style cannot be read as a means of establishing mimetic relations of identity between Torlino and Matthew, as if the indigenous and immigrant subject are both equally subject to the disciplinary capacities of the U.S. state. Indeed, glossing the diptych as a shared history of assimilation violently erases how, as Ndé poet and scholar Margo Tamez writes, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was a “camp and site of reindoctrination . . . a site of necropolitical crisis,” spatially as well as psychically removed from Matthew’s own experience of voluntary migration to the U.S. 53 I propose instead an alternate reading that mines the visual resemblance between Torlino and Matthew in order to make visible the tangled imperial histories of representation that produce this set of photographs. In chapter 2 I argued that Matthew’s self-­portraits conjure the memory of colonial photographs of indigenous subjects in India, a visual archive 150

of British empire that preceded and informed later U.S. settler colonial visual documentation of Native peoples. Here, I want to emphasize Matthew’s artistic practice as an immigrant who deploys Torlino’s image as the object of her — and our own — representation. Working within settler colonial image archives, Matthew retrieves Choate’s official photographs of Torlino. She uses these photographs, produced as a form of documentation and surveillance of indigenous subjects, in order to fashion her own self-­representation. Torlino’s body, subject to the disciplinary apparatus of a school camera within which he is already seen as “a tabula rasa onto which the will of civilization could be inscribed,” becomes the visual object in relation to which Matthew stylizes her self-­portrait. 54 In turn, Matthew’s artwork is displayed at the exhibition in tandem with a host of material objects, ranging from tableware to trophies, which together curate the conditions of South Asian American representation. And finally, those viewers who encounter Torlino’s photograph and Matthew’s see this doubled set of images as visualizing narratives of citizenship and belonging in an exhibition about South Asian Americans, inside a museum that still retains, in its permanent collection, plaster facial busts of Native peoples. 55 CHAPTER THREE

In both diptychs, the archival images used are from Tom Torlino’s student file in the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. 56 Torlino’s existing student record describes him as a “Navajoe” male; his mother and father are described as “living” but are given no names; Torlino’s Diné name is also absent from official record. 57 As the school’s photographer, Choate frequently took portraits of Native students in pairs of before and after shots, which, as Laura Wexler points out, “show very clearly the exact dimensions of the change the students are to demonstrate. They mark the line between nothing less and nothing more.”58 Such images were archived within the school as a form of institutional documentation, but Choate also sold several student images as tourist souvenirs, in the form of cabinet cards and stereographs that promoted his commercial studio work. For example, the verso of the image titled “Tom Torlino, Navajoe. Three Years Later” (used in the diptych Tom & Annu After) has the annotation “25¢” on the upper right corner. 59 Choate’s photographs thus not only functioned as a record of the disciplinary effects of the Carlisle School on indigenous students; the portraits also had aesthetic value as commoditized images of Native subjects that circulated widely. As images that document the bodily violence of U.S. settler colonialism on indigenous children dispossessed of their families, communities, and lands, the commercial circulation of Choate’s school photography and the consumption of these images by predominantly white viewers at the time speaks to the aesthetic value of the imperial archive: its ability to produce picturesque photographs of young Native subjects and, simultaneously, its devaluation of Native bodies featured in the prints, such that the portrait of one man incarcerated within the school could be sold for just twenty-­five cents, the equivalent of six dollars today. Matthew’s self-­portraits, aligned with Torlino’s images, could easily have circulated elsewhere in Beyond Bollywood. Her stern and professional profile in Tom & Annu After, for instance, could have been inserted into the “Groundbreakers” display in the adjoining section of the gallery. Instead, An Indian from India was installed in a section of the exhibit titled “America Imagines India.” On a single wall, Matthew’s fine art photography was juxtaposed alongside an array of popular media and everyday objects of consumption (figure 3.8). These included posters advertising Mira Nair’s 1991 film Mississippi Masala, as well as Nair’s 2006 film The Namesake (based on Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel by the same name), which were displayed in relation to film stills of Rudolph Valentino in The Young Rajah (1922) and the South Asian actor Sabu Dastagir as MowEXHIBITING IMMIGRANTS

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3.8  “America Imagines India.” Installation at Beyond Bollywood, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 2014. PHOTOGR APH BY AUTHOR.

gli in the 1942 film The Jungle Book.60 This array of photographic and cinematic images was surrounded by a collection of material objects, including coffee tins and advertisements from the 1950s depicting South Asians in turbans, atop elephants, and in long kaftans. Together, these visual representations narrate the orientalization of South Asians in U.S. media culture, particularly in Hollywood cinema: appearing in brownface (The Young Rajah), represented as bestial subjects (The Jungle Book) and as hypersexualized women (Mississippi Masala). Like Balbir Singh’s turban, which sits on the opposite side of this wall, such visual objects index a long history of South Asian American misidentification. Although the title of An Indian from India insists on the authenticity of Matthew’s racial subjectivity, its visual composition deliberately refracts the framework of racial identification onto settler colonial portraiture used to represent indigenous subjects in the early twentieth century. Yet when we encounter these diptychs on display alongside movie posters and coffee tins, such transnational visual histories of empire become lost to us. Within the exuberant visual narrative of national belonging crafted through this exhibition, both the archival and the contemporary portrait within the diptych become objects that stand in for South Asian Americans, images on display for our own consumption. At Beyond Bollywood, I noticed that several gallery visitors stopped to read the wall text, laughed, and brought their friends over to admire the work. Others walked right past Matthew’s diptychs, hardly giving them a glance. One South Asian woman remarked aloud on how Matthew’s statement resonated with her own experience, that she too had to clarify repeatedly what kind of Indian she was. Another visitor later claimed that there was a visible resemblance between both kinds of “Indians,” something he hadn’t noticed before.61 Still others paused in front of the diptychs and appeared befuddled, as if they were sorting through the dissonant aesthetic and commercial value of the objects on display. On social media and in online reviews, Matthew’s work unexpectedly became a touchstone for discussing representations of race and identity. “Which Indian Are You? Feather or Dot. (Not a Quiz)” blared a headline from Buzzfeed; “Portraits Challenge Cultural Perceptions,” declared CNN ;

elsewhere, Matthew’s photographs were described as “the most re-

deeming part of the exhibit.”62 What does it mean to see Matthew’s artwork as “redeeming” the curatorial premise of Beyond Bollywood? If the exhibition relies on doubling the representative capacity of the photograph, pairing portraits of imEXHIBITING IMMIGRANTS

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migrant subjects with material objects made, held, or won by these same subjects, in An Indian from India the act of doubling becomes manifold. We see the doubling of two photographs within one diptych; the doubling of one archive of settler colonial photography for another, earlier archive of British colonial photography; the doubling of one racialized and surveilled body (the indigenous subject) for another, differently racialized and surveilled body (the immigrant subject). As our eyes scan the diptych to detect the difference between the archival and the contemporary photograph, and as we try to evaluate as well the differences between the aesthetic and commercial objects on display, seeing An Indian from India at Beyond Bollywood makes the diasporic viewer double back on what she is looking at. Instead of considering the diptychs as part of the imperial history of racialization in the United States, for many South Asian diasporic viewers the effect of seeing Matthew’s artwork is to redouble their efforts to claim national belonging: as if the photographic image documents the fact of our citizenship, as if the truth of the image can now come to represent us. And yet the possibility of grasping our own representation as racialized immigrants in the United States within the scene of this exhibition comes at the cost of those Native subjects whose portraits are also reproduced within Matthew’s portfolio of 154

four diptychs on display at the Smithsonian. These include Tom Torlino (Diné), Hattie Tom (Chiricahua Apache Nde), and Red Shirt (Oglala Lakota), who like Torlino attended the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and whose portrait depicts him with a feather in his hair, a tomahawk in his hand, and a Ulysses S. Grant peace medal around his neck. Beyond Bollywood cannot represent Native histories of violent dispossession or Native movements for sovereignty, nor can it represent the ongoing participation of Asian American immigrants in the settler colonial project of the U.S. state. This, too, is an American story, though it is a story that has in part been curated, exhibited, and displayed in a separate museum entity, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Despite the constant doubling of the photographic image with the material object within the curatorial narrative of Beyond Bollywood, what we avert our eyes from seeing is that, as racialized diasporic subjects who demand to be represented within the halls of a national museum, when we enter this exhibition we see the intensity of our desire to see ourselves. Matthew’s diptychs have been widely displayed from 2001 onward, in the midst of widespread surveillance of South Asian and Muslim Americans after 9/11. The conditions of racial violence that shaped the CHAPTER THREE

early circulation of her artwork were the same conditions of violence toward racialized immigrants that led to the death of Balbir Singh Sodhi. Walking between Sodhi’s turban and Matthew’s diptychs just around the corner, I was reminded, not once or twice but multiple times, that the ways that South Asian diasporic subjects see ourselves are never far removed from the ways in which we are surveilled, documented, and represented by others. As I walked toward An Indian from India in each of my visits to Beyond Bollywood, I came to dwell not only on the ambitious desire of the curators to comprehensively represent South Asian American immigration, but also on my own belief in the power of representation. To come to terms with Matthew’s work meant that I could not proceed further in the energetic, linear momentum of the visual project of Beyond Bollywood. Seeing her diptychs repeatedly meant that I could not shake certain images out of my head: images of dispossession and surveillance, images of racialized violence and death. These were precisely the photographs unavailable to me in the exhibition, for they were replaced instead by portraits that indexed triumphant narratives of belonging and citizenship. As I returned, again and again, to the archival images that Matthew re-­creates in her work, I was deeply affected by the fragility of representation: the ways in which the visual object necessarily fails to represent us, the ways in which visibility belies claims to belong. Such a failure of representation requires us, as South Asian immigrants and as viewers, to contend with haunting feelings, feelings wrapped up in visual histories of empire, in imperial projects of taxonomic representation that shape the forms through which racialized subjects identify with, and come to know, images of themselves. But such feelings are precisely the place from which to think anew about the relation between visuality and representation in Asian American exhibition cultures. Beginning with visual and material objects that haunt us, rather than those that claim to identify who we are, we can begin to consider the value of images that refuse to deliver the promise of representation.

T H E C O S T S O F R E P R E S E N TAT I O N

Reflecting on the practice of curating Asian American art exhibitions, Susette Min asserts, “It is more important [than] ever to curate identity-­ based exhibitions. . . . It is important to think about what part of this curatorial framework or strategy is outmoded and how, for example, EXHIBITING IMMIGRANTS

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identity-­based exhibitions invariably serve as an effective strategy, a regulatory mechanism for promoting difference. . . . But such practices are not easy to let go, and to do so seems counterproductive, even irresponsible, in this day and age, when resources and cultural capital are increasingly inaccessible and unequally distributed.”63 Min underscores the necessary work of curating Asian American visual culture, linking that aesthetic project to the redistributive politics of social justice. At the same time, by highlighting how exhibitions of Asian American art can operate as “regulatory mechanism[s] for promoting difference,” she emphasizes that a fidelity to identity — manifest in curatorial frameworks that prioritize making minoritized identities visible — is complicit with neoliberal discourses of multiculturalism. Beyond Bollywood is an exemplary instance of an “identity-­based exhibition” that is also a reminder of the costs of neoliberal representation. An aesthetic and political venture that emerged out of a select group of immigrants’ desires for public representation, the exhibit was entirely reliant on private funds raised by national networks of South Asian immigrants; it sourced many of the photographic images and material objects on display from private donations and loans from within these networks. The curatorial premise of the exhibition was also deeply shaped by the 156

narrative logic of neoliberal multiculturalism, as the collection of photographs and objects showcased the heterogeneity and diversity of South Asian immigrant communities across religion, class, gender, language, and region of origin. This panoramic American story, told through portraits of South Asian Americans, rehearsed a familiar narrative of racial struggle, ultimately resolved by locating South Asian immigrants as upwardly mobile citizens of the United States. In each of its visual components, Beyond Bollywood conflated visibility with representation, and representation with belonging to the national body. The experience of walking through Beyond Bollywood, however, generated other kinds of feelings, feelings of estrangement and abjection in relation to photographic and material objects that could not adhere to the narratives of belonging that organized the exhibition. One of the paradoxes of living as racialized subjects within the neoliberal and settler colonial state is that even as we mobilize for and fund curatorial projects that demonstrate our own existence, creating exhibitions that display visual representations of our own creation, the feeling of being seen is not necessarily one of triumph, but of failure. Even as the framework of the identity-­based exhibition solicits the participation of minoritized subCHAPTER THREE

jects at every level — f rom fund-­raising to curation to artists to viewers to writing reviews — our participation in the making of this exhibition comes out of an acute sensation of lack, a feeling that we cannot see ourselves. That is why, within the exhibitionary framework of Beyond Bollywood, photographs of South Asian diasporic subjects multiply across every wall; why portrait and documentary photographs are sourced from national archives and crowdsourced across digital and social media; and why such photographs are paired with an array of material objects, with varying degrees of historical and aesthetic value. Inside the expansive space of the Smithsonian galleries, visual objects proliferate, but none of these images or objects in themselves can capture who we are, even though we invest ourselves in their representational capacities. Within the biopolitical language of multicultural representation that organizes the taxonomic display of the museum, the dominant experience of seeing the exhibition — its strongest feeling, as it were — is a feeling of failure. Across my visits to Beyond Bollywood, I came to recognize that the failure to identify with visual images of ourselves can enable us to reenter the terrain of representation. For South Asian diasporic viewers, to see ourselves as both the subject and object on display is an uncanny feeling. It emerges out of sighting the photographic subject and fastening onto its likeness of ourselves, and recognizing in that instant the ways in which the photographic object refuses to record and represent the viewer. That moment of disorientation, of identifying with and becoming estranged from the photograph, is where we see photography’s failure to secure our identities as subjects and as citizens. The failure of the aesthetic object to provide us with a full and complete representation of ourselves leads me to look elsewhere, toward the imperial histories of racial representation that shape the form of the image, and toward the institutional context of its display. From British colonial documentation of “natives” on the subcontinent in the nineteenth century, to settler colonial portrait images of indigenous subjects in the twentieth century, to the surveillance of racialized immigrants in the twenty-­fi rst century, the photographic images that are most familiar to us are ones in which we are already rendered as objects. Behind the exuberant display of South Asian Americans at Beyond Bollywood are these transnational archives of imperial photographic production, archives that surface in the exhibitionary form of the natural history museum and take their most natural shape there. In this context, to claim that the images of racialized subjects whom I see at this exhibition site “look like me” is to experience abjection, as I come to EXHIBITING IMMIGRANTS

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terms with the knowledge that I see myself as an object because it is that representational form that has shaped how I know who I am. In chapter 4, I leave the site of the imperial museum to reenter the space of the commercial gallery, this time to consider another exhibition of contemporary fine art photography that documents South Asian immigrants and communities across the United States. Departing from the nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century colonial and settler colonial archives that have shaped the artworks and sites of display that I have discussed thus far, these photographs evoke the legacy of mid-­t wentieth-­ century American documentary photography: realist and socially conscious photographs of everyday life. As the exhibit traveled across New York, Mumbai, New Delhi, and Chicago, the display of this photographic series created a vibrant and heterogeneous sense of community, as South Asian and South Asian American viewers forged intensely affective relations of identity with the portrait subjects, with each other, and with the artist. Such forms of intimacy are premised on the capacity of the documentary photograph to offer a mimetic representation of the portrait subject, and thus of the viewer herself. But as we repeatedly incorporate these photographs into our own archives of self-­representation, the intimate ties that bind us to the photograph become subject to failure. To 158

look at the images on display, to hold and cherish them as mirrors of ourselves, is to confront the fact that the photograph can encompass other modes of representation, styles or forms that break with how we already know our experience as racialized subjects. This too is a form of disorientation, a reappraisal of whether we can in fact let go of what it means to be haunted by empire. Diasporic mimesis and its failures are what lead me to turn away from the photographs on view to glimpse, instead, the intensity of my desire to see myself.

CHAPTER THREE

fou r ARCHIVES OF DIASPOR A Gauri Gill’s The Americans

Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by means of its likeness, its reproduction.   — Walter Benjamin, Illuminations

O

n a bitterly cold and windswept January night, I squeezed into a narrow elevator in an immense arts warehouse in Chelsea, New

York City. Alongside middle-­a ged women with immaculately coiffed hair and silk shawls, and younger people dressed in graphic T-­shirts and expensive sneakers, we slowly made our way up through the warren of galleries and artists’ studios crammed inside the building. Exiting onto the eleventh floor, I followed the thrum of conversation to enter Gauri Gill’s solo show, The Americans, at Bose Pacia Gallery. 1 As I navigated

the heartfelt greetings, hugs, and air kisses exchanged between viewers congregated inside the gallery space—who were largely South Asian, as well as white, African American, Latinx, and Asian American—I was immediately compelled by the intimacy that had been created around this series of photographs. Across diptychs, triptychs, and single prints, the daily lives of immigrants from the subcontinent emerged into view. Walking around the room, we saw the cramped kitchens of a restaurant, where two elderly Sikh men prepared to work a shift; a pair of businessmen on a patio overlooking Capitol Hill, extending their arms to shake hands; a young couple embracing on a leather couch at a party. Training her camera on the interior lives of first-­and second-­generation immigrants, Gill produced a series of color prints that portray South Asians — i ncluding Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims, and Christians — c reating

homes and communities across the United States. Taken between 2000 and 2007, The Americans documents Gill’s journey from the West to East Coasts, across the South and Midwest. Photographing relatives, friends, and strangers, Gill moved through suburban homes and rural farmland; community festivals and basement clubs; factories and construction sites. For her first solo show in New York City, Gill hung her prints on unmarked walls; viewers could access a list of captions along with an exhibition catalogue at the reception. These nameless, placeless photographs on display nonetheless produced visual narratives that resonated for viewers, as many commented aloud on the deep familiarity evoked by Gill’s images. The suburban house portrayed in one of the diptychs, one middle-­aged South Asian man remarked, could have been his own relative’s house; the nightclubs that Gill documented were like those he regularly went to. Throughout the evening, young and older South Asians clustered around the photographs to observe subjects whom they recognized — family members, a friend, community celebrations that they too had attended. For the South Asian viewers I spoke with on opening night, the exhibition was not simply about making visible an underrepresented group of immigrants in the United States; instead, the visuality of the photographs brought to life their own experiences as South Asians 160

in America. As this diverse crowd moved through the bustling gallery, they recognized Gill’s prints as both documenting immigrant life and constituting the collective memory of a racialized community. In turn, the display and circulation of these prints produced a social experience of what it means to be South Asian via a series that was powerfully titled The Americans. The Americans arrived in New York City after a series of solo exhibitions at major metropolitan galleries, university museums, and cultural centers in India and across the United States. 2 Bose Pacia New York, where I saw Gill’s show, was at the time the U.S. commercial partner of Nature Morte Gallery in New Delhi (where, a year later, I would see Seher Shah’s work, discussed in chapter 1). As Gill remarked, The Americans evoked a range of affective sentiments in different constituencies of viewers as it traveled across India: “In Delhi it was a lot of writers and artists who came, in Calcutta it was a lot of students . . . and in Bombay there were a lot of Indian Americans . . . a lot of foreigners, tourists.” As she went on to note, “In Calcutta people reacted to the loneliness. . . . In Delhi and Bombay people responded to the humor.”3 Across each of these sites, viewers (Indians, South Asian Americans, and “foreigners”) CHAPTER FOUR

claimed images from the series in unexpected ways. In Mumbai, for example, The Americans attracted viewers who, like the men and women photographed in Gill’s series, were South Asian immigrants, though in contrast to her photographic subjects they had reversed the geography of migration and were now pursuing economic opportunities in India. For her gallery openings in Palo Alto and New York City, Gill contacted people she had photographed for the series in California and on the East Coast, several of whom made the journey to see the exhibition. At Bose Pacia, I saw one man quietly but enthusiastically point out to his friend how he was photographed twice in Gill’s series, as both of them lingered to admire how a seemingly casual snapshot now adorned a gallery wall. Another Asian American viewer, unrelated to Gill’s photographic subjects, talked with me about the series of images as if it were a narrative of their own life. What does it mean for a photograph to become an image of the self, and of the community that it conjures? In this chapter, I examine how a photographic series like The Americans captures the vexed relations that bind together the aesthetic object of representation with the political desire to be represented. For South Asian American viewers who attended the exhibition opening in New York City and elsewhere, the intimate relations that they cathected to the images were narrated as a desire to see themselves represented in the public sphere. The object of representation became the representational object: the thing that diasporic viewers wanted to see, which was the representation of their own racialized subjectivities, became the images that they saw, images that purported to represent diasporic subjects. Such feelings of intimate identification with the photographs — an intimacy that was amplified by the artist’s ongoing relationships with many of her photographic subjects and, in the context of my viewing, by my own long-­standing friendship with Gill — came to define the forms of diasporic social community generated among viewers at the exhibition site. Through these intimate attachments to the photograph, the aesthetic value of The Americans became sutured to its political value as an image archive of those racialized viewers who came to see and support the show. Intimacy, as I have come to understand it, is central to the relationship between race and representation in the neoliberal state. It is the affective condition that demands that the representation of racialized subjects in the public sphere take the form of mimetic reproduction: images become representational when they are seen as real, authentic, and accurate deARCHIVES OF DIASPORA

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pictions of immigrant life. The capacity of a particular photographic image to represent one’s own life, in whole or in part, depends directly on its evocation of the real: this includes the real feelings of identification that structure the viewer’s intimate ties to the photograph, whether or not the photograph really represents the viewer’s own life. An image’s departure from the real, or our perception of its inauthenticity, then becomes a measure of the image’s inability to claim representation. For a photographic series like The Americans to become a representation of South Asian immigrant experience, the image must appear real in two senses of the term: first, in terms of its formal qualities (the composition and content of the image), and, second, in terms of the viewer’s ability to see that the image constitutes a likeness of her lived experience, a likeness that the viewer can claim as her own despite visible differences between the photographic object of representation and the viewing subject herself. Establishing these intimate claims to the photograph-­ as-­representation is an affective stance that itself is a form of mimesis. Mimesis is the form of representation that we, as racialized immigrant subjects, most immediately recognize and defer to, and it is also the form of representation that we demand. Across this book, I have discussed the intimate identifications that I 162

have crafted with a variety of photographic objects on display. In chapter 1, I discussed how encountering Seher Shah’s drawing, and its reproduction of architectural photographs of British empire in early twentieth-­ century India, reminded me of the decimation of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. Likewise in chapter 2, I argued that Annu Palakunnathu Matthew’s reproduction of settler colonial portraits of Native peoples recalled another, earlier history of ethnographic photography conducted by British colonialists on the subcontinent. In my experience of viewing these works across multiple exhibition sites, I have argued that diasporic mimesis is central to seeing a contemporary representation of racialized subjecthood and remembering, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, another set of images that I am deeply familiar with, from archives of empire that include those of my own time. Gill’s Americans does not reproduce or incorporate nineteenth- or early twentieth-­century colonial and settler colonial photography. Nor does the act of seeing her photography evoke archives of empire, those compilations of abject images of racialized subjects that inform how we see and identify with representations of ourselves. However, in quite a different way from my response to the two previous artists, when I see CHAPTER FOUR

Gill’s photography I am reminded of my intense desire to be represented. Like viewers who encountered their own reflections in the mirrors that dotted Beyond Bollywood (chapter 3), elated to see themselves on display alongside family photos and archival images at the Smithsonian, such desires for visibility and representation precipitate an urgent need to see oneself in the public sphere of the nation. But unlike the portraits of celebrities that are collated in Beyond Bollywood, the diptychs and single prints that compose The Americans document a domestic sphere of home and family, as well as interior spaces within a variety of workplaces (motels, convenience stores, restaurant kitchens, and so on). It is precisely Gill’s focus on the private sphere, along with the realist aesthetic of her documentary style, that enables viewers to generate an intimate familiarity with the anonymous photographic subjects that they see. Such familiarity, in turn, enables the diasporic viewer to assume that she shares an experience of racialization with the subject she sees in the photograph. In this context, the photograph as an image that documents the life of a racialized subject cannot simply remain an aesthetic representation. For immigrant viewers who suture their life to the image, the photograph becomes proof of their belonging. One week after the opening of her exhibition in New York City, Gill invited me to conduct a public walk-­t hrough with her at Bose Pacia. A smaller, largely South Asian American crowd attended this event, and Gill and I developed an informal ongoing conversation about her work. As we paused in front of diptychs and triptychs, remarking on individual images and soliciting comments from viewers, I became aware of the ways in which this group of viewers crafted affective relationships with the photographic objects as well as with Gill herself, whom they came to regard as a documentarian of their own lives. As I spoke with and observed viewers during the gallery walk-­t hrough, I realized that such feelings of intimacy also emerged through the formal composition of the photographs: in the glances exchanged between multiple photographic subjects within a single print, and through the location of these immigrant subjects in private spaces such as bedrooms and kitchens, closets and bathrooms. Intimacy emerges as well through the kin relations that Gill establishes with her subjects, whether in terms of the photographs Gill takes of her own family members, or by way of an imagined kinship to working-­and middle-­class immigrants whom she photographed across her travels. For diasporic South Asian viewers, our likeness to Gill’s photographic subjects also generates a kind of intimacy, a way of ARCHIVES OF DIASPORA

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seeing the series that makes it appear less an ethnographic document of an immigrant community and more an evocation of the viewers’ own experiences, however disparate such experiences are from Gill’s photographic representations. Such proximal feelings, as embodied by the viewer, range from desire to warmth to attraction toward Gill’s photographic subjects; but as I discuss below, dwelling on these images also leads to feelings of displacement and melancholy. Many viewers at the walk-­t hrough offered personal anecdotes that evaluated the images in terms of their authenticity and capacity to document the truth of immigrant lives. Gill responded with sensitivity, commenting on the organic evolution of The Americans out of her own diasporic experiences as an art student and professional photographer in the United States. As she remarked, “In some ways I was an insider and outsider . . . and there were also questions that I was asking of myself. Would I live here? Would I go back? What’s it like [to live here]?”4 One South Asian American viewer commented on Gill’s choice to photograph domestic rather than public spaces and noted her focus on material objects alongside the human subjects of her photographs. Taking in these observations, Gill related an anecdote that preceded her exhibition opening in New Delhi. In response to those who asked her, “Why don’t you 164

do pictures that look like they could only be in America?” Gill responded that it was irrelevant whether a particular photograph looked as if it were taken in Gurgaon or Ludhiana, two cities in India. 5 Her concern, she noted, was not with marking geographic space, but with demonstrating how lived spaces come to represent histories of migration. As she went on to say, “The material world — what they [immigrants] use to re-­create their world — becomes quite important. . . . The act of immigration for me . . . is also an act of imagination.”6 As the photographs bridge the relationship between immigrant acts and imaginative acts, the exhibition itself comes to perform what the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has described as the social work of the imagination.7 In this context, the proverbial white cube of the commercial gallery exceeds its function as a site for the display and sale of photography.8 Instead, viewers’ participation in and engagement with the exhibition reveals how photographs of racialized subjects operate simultaneously as an archival and social text: one that, in the case of The Americans, produces the very community that it appears to represent. At the same time, the intensity of our collective desire as viewers to see ourselves in the image elides the fact that the very composition of CHAPTER FOUR

the photograph can refuse to represent our lived realities. As Anne Anlin Cheng writes, “ ‘When we desire in the visual field, we expect that the object of our desires remains just that, an object.’ . . . A lot can happen to disrupt that complacency. The object can look back and show itself to be desiring. Or, in our case, mirror-­like, that object can reflect back on us the precariousness of our own subjectivity.”9 The intimacy that structures Gill’s single prints and diptychs means that in several images in the series, the photographic subject “can look back” at the viewer, refusing the viewer’s desire to be identified with. The viewer’s desire for the object of representation in this case is refracted through the gaze of the photographic subject who “look[s] back” and who, in so doing, resists appropriation by the viewer. On the other hand, for the diasporic viewing subject the photograph also functions as a kind of mirror, within which the representational image reflects back onto the viewer “the precariousness of our own subjectivity.” As The Americans simultaneously solicits and refuses our desire for representation, the series realigns our expectations of what photography documents. Rather than producing representations of racialized minorities as the other (as with the portraits on display at Beyond Bollywood), the series provokes a reflective look back at the racialized self. Yet even as The Americans enables diasporic viewers to intimately identify with the photographic image through its aesthetic focus on the domestic sphere, and through the photographer’s kinship with her subjects, viewing the series also induces a profound disorientation about how we are represented, or if we are represented at all. The precarity of our subjectivity is particularly acute when we see a series that, precisely because of its ambitious scale and scope, appears to materialize the possibility of full and transparent representation. If, as Stuart Hall has argued, identities are always constructed through and not outside of representation, what does it mean for diasporic subjects to demand more representation from the photographic image, as if representation can complete us?10 I take up my own intimate attachments to The Americans to push back against the mimetic demands that, as racialized viewers, we place onto the photography of racialized subjects. Kandice Chuh incisively writes that “one of the challenges confronting minoritized discourses now is precisely the need to generate ways of making sense beyond the paradigms of identity and representation.”11 Moving beyond these dominant paradigms, I propose ways of seeing photographs of racialized subjects that center on nonmimetic forms of identification, ways of making sense ARCHIVES OF DIASPORA

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of the image that produce a different set of feelings for diasporic viewers: estrangement, deferral, and refusal. These, too, are productive ways of understanding our desire for representation, for such feelings enable us to understand the limits of intimacy between the viewer and the photographic object. Attending to the formal structure of The Americans as well as its thematic content, I contend that the collection as a whole enjoins us to look at objects other than the immigrant subjects that we want to see. I foreground Gill’s use of strong geometric silhouettes and angles across her single prints, her use of these visual lines to create diptychs and triptychs, and her deployment of tropes of visibility (such as mirrors and other image-­producing objects) in order to amplify the asymmetrical relationship between the immigrant subjects and material objects that populate her series. Such asymmetrical lines of seeing require us to acknowledge that the photograph occupies multiple indexes of representation, not all of which it can fully encompass. It means, therefore, that a certain failure of representation is inherent in our act of viewing The Americans, a failure that emerges through the multiple glances that diasporic viewers direct toward the photograph. Engaging with this imminent sense of failure — instead of rejecting it entirely — requires alternate routes of encountering the photographic object, ways of seeing that take 166

seriously our own investments in what we want to see. Such routes of nonmimetic identification with the photographic object traverse many archives, some of which are outside the geographic and temporal parameters of The Americans. Gill’s collection is named in part for Robert Frank’s seminal 1958 photographic series The Americans, which is the most immediate and visible context for her work. Several critics have noted the aesthetic, thematic, and conceptual similarities between Gill’s and Frank’s collections, while also marking the racial difference of Gill’s photographic subjects.12 However, I argue that such comparative frameworks reproduce a hierarchical relationship between practices of photographic documentation and representation in the United States and in South Asia, retaining Frank’s work as the original archive in relation to which Gill’s images can only be seen as derivative. By situating my experience of Gill’s photography in relation to an exhibition of Frank’s Americans at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, I demonstrate how Frank’s images formally and affectively index America-­as-­empire in the mid-­t wentieth century. Reframing what is assumed to be a mimetic relation between Frank’s work and Gill’s series, I contend that for many South Asian American viewers, Gill’s Americans CHAPTER FOUR

engenders images of diasporic subjectivity that are in excess of images of nation and empire codified in Frank’s prints. As an aesthetic and political representation of selfhood and community, Gill’s Americans produces what I call an archive of diaspora. Rupturing the affective sensation of being haunted by empire, my reading of Gill’s Americans incorporates another genealogy of photographic history, one that is rooted as much in South Asian diasporic cultural production as in modern American photography. I situate Gill’s series in relation to the work of photographers Pablo Bartholomew and Sunil Gupta, who from the late 1980s to the present have documented, in quite different ways, South Asian immigrant communities in North America and Europe. Through photojournalism and autoethnography, in single prints as well as in large-­scale diptychs, the dissimilar aesthetic strategies of racial representation taken up by Bartholomew and Gupta expand the spatial and temporal parameters through which we see Gill’s Americans. As Christopher Pinney points out, the act of seeing photography outside of the West requires a framework of photographic analysis that shifts from “the notion that photographic history is best seen as the explosion of a Western technology whose practice has been molded by singular individuals” toward constructing “a radically different account of a globally disseminated and locally appropriated medium.” 13 I take up Pinney’s call here by delineating ways of seeing that reorient the U.S. archival context for Gill’s photography and by emphasizing instead the transnational circulation, curation, and consumption of her work. At an exhibition held at the Newark Museum in New Jersey, where Gill’s work was displayed alongside Gupta’s and Bartholomew’s, I delineate how this diverse set of photography evokes, on the part of diasporic viewers, nonmimetic ways of seeing that refuse to resolve our demands for visibility and representation. Turning away from intimacy and identification as the primary forms of attachment to the photographic image, I create modes of consuming photography that are premised on the fact that representations of diasporic subjectivity are necessarily incomplete. Instead of depicting a changing America through its immigrants, Gill’s photographs question the very meaning of what it is to be an American. But her excavation of a term that stands in for national belonging and citizenship, routed through the everyday lives of diasporic subjects, is manifest in prints that often do not look like they are taken in the United States. Nor do the prints necessarily focus on the immigrant subjects that we want to see, ARCHIVES OF DIASPORA

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and who we want to be. That The Americans produces a transnational community of viewers who in aspiring to identify with the title of the collection sometimes fail to do so is one of the many ironies that emerge through our viewing of this series.

T H E L I M I T S O F R E P R E S E N TAT I O N

Encountering The Americans is akin to seeing a cinema reel, one that continuously unspools images that document the heterogeneous experience of South Asian immigrants to the United States. In the exhibition catalogue published for Gill’s show, viewers can flip past a single print of an elderly man peering out from his hospital bed, surrounded by beige walls and blinking monitors; five panoramic images of youthful couples speed-­dating at a marriage convention in New Jersey; a diptych of a middle-­aged woman, her eyes closed in exhaustion, cleaning a motel room in Mississippi. Gill’s camera is trained on South Asian immigrants as well as the objects that fill their homes and workplaces: videotapes, racks of clothing, artwork, trophies, memorabilia. Although the photographs are not organized by representations of religious community, gender, class, region of origin, or residence, these categories of difference are 168

nevertheless reworked into a visual relationship between domestic and public space, between high and low culture, and between scenes of production and acts of consumption. The Americans is one of several photographic projects that Gill has exhibited globally over the past twenty years. Based in New Delhi, Gill attended the Delhi School of Art and received a second BFA at Parsons/ The New School, during which time she interned with the photographer Mary Ellen Mark, digitizing Mark’s archive of film stills; Gill earned her MFA

from Stanford University in 2002.14 Over the past two decades, Gill

has become one of India’s most prominent fine art photographers, with her work shown in solo shows and at international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale, MoMA PS 1, Documenta 14, and the Kochi-­Muziris Biennale. Many of her photographic series foreground minoritized communities: Muslim women and girls; Jogi nomads and tribal communities such as the Bishnois in rural Rajasthan (Notes From the Desert and Balika Mela); Sikh survivors of the 1984 pogrom in Delhi, as well as Sikh refugees who fled their homes in Afghanistan (1984 and What Remains); and Adivasi communities in western Maharashtra (Fields of Sight, her ongoing work with the Warli artist Rajesh Vangad, as well as her colCHAPTER FOUR

laboration with papier-­mâché artists in Acts of Appearance). Central to Gill’s photography are the long-­standing relationships that she builds with her photographic subjects, which have resulted in a wide range of interdisciplinary projects: an installation of the photographs and letters exchanged over decades between Gill and the mother of one of her long-­ standing subjects from Rajasthan (Jannat); camera-­based images created by young children whom Gill had previously photographed (Ruined Rainbow Pictures); and oral narratives of home written by the second-­and third-­generation descendants of Sikh refugees (What Remains). As Iftikhar Dadi has noted, such collaborative endeavors are reflected in the fact that Gill’s photographic prints are often displayed as “constellations,” juxtaposed against written and image-­based texts produced by her photographic subjects.15 In series that span years and sometimes decades, Gill’s investment in her subjects exceeds the moment of the photograph, as she develops close friendships with her photographic subjects and collaborates with nongovernmental organizations to create workshops for local community participants. Throughout her career, Gill’s photographic images have not simply contested dominant representations of Indians: she has created forms of photographic practice and exhibition that reframe the country that we know as India. In this regard, The Americans is a striking departure from Gill’s larger body of work. It is to date her only photographic series based in the United States, and it is also one of the few collections she has created in color. Rather than focusing on minoritized subjects in South Asia, The Americans documents the lives of working-­and middle-­class South Asian immigrants in the United States. However, in contrast to her photographs of Rajasthan, New Delhi, and Kabul, very few of the landscapes she photographs can be identified as iconically American. Instead, by portraying her subjects inside their homes and workplaces, and using largely ambient light, Gill’s camera focuses on bathroom mirrors, store windows, and television screens, onto which are displaced reflections of the immigrant subjects that she photographs. Curatorial readings of The Americans have taken the distance between Gill’s camera and the subjects she photographs as a measure of the series’ objectivity, praising Gill for bringing “an outsider’s lens to bear on a community of people who are themselves poised near the threshold.”16 Others have emphasized the dislocation of Gill’s photographic subjects, describing South Asian Americans in the series as between “two cultures,” shaped by discourses of “migration and diaspora,” who aspire to belong in both “the Indian and ARCHIVES OF DIASPORA

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the American dream.”17 Such perspectives transform The Americans into an ethnographic depiction of an immigrant group, reinforcing a spatial and temporal divide between South Asia and the United States, between outsiders and insiders, immigrants and citizens, a divide that appears to be irreconcilable within the framework of the photographic print. By contrast, in her public comments Gill has consistently located herself within the representational parameters of The Americans. At our walk-­through, she described the project as one that began when she first arrived in the United States, taking photographs that were precursors to the images compiled in the series. “It all started in 1993 when I came to the U.S.,” she noted. “It was a bit of a surprise — it was home but not quite home — it started with making portraits of them [her extended family].” 18 These early photographs were slides, rather than the thirty-­ five-­m illimeter camera lens that Gill subsequently used. Photographing family members and strangers who became friends during her daily commute to New York City, Gill compared The Americans to “a kind of family album which grew and grew outwards over the years.” 19 Blurring the lines between documentary photography and personal portrait, Gill went on to remark, “A lot of it was about me — who I was in these spaces, my relationship to what was going on.”20 Emerging out of her own ex170

periences in the United States, nearly a decade prior to the first photographs that eventually became a part of the series, The Americans is not an ethnographic collection but rather another form of artistic collaboration, one that centers on the kin relations that Gill forges with relatives, friends, and strangers. While Gill speaks openly of her ties to her photographic subjects, her use of mirrors and mirrorlike objects in The Americans disrupts a linear narrative of identification between herself as an artist and those that she photographs, as well as between ourselves as viewers and the immigrant subjects that we want to see. Throughout the series, Gill mobilizes mirror objects as tropes of visibility. Car windows, swimming pools, and storefront glass panes proliferate across single prints; in her diptychs and triptychs, adjacent images appear to mirror each other. Looking through glass for evidence of immigrant lives, we see instead the geometric shapes of automobiles, pieces of furniture, and household objects scattered throughout kitchens and living rooms. Such mirror images draw attention away from the human subjects that foreground many of the prints and pull our eye toward the strong geometric symmetries that delineate relations between photographic subjects and objects CHAPTER FOUR

4.1  Gauri Gill, Praveen Bhai, school teacher from Baroda, and his wife run the Sportsman Inn so they can get their children Green Cards. Marion, South Carolina 2004, from The Americans, 2000 – 2 007. Archival pigment print, 16 × 24 inches, edition of 7 + 1. AP. COPY RIGHT GAURI GIL L .

in each print. These symmetries become the sight lines that bind us, as diasporic subjects, to representations of racialized subjectivity within the photograph. Such an invitation to see oneself in relation to the photographic print produces strong feelings of identification among some viewers, but also powerfully generates its inverse: the failure to secure or to recognize identification. Indeed, the proliferation of mirror objects anticipates, first, our inability to see clearly the immigrant subjects of her series, and second, Gill’s deferral of her own reflection from the prints.21 For example, in Praveen Bhai, school teacher from Baroda, and his wife run the Sportsman Inn so they can get their children Green Cards. Marion, South Carolina 2004, Gill photographs a middle-­aged couple seen through the windshield of a car (figure 4.1). In the foreground of the print are dark, dense objects — t he car’s rearview mirror, its dashboard — t hat define the frame within which we see Praveen Bhai and his wife. They stand in front of the peeling walls of a motel unit that is stripped of exARCHIVES OF DIASPORA

terior paint, its brick patio adorned by a flower urn with no flowers in it. Toward the left of the couple, a large window frame offers a possible glimpse into the room’s interior: but the window blinds are pulled down and the door to the unit is shut. What is reflected in that window instead is the blurry image of a telephone pole and a tree. Praveen Bhai looks askance, his damp shirt sticking to his torso in the heat. His wife stands with her arms crossed, looking toward the left of the photo frame. We see no evidence of Praveen Bhai as a schoolteacher, nor do we see the children for whom they work. Nor is there anything in this print that shows us that the image was taken in Marion, South Carolina. Instead, what we see is the distorted angle of the car’s windshield and rearview mirror, reversing as it drives away from the Sportsman Inn. Looking through the glass objects that proliferate across The Americans produces a partial, fragmented, and incomplete picture, far removed from the long history of ethnographic portraiture on the subcontinent and in the United States. In Bharatanatyam Arengatram performance, for family and friends, on the 16th birthday. Birmingham, Alabama 2004, Gill photographs a narrow rectangular mirror hung on a nondescript beige wall (figure 4.2). Within the mirror we see the slender profile of a young Bharatanatyam dancer, dressed for her arangetram, or debut 172

dance performance. She stands upright, looking pensively at her reflection. Her body obscures the reflection of another woman who stands behind her, helping the dancer into her clothing. Crammed onto a plush red chair at the bottom center of this mirror image is a pile of bric-­a-­brac: a plastic bag, handbags, open jewelry pouches, velvet cases. The dancer’s face is made up, her hair adorned with flowers, and her ears, neck, waist, and wrists bejeweled. The thick gold borders of her sari, the pearl and gemstone necklaces that she wears, are the signs of her family’s material investment: she embodies their time, labor, and money. But the mirror is cut short: it slices off the entire left side of the dancer’s body. Even as the debut dance performance is meant to celebrate the classical beauty and mobility of the dancer — and, by extension, the class mobility and cultural capital of her immigrant family — w ithin this sliver of a mirror we cannot contemplate the fullness of this young dancer’s diasporic experience. Likewise, a diptych titled Laljibhai and his wife Pushpa Ben Patel work as cleaners at Days Inn West. Knoxville, Mississippi 2004 (plate 12), displays Pushpa Ben Patel, the woman in her work uniform on the left side of the print, leaning against a bedroom wall with her eyes closed in exhaustion. The right side of the print is an image of her coworker and CHAPTER FOUR

4.2  Gauri Gill, Bharatanatyam Arengatram performance, for family and friends, on the 16th birthday. Birmingham, Alabama 2004, from The Americans, 2000 – 2 007. Archival pigment print, 16 × 24 inches, edition of 7 + 1. AP. COPY RIGHT GAURI GIL L .

husband Laljibhai, reflected through a bathroom mirror that he cleans. Pushpa Ben Patel’s face is upturned, refusing to meet the gaze of the viewer; Laljibhai’s face is blurred by the cleaning fluid on the mirror, which renders part of the glass opaque. Reflected behind the glass mirrors is the motel room that the pair cleans, giving us a glimpse of the draining daily labor required to keep up its premises. Yet the surface of the mirror that is captured in the print obscures the very person who burnishes its reflection. That a mirror image cannot grant us a full and complete representation of its subject reflects the problem of photography itself and, in particular, the demands made by viewers on documentary collections of racialized subjects to reflect the diversity, heterogeneity, and difference of their communities. Our attention to the various objects that come to the foreground of each of these prints — the windshield and rearview mirror that frames Praveen Bhai, the junk piled in front of the Bharatanatyam ARCHIVES OF DIASPORA

dancer, the bathroom mirror that Laljibhai cleans — begins to reflect our ambivalence as viewers, as our desire to see immigrant subjects who look like us is thwarted by the formal arrangements of the photographic prints. Across these prints, the surface of Gill’s mirrors often obscures the very person it reflects. The scope of that reflection includes not only the subject of the print but the viewer as well as the photographer. If the mirror is a mimetic object, here the mirrored surface fails to identically represent its subject: instead, the mirror obscures the subject of the print, the artist who makes the print, and the viewer who desires to see herself within that same print. That is, the photographic print cannot bear the weight of mimetic representation. We see this through the aesthetic strategies of the artist, which pull in two directions. On the one hand, The Americans acknowledges the desire for representation, as the surface of Gill’s photographs themselves constitutes a kind of mirror, her use of the candid shot revealing the apparent truth of our immigrant lives. On the other hand, Gill’s use of mirror objects within the prints defers and displaces the desire for representation, disrupting the lines of identification between the viewer and the subject of the print (both immigrants), and rerouting this instead through a series of material objects that crowd the field of vision. 174

Our deferral of vision from the human subjects to the material objects that populate Gill’s print produces another kind of seeing, one that disrupts linear narratives of immigration, upward mobility, and cultural assimilation. In a diptych titled Brahmin thread tying ceremony for Silicon Valley professionals in a local strip mall. Fremont, California 2002 (plate 13), the image on the right depicts a mirror reflection of rows of bare-­chested men and boys preparing to participate in Avini Avittam, the annual Tamil Brahminical male rite of changing sacred threads. Such public displays of faith, reinvigorated within diasporic South Asian communities, are frequently held out as a defining feature of “tradition.”22 The room in which the men sit is unremarkable: beige walls, utilitarian curtains, lit by fluorescent light. In the image on the left, a South Asian man is reflected in a storefront glass window as he prepares to join the ritual, applying sandalwood marks to his forehead. These are the caste marks that enable some viewers to read this photographic subject, and the rows of men adjacent to him, as Brahmin, as Tamil, and as Hindu. Bisected by the glass pane of the storefront mirror, another man stands outside the changing room in a parking lot, his hands cupped around a

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cell phone. Surrounding him are strip mall storefronts, advertising in Korean as well as in English. Rather than photographing the corporeal bodies of these men and boys, Gill chooses to photograph their reflection in the mirror. In that reflection, their bodies are slack, bellies softly rounded under their chests. An old television, antennas poking out, sits heavily on the cabinet at the far right. Silver plates, cups, and a platter of fruit lie untouched on the ground. Many of the men have their heads upturned, not toward the photographer but possibly toward another participant outside the frame, who directs them through the steps of the ritual. Two boys in the front row are distracted, utterly bored. The clarity of this mirror image is eroded on the left of the diptych, where we see the dark shadow of a man preparing to join the ritual proceedings. Here he stands like a mannequin encased by the glass panes of a storefront; his own body is reflected in the glass that surrounds him. That doubled reflection, in turn, is bisected by the passing figure of a man who wanders past the storefronts outside. Across the left and right images of the diptych, the only person who is photographed outside a series of mirror reflections is the lone South Asian man in the parking lot, talking on his cell phone. What is the story of identity and community told through these mirrors? On its surface, Gill’s photograph unfolds a narrative of religious, ethnic, and caste identity, a story that tells us what it means to be a Tamil Brahmin man in the United States. The diptych is dense with the presence of immigrants who collectively, and in synchrony, participate in rituals that produce a sense of cultural authenticity and reproduce caste privilege. On the right side of the diptych, the mirror captures men and boys who, via their participation in this event, create an embodied understanding of themselves as upper-­caste Hindu male subjects and provide ethnographic evidence of that ritual. The absence of women from the print as a whole demonstrates how such rituals are central to the reproduction of patriarchy. The photograph is also a sociological documentation of the changing demographics of California, denoted through the Korean storefronts and Indian immigrants that populate a Bay Area shopping mall. And yet the formal composition of this artwork produces a visual narrative that is less secured and more in flux. “There are diptychs within a diptych,” the critic Aveek Sen writes in his review of The Americans, such that the print “asks for a layered viewing that must not only engage with the content of the work, but also pay close attention

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to its technical, formal and aesthetic achievements.”23 The diptych conjoins two images of the same ritual, taken at different times. The images on both the right and the left are bisected by sharp vertical lines: on the right, two panels of mirrors joined together, and on the left, the dark metal of a storefront pane of glass. Juxtaposed against each other, these vertical lines multiply the narrative twofold: what were two distinct photographs are now four discrete images. Read from left to right, we have the man preparing for the thread-­changing ceremony and his reflection, the man standing outside the storefront, and two contiguous images of men participating in the religious proceedings. There is only one man who stands outside this hall of mirrors, the man on his cell phone who is physically and temporally distanced from the ritual proceedings. Notably, the only other person whose reflection is not captured by the series of mirror objects is Gill herself. Reading across the mirror objects gathered in this diptych, the surface of the image comes to reflect our desire for identification itself. At one level, what we see when we see the photograph is a performance of identity and community by one particular demographic of South Asian American immigrants. As the men and boys featured in this photograph follow a prescribed set of religious rituals, their very bodies — defined by 176

sandalwood caste marks, sacred threads, and white dhotis — reproduce a vision of Hindu upper-­caste masculinity. Such a reading of the photograph satisfies our desire to know who the subjects of the photographs are and to consider how, if at all, we identify with them. At another level, what we see in this image are the glass surfaces that multiply across the diptych, so much so that it is these glass objects that become the subject of the photograph. The mirror, the storefront panes, the car windows in the parking lot: these are the objects that hold our desire to be represented, the objects that displace the immigrant subjects that we want to see. The fact that we can only see through these glass surfaces, and that while looking through them we can only see a reflection, means that our desire as racialized diasporic subjects for full and embodied representation is always beyond our grasp. Even the man standing with his cell phone is seen through Gill’s camera lens, which of course is the primary mirror object that generates this diptych. In this sense, to see The Americans is to consider what it means for racialized viewers to encounter the limits of photographic representation or, more specifically, the limits of our desire to see ourselves in the image. As Jack Halberstam has argued, looking at the photographic imCHAPTER FOUR

age can produce a multiplicity of narratives, not all of which secure the identity of the photographic subjects, the viewer, the photographer, or indeed the critic. In his discussion of the Hungarian photographer Brassaï’s acclaimed images of Le Monocle, a lesbian bar in Paris in the 1930s, Halberstam writes at length on the disjuncture between Brassaï’s photographs and the text that the photographer wrote to accompany his prints: While Brassai considered Le Monocle to be a sad world of inverts, a “fringe world,” an “underworld,” the images tell another story. Brassai tries to direct the gaze through the text that accompanies the photographs. Of Le Monocle, he writes: “all the women were dressed as men, and so totally masculine in appearance that at first glance one thought they were men. Obsessed by their unattainable goal to be men, they wore the most somber uniforms; black tuxedos, as though in mourning for their ideal masculinity.” At first glance, Brassai tells us, “one thought they were men”: how important then to have the captions to guide our gaze through the first apparently mistaken glance to the second and third orders of vision where we see that these are not men but merely women in mourning for a masculinity that will always elude them, a masculinity that Brassai projects as “their ideal.” But the first glance is what photography offers, the second glace is the redirected look which the caption produces, and this second look opens out into third and fourth glances, each one offering new information to the fascinated viewer. The repeated viewings that each image demands unlocks the queer photographic subjects from the abjection that the caption projects upon them and it opens up new interpretive possibilities which we can associate with the bundled gazes that make up the “transgender look.”24 Here Halberstam directs us to the multiple registers of representation demanded of Brassaï’s photographs. Halberstam is the “fascinated viewer,” whose repeated viewing “unlocks queer photographic subjects from the abjection” enforced on them by the image. In Halberstam’s proposal of the “transgender look,” a look that requires looking at the image repeatedly, even obsessively, viewers’ desire to see themselves in the photographic subject — t hat is, viewers’ desire to see the photographic subject as a representation of themselves — emerges not in the first order of looking but only after multiple looks, after the accompanying caption has been exhausted. If a first glance at Brassaï’s photographic series registers “normativity, stability and immutability,” the second glance “asks the ARCHIVES OF DIASPORA

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viewer to look again.”25 The second glance invites the viewer to see what Brassaï himself wants the viewer to see, and yet in soliciting the viewer’s gaze Brassaï risks that “the viewer may experience not shock, not horror not disgust, but desire, belonging, identification, fascination.”26 The second and third glances, Halberstam argues, generate unexpected bonds of desire for, and identification with, the abjected photographic subject. Halberstam’s reading of these photographs produces identification with the photographic subject in the place of abjection, capturing the queer and trans subjectivity of those who are photographed while also recognizing the queer desire of viewers to see themselves in those who are photographed. But instead of offering a means of recuperating the subject of the image into the subjectivity of the viewer — a narrative that would enable viewers to name both themselves and the photographic subject as queer or trans — t he “transgender look” is an act of looking that requires multiple glances, never to fix the visual narrative generated by the photographic object but to encompass its many modalities of identification. Unlike the patrons of Le Monocle, the majority of Gill’s photographic subjects in The Americans appear to be gender normative. Nor are they visibly abject. Indeed, a first glance at the series — what I have previously 178

described as a relation of mimetic identification with the image — y ields a narrative of likeness between a middle-­class South Asian American gallery viewer’s own experience of upward mobility and those of the subjects she sees in the images. The caption appended to each image (not visible in the gallery context but listed in the published exhibition catalogue) also provides a proper name for the majority of the photographic subjects as well as a geographic location and occupation. Such an experience of viewing secures the relation between the viewer’s desire for representation and her identification with the photographic subject as a mimetic representation of herself. However, even as The Americans is claimed as an exemplary photographic representation of South Asian American immigrants, a second, third, and fourth look at the collection repeals that very narrative. These multiple looks engender what I call nonmimetic identification, as the viewer scans the image and sees not herself but the very idea of representation refracted through the mirror objects that are photographed. Our repeated viewings of Gill’s collections hold out the possibility that not only can the viewer fail to identify with the photographic image; equally important, the series itself cannot

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function as a comprehensive representation of South Asians in America, for such a representation is impossible. Representation, as queer studies has shown us, is not enough.27 Yet it is precisely the thing that as racialized subjects we desire more of, in order to cathect a relationship to the photographic object that will reveal more of ourselves. Our desire for representation becomes particularly intense when both the object on view and the subject viewing that object appear to be the same: in the case of The Americans, when both viewer and image are identified as South Asian American. When the photographic object fails to show us ourselves — when multiple looks do not consolidate the representational qualities of the object but rather unravel the narratives of identification that emerge through the act of looking — t hen what we see are the limits of representation. It is precisely the fact that I cannot see myself in the photographic image, even as I look toward it as a reflection of myself, that enables me to analyze more fully how visual representations of racialized subjects are produced; which modes of curation and exhibition enable the circulation of such representations; and what acts of consumption create and disseminate meaning for the racialized subject. One more print from the series demonstrates how our desire to look, and look again, at the photographic object produces tangled claims to representation. In Software engineer Alok Patel-­Pareek; business owner, Sumati Patel-­Pareek. Silicon Valley, California 2001 (plate 14), Sumati is the young woman in the photograph opening the door of her black sedan. A handbag and wallet are perched on the hood of her car. Alok is the man immediately to her rear, opening the trunk and back door of his white car. Fully occupying the foreground of the image, the two cars are gleaming, opaque surfaces. Through the car windows we catch a glimpse of the interior: leather car seats, no other passengers inside. The couple’s bodies are obscured by the cars, and their reflections bounce off glass windows. Behind Sumati and Alok is a row of town houses, in what appears to be a newly developed suburban subdivision. Planted alongside the houses are trees no larger than shrubs: wooden sticks prop up struggling vines of foliage, and patches of dirt are visible through the landscaping. There are no pedestrians on the sidewalk, no one who emerges onto the balconies, no one who occupies the world of this image except for Sumati and Alok, who, in their preoccupation with loading their cars, avert their eyes from each other and from the viewer.

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At first glance, our mimetic identification with this image yields a representational portrait of South Asian American assimilation. Determinedly professional, this heterosexual couple embodies images of a model minority citizenship. Alok and Sumati are immaculately groomed, as are the green lawns behind them and the spotless cars in front of them. Icons of speed, efficiency, and social mobility, the cars index the sprawling accumulation of capital that has shaped the landscape of Silicon Valley, displacing farms, orchards, and agricultural workers. While this region of California has long been home to diverse waves of immigration, here in this pristine subdevelopment there are no visible signs of immigrants other than Alok and Sumati. But their bodies are also obscured behind car doors, as if the couple has become the vehicle of their own upward mobility. If in our first glance we pay attention to the couple depicted in the photograph, Software engineer Alok Patel-­Pareek; business owner, Sumati Patel-­Pareek. Silicon Valley, California 2001 comes to represent the aspirational desires of middle-­class South Asians in Silicon Valley at the turn of the twenty-­first century, as the photo becomes a portrait of upwardly mobile Americans. A second glance at the photograph generates a sense of hesitation, a critique of this picture of mobility and capital accumulation. If we look 180

past Alok and Sumati, toward the built environment that they occupy, we see darkened balconies, vacant patio furniture, houses with shuttered windows, an empty pavement. Within the frame of this photograph is a vast amount of built space occupied only by the young couple. A sense of stillness pervades the image even as Sumati and Alok attend to their busy working lives. This, too, produces a dominant story of South Asians in America: a story of melancholia that becomes a trope for the losses incurred through migration. 28 Such feelings of isolation are multiplied by the contrast between opaque and translucent surfaces in the print. Whereas the flat paint on the façade of the town houses shuts the viewer out of the homes, the reflective surfaces of the car windows appear to give viewers an unmediated access to the interior of Sumati and Alok’s lives, an interior that is resolutely empty. But there is also a third way of looking at the print, one that moves away from reproducing narrative tropes about assimilated or alienated immigrants. A nonmimetic mode of identification with the image shows us that what emerges most clearly within the frame of the photograph is Gill’s attention to geometric precision. In the foreground are the 45-­degree angles of car doors opening, reversed by the houses that close CHAPTER FOUR

in toward each other in the background. At the same time, the proliferation of square windows and rectangular balconies is mirrored in the angular shapes of the car windshields and side mirrors. These angles shape the surface of the print, requiring the viewer to constantly realign her perspective in relation to the photograph. Looking straight at the print causes our eyes to move right of center, toward a vanishing point that emerges between the two houses in the background. Here we see nothing but a gray slate of sky and, immediately below, patches of dirt amid the shrubs. As we shift our eyes right, then left, what comes into view are the opaque surfaces of the houses and then the cars. Sumati’s figure, though physically situated at the midpoint of the print, is blurred in relation to the sharp edges of her car door. Alok’s head is tilted downward, as if he deflects the viewers’ gaze: what appears in sharp relief are the silhouettes of his nose and sinewy neck. Tracing the geometric angles of the print means that our eyes are guided back to the empty sky: Alok and Sumati are effectively displaced from our line of vision. What dominates our visual plane, instead, is the density of material objects in the photograph: the solidity of metal, the tactility of a leather handbag, a signpost that tilts askew just behind Alok. As I trace the sight lines that emerge through the confluence of geometric shapes in this print and attend to the repetition of mirrored images in Brahmin thread tying ceremony for Silicon Valley professionals in a local strip mall. Fremont, California 2002, my reading of the photographs displaces the immigrant subject that viewers, myself included, are looking for. In other words, my repeated looks at The Americans create a nonmimetic way of seeing the series that, even as it appears to proffer a comprehensive portrait of South Asian immigrant experience, in fact defers the visibility of the immigrant. For South Asian American viewers, particularly for those who identify as upwardly mobile and middle class, The Americans at once holds our demand for representation and refuses our desire to be represented, as its images offer angles of vision that draw our eyes to objects that we may not otherwise see. These are the mirror objects in the photographs: the gleaming surfaces, translucent glass, and windows that refract and redirect representations of its immigrant subjects. As I subject each photograph in the series to multiple looks, The Americans becomes a collection of images that captures my own desires to belong, to identify, and to be seen within this American landscape. But the formal composition of the series also defers that same longing for representation. What I see when I look at this collection is the limits ARCHIVES OF DIASPORA

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of my desire for representation, the fact that even a mirror image cannot promise a mimetic representation of myself.

TH E AM ER ICANS : N AT I O N A N D DI A S P O R A

In the fall of 2009, several months following Gill’s exhibition opening at Bose Pacia Gallery, I went to see Looking In, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Robert Frank’s The Americans. 29 Pairing all eighty-­t hree photographs published in the 1958 volume along with contact sheets that Frank used to create the book, Looking In was accompanied by an extensive display of Frank’s early photography from Europe and Latin America, as well as his more recent work in film. As I joined the long queue of visitors in the grand hallways of the Met, snaking through galleries that contained both prints and contact sheets from the series, I was taken by the enormous amount of intimacy and reverence directed toward his photography by viewers. In comparison to the opening of Gill’s work at Bose Pacia, this crowd of viewers predominantly (though not exclusively) appeared to be white and middle class. Sarita See observes, “The visitor who strolls through the Met’s galleries is pre182

sumed to be a fully formed and disciplined adult with an achieved idea of the aesthetic.”30 Likewise, I encountered many older viewers at the exhibition who spoke with familiarity and authority about the images that they saw. On display in the Met’s capacious galleries were Frank’s panoramic images of postwar America, portraying thriving Black communities alongside documentation of Jim Crow segregation in the South; a pastoral Fourth of July celebration in rural New York and the obscured faces of those who watch a parade from the dark confines of their tenement building in Hoboken, New Jersey; the corpulent bodies of white society matrons at a charity gala in Miami Beach and a forlorn young woman who operates an elevator in that same city. As the curator Sarah Greenough writes, Frank’s perspective as “both an outsider and an insider” was central to his ability to access photographic subjects. 31 Walking through The Americans, viewers retraced with ease Frank’s journey across geographic regions and social classes, and between domestic and public spaces. As I moved through the exhibition, I lingered as far as possible on each photograph on display, knowing that the crowds made it impossible for me to retrace my steps. I could not double-­check an image that CHAPTER FOUR

I saw previously, or cross-­compare one contact sheet with another, or stand for too long in front of any of Frank’s handwritten letters. Like many viewers who surrounded me, I peered into the images, leaned toward the photographs displayed on the walls, and looked closely into the glass vitrines, participating as far as possible in intimate contact with the photographs. 32 But rather than identifying with the image at hand, I experienced feelings of estrangement and distance, feelings that were unfamiliar to me given my previous familiarity with the collection in its published form. Throughout this comprehensive display of The Americans, I noticed that racial difference was marked exclusively through portraits of Black men, women, and families. Frank’s photographs indexed the social and economic segregation of African Americans, but Black bodies also functioned as the visual exception to an overarching narrative of American modernity. None of Frank’s images document Native peoples, nor are Asian Americans figured within the series. I recognized only two photographs that explicitly featured immigration to the United States: New York City, 1955, and Chinese Cemetery — San Francisco, 1956. In New York City, three queer and trans Latinx subjects lean against a sidewalk wall, arms firmly placed on hips, glancing toward Frank off-­camera, as if ready for their portrait. Two of the subjects look toward Frank, and a third person covers their face, peering at the photographer through their fingers. Frank shoots this image across a metal fence, its ironwork a barrier between himself and those he photographs. This single image of non-­Black racialized subjects in Frank’s series (unnamed, and identified as Latinx only through my reading of their hair, skin, and posture) documents the rapidly changing racial formation of New York City in the 1950s, delineating the migration of Puerto Rican immigrants to the United States and the expansive reach of U.S. empire in the Caribbean and Latin America. In the second photograph, Chinese Cemetery, there are no Asian American subjects in the frame. What we see is an elaborate floral arrangement that has tumbled to the ground, its wooden spikes scattered across the soil and flowers strewn on adjacent mounds. A ribbon peeks out from under the fallen arrangement, and the viewer cannot make out for whom this arrangement once stood. A row of tombstones appears in the rear of the cemetery, hardly visible through the thick clouds. The fact of Asian immigration appears in this photograph as a history that is already dead, that has no place in an American future. In a region that has long been home to thriving Asian American communities — despite the successive passage of restrictive immigraARCHIVES OF DIASPORA

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tion acts throughout the twentieth century — the absence of Asian immigrants from Frank’s frame is less about the invisibility of this particular group, and more about the elision of Asian American racialization from a major photographic compilation of what it means to be American. Compiled during his travels across the United States in 1955 – 1957, Frank’s Americans is acclaimed for its singular vision of post – World War II America: a country characterized by sweeping social change, dotted with bucolic rural towns and thriving urban centers, experienced through the solitary speed of automobiles on freeways. As Frank put it in his application for the Guggenheim Fellowship that funded his travels, “What I have in mind, then, is observation and record of what one naturalized American finds to see in the United States that signifies the kind of civilization born here and spreading elsewhere. . . . A small catalog comes to the mind’s eye: a town at night, a parking lot, a supermarket, a highway, the man who owns three cars and the man who owns none. . . . The uses of my project would be sociological, historical, and aesthetic.”33 This multi­ dimensional portrait of America has been the subject of intense critical adulation for its formal ambitions as well as its conceptual scope. In his oft-­cited introduction to The Americans, Jack Kerouac writes, “Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and 184

snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film.”34 As literary scholar Caroline Blinder notes, Kerouac’s prelude emphasizes the “romantic thrust within Frank’s ethos. . . . It is romantic, partly because it mystifies the photographic process, but more so because it maintains the illusion of an America heroically struggling to survive such things as industrialization, racism, and urban alienation.”35 As I see it, the optimism and idealism popularly ascribed to Frank’s photographs also eclipse the fact that the collection documents changing domestic configurations of race and class, at a time when the U.S. continued to expand its imperialist ambitions abroad. The vast landscape of America that we see in Frank’s Americans has not reckoned with the incarceration of Japanese Americans in internment camps during the war, or the ongoing settler colonial occupation of Native lands; likewise, Frank’s photographs of Black and white Americans cannot anticipate legislative changes that emerge out of political movements for civil rights and social justice. Moreover, though the collection incorporates images of patriotic national celebrations, it omits entirely the consequences of U.S. nationalism abroad during this time: the United States’ military occupation of Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, as well as the establishment of CHAPTER FOUR

U.S. military aid to Pakistan and Vietnam, among other countries. Even as Frank’s critique of racial and class segregation in the United States was seen as ahead of its time, I see his photography as central to the consolidation of imperial power in the United States, at home and abroad. Viewers of Gill’s Americans have located her series as “a dialogue with Frank’s rather than a re-­enactment,” based on biographical and aesthetic concerns. 36 Like Frank, Gill was a foreign national when she embarked on The Americans; like Frank, she embarked on a series of road trips along the East and West Coasts as well as through the South over a period of several years; and like Frank’s, Gill’s aesthetic practice in this collection is also marked by the use of the photographic snapshot. Such analyses point toward obvious differences that separate the two series, such as the advent of color photography, but otherwise retain Frank’s Americans as the primary archival context and theoretical framework for viewing Gill’s work. 37 However, unlike Shah’s Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force (chapter 1) and Matthew’s An Indian from India (chapter 2), Gill’s Americans does not reproduce, in whole or in part, archival images from this earlier photographic collection. If Frank’s Americans emerges at all in Gill’s series, it is as a kind of leitmotif, recalled as Gill photographs subjects that carry a memory of Frank’s work. Both Frank’s and Gill’s collections, for example, feature single prints of men engaged in prayer: in Frank’s series, a Black pastor kneeling on the banks of the Mississippi (Mississippi River, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1955); in Gill’s work, an upper-­caste Hindu man sitting cross-­legged on the carpeted floor of a conference room (Brahmin Samaj of North America Convention. East Windsor, New Jersey 2004). Gill also photographs the relationship between workers and the built environments that they labor in: restaurants, storefronts, and factories. Importantly, Gill shares with Frank a keen attention to the surface relation between human bodies and material objects, as both photographers create prints that appear to be “cluttered with objects or with people that seem to have barred the photographers’ access to his [or her] main object of interest.”38 These include what I have described as image-­producing objects (such as mirrors or television screens), as well as objects that connote mobility (cars and trucks), and iconic objects of nationhood (such as the American flag), all of which proliferate across both series. Yet in my view such cross-­c onnections between Frank and Gill’s works do not translate into a mimetic relation that binds together the ARCHIVES OF DIASPORA

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two photographers. Many years after my experience of walking through this expansive showcase of Frank’s work, I reflected on my response to the photographs on display at the Met, as well as my constant return to the images in the 1958 publication of The Americans. As I read Frank’s work in relation to the images compiled in Gill’s exhibition catalogue for The Americans, attempting to discern where, if at all, the collections intersect, I became increasingly unsettled by the archival through-­line that I had conjured between two sets of images. To look back at Frank’s series was to experience once again my alienation from his photography, despite its documentation of racial segregation and class disparity. Instead of bringing me closer to the South Asian American lives documented in Gill’s Americans, my attempt to recuperate Frank’s work as an archival context for the contemporary image failed to produce identification with both. If the representational legacy of Frank’s archive is to document imperial America in the mid-­t wentieth century, I came to see that Gill’s collection reframed the form of documentation itself. I could not be haunted by Frank’s Americans as I saw Gill’s work, not only because that archive of empire is not duplicated mimetically in Gill’s collection, but more precisely because the documentary form of Gill’s series unmoors the nation-­ as-­subject of the photographic image. Whereas Frank aimed to create “a 186

composite picture of an entire nation,” Gill creates photographic prints that reject both the unity and the visibility of the nation-­state. 39 Pivoting away from representations of nationhood, Gill’s Americans reminds us of the costs of national belonging. What defines the half ­century between Frank’s and Gill’s Americans is not only the advent of color photography: it is also the advent of another set of wars. The seven years that frame Gill’s collection are marked by the devastation of September 11, 2001; the sharp rise in race-­based hate crimes against South Asians, Arab Americans, and Muslim Americans that followed in its wake; and U.S. military intervention in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, accompanied by surging white nationalism at home. The violent expansion of U.S. empire in South Asia and the Middle East, coupled with constant state surveillance of Muslim South Asian and Arab American subjects in the United States, means that Gill’s photographs necessarily rework the very conditions of what it means to be American, in public as well as private spaces.40 In this context, Gill’s The Americans cannot be read as a supplement or addendum to Frank’s collection. It is not simply that Gill’s focus on South Asian immigrants corrects the absence of Asian Americans, among other minoritized populations, in Frank’s seCHAPTER FOUR

ries: more importantly, as Gill works to create photographic images of immigrants that do not mimetically reproduce the conditions of racial representation produced under surveillance, she refashions photography’s role as a technology of national documentation. I frame Gill’s Americans against and in relation to the proliferation of surveillance photography at the turn of the twenty-­first century. Surveillance is one of many modes of looking, but it is an especially intimate form of observation and documentation that racialized minorities are familiar with. To be surveilled by the U.S. state, as a racialized immigrant in the twenty-­fi rst century, is to become familiar with the prospect of your facial image, your fingerprints, electronic communications, physical movements, and domicile being recorded, compiled, and archived anonymously by the state.41 Because the data that are generated by surveillance are meant to create a likeness of the racialized subject, surveillance closely approaches mimetic forms of documentation and representation. Like mimetic representations, surveillance images are frequently evaluated for their accuracy, authenticity, and adherence to “realness”: their ability to document what really happened. What really happened before and after September 11, 2001, is that South Asian Americans were and are continuously surveilled as racialized subjects who cannot belong to the U.S. state. For South Asian artists who document racialized immigrant communities alongside and in relation to visual technologies of surveillance, the task becomes how to disrupt the symmetry between surveillance and documentary images.42 We see this in Gill’s photographic strategies of creating asymmetrical visual lines within the photographic image, using diptychs and triptychs to mirror the photographic subject, and shifting the viewer’s sight line from the immigrant subjects to the material objects that define them. On the left side image of a diptych from Gill’s Americans, titled Yuba City, California 2001 (plate 15), an elderly Sikh man, distinguished by his red turban, rides his bicycle away from a brilliantly red and yellow Quik Stop gas station. A small American flag is propped behind the bicycle’s handlebars, almost obscured between the cyclist’s legs. What dominates the print are the flat, wide lines of the yellow crosswalk that the cyclist travels on, which are paralleled by the taut telephone wires that hang overhead perpendicular to him. Like many South Asian Americans, particularly Sikh men who were misrecognized as Muslims in the months following 9/11, traveling with the flag is a safeguard, a means of visibly attesting to their patriotism to the U.S. state. Such patriotism is itself a ARCHIVES OF DIASPORA

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kind of misidentification, which the state demands of its immigrants as proof of their allegiance. The right-­side photograph is a detailed image of the same gas station, whose billboard and rooftop are at right angles to each other. Propped up on the sidewalk is a series of lawn signs for the local city council election. Here too the flag emerges as a dominant motif, its colors resonating with the bold red of the Quik Stop. Two signs prominently display the candidacy of Sikh Americans: Tej Maan, running for city council, and Romy Saini, campaigning for the position of supervisor. Like the American flag fluttering between the legs of the cyclist in the first image, Saini and Maan’s signs, bent by the wind, deploy elements of this nationalist icon: a burst of stars, stripes, a reproduction of the flag itself. “Building a Family-­Friendly Yuba City,” proclaims Maan’s poster. It is no small irony that the Quik Stop in the background of both prints brings into relief the murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi, the Sikh American who, while manning a gas station in Arizona, became the first South Asian to be murdered in a hate crime after September 11 (Sodhi’s remains, as discussed in chapter 3, have been memorialized at the Smithsonian). Viewing Yuba City, California 2001 requires us to look again at the iconography of the flag that is prominently featured on the left side of the print and partially obscured on the right. It compels us to read across the 188

geometric symmetry of the perpendicular lines on the crosswalk, which are then mirrored in the structure of the Quik Stop. Gill’s emphasis on the angularity of these strong lines dominates the print, making them loom larger than the immigrant on the bicycle, his face partially shadowed by the sun. Her photography becomes a means of indexing not just the presence of the immigrant in the nation but the overwhelming production and circulation of U.S. nationalism itself. Yuba City, California 2001 showcases how now, perhaps more than ever, documentation is central to the visibility of minoritized, misidentified, and racialized immigrant communities. But the diptych also crucially documents what happens when the immigrant subject is literally framed by representations of nationhood, and, as the campaign signs testify, when immigrants are compelled to rely on the same iconography to claim their place in the public sphere of the nation. The specter of surveillance is long, and Gill’s work captures how racial difference is embodied and identified by South Asian Americans themselves. Whereas her diptych of Yuba City records the aftereffects of racial violence in the months following September 11, 2001, several other images in the series also document what it means to be racialized by the CHAPTER FOUR

specter of state violence. In Taxi driver Prem Kumar Walekar, 54 was shot dead at a gas station in Rockville, Montgomery by a sniper. Seen at his right is his son. Maryland 2002 (plate 16), the left-­side image of this diptych shows Walekar’s open-­casket funeral, his corpse nested within a richly varnished coffin. Walekar’s death at the hands of John Allen Muhammed and Lee Boyd Malvo is displaced outside the coffin: in the profusion of roses in the floral wreaths that surround him, the deep red carpeting, the orchestration of the funeral.43 Walekar, a part-­t ime taxi driver, would already have known of the risk of South Asian taxi drivers being subject to race-­based hate crimes; he was killed by the “DC snipers” when pumping gas into his taxi.44 For his daughter Andrea, who feared that the American flag stickers on her father’s taxi would not shield him from prospective violence, the news of her father’s death was deferred through misidentification: “ ‘It’s not your dad,’ she was assured. ‘They’re saying he’s black.’ ” That racial misrecognition itself confirmed Andrea’s suspicions that her father was dead.45 In Gill’s right-­side image, Walekar’s son Andrew stares back at the camera, his rage clenched into white-­g loved fists, as mourners embrace behind him. Gill’s photographs of Prem Kumar Walekar’s funeral and its aftermath are the only images I have seen that document Walekar’s dead body, archiving what it means to live now as a South Asian immigrant, as a man whose body was picked to be annihilated through the telescopic sight of a sniper lens. South Asian American viewers of Gill’s work survey her images for their power to represent who we are in this uncertain time. But the images themselves betray the volatility of how to identify as South Asian, at a time when the racialization of South Asian Americans operates in contested relation to Black and other minoritized populations. My own attachments to Gill’s images as a documentation of a post-­9/11 America betray my need to see, first, the specificity of South Asian American racialization in our present time, and, second, my desire to have an archive of this immigrant community that is somehow distinct from the photographic archive of the nation. Delinking Gill’s Americans from Frank’s Americans speaks to the urgency of this project, and more broadly to the need for reading visual representations of diaspora outside of a U.S.-­ based framework of race and citizenship. Instead of securing our ability to see America through a series of photographic portraits, Gill’s Americans fractures the very notion of photography as a documentary apparatus of the nation.

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M A K I N G N E W A R C H I V E S : GI L L , G U P TA , B A R T H O L O M E W

Moving away from the imperial visions of mid-­t wentieth-­century American photography, I situate Gill’s Americans in conversation with the work of two South Asian artists, Sunil Gupta and Pablo Bartholomew, to create an archive of diaspora: a documentation of what it means to be living, working, and feeling in diaspora today. Though Gupta and Bartholomew’s photographic collections are conceptually and formally distinct from each other — a nd while Gill created The Americans without knowledge of Bartholomew’s series on immigration and prior to her working relationship with Gupta46 — reading Gill’s images in tandem with Gupta’s and Bartholomew’s works opens out the geographic scale and historic scope of what it means to see photographic representations of South Asian immigrants. First, reframing the context of the archive enlarges the spatial configuration of Gill’s Americans, as a photographic series about South Asians in the United States that relates not just to other series about Americans but to very different photographic collections of South Asian immigrants in the U.K., Canada, France, and India. Collectively this body of work shows us how visual representations of South Asians in diaspora always already constitute a transnational docu190

mentation of race, identity, and community. Second, creating an archive of diaspora reconfigures the temporal framework of documentary photography as social analysis. In addition to U.S. documentary photographers from the 1930s to the 1950s whose images of Depression-­era farmworkers directly shaped Frank’s Americans, and who, as Dadi suggests, are also evoked by Gill, Gupta’s autoethnographic methods and Bartholomew’s photojournalism draw our attention to photographic practices in the 1980s and 1990s that were central to the documentation of South Asian immigrants.47 Uniquely curated together as part of a group exhibition at the Newark Museum of Art in New Jersey, the resolutely nonidentical work of these three artists highlights the interrelationship between photography as ethnography, photography as documentation, and photography as self-­representation in diaspora. Pablo Bartholomew, known principally as an award-­w inning photojournalist, created an early series of documentary photographs on Chinese immigrants in Kolkata and has created as well a series on South Asian immigrants in France. The Emigres (also known as Indians in America, 1989) is Bartholomew’s first, and only, photographic collection on South Asians in the U.S.48 While it predates Gill’s Americans, CHAPTER FOUR

Gill herself was unaware of Bartholomew’s photographic series until she completed her project. In this color series, Bartholomew trains his camera on a wide variety of photographic subjects: the descendants of early twentieth-­century Sikh farmworkers in northern California, as well as immigrant scientists, entrepreneurs, spiritual leaders, and small business owners. As Bartholomew describes, Emigres examines “the two worlds of the migrant Indian — t he inner world which he brought within himself, the world of roots, religion, of tradition — of ‘Indianness’ — a nd to see how much of it was retained and preserved in the exterior world. . . . How does one world manifest itself in the other? What are the relationships, adjustments, juxtapositions of signs and images that might explain the truth between the two worlds?”49 For The Emigres, Bartholomew also traveled across the West and East Coasts, photographing a heterogeneous population of South Asian immigrants across class, region of origin, and religious community. But Bartholomew’s orientation toward his photographic subjects diverges sharply from Gill’s, as he cultivates a stance of objective distance rather than intimate kinship. In particular, the captions that Bartholomew appends to his photography produce an ethnographic portrait of South Asian immigrants, as figures who are other to him. Such captions also operate as racialized descriptions of his subjects: for example, one wedding portrait is titled Second-­Generation Mixed Blood Indian American Marrying a Venezuelan Woman, Imperial Valley, California. Bartholomew’s use of interior shots frequently incorporates objects of cultural significance, such as Hindu and Christian iconography, that amplify the racial and religious difference of his photographic subjects. In images such as Mr. and Mrs. Ohri, a Hindu and Sindhi Couple, Yuba City, California, Bartholomew produces a portrait of the heterosexual nuclear family that (without any visible evidence of what makes one subject Hindu and the other Sindhi) becomes an ethnographic object for our viewing consumption. Still other prints demarcate class differences between South Asians and other communities of color, even when their conditions of labor appear the same. In An Indian Labor Contractor Pays a Mexican Worker, Yuba City, California, we see the pitted, muddied face of the farmworker reflected in the bent side-­v iew mirror of the contractor’s pickup truck. The contractor’s darkened face and downcast eyes are set off by a blue and white trucker hat; the worker’s bare upper body occupies center left of the picture frame. Both men’s skin is burned by the hot, arid sun. Within the tight frame it is impossible to identify who is Indian or Mexican in this photograph. What distinARCHIVES OF DIASPORA

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guishes the two men is the asymmetrical exchange of money between the driver seated inside the white truck, his door firmly shut, and the man on the dirt road, whose scarred arms and torso face the viewer. Likewise, One of the Many Patel Motels, Fresno, California depicts a South Asian motel owner behind a grimy bulletproof window, his face nearly obscured. The window panel is surrounded by a series of “Hotel Policies” prominently pasted over and around his reception desk. Entombed by the dark wood veneer that surrounds him, pushed out of center frame by the brash red Coke machine standing in the hallway, the motel owner is diminished within the site of his own labor. It is an abject position reflected even in the photograph’s title, One of the Many . . . , a caption that cannot bear to give a proper name to this man. Such prints are in direct contrast to Bartholomew’s portraits, in the same series, of South Asian professionals: scientists, entrepreneurs, and art historians. These individuals, identified by their full names in the captions, are shown at work in their labs, at their businesses, and in museums. Frequently these men and women are photographed on their own, without spouses or children: their portraits of upward mobility appear to belong to an entirely different collection. As one curator who has worked with Bartholomew and Gill writes, “The works of photographers like 192

Pablo Bartholomew . . . tend to depend on a kind of dispassionate, anthropological, almost clinical distance on the part of the photojournalist, a distance that encourages the viewer to believe that the subjects speak for themselves. In contrast, Gill’s diptychs begin to suggest a more enigmatic, subjective, psychological realm, on the part of both the photographer and the subjects of the photographs.”50 In Sunil Gupta’s photography, the relationship between “the photographer and the subjects of the photographs” is once again reconfigured, through the explicit self-­representation of the photographer as a “gay, Indian, and HIV positive” immigrant subject. 51 Working as an artist, curator, and educator within the Black British arts community from the 1980s onward, Gupta’s photography and activism has advocated for the transnational visibility of Black, South Asian, queer, disabled, and working-­ class subjects. In contrast to Bartholomew’s distance from his subjects, much of Gupta’s early photography is characterized by its autoethnographic orientation. In several series, Gupta’s commitment to the visibility of queer and racialized bodies hinges on the intimate representation of his own sexual and romantic relationships. 52 Across the last four decades, Gupta’s photographic portraiture has documented and archived CHAPTER FOUR

the presence of public, visible, and politically active queer South Asian communities in Europe, North America, and South Asia. 53 Straddling documentary, autobiography, and performance, in photographic series such as Homelands (2001 – 2003), Gupta archives the diverse geographies of his own diasporic subjectivity. In a series of large-­ format diptychs, Gupta binds together disjointed natural landscapes: the village of his father’s birth in northern India alongside apartment complexes in New York’s Upper East Side; police signs that testify to brutal homophobic assaults in London with the exterior of a Hindu temple in Queens; nude images of himself at leisure in the Hamptons and in Chelsea, New York. Taking up a different dimensional scale from Gill’s diptychs in The Americans, here Gupta creates crooked lines of identification between the subject and object of each photographic print, as well as across the right-­and left-­hand-­side images of each diptych. For example, in Mundia Pamar, Uttar Pradesh/Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, the photograph at left depicts the densely green, rural landscape of Mundia Pamar, his father’s birthplace. It is dusk, and a solitary cow casts a long shadow over the grassy land. At right is a full-­length self-­portrait of Gupta’s naked body. His feet planted on a mossy green carpet, his shoulders hunched, face and torso turned away from the viewer, Gupta is lit by a single shaft of afternoon light that pours in through the window. He appears weighted down, his body becoming one object among the many pieces of heavy wood furniture and wood paneling that fill the room. 54 Linking exterior and interior spaces, human and animal, what relations of belonging could tenuously exist between Gupta and his father’s hometown are mapped in this diptych through an awkward identification between a young calf and an aging, chronically ill man. 55 Breaking and resuturing narratives of migration across a single photographic print (his father’s migration from rural Mundia Pamar to urban Delhi, and later from Delhi to Montreal; Gupta’s own migration from India to Canada to the U.S. to the U.K.), Mundia Pamar does not attempt to bind together the difference between two generations but instead displays skewed lines of identity across irreconcilable sites, subjects, and landscapes of diaspora. As Gupta writes in his preface to Homelands, “Initial experiments in binary oppositions — the West versus India, inside versus outside — seemed formulaic. . . . What I wanted in the end was a sense of the landscape of these different worlds. This was the landscape that the HIV

virus was travelling in.”56 Representing Gupta’s own ambivalent loca-

tions, both as a gay South Asian diasporic subject and as one who travels ARCHIVES OF DIASPORA

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with an immune system compromised by

HI V,

Homelands disrupts our

expectations of visual symmetry between dissonant landscapes and redirects our view, instead, to the specific bodies, memories, and histories that circulate through these spaces. Another diptych in the series, Jama Masjid, Delhi/Blvd. René Levesque O., Montreal pairs exterior shots of the ornate marble and sandstone exterior of the Jama Masjid mosque in Delhi with an interior shot of the spare but lovingly decorated wall of his mother’s home in Montreal, where scenes of the Nativity and of churches in Bethlehem share space with an old black-­and-­white photo of Gupta with his sister. 57 Alongside this archival family photo, a xeroxed print of Gupta’s mother’s face, colored over with purple hearts for eyes and a hot pink mouth, is set off by a sticky note that contains the handwritten message “The Lord set me free from all my fears.” Like Mundia Pamar, Jama Masjid links together public and private spaces, bringing an iconic mosque (one that was central to the military pageantry of the Delhi Durbars, discussed in chapter 1) together with the nondescript Montreal apartment of his widowed mother. But Jama Masjid does something more than fasten together two different landscapes. In previous works Gupta has photographed and written about his own experience of being made invisible as a gay man by his 194

parents, and the feelings of claustrophobia and isolation that accompanied his trips home as an adult. Here, Gupta aligns the Jama Masjid —  located in an Old Delhi neighborhood that Gupta has documented elsewhere as a vibrant gay cruising ground — w ith the memorialization of his childhood on a wall in his mother’s flat in Montreal. 58 In so doing, Jama Masjid generates an alternate temporality, one in which it is Gupta’s adult life, as an out gay man in Canada and subsequently as a photographer working in India, that remains undocumented via the landscape image of the mosque; and his (ostensibly presexual) childhood in Delhi that is enshrined, via the black-­and-­white portrait of his sister and himself, in Canada. “The Lord set me free . . .” states the note near that childhood photo: though the prayer gives solace to Gupta’s mother, it is Gupta himself who finds this notion of freedom elusive inside his mother’s home. How do these distinct photographic series of South Asian immigrants resonate in relation to Gill’s The Americans, and how do Gupta’s and Bartholomew’s works together with Gill’s address the problem of representation in diaspora? In 2008, one year prior to Gill’s solo exhibition at Bose Pacia Gallery, selections from The Americans were displayed alongside prints from The Emigres and from Homelands in a show titled India: CHAPTER FOUR

Public Places, Private Spaces at the Newark Museum of Art in New Jersey. Curated by Gayatri Sinha and Paul Sternberger, the exhibition was a survey of contemporary Indian photography and video art, at a state museum that has exhibited “Asian Indian culture” since the 1920s, with a long-­standing permanent collection of painting, textile, and sculpture from the subcontinent. 59 The broad curatorial purview for the exhibition encompassed street photography and experimental video, displaying these works as representations of public history and private life in the postcolonial Indian state. Toward the end of the exhibition, however, the curators pivoted away from a contemporary survey of Indian art toward representations of South Asians in diaspora. In the section titled “Where Is the Border? The Diasporic Experience,” the curators displayed Gill, Gupta, and Bartholomew’s works together with selected diptychs from Annu Palakunnathu Matthew’s An Indian from India (chapter 2). Organized to highlight a thematic emphasis on immigration, rather than (as in previous sections of the exhibit) formal linkages across artists’ works, this final section magnified the uses of photography as a sociological record of American immigrant life. That the exhibition concluded with a focus on immigration is perhaps not surprising, given that the Newark Museum is a public institution in a state that is home to one of the largest South Asian immigrant populations in the United States. The advisory committee for the exhibition was composed of a number of local South Asian American journalists, small business owners, and representatives from the Indian Consulate in New York; in addition to public state grants, the exhibition was funded through major donations from South Asian American philanthropists.60 At the Newark Museum, Gill’s diptych Motel owner Dhansukh Dan Patel’s parents, in his new home. Nashville, Tennessee 2004 (figure 4.3) was displayed alongside Bartholomew’s single print One of the Many Patel Motels. Both photographs document the enormous social and cultural labor of South Asian Americans in the motel business.61 In Gill’s diptych, the left-­side image is of an aging man with a shock of white hair, perched alone on the edge of a richly upholstered bed, staring off into the distance. He is unnamed but appears to be Dansukh Dan Patel’s father. In the right-­side image, a single framed photograph of the man’s dead wife sits atop a lavish marble mantelpiece in the vast living room of Patel’s new home. The diptych is bathed in the warm glow of sunlight that floods the cream-­colored walls and marble floors of the living room and bedroom. This house is the culmination of years of labor for the Patel ARCHIVES OF DIASPORA

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4.3  Gauri Gill, Motel owner Dhansukh Dan Patel’s parents, in his new home. Nashville, Tennessee 2004, from The Americans, 2000 – 2 007. Archival pigment print, 16.5 × 50 inches, edition of 7 + 1. AP. COPY RIGHT GAURI GIL L .

family, the fruit of their capital accumulation in the United States. But the house is built too late to accommodate Patel’s mother: her work for the family and their motel business is lost. Whereas Bartholomew’s One of the Many Patel Motels depicts an unnamed motel owner encased and entombed, as I have suggested, within his place of work, Gill’s photo196

graph of Patel’s parents is situated outside the workplace, in the palatial home built through their labor. Gill’s three-­quarter-­length profile of Patel’s father, whose wrinkled hands and crisp shirt are illuminated in the natural light, also stands in contrast to the motel operator photographed by Bartholomew, whose face and upper body are rendered opaque by a smudged glass window. These aesthetic differences are central to how the two artists document the costs of immigrant labor. In One of the Many Patel Motels, there is no release for the motel owner, whose labor is as cheap as a can of Coke from the adjacent vending machine. In Motel owner Dhansukh Dan Patel’s parents, in his new home. Nashville, Tennessee 2004, the result of Patel’s labor is on display in his newly built house. But that home comes belatedly for his father, who will never enjoy it in the company of his wife. Although the exhibition brought together Bartholomew and Gill’s works as an ethnographic depiction of one group of South Asians in the United States, the experience of seeing the diptych and the single print together produces something other than mimetic representation: it generates an archive of diaspora. We see the traces of this archive by pairing Gill’s diptych in relation to Gupta’s Mundia Pamar, Uttar Pradesh/ CHAPTER FOUR

Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, also on display in the same section of the exhibition. The artists’ diverse and varying uses of the diptych as a conceptual framework shift the viewer’s attention from subject to object. As I have noted, both sides of Gill’s diptych are lit by the warm glow of natural light, flooding the expansive rooms of the house and drawing our attention not only to the solitary figure of Patel’s widowed father but also to the carved bedpost, tasseled cushions, and bedside lamp that frame him. Likewise, on the right side of the diptych we see the creamy marble mantelpiece and ornate light fixture that accompany the framed photo of Patel’s dead mother. Whereas the consistent lighting of Gill’s diptych links and expands the visual narrative between both the right-­and left-­ hand-­side images, in Mundia Pamar, shafts of afternoon sunlight spotlight Gupta’s naked body, but the same light (many thousands of miles away, taken at another time) casts a shadow over the cow on the left side of the diptych. Gill is absent from both frames of her diptych, while Gupta’s singular presence in his work establishes an affiliation between his father’s migrations and his own diasporic trajectories. As I take up the formal differences that mark the artists’ works, I also see both diptychs as producing a history of loss that exceeds the technological capacities of the photograph-­as-­representation. In Gill’s diptych, the framed memento of a dead wife and mother evokes the profound loss of family, friendship, and community experienced by those who immigrate, losses that cannot be accounted for in a single photograph. In Gupta’s diptych, the display of his own body invokes the memory of his father’s death and the (delayed, if inevitable) prospect of his own. Together, these diptychs produce lines of seeing that, even if they defer a mirror representation of ourselves, enable us as South Asian diasporic viewers to come closer to another image, something that looks and feels like the structure of our everyday life. Reading Gill in relation to Gupta and Bartholomew’s images at the Newark Museum reroutes the sociological impulse of the exhibition, providing another glimpse of what diasporic representation can look like. For a population that is rarely represented within museum walls, the exhibition’s diverse overview of photography and video installation enables prospective South Asian American (and particularly Indian American) visitors to take pride in the sheer volume of representation. These are the feelings of pride produced through intimate attachment to the photograph, an attachment that enables the diasporic viewing subject to claim a photographic image as a representation of her own life. But as ARCHIVES OF DIASPORA

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the viewer encounters the dissonant formal practices that define Gill’s, Bartholomew’s, and Gupta’s work, as well as Matthew’s An Indian from India, the exhibition simultaneously generates another set of feelings, one that pulls the diasporic viewer into the image and also shuts her out. It is not simply that, for example, Bartholomew’s photographs objectify the diasporic viewer’s immigrant condition, or that Gupta’s body in all its complexity cannot stand in for the viewer’s own. It is also the fact that each of these photo-­based works produces a partial, fragmented, and incomplete vision of diaspora, a vision that refuses to deliver through the photographic frame a narrative of self, community, and nationhood that the viewer can grasp or claim as proof of belonging. Despite the comprehensive claims to visibility (of India and of Indians) that the exhibition as a whole aspires to, the artworks that compose this final section of the exhibition deliver, instead, nonmimetic representations of race, gender, and sexuality in diaspora. In our current political moment, when the stakes of visibility for racialized subjects are so high, such refusal to produce totality in the photographic image is not only an aesthetic strategy — it also invokes the risk of failure. It is the risk of curating artworks that, within this exhibition context, are mobilized to represent the nation-­state, but that are consumed instead by diasporic subjects as re198

fracted images of the self: smudged and obscured, isolated and alienated, shadowed and in mourning. It is a series of images that, once archived together, cannot ever produce a triumphant narrative of belonging. I am compelled by the potential for failure, as I see how these photographic works create a diverse and disjointed archive of diaspora, compelling us to look elsewhere, pointing toward alternate historical and social frameworks for documenting South Asian diasporic lives.

CLOSE F EEL INGS

Throughout this chapter, I have outlined the ways in which viewers’ desires to identify with The Americans have intersected with the refusal of the prints to represent a singular vision of the immigrant subject. Within the gallery space, many South Asian American viewers identified with Gill’s series despite visible differences between themselves and the photographic subjects in the prints, so much so that viewers claimed the images as a reflection of themselves. Such mimetic relations to the photographic image, I suggest, eclipse other ways of seeing the print: for example, recognizing that the photographic image can occlude the CHAPTER FOUR

immigrant subject, or that the image can cause the viewer to look and look again as the print evades a fixed narrative of representation. Outside the gallery context, Asian American viewers and academics with whom I have shared and discussed Gill’s work have been enamored by what they perceive to be the project of The Americans: a comprehensive documentation of South Asian American experience in the United States. But some of my interlocutors have also faulted the series for what they describe as a narrow or limited interpretation of that project. These viewers have drawn attention to Gill’s numerous photographs of middle-­and upper-­middle-­class immigrants; her sustained focus on Sikh and Hindu immigrants rather than on Muslim and Christian communities; and her photography of large suburban homes alongside densely populated urban neighborhoods. For this group of viewers, their perception of a representational lack in the series — a lack that centers on class and religious difference, despite the fact that more than half the collection foregrounds the lives and occupations of working-­class South Asian Americans from a variety of religious communities —  p roduces feelings of estrangement and alienation from the image, a feeling that is in turn articulated through a suspicion about the political value of The Americans. Such critical interpretations draw our attention to the fact that The Americans does not produce photographic representations that are proportionate to the heterogeneity of class, gender, religious, sexual, and regional differences within South Asian immigrant populations in the United States. And yet I see such critiques as also born out of the desire for intimacy: a desire to come closer to, and to see more clearly, the immigrant subjects depicted in the photographs. It is a viewing position that is premised on the misidentification of Gill’s photography as a documentary record of South Asian American communities, and on the misidentification of photography’s use as a technology for the accurate, realistic, and comprehensive documentation of racialized community. It is also a form of seeing that prioritizes identification as the principal form of attachment that can be cathected between the viewer and the photographic object. Such identity is premised on the transparency of photographic representation, as if photography can show us what and whom we want to see. For diasporic viewing subjects who demand clarity from a series like Gill’s Americans, such demands are also a refusal to recognize what the photographs already show us: namely, that there are ways of seeing that can unbind us from the unremitting desire for full and complete repreARCHIVES OF DIASPORA

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sentation. To encounter such photographs is to experience precisely those discomfiting feelings of estrangement from the image that we want to set aside. But as I have argued, such feelings of alienation are necessary to create viewing strategies that unsettle our longing for intimacy and identity with the image, and that enable us to reflect on how our desire to see ourselves is inextricable from our aspirations to be seen. To create ways of seeing that come to terms with nonmimetic forms of identification —  and that, therefore, do not produce resolution or representation — makes it possible for us to see these photographs of South Asian immigrants as an archive of diaspora. I turn to a final single print from Gill’s Americans titled Bonnie Singh at home, Bonnie is a cook at Taste of India restaurant. Nashville, Tennessee 2004 (plate 17). Singh, a restaurant worker, sits in his living room with the remains of an evening meal. A neon clock advertising Bud Light casts a pallid aura over the entire room. Below the clock, a television set screens black-­and-­white images from a Hindi film. To the left of the television is a CD player and multiple VCR sets, and underneath are piles of videocassettes. Singh’s heavyset body is displaced right of center and framed by a collection of assorted objects: a granite fireplace, a round glass table, a CD player perched high above the television screen. Singh 200

is a balding, middle-­aged man wearing a sky-­blue T-­shirt, his downcast eyes fixed on the carpeted floor. Only the license plate on the mantelpiece at his right, which announces KHALSA in red block letters (a word alternately translated as “sovereign,” “free,” or “pure”) makes Singh’s Sikh heritage visible. The foreground of the photograph is dominated by the remnants of Singh’s workday: a plate of chana dal, a stack of naan, piles of paper napkins, remote controls, and a pair of spectacles tossed onto the glass table. The room in which Singh sits gives us no view of Nashville, nor can we see him in relation to the longer history of South Asian immigration to the U.S. South. Instead, the photograph emphasizes the commodities purchased through Singh’s labor, a kind of object archive of his life: the videocassettes, a pile of CD s, decorative cups on his mantelpiece, a living room crowded with furniture. Encountering this photograph at eye level, what we see first is the Hindi film hero on the television screen, the actor Manoj Kumar.62 Kumar, who appeared in several blockbuster Hindi films in the 1960s and 1970s, has been celebrated for his portrayal of patriotic Indian subjects: farmers, soldiers, and anticolonial revolutionaries. Kumar is also featured in one of the earliest popular Hindi film depictions of South Asians CHAPTER FOUR

in diaspora, Purab aur Paschim (East and West, 1970), playing the son of a freedom fighter who travels to London, meets a young and modern Indian woman in Britain, and eventually convinces her to return to India with him to become his seemingly traditional wife.63 It is unclear from Gill’s photograph whether the video still of Kumar’s face is from this particular film. But Kumar’s brooding pose, his fist clenched as if in solidarity with Singh’s weary body, underscores the visual relationship between two dominant forms of representation in diaspora, the Bollywood film and the documentary photograph. Kumar’s presence on the television set (at least in Purab aur Paschim) is a cinematic fantasy of return to the homeland, a spectacular display of postcolonial nationalism that disciplines and eventually incorporates both the prodigal male and the diasporic female subject as Indian national subjects. Because Singh’s eyes are averted from the television set as well as from the photographer, he cannot see Kumar’s reflection onscreen and thus cannot acknowledge or identify with the film’s promise of return to the subcontinent. For viewers like myself who encounter this photograph as one in a series of images that are named The Americans, what we want to see are the ways in which immigrant subjects like Singh create and sustain everyday lives, lives that mirror in some ways our own diasporic localities. Singh is surrounded by an array of branded commodities, all of which speak to his location in the United States: the Bud Light clock, the Aquafina water bottle, the KH A LSA license plate, fit for an American car. But it is precisely the accumulation of material objects within the print that displaces Singh as the singular object of our visual consumption, that leaves me feeling unsettled and perhaps even disappointed by my inability to meet Singh’s gaze. To encounter this print is to recognize the fact that though I want to cathect a relationship of identification with Singh’s image, the object lines of the photograph itself direct me to look elsewhere. I cannot identify with Singh, his working life, or the grainy black-­a nd-­ white film that screens endlessly behind him, because the photograph refuses my desire for mimetic representation. Having seen this photograph numerous times both in the exhibition context and in the published catalogue, I have dwelled at length on what draws me to this particular image and why I insist on some form of identity with the subject of this print.64 I have wondered often about Singh’s loneliness, and whether he reflects my own alienation here in the United States, or whether the videocassettes he surrounds himself with contain not only Bollywood films but also home video footage, constituting a ARCHIVES OF DIASPORA

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moving-­i mage archive of his family members on the subcontinent and elsewhere. I have thought of whether my act of viewing this image is to provide some company to Singh at the end of his workday, and perhaps in so doing recuperate some solace for myself. It was only recently, when I could not bear to see Singh’s solitary figure and quickly averted my eyes from the image, that I glanced back and noticed, at the bottom left corner of the print, someone else’s knee at the glass coffee table. It was only then that I realized that the picture I thought I saw of Singh’s life — his boredom and sadness, the leftovers he eats for dinner, the siren call of return projected by Manoj Kumar’s face — was in fact a life shared in the company of someone else. That what I had read as my inability to identify with him — a feeling that expanded to an inability to be him — was a problem of seeing. For large numbers of South Asian diasporic viewers, The Americans is an aspirational collection, one that reflects their own desire to belong. It is a name that immigrant subjects can claim for themselves as they engage with photographs on display — a feeling of being able to say, “I too am American” — even if they cannot see themselves transparently or fully in the images that surround them. In this sense, the very act of viewing The Americans requires holding in place the possibility of non202

mimetic identification with the subject of the print. For South Asian diasporic viewers who claim The Americans as a representation of themselves, the images that make up the collection exceed the function of the document. But the fact that we continue to approach the series via a sense of contingency — as if its images cannot fully register the heterogeneity of immigrant lives, as if the photograph fails to capture its own representation — demonstrates the limits of our demands. It is through forms of intimacy and distance that structure our relation to this visual object that we come to see how mimesis haunts our very desire to see ourselves. Walking through the exhibitions that showcase various versions of The Americans — f rom the gallery spaces of Bose Pacia New York to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Newark Art Museum — is an exercise in coming to terms with how much we want to see ourselves reflected in the photographs that surround us. The photographs mirror the intensity of our desire to see ourselves, but the ways in which we see these images are also central to how we constitute our experience as racialized immigrants. Realigning the relationship between subject and object, the nonmimetic viewing strategies that I elucidate offer us another way of CHAPTER FOUR

looking at The Americans: not for its accuracy or its realism, but for its capacity to generate other ways of understanding our lives. As Gill reflects, her diptychs are “not so much a juxtaposition but taking it [the narrative] one step further, or just pushing the narrative a little bit further.”65 To push the narrative further is also to trace a pathway out of the imperial archive, a way of moving beyond our experience of diasporic mimesis. Creating an archive of diaspora is one way of orienting ourselves, in what would otherwise look like a hall of mirrors. We continue to be oriented toward the photograph as an object of representation, but that object does not determine who we are or how we know ourselves. As racialized immigrants and as diasporic subjects, creating new ways of seeing leads us to depart the scene of haunting and experience our own lives as unbound by states of empire.

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EPILOGUE Curating Photography, Seeing Community

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n an unseasonably warm night in November 2015, I opened the doors to Twelve Gates Arts in Philadelphia for the opening of my

exhibition, Ruins and Fabrications. The air was thick with humidity, and the brackish smell of the Delaware River just a few blocks away wafted through the red cobblestone streets. This was my first time curating a public exhibition of photography, and the opening was part of the city’s monthly First Friday art events. The sidewalks were jammed with artists and musicians readying themselves for the night ahead, as neighborhood restaurants prepared for the evening crowds. I had invited nearly two hundred people to the opening, but in the minutes before the exhibition opened, I was struck by the possibility that no one would come at all. Under bright spotlights, the photographic projections, color prints, and digital animations appeared eerily still, as if waiting for their encounter with viewers. As I stood in the doorway, my own excitement took hold of every part of my body, so much so that I almost didn’t see the stream of people who began to enter. Engulfed by enthusiastic greetings and hugs, I became immersed in a social experience that I had not anticipated. In this small gallery space, surrounded by the artworks that I had gathered and people I had invited, I experienced curation not just as a critical practice of displaying visual art but as an affective project of creating community.

I began this book by considering how, as diasporic viewers, we grab hold of photographs of racialized subjects, both archival and contemporary, as if these images can represent us. Despite our compelling desire to see ourselves represented in a variety of visual forms, I have argued that our identification with photography is haunted by colonial histories of documentation and surveillance, within which we are already rendered as objects. Yet on opening night as I stood waiting for the first viewers to arrive at the exhibition, I found myself remaining deeply invested in the possibility that photography can restore a sense of selfhood to ourselves; that the act of seeing can be collective, even collaborative. Curation became one way for me to contend with the affective pull of visual representation, a way of coming to terms with my failure to relinquish what I have described as the practice of diasporic mimesis. As a viewer and as a critic at over a hundred exhibitions of South Asian diasporic art during the previous decade, my experience of consuming visual culture enabled me to deliberate on how and why we claim the images that we see. Pivoting to the role of curator opened out another mode of relating to visual culture, one that compelled me to see more clearly my own desire to belong. Even as I worked to conceptualize the aesthetic, historical, and political relationships among the artworks that I had selected for display, 206

embodying the role of curator brought me closer to what it means to produce a sense of community within the exhibition space, however fleeting that feeling might be. I was invited to curate Ruins and Fabrications by Aisha Zia Khan, the executive director of Twelve Gates Arts, a nonprofit organization established in 2011 whose mission is to “showcase international, multi­ disciplinary arts bound by the sensibilities of a diasporic identity” and to “create and promote projects in the community that cross geographic and cultural boundaries.” 1 To date, Twelve Gates Arts is the only gallery in Philadelphia dedicated to visual and performance art from South Asia, the Middle East, and its diasporas. When Khan and I began the process of drafting the exhibition, I had just begun writing this book, and thought immediately of bringing together the artists I had in mind: Gauri Gill, Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, and Seher Shah. Each of these artists was already a globally recognized name: in 2015, their work was circulating in solo and group shows at international venues including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; and the San Jose Museum of Art, California. By the time Khan and I could schedule a EPILOGUE

fall exhibition, our challenge was to secure artworks that were available for the duration of our show, that could be installed within the confines of a small independent gallery, and to generate funding for the international shipping and handling of these works. Early in the process, I was confronted by the fact that being a curator was far from the glamorous position that I had assumed as an exhibition viewer. In the context of a nonprofit gallery, curating also encompassed being a fund-­raiser, publicist, grant writer, public speaker, and advocate for the artists and their works. Gill and Matthew accepted my invitation to participate in the exhibition, while Shah declined due to existing commitments. For the next eleven months, I was in near constant dialogue with the artists, our conversations encompassing every aspect of the exhibition including the specificities of the artworks, plans for site installation, and catalogue and promotional material.2 I had assumed, somewhat naively, that bringing Matthew’s and Gill’s art to Philadelphia would be an extension of my book or, more precisely, a rendering of my manuscript within the gallery space. What I had not anticipated was that placing their artworks in the gallery itself transformed the nature of the argument I was making and unraveled the narrative that I initially imagined would hold these works together. In my ongoing writing on these artists, I could establish control over the aesthetic objects that they created, as well as my frameworks of analysis. By contrast, the artworks that I brought to Philadelphia were literally out of my hands once on display: the images took on a life of their own for the duration of the exhibition, creating what I experienced as a kind of haunting. In conceptualizing Ruins and Fabrications, my original intent was to create an exhibition of contemporary photography by South Asian diasporic artists that refused to display a coherent narrative of South Asia or South Asians, even in images that explicitly featured South Asian portrait subjects. In my view, the purpose of the exhibition was to push back against the assumption of identity between artist and artwork, as well as between artwork and viewer. The task of the curator, I thought, was to compel viewers to take up nonmimetic ways of looking at photograph-­ based works on display, to demand ways of seeing that were not ethnographic or autobiographical. And yet I came to the project of curating the exhibition after thirteen years of living and working in Philadelphia. Despite having a rich group of friends, I had no claim of belonging to the city, much less to a community that I could name and claim as South C U R AT I N G P H O T O G R A P H Y, S E E I N G C O M M U N I T Y

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Asian American. In this context, what motivated my curation of Ruins and Fabrications was precisely the mimetic relations of racialized subjectivity that I had privately crafted between myself and the artworks that I selected for display, and (far less consciously) between myself and other South Asian diasporic subjects who I anticipated would come to see the show. Ruins and Fabrications emerged out of this bind between mimetic and nonmimetic relations of identity to the artworks, a bind that I embodied but could not admit to or reconcile by the time the show opened. Four works were on display in the gallery, each taking up a different form of photography. In the bay windows of Twelve Gates Arts, looking out onto the streetscape, we placed Matthew’s photo book, Fabricated Memories, which I had first seen in New York in 2005 (see plate 18). Though in the interim I had seen this installation in Toronto, coming to recognize how these altered family photographs rendered the artist’s loss of her father, I could not help but shiver with pleasure when, for the first time, I touched and felt the photographs. As I unfolded the delicate, tissue-­l ike paper with gloved hands, laying the installation in its own glass vitrine, prominently positioning the antique Chesterfield cigarette box that it was originally encased in, I was overwhelmed with nostalgia: not just for this extraordinary aesthetic object that had initiated my 208

scholarly project, but for the viewer I was when I first saw this work, the young woman who felt herself surrounded by other South Asian Americans, strangers who felt like kin on the mezzanine floor of the Queens Museum. Now, as a middle-­aged woman installing Matthew’s work in a city that still did not feel like home, I felt a palpable desire for diasporic community, which in its intensity reminded me that I had still not relinquished my desire to be seen, and to belong. Across the gallery space, I turned toward Matthew’s ReGeneration. In this series, Matthew compiles photographic portraits of three generations of women in a single family to document their journey to the United States: from India and Pakistan in the aftermath of Partition, and from Vietnam after the Vietnam War, making visible experiences of downward and upward class mobility, marriage, death, and reproduction. Layering archival family portraits together with her own photographs of women with their daughters and granddaughters, Matthew created two-­m inute-­long photo animations, which were mounted on iPads concealed by photo mats and frames. Looking at ReGeneration meant looking at the same image multiple times — once, twice, and then a third time — to see how what appeared to be an old family portrait EPILOGUE

could in fact compress a half ­century of immigrant history. Instead of aligning Matthew’s works symmetrically in the gallery space, my curatorial strategy was to create sight lines between the translucent quality of the fabricated photo book in the gallery window and the digital animations of archival and contemporary portraits on the walls. Creating that back-­and-­forth movement enabled me to emphasize how these works make visible the fallibility of photography — or, its failure to fix the object of its own representation. On the opposite wall of the gallery, Khan and I installed Ruined Rainbow Pictures, a collection of photographs taken by children in rural Rajasthan whom Gill had worked with and photographed in the early to mid-­2000s (figure E.1). As part of her collaboration with the children, Gill encouraged them to take photographs of themselves and their homes with cameras she gave them. Most of the children were from Muslim families with small and barren landholdings; in these conditions their parents had become migrant workers. Later, the children dismissed several images that they took, as light had leaked into their camera and “ruined” the images. Retrieving these discarded film rolls more than a decade later, Gill selected and framed the previously unused images. The sunspots and flares on the dense color prints, hung in succession inside the gallery, obscured some portrait subjects and highlighted others, as the images acquired an uncanny beauty. Finally, adjacent to this series of original photographic prints, we installed a projection of Gill’s recent work with the Warli (Adivasi) artist Rajesh Vangad, Fields of Sight (since 2013). Beginning with Gill’s black-­a nd-­white photographs of Vangad, whom she documented in various sites across his home village in Maharashtra, Vangad overlaid Gill’s portrait images with his own black paint drawings. Intertwining memories of place with the photographic document, Vangad and Gill refract the representational qualities of the photograph with drawings that depict the lived experience of indigenous histories and communities. 3 Here the surface of the portrait photograph inscribes multiple times and places: the current environmental destruction of coastal Maharashtra, Gill’s working relation with Vangad as a fellow artist, and Vangad’s narration of Warli time. In the absence of original images at the time, all of which had been sold prior to the installation of our show (since 2015, more images have been added to this work in progress), Gill, Khan, and I decided to screen a projection of the series. As the projector hummed in one corner of the gallery, the images acquired a spectral quality, as the density and texture of the painted C U R AT I N G P H O T O G R A P H Y, S E E I N G C O M M U N I T Y

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E.1  Gauri Gill, Ruined Rainbow Pictures. Installation at Ruins and Fabrications, Twelve Gates Arts, 2015. COPY RIGHT GAURI GIL L . PHOTOGR APH BY STE VEN M. FAL K .

photographs came alive on the walls. I had intended for the display of Fields of Sight to expand the collaborative dimensions of the series, as viewers would become interlocutors to the aesthetic practice between Gill and Vangad. But in the act of seeing both Ruined Rainbow Pictures and Fields of Sight, I came to recognize how photography records both loss and presence: in the discarded film rolls that yielded photographs documenting the small pleasures of children’s daily lives, and in images of a landscape destroyed by neoliberal industrialization that continues to hold the sovereignty of indigenous life. Bringing together these four artworks to Philadelphia for the first time, my curatorial statement, posted by the entrance to Twelve Gates Arts, emphasized the relationship between photography and memory, between documentation and self-­representation, and between the artist and her archives. I privately wished for viewers to occupy an intimate relation to the images on display, as if simply by installing the photographs that I was drawn to, I could replicate in a crowd of strangers my feelEPILOGUE

ings in relation to these artworks. But as viewers began to filter into the gallery, I came to see that the very idea of representation was fractured through the space of the exhibition. More precisely, when students and colleagues shared with me the sight lines that they established between and among the images, sight lines that diverged widely from what I anticipated, their viewing undid the project of representation itself. What does it mean to create an exhibition that repeals the representational capacities of the photographic image, and what emerges when viewers refuse, retrain, and redirect their view from the image? On the opening night for Ruins and Fabrications, I arranged a special preview of the exhibition for my students. That semester, the majority of my students were Asian American, Latinx, and Black; their participation in the preview was one of many extracurricular activities I had organized for a class on cultural studies, alongside fieldwork at public events and readings on feminist and queer theory. We had already discussed in class the capacity of the photographic image to document and archive our racialized selves; we had also talked about what it means to develop ways of seeing images that direct us toward objects other than the racialized subjects we were looking for. But as I interacted with my students that night, talking with them about Gill and Matthew’s art, I saw how their own mimetic and nonmimetic identification with the photographic works on display occurred simultaneously. Some of them watched Matthew’s animated photographs intently and repeatedly, as if they could compel the image to stay still if they just looked at it longer. Others made photographs of the photographs on the walls, capturing the image, shadowing it with their own bodies. Several students of color seemed to spend as much time looking at other viewers as they did at the artwork on display, captivated by the fact that they were surrounded, in this small gallery space, by people of color, a world away from the predominantly white campus of Swarthmore. A few commented on the fact that they were disoriented by my presence in the gallery, so used were they to my role as a teacher in the classroom. Still others breezed out of the gallery and into the vibrant, noisy space of the street, taking selfies. For my students, it was not the act of seeing photography that constituted their experience of Ruins and Fabrications. Instead, it was every part of their experience: taking the train into Philadelphia, walking on the cobblestone streets of the Old City neighborhood, wandering in and out of adjacent galleries with friends, seeing me outside the confines of the classroom, occupying my role as a curator and scholar. The work of seeing became a mode of C U R AT I N G P H O T O G R A P H Y, S E E I N G C O M M U N I T Y

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being: a way for these students of color to embody misaligned relations of identification with images, places, and people. Through their acute and sustained interest in the artwork as well as their deferral and estrangement from it, the images on display — those photographs and artists that I felt so close to — became something else: not a set of images that restore us to ourselves, not an archive of racialized subjectivity, but objects that make us look elsewhere, that produce asymmetrical ways of seeing and being (see plate 19). Community itself, in other words, had become unbound from what I had expected to see. I had curated an exhibition of South Asian diasporic photography in order to showcase the work of artists I admired and artworks I felt I belonged to. I had created this exhibitionary narrative to reframe ethnographic visual frameworks of racialized subjectivity and to challenge how we see photography as representational, as truthful, and as constituting a static archival document. But I had also curated the exhibition out of a desire to produce community. Seeing and feeling my own exhibition through the mimetic and nonmimetic identifications that viewers established in relation to the artworks and to each other reoriented entirely what I thought I wanted to see. By shifting my gaze away from the vertical relation between viewer and artwork, I could begin to 212

see the horizontal social ties forged among viewers in the exhibition site, as well as the connections that viewers established with people and objects inside and outside the gallery. These asymmetrical social relations created brief, ephemeral spaces of racialized community at Twelve Gates Arts, but they also rerouted the object of representation itself. Over the six weeks of the exhibition, Ruins and Fabrications did not create the sustainable model of community that I aspired to. Nor were Gill and Matthew’s works in this show reviewed in the city’s major papers. The only archive left behind was a collection of professional photographs of the exhibition installation from opening night, an article in one of the college newspapers, and a series of postings on social media from Twelve Gates Arts.4 As a public event and as an aesthetic narrative, the exhibition generated something that looked and felt like an incomplete experience of representation. Indeed, the minor scale of my curatorial venture became magnified when I realized that Ruins and Fabrications would be held concurrently, entirely by coincidence, with a major exhibition of contemporary Indian photography at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA). 5 At this august institution, ensconced within its luminously lit interiors, viewers could see another set of photographs by Gauri Gill: her EPILOGUE

highly regarded portraits of young women and girls in rural Rajasthan (from the series Balika Mela), as well as single prints by Sunil Gupta. Yet instead of producing what I have called an archive of diaspora, the experience of seeing Gill and Gupta’s photographs together with the works of other artists at the PM A enabled a nationalist celebration of Indian art, even though many of the featured artists lived and worked outside the subcontinent. One month after the opening of Ruins and Fabrications, the inauguration of this exhibition at the PM A was an opulent affair, attracting hundreds of upper-­middle-­class South Asian, white, and Asian American art collectors, dealers, and academics. As at the opening night for Beyond Bollywood at the Smithsonian, South Asian Americans were visible in full force, and our visibility felt like representation. As I chatted with friends and acquaintances by the PM A’s magisterial façade, I was distinctly reminded of my own failure to create and sustain a community of this size and scale at Twelve Gates Arts. But to stay with that sense of failure, rather than aiming to succeed in full and complete representation, is part of the work of seeing. Even in an exhibition like Ruins and Fabrications that was distinctly low budget and low tech, even in a small independent gallery space that could barely accommodate the artists’ works, and even when I could not hold onto the feeling of community that swelled within the gallery on that November opening night, I experienced flashes of mimetic identification with the artwork, the artists, and the viewers. When I organized a public dialogue with Matthew at Twelve Gates Arts, the audience was packed with friends, colleagues, students, artists, and local community members, along with curators and collectors from the PM A .6 Viewers spoke movingly of their own family archives, memories that were locked away in dusty slides and overexposed Polaroids that accumulated in their homes and basements, but which now — in relation to Matthew and Gill’s work — t hey retrieved and remembered through telling their stories. At other times, the entire exhibition appeared to compel non­ mimetic forms of identification, even from myself as a curator. Walking by Twelve Gates Arts on a crisp December day, a fortnight after my public talk with Matthew, I was struck by how empty the gallery appeared: how the projectors, endlessly screening looped images of immigrant families and photographs of indigenous homelands, reflected these photographs on ghostly white walls, with no viewer in sight. As I peered into the gallery, I felt a familiar sense of abjection. Far from pushing back against narratives of identity and representation, it seemed to me that C U R AT I N G P H O T O G R A P H Y, S E E I N G C O M M U N I T Y

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among the artworks that composed Ruins and Fabrications, there was no exhibitionary narrative at all. To desire aesthetic narratives of representation, whether as a scholar or as a curator, as an artist or as a viewer, does not necessarily mean that we feel good about what we see. Representation can be partial and fractured, and our discomfited acts of seeing can guide us to consider other objects, within and outside the picture frame, that we may initially ignore. Sometimes the work of seeing also means that we come to see ourselves as objects on display. To curate a visual narrative of race and diaspora, and to do so in the name of producing and embodying racialized community, is to recognize that the visibility promised by the photographic object remains elusive. The image cannot restore us to ourselves, nor can it conjure the community that we desire. But as we look, and look again, at the photograph, our collective work moves us toward other ways of seeing. In curating to make visible our subjectivities as racialized immigrants, we tie together unexpected times and places, generating ways of being that may yet relieve us from the experience of haunting.

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EPILOGUE

NOTES

Introduction: The Work of Seeing

1 Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), xiii.

2 An archival copy of the Queens Museum of Art exhibition catalogue for Fatal Love, with curatorial essays and a full description of artists and their works, is available online at Fatal Love: South Asian American Art Now: February 27 – June 5, 2005, accessed April 9, 2020, http://www.queens museum.org/wp-­content/uploads/2017/03/Fatal%20Love.pdf. 3 Holland Cotter, “Taking a Magical Flight through Modern India,” New York Times, March 4, 2005, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/04/arts /design/taking-­a-­magical-­flight-­t hrough-­modern-­india.html. 4 The exhibition’s website states, “Before September 11 most of the artists in the community were concerned to reconstruct a diasporic identity and challenge an imposed politics of representation. Since September 11 many artists have been concerned to confront, challenge and undermine the distorted and limited presentations of South Asian communities that are too often presented by the media and the government. It is a move from an art that seeks to define an identity for the community to an art that seeks to resist a false, imposed identity.” Fatal Love: South Asian American Art Now: February 27 – June 5, 2005, accessed April 9, 2020, http://www.queens museum.org/2015/11/fatal-­love-­south-­asian-­american-­art-­now.

5 My definition of visual art as a commodity that acquires a social life through circulation and consumption builds on Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

6 I use the term “native” in reference to nineteenth-­century South Asia, in distinction from the term “Native American.” While indigenous subjects in the Americas may self-­identify as Native, in South Asia the term “native” emerges out of colonial regimes of race and power, as British administrators identified entire populations as “native,” even when these populations did not include indigenous subjects. I discuss the relation between colonial and settler colonial paradigms of indigeneity further in chapter 2.

7 Kandice Chuh, The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 95. 8 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xvi. 9 Bakirathi Mani, Aspiring to Home: South Asians in America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). Art/activist festivals that were central to queer and transnational forms of South Asian diasporic public cultures in the 1990s and 2000s include Desh Pardesh, Diasporadics, and Artwallah. 10 The global circulation of South Asian art mirrors the rapid rise in the value and display of contemporary art from mainland China during the same period. See Melissa Chiu, Breakout: Chinese Art outside China (Milan: Charta, 2006). 11 Major exhibitions of contemporary South Asian art in the early 2000s include Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan, curated by Salima Hashmi (Asia Society, 2009 – 2010); Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, curated by Sunil Gupta (Whitechapel Gallery, 2010); The Matter Within: New Contemporary Art of India, curated by Betti-­Sue Hertz (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2012 – 2013); After Midnight: Indian Modernism to Contemporary India 1947/1997, curated by Arshiya Lokhandwala (Queens Museum, 2015); and Postdate: Photography and Inherited History in India, curated by Jodi Throckmorton (San Jose Museum of Art, 2015). 12 Edge of Desire: Recent Art from India, curated by Chaitanya Sambrani (Asia

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Society Museum, March 1 – June 5, 2005; and Queens Museum of Art, February 27 – June 5, 2005). 13 “Asia Society Presents ‘Lucid Dreams and Distant Visions: South Asian Art in the Diaspora,’ ” Asia Society, April 26, 2017, https://asiasociety.org /media/asia-­society-­museum-­presents-­lucid-­dreams-­and-­distant-­v isions -­south-­asian-­art-­diaspora. 14 “Fatal Love: Where Are We Now?,” Queens Museum, July 1, 2017, http:// www.queensmuseum.org/events/fatal-­love. 15 Holland Cotter, “A Local Place for a Global Neighborhood,” New York Times, November 7, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/08/arts /design/the-­expanded-­queens-­museum-­reopens.html. 16 My definition of nonmimetic identification draws in spirit upon José Esteban Muñoz’s seminal Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 17 Lisa Lowe, “The State of the Archives,” faculty seminar held at Swarthmore College, March 23, 2017. 18 David Eng, “The Feeling of Photography, the Feeling of Kinship,” in Feeling Photography, ed. Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 328. 19 Leigh Raiford, “Notes toward a Photographic Practice of Diaspora,” English Language Notes 44, no. 2 (2006): 213.

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

20 Gayatri Gopinath, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diasporas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 1. 21 For a critical perspective on photography and film as mimetic forms of representation, see Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994), 180. 22 Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Visions: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Kimberly Juanita Brown, The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2015); Krista Thompson, Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); and Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 23 Tina Campt, Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 74. 24 Eng, “The Feeling of Photography,” 343. 25 Kristen J. Warner, “In the Time of Plastic Representation,” Film Quarterly 71, no. 2 (winter 2017): 33. See also Kristen J. Warner, “They Gon’ Think You Loud Regardless: Rachetness, Reality Television, and Black Womanhood,” Camera Obscura 30, no. 1 (2015): 129 – 153. 26 On the ethical and affective consequences of the failed photographic image, see Kimberly Juanita Brown, “Regarding the Pain of the Other: Photography, Famine, and the Transference of Affect,” in Feeling Photography, ed. Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 181 – 203. 27 Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 88. 28 Halberstam, Queer Art of Failure, 2 – 3. 29 Stuart Hall, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?,” Social Justice 20, nos. 1 – 2 (spring 1993): 111. 30 On the relation between surveillance, citizenship, and the neoliberal state, see Inderpal Grewal, Saving the Security State: Exceptional Citizens in Twenty-­First-­Century America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); on the racial and economic geographies produced by neoliberalism, see David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996); and on the refusal to inhabit heteronormative modes of living within the neoliberal state, see Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 31 Chuh, The Difference Aesthetics Makes, xii. 32 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 33 Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 6.

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34 Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 7. 35 Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 4. 36 Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 17 – 53. 37 As Anjali Arondekar writes, “There is, of course, no self-­evident or singular colonial archive. . . . What has remained stable . . . is a narrative of the colonial archive as a secret archive, a space precariously hinged between a language of loss and recovery, absence and presence.” Arondekar, For the Record, 13. 38 On the colonial photograph as postcard, see Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); on the photograph as ethnographic document, see Christopher Pinney, Photography and Anthropology (London: Reaktion, 2011). 39 See in particular Saloni Mathur, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and Krista Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 40 Krista Thompson, “ ‘I Am Rendered Speechless by Your Idea of Beauty’: The Picturesque in History and Art in the Postcolony,” in Empires of Vision, ed. Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 474. 41 Fred Wilson and Howard Halle, “Mining the Museum,” Grand Street, no.

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44 (1993): 151 – 172, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25007622. 42 See Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); and Gayatri Gopinath, “Archive, Affect, and the Everyday: Queer Diasporic Re-­ visions,” in Political Emotions: New Agendas in Communication (New York: Routledge, 2010), 165 – 192. 43 Gopinath, Unruly Visions, 11. 44 A seminal instance of Asian American art as a public representation of Asian American lives was the exhibition Asia America, curated by Margo Machida (Asia Society Museum, 1996). 45 On the legacy of representational politics in contemporary Asian American art, see Melissa Chiu, Karin Higa, and Susette Min, eds., One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 26 – 33. 46 Elaine Kim, “Interstitial Subjects: Asian American Visual Art as a Site for New Cultural Conversations,” in Fresh Talk, Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art, ed. Elaine Kim, Margo Machida, and Sharon Mizota (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 32. 47 See Margo Machida, Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). While Machida’s method of “oral hermeneutics” argues for examining art

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

in dialogic relation to the artist and the subject of the artwork, it also insists on a stable construct of Asian American identity. 48 Daniell Cornell and Mark Dean Johnson, eds., Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900 – 1970 (Berkeley: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and University of California Press, 2009). 49 Celine Parreñas Shimizu, The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian American Women on Scene and Screen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 50 David Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 51 Ronak Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 10. 52 Sarita See, The Filipino Primitive: Accumulation and Resistance in the Imperial Museum (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 143 – 1 44. 53 Sarita See, The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and Performance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 54 Susette Min, Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 83. 55 Min, Unnamable, 28. 56 Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Mathur, India by Design; Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 57 On photography and its centrality to colonial practices of representation, see Tapati Guha-­Thakurta, “The Compulsions of Visual Representation in Colonial India,” in Traces of India: Photography, Architecture, and the Politics of Representation, 1850 – 1900, ed. Maria Antonella Pelizzari (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 108 – 139. On photography and its relation to modern and postmodern forms of South Asian subjectivity, see Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism? (New Delhi: Tulika, 2000); and Iftikhar Dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). On photography and its anticipation of a modern India, see Rebecca Brown, Art for a Modern India, 1947 – 1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); and Beth Citron, “Rethinking the Figure in Early Photography from South Asia,” in Allegory and Illusion: Early Portrait Photography from South Asia, ed. Beth Citron and Rahaab Allana (Ahmedabad: The Alkazi Collection of Photography and Mapin, 2013), 30 – 45. On the visual and the secular in colonial and postcolonial art, see Patricia Uberoi, “ ‘Unity in Diversity’? Dilemmas of Nationhood in Indian Calendar Art,” in Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India, ed. Sumathi Ramaswamy (New Delhi: Sage, 2003), 191 – 232. 58 Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Christopher Pinney, The Com-

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219

ing of Photography in India (London: British Library, 2008), 3, emphasis in original. 59 Christopher Pinney, “Some Indian ‘Views of India’: The Ethics of Representation,” in Traces of India: Photography, Architecture, and the Politics of Representation, 1850 – 1900, ed. Maria Antonella Pelizzari (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 262 – 275. 60 Zahid Chaudhary, Afterimage of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 130 – 131. 61 On the relation between Indian American viewers and exhibitions of Indian art, see Vidya Dehejia, “Identity and Visibility: Reflections on Museum Displays of South Asian Art,” in New Cosmopolitanisms: South Asians in the U.S., ed. Gita Rajan and Shailja Sharma (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 71 – 90. 62 Ruins and Fabrications, curated by Bakirathi Mani, Twelve Gates Arts, Philadelphia, November 6 – December 15, 2015, http://www.twelvegatesarts .org/exhibitions/2016/11/6/ruins-­and-­fabrications. 63 Elspeth Brown and Thy Phu, “Introduction,” in Feeling Photography, ed. Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 64 Min, Unnamable, 30.

One. Uncanny Feelings

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A preliminary version of chapter 1 was published as “Archives of Empire: Seher Shah’s Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force,” in Social Text 29, no. 3 (2011): 127 – 138.

1 The Delhi Durbars were held three times over a fifty-­year period to establish British rule over the subcontinent in the aftermath of the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny, in 1877, 1903, and 1911. The Durbars successively commemorated the coronations of Queen Victoria, King Edward VII, and King George V as empress and emperors of India.

2 “Paper to Monument: Seher Shah,” Nature Morte, December 8, 2009 –  January 9, 2010, http://naturemorte.com/exhibitions/papertomonument/. In 2009, Nature Morte was affiliated with Bose Pacia Gallery, New York, an exhibition site I discuss in chapter 4. 3 Though Shah is now based in New Delhi, her drawings and sculptures are globally exhibited in venues as diverse as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Basel, Switzerland; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Green Art Gallery, Dubai; and the Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi, among others. 4 Peter Nagy, “Deep in the Heart of the Brain,” and “Jihad Pop: An Interview with Seher Shah and Tom Finkelpearl,” both in Seher Shah, Seher Shah: Jihad Pop (New York: Bose Pacia Gallery, 2008), 4, 72.

5 Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), 21.

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

6 David Eng, “The Feeling of Photography, the Feeling of Kinship,” in Feeling Photography, ed. Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 331. 7 Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3 – 30. 8 The historian Tapati Guha-­Thakurta argues that the picturesque, as an aesthetic form, defines the colonial “drive for order and history.” Writing on British imperial drawings of Indian monuments, she contends that such drawings “called not just for grand and authentic representation; they also demanded to be ‘read’ and decoded. The challenge was to render each building historically and architecturally ‘legible.’ ” Tapati Guha-­Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 13. For examples of the picturesque as a definitive aesthetic of colonial British landscape photography, see Arthur Ollman, Samuel Bourne: Images of India (Carmel, CA: Friends of Photography, 1983). 9 Zahid Chaudhary, Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-­ Century India (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 24. 10 Chaudhary, Afterimage of Empire, 125. 11 Natasha Eaton, Mimesis across Empires: Artworks and Networks in India, 1765 – 1860 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 1, 4. 12 Iftikhar Dadi, “Seher Shah,” in Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space, ed. Iftikhar Dadi and Hammad Nasr (London: Green Cardamom; Ithaca, NY: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, 2012), 208. 13 Iftikhar Dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 226. 14 Art historian Karen Kurczynski suggests, “The large scale [of Shah’s work] turns a private fantasy into a public architectural scheme, collapsing the formats of sketchbook and architectural drawing to situate the viewer in an unstable, transcultural, public-­private space.” Karen Kurczynski, “Drawing Is the New Painting,” Art Journal 70, no. 1 (spring 2011): 96. 15 On the “uncanny” as a means of reading Asian racialization, see Seo-­ Young Chu, “I, Stereotype: Detained in the Uncanny Valley,” in Techno-­ Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media, ed. David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 76 – 88. 16 Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers, vol. 4, trans. Alix Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 2. All subsequent references rely on this translation. An alternate translation reads, “For him [Jentsch] the essential condition for the emergence of a sense of the uncanny is intellectual uncertainty. One would suppose, then, that the uncanny would always be an area in which a person was unsure of his way around: the better oriented he was in the world around him, the less likely he would be to find the objects and oc-

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currences in it uncanny.” See Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David Mclintock (London: Penguin, 2003), 125. 17 Freud, Collected Papers, 2. 18 Freud, Collected Papers, 11. 19 Freud, Collected Papers, 11. 20 Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 2. 21 Shimakawa, National Abjection, 3, 10. 22 Freud, Collected Papers, 11. 23 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 25 – 63. On encountering strange objects within one’s own home, Avery Gordon reminds us that Sabina Spielrein encountered a mirror image of herself as a wolf “in a familiar room become alien,” where the uncanny emerged when she “saw herself animistically, as if herself and yet unknown, a stranger.” Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 50. 24 Eaton, Mimesis across Empires, 235. 25 Roland Barthes, The Neutral, trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 164. Quoted in Eaton, Mimesis across Empires, 235. 26 Many thanks to Lisa Arellano for bringing this to my attention. 27 “Paper to Monument: Seher Shah.”

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28 Quoted in Murtaza Vali, ed., Brute Ornament: Kamrooz Aram and Seher Shah (Dubai: Green Art Gallery, 2012), 50. 29 Meenakshi Thirukode, “Seher Shah,” WhiteWall Magazine, February 5, 2010, https://www.gagallery.com/press/whitewall-­magazine. 30 Himanshu Bhagat, “Mind over Matter,” LiveMint, December 4, 2009, https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/tjratua8lmbCBtX2ptQTlL/Mind-­over -­matter.html. 31 Jisha Menon, The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan, and the Memory of Partition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 5. 32 Gayatri Gopinath, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diasporas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 109. 33 Santhi Kavuri-­Bauer, Monumental Matters: The Power, Subjectivity, and Space of India’s Mughal Architecture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 76. 34 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­Making in Nineteenth-­Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 35 Tapati Guha-­Thakurta, “The Compulsions of Visual Representation in Colonial India,” in Traces of India: Photography, Architecture, and the Politics of Representation, 1850 – 1900, ed. Maria Antonella Pelizzari (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 111.

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

36 Eaton, Mimesis across Empires, 63. 37 Tim Barringer, “Sonic Spectacles of Empire: The Audio-­Visual Nexus, Delhi-­L ondon, 1911 – 1 2,” in Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums, and Material Culture, ed. Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, and Ruth B. Philips (New York: Berg, 2006), 176. 38 Barringer, “Sonic Spectacles,” 175. 39 Julie Codell, “On the Delhi Coronation Durbars, 1877, 1903, 1911,” BR ANCH : Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-­Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga, 2012, http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=julie-­codell -­on-­t he-­delhi-­coronation-­durbars-­1877-­1903-­1911. 40 Barringer, “Sonic Spectacles,” 172. 41 The 1903 Durbar was not Curzon’s first attempt to monumentalize empire: he was also the architect of the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta. Thomas Metcalf, “Monuments and Memorials: Lord Curzon’s Creation of a Past for the Raj,” in Traces of India: Photography, Architecture, and the Politics of Representation, 1850 – 1900, ed. Maria Antonella Pelizzari (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 249. 42 Charles Allen, “Imperial Image: The Grand Durbars of 1903 and 1911,” in India through the Lens: Photography 1840 – 1911, ed. Vidya Dehejia (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2000), 238. 43 John M. MacKenzie, “Exhibiting Empire at the Delhi Durbar of 1911: Imperial and Cultural Contexts,” in Exhibiting the Empire: Cultures of Display and the British Empire, ed. John McAleer and John M. MacKenzie (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2015), 194. 44 Julie Codell, “Photography and the Delhi Coronation Durbars: 1877, 1903, 1911,” in Power and Resistance: The Delhi Coronation Durbars 1877, 1903, 1911, ed. Julie Codell (Ahmedabad: The Alkazi Collection of Photography and Mapin, 2012), 17. 45 Allen, “Imperial Image,” 234. 46 The anthropologist Bernard Cohn notes that the assemblage of maharajas, nawabs, and nizams at the 1877 Durbar, along with their retinues, produced a “sociology of India” at the Durbar. Such ethnographic codification of Indians was central to establishing British administrative control over a population otherwise perceived as unruly. See Bernard Cohn, “Representing Authority in Victorian India,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. E. J. Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 165 – 210. 47 Thomas Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 76. 48 Codell, “Photography and the Delhi Coronation Durbars,” 31 – 34. 49 The Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib pronounced, “Delhi is not a city now. It is a camp.” Quoted in Eaton, Mimesis across Empires, 236. 50 Codell, “Photography and the Delhi Coronation Durbars,” 30. 51 Codell, “On the Delhi Coronation Durbars.”

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52 Tulay Atak, “Breaking a Coconut in Mumbai on the CSMVS ,” in No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in India, ed. Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh (New Delhi: Routledge, 2014), 223. 53 Metcalf, An Imperial Vision, 87. 54 Metcalf, An Imperial Vision, 58. 55 Metcalf, An Imperial Vision, 70. The Indo-­Saracenic style also traveled back to England, as seen in the paisley ironwork at London’s Paddington Station. Christopher Pinney, “Creole Europe: The Reflection of a Reflection,” in Empires of Vision: A Reader, ed. Martin Jay and Sumathi Rama­ swamy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 539 – 565. 56 Preeti Chopra, A Joint Enterprise: Indian Elites and the Making of British Bombay (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 32. 57 Chopra, Joint Enterprise, 56. 58 Kavuri-­Bauer notes, “The interplay of power, subjectivity and creativity produce the monument recursively and radically as one of the most critical and unstable spaces of modern India.” Kavuri-­Bauer, Monumental Matters, 14. 59 Thomas R. Metcalf, “Imperial Towns and Cities,” in The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire, ed. P. J. Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 224 – 254. 60 Codell, “Photography and the Delhi Coronation Durbars,” 35. 61 James R. Ryan and Nicole J. Thomas, “Landscapes of Performance: Staging the Delhi Durbars,” in Power and Resistance: The Delhi Coronation Durbars, ed. Julie Codell (Mumbai: Mapin and the Alkazi Collection of Photog-

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raphy, 2012), 59. 62 For example, the Indian photographer Raja Deen Dayal was bankrupted by his studio production of albums commemorating the 1903 Durbar. Deepali Dewan, “The Limits of Photography: The Dayal Studio’s Coronation Album,” in Power and Resistance: The Delhi Coronation Durbars, ed. Julie Codell (Ahmedabad: The Alkazi Collection of Photography and Mapin, 2012), 142 – 159. 63 Lovat Fraser, At Delhi (Bombay: Times of India Press, 1903), 83 – 84. Quoted in Ryan and Thomas, “Landscapes of Performance,” 67. 64 Saloni Mathur also emphasizes the audible presence of the camera at the Durbars, citing the Australian painter Mortimer Menpes, who describes “the sound of ping, ping, ping all over the place, and the buzz of the cinematograph.” Saloni Mathur, “The Durbar and Visual Arts: Revisiting the Picture Archive,” in Power and Resistance: The Delhi Coronation Durbars, ed. Julie Codell (Ahmedabad: The Alkazi Collection of Photography and Mapin, 2012), 77. 65 Dewan, “The Limits of Photography,” 142. 66 Dewan, “The Limits of Photography,” 143. 67 Codell provides somewhat different figures, writing that the “amphitheaters and arenas accommodated 84,000 spectators in 1877 and 250,000 by 1911.” Codell, “On the Delhi Coronation Durbars.”

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

68 Metcalf, Imperial Vision, 201. 69 Metcalf, Imperial Vision, 201. 70 Ryan and Thomas, “Landscapes of Performance,” 59. 71 MacKenzie, “Exhibiting Empire,” 203. 72 MacKenzie suggests that the pageantry of the Durbar lives on through the spectacular display of missiles, marching bands, and cavalrymen that marks the Republic Day parades held annually in New Delhi. See Mac­ Kenzie, “Exhibiting Empire.” On the performance of postcolonial nationhood via the Republic Day parade, see Jyotindra Jain, “India’s Republic Day Parades: Restoring Identities, Constructing the Nation,” in India’s Popular Culture: Iconic Spaces and Fluid Images, ed. Jyotindra Jain (Mumbai: Marg, 2007), 60 – 75. 73 Allen, “Imperial Image,” 235. 74 Allen, “Imperial Image,” 235. 75 Codell, “On the Delhi Coronation Durbars.” 76 Aparna Balachandran and Deborah Sutton, “Delhi’s Coronation Park Highlights How Urban Governance Ignores Both History and the Public,” The Wire, September 28, 2017, https://thewire.in/181925/coronation-­park -­confederate-­statues/. 77 “AHA Statement on Confederate Monuments,” American Historical Association, August 2017, https://www.historians.org/news-­and-­advocacy /statements-­and-­resolutions-­of-­support-­and-­protest/aha-­statement-­on -­confederate-­monuments. 78 Allen, “Imperial Image,” 239. 79 Okwui Enwezor, “Archive Fever: Photography between History and the Monument,” in Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (New York: Steidl and International Center of Photography, 2008), 35. 80 Enwezor, “Archive Fever,” 29. 81 Enwezor, “Archive Fever,” 29. 82 For a compilation of U.S. television news footage on the morning of September 11, 2001, see Backflash971, “September 11th as It Happened: The Definitive Live News Montage,” YouTube, October 5, 2014, https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=IjXgbpkKnKo. This and other news image compilations from that day are readily available on online platforms such as YouTube. 83 In 2016, the Partition Museum was established in Amritsar, Punjab, to document, display, and archive oral and visual histories of the 1947 partition of the subcontinent (https://www.partitionmuseum.org). 84 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 96. 85 Peggy Phelan, “Haunted Stages: Performance and the Photographic Effect,” in Haunted: Contemporary Photography, Video, Performance, ed. Jennifer Lessing and Nan Trotman (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2010), 59.

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86 David Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Radicalization of Intimacy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 135. 87 Enwezor, “Archive Fever,” 33. 88 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 7.

Two. Representation in the Colonial Archive

1 Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Annu Palakunnathu Matthew: Bollywood Cowboys and Indians from India (Syracuse, NY: Light Work/Robert B. Menschel Media Center, 2002), 34.

2 Ann Laura Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen,” and “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post)Colonial Studies,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 1 – 67. 3 Raqs Media Collective, “In the Theater of Memory: The Work of Contemporary Art in the Photographic Archive,” Lalit Kala Contemporary, no. 52 (2012): 88. 4 Parul Dave Mukherji, “The Photographic Present: The Here and the Now of Contemporary Indian Art,” in The Matter Within: New Contemporary Art of India, ed. Betti Sue-­Hertz, Nancy Adjania, and Parul Dave Mukherji (San Francisco: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2011), 53.

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5 Original images from The People of India as well as a facsimile of selections from the eight-­volume set were displayed in New York City in the exhibition Allegory and Illusion: Early Portrait Photography from South Asia, curated by Beth Citron and Rahaab Allana (New York: Rubin Museum of Art, October 16, 2013 – February 10, 2014).

6 Matthew’s photography has been widely exhibited in the past decade, including at the MFA Boston, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the 2018 Kochi-­Muziris Biennale. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Royal Ontario Museum, the George Eastman House, Fogg Museum at Harvard, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the RISD Museum. 7 Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, An Indian from India, accessed May 8, 2018, http://www.annumatthew.com/gallery/an-­indian-­f rom-­india/. 8 Shona Jackson, Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 64. 9 Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 179. 10 Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xxxiii – x xxiv. 11 Gayatri Gopinath, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 13.

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

12 J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 9. 13 Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 18. 14 Manu Vimalassery, “Antecedents of Imperial Incarceration: Fort Marion to Guantánamo,” in The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power, ed. Vivek Bald, Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, and Manu Vimalassery (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 367. 15 I take the term “picture-­making” from Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 16 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xvi. 17 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, xvi. 18 Coll Thrush, Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-­Over Place (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007); see also Jennifer Ott, “Seattle Board of Trustees Passes Ordinance, Calling for Removal of Indians from the Town, on February 7, 1865,” History Link, December 7, 2014, http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?displaypage=output.cfm &file_id=10979. 19 On settler colonial portraiture of Native subjects, see Elizabeth Hutchinson, “From Pantheon to Indian Gallery: Art and Sovereignty on the Early Nineteenth-­Century Frontier,” Journal of American Studies 47, no. 2 (2013): 313 – 337; as well as Elizabeth Hutchinson, “The Dress of His Nation,” Winterthur Portfolio 45, no. 2 – 3 (2011): 209 – 228. 20 Quoted in Shannon Egan, “Yet in a Primitive Condition: Edward Curtis’s North American Indian,” American Art 20, no. 3 (2006): 63. 21 As Jean M. O’Brien notes in the context of mid-­nineteenth-­century New England, “Indian history is narrated in the past tense, which places an additional burden on the possibility of Indian futures.” Jean O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 140. 22 O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting, xiii. 23 O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting, 28. 24 Estelle Jussim, “Technology or Aesthetics: Alfred Stieglitz and Pho­ togravure,” in The Eternal Moment: Essays on the Photographic Image, ed. Estelle Jussim (New York: Aperture, 1989), 42. Quoted in Shamoon Zamir, The Gift of the Face: Portraiture and Time in Edward S. Curtis’s “The North American Indian” (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 23. 25 Christopher Lyman, The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions: Photographs of Indians by Edward S. Curtis (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982), 70.

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

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26 Lyman, The Vanishing Race, 64 – 107. 27 Marie Clements and Rita Leistner, The Edward Curtis Project: A Modern Picture Story (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2010), 72. 28 See for example Steadman Upham and Nat Zappia, The Many Faces of Edward Sherriff Curtis: Portraits and Stories from Native North America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); and Christopher Cardozo, Edward S. Curtis: The Women (New York: Bulfinch, 2005). 29 Aaron Glass and Brad Evans, “Introduction,” in Return to the Land of the Head Hunters: Edward S. Curtis, the Kwakwaka’wakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema, ed. Aaron Glass and Brad Evans (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014), 4. 30 The dynamic range of photo-­based art by contemporary Native artists includes but is not limited to Wendy Redstar, Family Portraits and White Squaw; Will Wilson, The Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange (CIPX ); Zig Jackson, Indian Photographing Tourists Photographing Sacred Sites; and Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, Double Vision and Photographic Memoirs of an Aboriginal Savant. 31 See E. Richard Atleo, Pam Brown, Marie Clements, Karmen Crey, Miqe’l Icesis Dangeli, Andy Everson, Linc Kesler, David Neel, Evelyn Vanderhoop, and William Waden Jr., “Old Images/New Views: Indigenous Perspectives on Edward Curtis,” in Return to the Land of the Head Hunters: Edward S. Curtis, the Kwakwaka’wakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema, ed. Aaron Glass and Brad Evans (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014),

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237 – 257. 32 Jeff Thomas, My North American Indian Volume 21, accessed July 24, 2018, http://jeff-­t homas.ca/2014/04/my-­north-­american-­indian-­v21/. 33 Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Jeff Thomas, “At the Kitchen Table with Edward Curtis,” in Return to the Land of the Head Hunters: Edward S. Curtis, the Kwakwaka’wakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema, ed. Aaron Glass and Brad Evans (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014), 128 – 1 44. 34 Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, “When Is a Photograph Worth a Thousand Words?,” in Photography’s Other Histories, ed. Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 41, 52. 35 Matika Wilbur, “About,” Project 562, accessed March 29, 2019, http://www .project562.com. 36 Kauanui, Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty, 41. 37 Clements and Leistner, The Edward Curtis Project, 73. 38 Gerald Vizenor, Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 160. 39 Sumathi Ramaswamy, “Introduction: The World of Vision in the Age of European Empires,” in Empires of Vision, ed. Martin Jay and Sumathi Rama­ swamy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 13.

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

40 Gerald Vizenor, “Edward Curtis: Pictorialist and Ethnographic Adventurist,” American Memory Collections, Library of Congress, accessed April 27, 2014, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award98/ienhtml/essay3.html. 41 Ramaswamy, “Introduction,” 14. 42 In this context, my reading of Matthew’s work is distinct from Iyko Day’s analysis of Jin-­me Yoon’s Group of Sixty-­Seven, which “exemplifies how the Native and the Asian personify opposite sides of an antinomical view of capitalist relations, in which the concrete noncapitalist dimension is Indigeneous and the abstract representation of capitalist modernity is Asian.” Day, Alien Capital, 104. 43 Mukherji, “The Photographic Present,” 53. 44 Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, email to author, May 5, 2014. 45 Frank Albert Rinehart (1861 – 1928) and Frank La Roche (1853 – 1936) were known for their portrait photographs of Native subjects; the studio practice of William Howard Case and Horace H. Draper was active 1901 – 1907. 46 James Faris, “Navajo and Photography,” in Photography’s Other Histories, ed. Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 95. 47 Faris, “Navajo and Photography,” 94. 48 Faris, “Navajo and Photography,” 96. 49 The print is also catalogued as Indian Madonna. See “Benjamin A. Gifford Photographs, circa 1885 – circa 1920,” Oregon State University Libraries, University Archives, accessed March 21, 2020, http://scarc.library.oregon state.edu/findingaids/index.php?p=collections/findingaid&id=2635. 50 Beth Piatote, Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 1. 51 Laura Wexler has written extensively on the “Madonna genre” of early American photography, with particular attention to the relation between enslaved Black women and the infants they were charged with. See Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 60 – 67. 52 Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 80 – 1 20. 53 Vanita Reddy, Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity, and South Asian American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015), 125. 54 Wu Hung, “Inventing a ‘Chinese’ Portrait Style in Early Photography: The Case of Milton Miller,” in Brush and Shutter: Early Photography in China, ed. Jeffrey W. Cody and Frances Terpak (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011), 81. 55 Sarah E. Fraser, “Chinese as Subject: Photographic Genres in the Nineteenth Century,” in Brush and Shutter: Early Photography in China, ed. Jeffrey W. Cody and Frances Terpak (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011), 93. 56 Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, email to author, May 3, 2014.

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57 J. Forbes Watson and Sir William Kaye, eds., The People of India: A Series of Photographic Illustrations, with Descriptive Letterpress of the Races and Tribes of Hindustan, Originally Prepared under the Authority of the Government of India and Reproduced by Order of Secretary of State for India in Council, 8 vols. (London: India Museum, 1868 – 1875). 58 John Falconer, “A Pure Labor of Love: A Publishing History of the People of India,” in Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place, ed. Eleanor M. Hight and Gary D. Sampson (London: Routledge, 2002), 52. 59 Watson and Kaye, preface to The People of India, vol. 1, 1868, https://archive .org/details/peopleofindiaser01greauoft/page/n6/mode/2up. 60 Falconer, “A Pure Labor,” 58 – 59. 61 Falconer, “A Pure Labor,” 61. 62 Falconer, “A Pure Labor,” 82n28. 63 See for example Balthasar Solvyn’s Collection of Two Hundred and Fifty Colored Etchings Descriptive of the Manners, Customs, and Dresses of the Hindoos, and its ramifications for early colonial Indian and British painting, cited in Natasha Eaton, Mimesis across Empires: Artworks and Networks in India, 1765 – 1860 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 195 – 227. 64 Satish Sharma, “Hidden Histories: The Colonial Encounter,” in A Shifting Focus: Photography in India 1850 – 1900, ed. Brett Rogers, John Falconer, Satish Sharma, and Michael Gray (Hampshire, UK: British Council Visual Arts, 1995), 24. 65 Pinney, Camera Indica, 45.

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66 This is a point that Zahid Chaudhary makes in his reading of G. E. Dobson’s photograph Group of Five Young Andamanese Women (1872), noting that “the truth of the authentic primitiveness revealed here could be represented only through an imposed phantasmagoria of naked flesh, mud-­ caked faces, and the requisite wooden vessel.” Zahid Chaudhary, Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-­Century India (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 6. 67 Falconer, “A Pure Labor,” 75. 68 Mrinalini Rajagopalan, Building Histories: The Archival and Affective Lives of Five Monuments in Modern Delhi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 25 – 58. 69 Watson and Kaye, preface to The People of India. 70 Falconer, “A Pure Labor,” 76. 71 In the British colonial context, ethnographic photographs were usually designed as “full-­face, profile and three-­quarter-­face” poses. James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 142. 72 Watson and Kaye, preface to The People of India. 73 Volume 7 of The People of India contains forty photographs of the Begum of Bhopal: these images do not document her stature as a female ruler of a Muslim kingdom, but rather index her value to the British Empire.

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

74 The 1901 census used “ ‘animism’ as a criteria to distinguish between castes and tribes. Tribes were defined in opposition to caste, as lacking caste attributes — hierarchy, purity and pollution, kinship-­based, technologically primitive, economically homogenous and politically segmentary groups.” Vibha Arora, “Assertive Identities, Indigeneity, and the Politics of Recognition as a Tribe: The Bhutias, the Lepchas, and the Limbus of Sikkim,” Sociological Bulletin 56, no. 2 (2007): 208. 75 On Adivasi as a political construct, see David Hardiman, “Adivasi,” in Key Concepts in Modern Indian Studies, ed. Gita Dharampal-­Frick, Monika Kirloskar-­Steinbach, Rachel Dwyer, and Jahnavi Phalkey (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 3. On the changing historical and sociological narratives that produce these political constructs, see G. S. Ghurye, The Scheduled Tribes, 2nd ed. (Bombay: Popular Press, 1959); Tarun Chhabra, The Toda Landscape: Explorations in Cultural Ecology (Cambridge, MA: Department of South Asian Studies, Harvard University and Orient Blackswan, 2015); and Prathama Banerjee, The Politics of Time: “Primitives” and History-­Writing in a Colonial Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006). 76 J. Forbes Watson and Sir William Kaye, The People of India: A Series of Photographic Illustrations, with Descriptive Letterpress of the Races and Tribes of Hindustan, Originally Prepared under the Authority of the Government of India and Reproduced by Order of Secretary of State for India in Council, vol. 2 (London: India Museum, 1868), https://archive.org/details /peopleofindiaser02greauoft/page/n57. 77 Watson and Kaye, “Newars,” in The People of India, vol. 2, n.p. 78 Watson and Kaye, “Newar Group. Slave Population. Supposedly Aboriginal. Nipal,” in The People of India, vol. 2, n.p. 79 Sangeeta Dasgupta, “Introduction: Reading the Archive, Reframing ‘Adivasi’ Histories,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 53, no. 1 (2016): 3. 80 Watson and Kaye, “Newars.” 81 Prathama Banerjee, “Writing the Adivasi: Some Historiographical Notes,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 53, no. 1 (2016): 134. 82 Alice Tilche, “A Forgotten Adivasi Landscape: Museums and Memory in Western India,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 49, no. 2 (2015): 190. 83 Arora, “Assertive Identities,” 201. In the state of Sikkim in northeastern India, Newars have contested their OBC classification as they aspire to ST status. See Mitra Pariyar, Bal Gopal Shrestha, and David N. Gellner, “Rights and a Sense of Belonging: Two Contrasting Nepali Diaspora Communities,” in Facing Globalization in the Himalayas: Belonging and the Politics of Self, ed. Gerard Toffin and Joanna Pfaff-­Czarnecka (New Delhi: Sage, 2014), 153; and Declan Quigley, “Ethnicity without Nationalism: The Newars of Nepal,” European Journal of Sociology 28, no. 1 (1987): 152 – 170. 84 See David Hardiman, The Coming of the Devi: Adivasi Assertion in Western India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Banerjee, Politics of Time;

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and Megan Moodie, We Were Adivasis: Aspiration in an Indian Scheduled Tribe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 85 See Suneeti Rekhari, “ ‘Jaisa Desh, Waisa Vesh?’: Explorations on the Representations of Adivasis in Popular Hindi Cinema,” Studies in South Asian Film and Media 2, no. 2 (2010): 107 – 117. In the Bollywood blockbuster Mary Kom (2014), the actress Priyanka Chopra plays the title role of an Olympic medal – w inning woman boxer of Manipuri tribal descent, wearing prosthetic eyelids for an “Oriental” look. Adarsh Vinay, “Here’s Why It’s Wrong for Bollywood to Cast Priyanka Chopra as Mary Kom,” Scoop Whoop, August 6, 2014, https://www.scoopwhoop.com/inothernews/bollywood -­mary-­kom-­priyanka/. In another biographical film highlighting a women’s field hockey team, Chak De! (2007), Adivasi athletes from Jharkhand were depicted as non-­Hindi-­speaking. Sameer Bhagat, “Adivasi Are Invisible and Unheard in Hindi Movies,” Focus Magazine, September 29, 2018, https://www.focusmagazine.in/adivasi-­are-­invisible-­and-­unheard -­in-­hindi-­movies/. 86 Chaudhary, Afterimage of Empire, 1. 87 George Farquhar Irving Graham, The Life and Work of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 188 – 189. Quoted in Chaudhary, Afterimage of Empire, 2 – 3, brackets in text. The same anecdote is cited, with slightly different translations, in Bernard S. Cohn, “The Past in the Present: India as a Museum of Mankind,” History and Anthropology 11, no. 1 (1998): 1 – 38; in David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim

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Solidarity in British India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 6; in Pinney, Camera Indica, 44 – 45; and in Falconer, “A Pure Labor,” 79 – 80. 88 Chaudhary, Afterimage of Empire, 3. 89 Despite the fact that the series took eight years to complete, The People of India did not generate widespread public interest or scientific enthusiasm in its time. James Forbes Watson’s investment in administering and bringing to completion The People of India carried significant financial risk: Watson personally lost approximately £1,400. See Falconer, “A Pure Labor,” 77. Similarly, Curtis also incurred financial losses as he completed The North American Indian. See Florence Curtis Graybill and Victor Boesen, Edward Sheriff Curtis: Visions of a Vanishing Race (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976). 90 “#ROMfamcam,” Twitter text and photo, accessed February 29, 2016, https:// twitter.com/ROMContemporary/status/649651482627862528/photo/1. 91 “Introduction to the ROM ,” Royal Ontario Museum, accessed May 8, 2016, http://www.rom.on.ca/sites/default/files/imce/newsroom_intro_rom.pdf. 92 On Nanook of the North, Michael Taussig writes, “Who can forget, in what has become one of the classics of ethnographic film, Nanook of the North’s look of wild disbelief on hearing sound emerge from the white man’s phonograph, and then trying to eat the record? Mimetic sensuosity incarnate! Except for one factor; shouldn’t we assume that this look and this eating is

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

not of the ‘primitive’ but of the primitivist film-­maker Robert Flaherty? — a set-­up job. Mimesis of mimesis; a link in the chain of what Horkheimer and Adorno called ‘the organization of mimesis.’ ” Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), 200. 93 J. Kēhaulani Kauanui and Paul Chaat Smith, “Paul Chaat Smith on the Politics of Representation,” in Speaking of Indigenous Politics: Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders, ed. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 273. 94 Cory Willmott, “Visitors’ Voices: Lessons from Conversations in the Royal Ontario Museum’s Gallery of Canada: First Peoples,” Material Culture Review 67 (spring 2008), https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/MCR/article /view/18119. 95 “The ROM Announces Complimentary Access to the Daphne Cockwell Gallery Dedicated to First Peoples Art & Culture,” Royal Ontario Museum, April 18, 2018, https://www.rom.on.ca/en/about-­us/newsroom/press -­releases/the-­rom-­announces-­complimentary-­access-­to-­t he-­daphne -­cockwell. 96 Michelle H. Raheja, “Reading Nanook’s Smile: Visual Sovereignty, Indigenous Revisions of Ethnography, and Atanajuart (The Fast Runner),” American Quarterly 59, no. 4 (2007): 1161. 97 Sarita See, The Filipino Primitive: Accumulation and Resistance in the American Museum (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 26. 98 On Canadian state-­sponsored projects of multiculturalism and their difference from U.S. multiculturalism, specifically in terms of exhibitions of South Asian diasporic visual art, see Bakirathi Mani, Aspiring to Home: South Asians in America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 163 – 207. 99 Two Moons — Cheyenne, in Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian, Northwestern University Digital Library Collections, accessed April 9, 2020, http://curtis.library.northwestern.edu/curtis/viewPage.cgi?showp =1&size=2&id=nai.06.port.0000031.p&volume=6#nav. 100 Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Uses of Diaspora,” Social Text 19, no. 1 (2001): 65. 101 Nancy Brokaw, “Colonizing the Colonizer: Annu Palakunnathu Matthew Takes On Edward S. Curtis,” Photo Review 26 – 27, no. 4-­1 (2004): 41; Nandini Bhattacharya, “Annu Palakunnathu Matthew: Alien: Copy with a Difference,” Meredians 6, no. 1 (2005): 82 – 110. 102 Ronak Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 143 – 192. 103 Amitava Kumar, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 104 Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 20.

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Three. Exhibiting Immigrants An early version of chapter 3 was published as “Beyond Bollywood: Exhibiting South Asian America,” in Journal of Asian American Studies 18, no. 2 (June 2015): 193 – 217. Epigraphs: Tee Corinne quoted in Jan Zita Grover, “Dykes in Context: Some Problems in Minority Representation,” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 176; museum visitor quoted in Smithsonian Institution Office of Policy and Analysis, Beyond Bollywood: Indian Americans Shape the Nation Summative Analysis, fall 2014, 3.

1 Prior exhibitions curated by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center include Asian American Portraits of Encounter (2011 – 2012) and I Want the Wide American Earth (2013). Both exhibitions emphasized Japanese American, Chinese American, Vietnamese American, and Filipino American visual histories but did not focus on any one Asian American community.

2 Kobena Mercer, Travel & See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 40. 3 Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Visions: Performance, Visuality, Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 16. 4 On Asian American exhibitions and racial representation, see Susette Min, “Unnamable Encounters: A Phantom History of Multicultural and Asian American Art Exhibitions, 1990 – 2008,” in Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art (New York: New York University Press, 2018),

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33 – 83.

5 The use of visual art by Asian American artists to render visible the lives and experiences of Asian Americans is apparent from the earliest exhibition of contemporary Asian American art, Asia/America, held at the Asia Society Museum and curated by Margo Machida. See Margo Machida, Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art (New York: New Press, 1994).

6 “Who We Are,” Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, accessed July 25, 2018, http://smithsonianapa.org/about/. 7 On government portraits of Asian immigrants as productive citizens, see Thy Phu, Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012). 8 Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 171. 9 Masum Momaya, “Before and after Beyond Bollywood,” lecture given at Independent Curators International, New York, April 24, 2014. 10 “Founders Circle,” Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, accessed November 2, 2017, http://smithsonianapa.org/beyondbollywood /founders-­circle/. 11 Momaya, “Before and after Beyond Bollywood.”

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

12 At the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, a traveling version of Beyond Bollywood was displayed at the far end of the Regenstein Halls of the Pacific. Walking through a hallway lined with early twentieth-­century photographs of expeditions taken by white American anthropologists to the Pacific Island countries of Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga, along with objects (masks, clothing, cloth) procured from indigenous communities in these nations, visitors arrived at a separate open gallery space decorated with saris hung from the ceiling. Original objects as well as photographic reproductions from the Smithsonian exhibition were supplemented by video, photographs, text panels, and objects specific to Chicago-­based South Asian American communities as part of an outreach project by the Indo-­ American Heritage Museum, a Chicago-­based nonprofit organization that was a cosponsor of the exhibition. The Indo-­A merican Heritage Museum has since transitioned to an online exhibition forum, the National Indo-­ American Museum: https://www.niam.org, accessed February 25, 2020. 13 A total of “24 artifacts, 36 works of art, 75 text panels and 300 photographs” were on display at the Smithsonian. Newton Sequeira, “Beyond Bollywood: Tracing the Indian-­Origin Story in America,” Times of India (Goa), October 31, 2014, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/goa /Beyond-­Bollywood-­Tracing-­t he-­Indian-­origin-­story-­in-­A merica/article show/44987938.cms. 14 Shehryar Nabi, “Beyond Bollywood: Sociology Professor Pawan Dhingra Breaks New Ground with Smithsonian Exhibit on Indian American Heritage,” Tufts School of Arts and Sciences, accessed May 19, 2018, http:// as.tufts.edu/news/2014beyondBollywood.htm. 15 Momaya, “Before and after Beyond Bollywood.” 16 On the imperative to “feel good” as diasporic subjects creating and contemplating our own representation, see Bakirathi Mani, Aspiring to Home: South Asians in America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 242 – 252. 17 Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 18 Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu, “Introduction,” in Feeling Photography, ed. Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 2. 19 Brown and Phu, “Introduction,” 7 – 8. 20 Tina Campt, Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 33. 21 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto, 2008), 82 – 108. 22 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 83. 23 Mercer, Travel & See, 60. 24 Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 19. 25 Shimakawa, National Abjection, 17. 26 Prerna Lal, “ ‘Beyond Bollywood’ but Perhaps Not beyond the White Gaze,” Race Files, March 19, 2014, http://www.racefiles.com/2014/03/19/beyond

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-­bollywood-­but-­perhaps-­not-­beyond-­t he-­white-­gaze; S. Mitra Kalita, “The New Smithsonian Exhibit on Indian-­A mericans Is Great — If Only It Were 1985,” Quartz, February 26, 2014, https://qz.com/181481/the-­new -­smithsonian-­exhibit-­on-­indian-­americans-­is-­g reat-­if-­only-­it-­were-­1985/; Susan Seizer, “Islam Omitted from Beyond Bollywood: Correcting Indian History as Represented in a Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition,” CaMP Anthropology, April 7, 2016, https://campanthropology .org/2016-­/05/07/islam-­omitted-­f rom-­beyond-­bollywood/. 27 Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 28 Thanks to Yoon Sun Lee for suggesting this connection. 29 Tracy Lang Teslow, “Reifying Race: Science and Art in Races of Mankind at the Field Museum of Natural History,” in The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture, ed. Sharon MacDonald (London: Routledge, 1998), 53 – 76. 30 Annie E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 3. 31 Monique Scott, Rethinking Evolution in the Museum: Envisioning African Origins (London: Routledge, 2007), 1. 32 Alice L. Conklin, “Skulls on Display: The Science of Race in Paris’s Musée de l’Homme, 1928 – 1950,” in Museums and Difference, ed. Daniel J. Sherman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 250 – 288. 33 Sarita Echavez See, The Filipino Primitive: Accumulation and Resistance in the American Museum (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 2.

236

34 See, The Filipino Primitive, 26. 35 Scott, Rethinking Evolution, 29. 36 Thanks to Joseph Joon for encouraging this comparison. 37 On James Luna’s work, see Paul Chaat Smith, “Luna Remembers,” in Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 88 – 102; and Jane Blocker, “Ambivalent Entertainments: James Luna, Performance, and the Archive,” Grey Room, no. 37 (fall 2009): 52 – 7 7. On Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-­Peña’s performance, Two Undiscovered Amerindians, staged at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in 1992, see Coco Fusco, English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (New York: New Press, 1995), 37 – 64. 38 Smithsonian Institution Office of Policy and Analysis, Beyond Bollywood, 26. 39 The U.S. Supreme Court’s denial of citizenship to Bhagat Singh Thind is an origin story for South Asian American studies that has been widely discussed in the earliest scholarship in the field, including Lavina Dhingra and Rajini Srikanth, eds., A Part, Yet Apart: South Asians in Asian America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); and Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 40 On the Ghadar Party, see Seema Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism in North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

41 “Fénykövi Elephant,” Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, accessed October 5, 2017, https://naturalhistory.si.edu/onehundredyears /featured_objects/fenykovi_elephant.html. 42 Nina Davuluri’s title as Miss America also made her the target of racist and Islamophobic assault; in response, progressive student groups created viral videos to reinstate Davuluri as a symbol of America’s multiculturalism, in a social media campaign analogous to the It Gets Better Project that recuperates queer life. Bakirathi Mani, “Beauty, Race and Citizenship: Becoming Miss America,” lecture given at the UC Santa Barbara Center for New Racial Studies, March 2, 2014. 43 Momaya, “Before and after Beyond Bollywood.” 44 Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, “The Smithsonian Beside Itself: Exhibiting Indian Americans in the Era of New India,” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 1, no. 2 (2015): 171. 45 Sameer Pandya, “The Spelling Bee: America’s Great Racial Freaks and Geeks Show,” Atlantic Monthly, June 11, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com /entertainment/archive/2014/06/the-­spelling-­bee-­americas-­g reat-­racial -­f reak-­show/372528/. 46 Sameer Pandya, “Freaks and Geeks: On the Provisional Citizenship of Indian American Spelling Bee Winners,” Journal of Asian American Studies 20, no. 2 (June 2017): 249. On Indian Americans and the spelling bee, see also Shalini Shankar, Beeline: What Spelling Bees Reveal about Generation Z’s New Path to Success (New York: Basic Books, 2019). 47 Valarie Kaur, “His Brother Was Murdered for Wearing a Turban after 9/11. 15 Years Later, He Spoke to the Killer,” PRI , The World, September 23, 2016, https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-­09-­23/his-­brother-­was-­murdered -­wearing-­turban-­after-­911-­last-­week-­he-­spoke-­k iller. 48 Gurumustuk Singh Khalsa, “Comic Book Tribute to Sept. 11th, Inspired by Balbir Singh Sodhi,” SikhNet: The Discussion Forum, January 22, 2002, http://fateh.sikhnet.com//sikhnet/discussion.nsf/By+Topic/c84ce960c489 25a887256b4a0003d7f3?Open. 49 Jasbir Puar, “ ‘The Turban Is Not a Hat’: Queer Diaspora and Practices of Profiling,” Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory 4, no. 1 (2008): 47 – 91. 50 Bakirathi Mani, “Beyond Bollywood: Exhibiting South Asian America,” Journal of Asian American Studies 18, no. 2 (June 2015): 193 – 217. 51 Louellyn White, “White Power and the Performance of Assimilation: Lincoln Institute and Carlisle Indian School,” in Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations, ed. Jacqueline Fear-­Segal and Susan Rose (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 106. 52 The Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania operated from 1838 to 1871 as a U.S. Army cavalry school “to train officers and soldiers to fight in the Indian-­ American wars.” The barracks were transferred from the Department of

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

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War to the Department of the Interior and reopened in 1879 as an “Indian School,” as Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz “concluded that it would cost a million dollars to kill an Indian in warfare, whereas it cost only $1,200 to school an Indian child for eight years.” The school was closed in 1918. Jacqueline Fear-­Segal and Susan D. Rose, “Introduction,” in Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations, ed. Jacqueline Fear-­Segal and Susan Rose (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 7 – 8. 53 Margo Tamez, “Necropolitics, Carlisle Indian School, and Ndé Memory,” in Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations, ed. Jacqueline Fear-­Segal and Susan Rose (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 239. 54 Hayes Peter Mauro, The Art of Americanization at the Carlisle Indian School (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011), 74. 55 Spencer Fullerton Baird, the first curator of the Smithsonian Institution, commissioned Clark Mills to create a series of plaster busts of “Indians” for a proposed “Hall of Native peoples.” These busts used living incarcerated Native subjects as models. As Mills wrote in a letter to Baird, “We have completed all the Indian casts. . . . They are undoubtedly the most important collection of Indian heads in the world, and when they have become extinct, as which fate is inevitable, posterity will see a facsimile of a race of men that once over ran this great country[;] not only their physiognomies but phrenological development also” (50). The painted plaster busts remain

238

in the Smithsonian collections today. See Mauro, The Art of Americanization, 40 – 52. 56 “Tom Torlino Student File,” Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, Archives and Special Collections, Waidner-­Spahr Library, Dickinson College, accessed October 18, 2017, http://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu /student_files/tom-­torlino-­student-­fi le. 57 “Tom Torlino Student File.” 58 Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 109. 59 Lara Turner, “John Nicholas Choate and the Production of Photography at the Carlisle Indian School,” Dickinson College Archives and Special Collections, accessed April 9, 2020, http://chronicles.dickinson.edu/student work/indian/4_choate.htm. 60 On the relation between literary, cinematic, and visual renditions of The Namesake, see Bakirathi Mani, “Cinema/Photo/Text: Intertextual Readings of The Namesake,” in Jhumpa Lahiri: Canons and Controversies, ed. Floyd Cheung and Lavina Shankar (New York: Lexington, 2011), 75 – 96. 61 Smithsonian Institution Office of Policy and Analysis, Beyond Bollywood, 9. 62 Tasneem Nashrulla, “Which Indian Are You?,” BuzzFeed, March 11, 2014, http://www.buzzfeed.com/tasneemnashrulla/which-­indian-­are -­you#34ymfzb; Helena Cavendish de Moura, “Portraits Challenge Cultural

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

Perceptions,” CNN Photos, February 11, 2014, http://cnnphotos.blogs .cnn.com/category/annu-­palakunnathu-­matthew/; Prerna Lal, “ ‘Beyond Bollywood’ but Perhaps Not beyond the White Gaze,” Race Files, March 19, 2014, http://www.racefiles.com/2014/03/19/beyond-­bollywood-­but -­perhaps-­not-­beyond-­t he-­white-­gaze/. 63 Susette S. Min, “The Last Asian American Exhibition in the Whole Entire World,” in One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now, ed. Melissa Chiu, Karin Higa, and Susette S. Min (New York: Asia Society; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 39.

Four. Archives of Diaspora An initial version of chapter 4 was published as “Viewing South Asia, Seeing America: Gauri Gill’s The Americans,” American Quarterly 16, no. 1 (2010): 135 – 150.

1 Bose Pacia New York opened in 1994 as the first commercial gallery in New York City focusing primarily on modern and contemporary South Asian art. The gallery closed in December 2011, and in 2012 – 2013 operated Transparent Studio, an artist residency program in Brooklyn. See “Farewell from Bose Pacia,” Bose Pacia Gallery, December 2011, http://www .bosepacia.com/exhibitions/2011-­1 2_farewell-­f rom-­bose-­pacia/.

2 Gauri Gill: The Americans, organized by Bose Pacia/Nature Morte Galleries. Bose Pacia, Kolkata, February 16 – March 8, 2008; Nature Morte, New Delhi, March 15 – 29, 2008; Matthieu Foss Gallery, Mumbai, April 10 – 24, 2008; Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery, Stanford, July 8 – August 17, 2008; Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, October 4 – December 28, 2008; Bose Pacia, New York, January 9 – February 7, 2009. 3 “In Conversation: Gauri Gill, Artist/Bakirathi Mani, Associate Professor,” Bose Pacia New York, January 14, 2009, accessed September 9, 2015, http:// www.bosepacia.com/exhibitions/2009-­01-­09_gauri-­g ill/selected-­v ideo /in-­conversation-­part-­6_6/. 4 “In Conversation.”

5 “In Conversation.”

6 “In Conversation.” 7 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 1 – 26. 8 Abigail Cain, “The Artsy Podcast — No. 30: Why the Art World Fell in Love with the White Cube,” Artsy, January 23, 2017, https://www.artsy.net /article/artsy-­editorial-­white-­cube-­dominate-­art. 9 Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 65. 10 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-­colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 392 – 403.

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11 Kandice Chuh, The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 77. 12 Aveek Sen, “Vast Native Thoughts,” Telegraph (Calcutta), February 23, 2008, https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/vast-­native-­t houghts/cid /622050; Christopher Pinney, “Gauri Gill’s The Americans,” lecture given at Chicago Cultural Center, November 7, 2008, available at Critical Collective, https://www.criticalcollective.in/ArtistInner2.aspx?Aid=88&Eid=26. 13 Christopher Pinney, “Introduction: ‘How the Other Half . . . ,’ ” in Photography’s Other Histories, ed. Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 1. 14 Mark is also known as a social documentary photographer of India: see Mary Ellen Mark, Indian Circus (San Francisco: Chronicle, 1993); Mary Ellen Mark, Photographs of Mother Theresa’s Missions of Charity in Calcutta: Untitled 39 (Carmel, CA: Friends of Photography, 1985); Mary Ellen Mark, Falkland Road: Prostitutes of Bombay (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981). 15 Iftikhar Dadi, “The Art of Documentation,” lecture given at South Asian Photographs across the Disciplines: The Uses of Visual Evidence, Yale University, February 27, 2015. 16 See Alexander Keefe, “Gauri Gill: The Americans,” accessed April 9, 2020, http://prod-­images.exhibit-­e.com/www_bosepacia_com/fc681f30.pdf. 17 Gayatri Sinha, “Gauri Gill — The Americans,” in Gauri Gill, The Americans (New Delhi: Nature Morte/Bose Pacia, 2008), 7. 18 “In Conversation.”

240

19 Gauri Gill, email communication with author, September 11, 2015. 20 “In Conversation.” 21 A single print in the series, Ladies room at a Bhangra Rap party at a local nightclub. San Francisco, 2002, reflects Gill’s body in a bathroom mirror, although her face is obscured by her camera. 22 On the relation between the performance of Hindu rituals and the production of Hindu nationalism in diaspora, see Prema Kurien, “Multiculturalism, Immigrant Religion, and Diasporic Nationalism: The Development of an American Hinduism,” Social Problems 51, no. 3 (2004): 362 – 385. 23 Sen, “Vast Native Thoughts.” 24 Jack Halberstam, “Queer Faces: Photography and Subcultural Lives,” in The Visual Culture Reader, 3rd ed., ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 2013), 98. 25 Halberstam, “Queer Faces,” 98. 26 Halberstam, “Queer Faces,” 98. 27 For a seminal queer and feminist reading of the limits of representation in visual culture, see Patricia White, Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 28 On immigration and melancholia, see David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

29 Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 22, 2009 – January 3, 2010, https://www.metmuseum .org/exhibitions/listings/2009/robert-­f rank. 30 Sarita See, The Filipino Primitive: Accumulation and Resistance in the American Museum (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 148. 31 Sarah Greenough, “Resisting Intelligence: Zurich to New York,” in Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans,” ed. Sarah Greenough (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2009), 3 – 4 . 32 For a critical experiential perspective on Looking In at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, see David Harris, “The Americans at 50: A Review of the Exhibition and Related Publications of Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans,” Photograph and Culture 4, no. 1 (2011): 93 – 102. Harris notes that the curatorial organization of the exhibition, including the sizes of the prints in relation to the contact sheets, and the gallery space allotted to the prints, produced an experience of seeing Frank’s The Americans that is at odds with the “private and intimate” experience of reading the publication of Frank’s work. 33 “Robert Frank, Application for John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 1954,” in Greenough, Looking In, 362. 34 Robert Frank, The Americans (Manchester, UK: Cornerhouse, 1993), 9. 35 Caroline Blinder, “ ‘A Kind of Patriotism’: Jack Kerouac’s Introduction to Robert Frank’s The Americans (1959),” in Writing and Seeing: Essays on Word and Image, ed. Rui Carvalho, Lambert Homem, and Maria de Fatima (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 240. 36 Sarah Parsons, “Gauri Gill: The Americans,” South Asian Visual Arts Collective, 2011, accessed August 10, 2015, savac.net/images/stories/2011 /gauri-­g ill/gg-­essay-­parsons.pdf. 37 Sen, “Vast Native Thoughts.” 38 Peter Halter, “Ut Pictura Poesis: Reading Robert Frank’s The Americans as a Photographic Sequence,” in Literature and the Visual Arts in 20th-­Century America, ed. Michelle Bottalico (Bari, Italy: Palomar, 2002), 47. 39 Halter, “Ut Pictura Poesis,” 45. 40 On states of surveillance that shape everyday life in Muslim South Asian immigrant communities, see Sunaina Maira, Missing: Youth, Citizenship, and Empire after 9/11 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 41 On surveillance and its relation to South Asian diasporic art, see Santhi Kavuri-­Bauer, “The Parallax View: The Art of Envisioning the South Asian American Diaspora,” South Asian Diaspora 10, no. 1 (2018): 45 – 63; and Laurel Ahnert, “The Surveillance Commodity, Unequal Exchange, and the (In)Visible Subject in Hasan Elahi’s Tracking Transience,” Social Text 35, no. 3 (2017): 1 – 16. 42 See for example the work of Hasan Elahi (http://elahi.umd.edu) and Visible Collective (http://www.disappearedinamerica.org).

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43 S. Mitra Kalita, “Sniper Attack Stole One Life, Gave Focus to Another,” Washington Post, May 16, 2003, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive /politics/2003/05/16/sniper-­attack-­stole-­one-­life-­gave-­focus-­to-­another /3e5444f3-­cf85-­40e8-­aa4b-­5c10a2167b59. 44 Sean Sedam, “Premkumar Walekar,” Gazette.Net, August 15, 2002, accessed July 27, 2018, http://www.gazette.net/gazette_archive/2002/200241 /montgomerycty/county/124965-­1.html. 45 Kalita, “Sniper Attack.” 46 Gauri Gill, email communication with author, September 11, 2015. 47 Documentary photographers who influenced Robert Frank include Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Jacob Riis. Dadi, “The Art of Documentation.” 48 Select images from The Emigres as well as Indians in France (shown at the Musée du Quai Branly, 2009) are available at: http://iia.bartholomew.tv/. More recently, Bartholomew has exhibited personal family photographs taken in the mid-­to late 1970s. See Geeta Kapur, The Way We Were: Photographs by Richard Bartholomew and Pablo Bartholomew (Delhi: PhotoInk, 2010). 49 Quoted in Gayatri Sinha and Paul Sternberger, India: Public Places, Private Spaces: Contemporary Photography and Video Art (Mumbai: Marg, 2007), 134. 50 Paul Sternberger, “Me, Myself and India: Contemporary Indian Photography and the Diasporic Experience,” Photographies 2, no. 1 (2009), 46 – 47. 51 Sunil Gupta, Pictures from Here (London: Chris Boot, 2003), 105. 52 See Sunil Gupta, Queer (New York: Prestel, 2011); and Sunil Gupta and

242

Charan Singh, Delhi: Communities of Belonging (New York: New Press, 2016). Select prints from both series were displayed in Queer Migrations: Family, Identity, and Place: Photographs by Sunil Gupta, at the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University, February 5 – May 20, 2015. 53 Sunil Gupta and Gauri Gill founded, in collaboration with Radhika Singh, the journal Camerawork Delhi, which they edited jointly between 2006 and 2011. 54 Gupta, Pictures from Here, 112. 55 My reading of temporality in Homelands diverges from Bill Leeming’s review of the series. Leeming writes that in Homelands, “time does not ravage: time does nothing but pass. The spaces themselves appear empty of time, slowed down, lacking movement or speed of movement.” See Bill Leeming, “Crumbling on a Grander Scale: Sunil Gupta’s Homelands (2001 – 2003),” Fuse Magazine 29, no. 3 (2006), 39 – 41. 56 Gupta, Pictures from Here, 104 – 105. 57 Gupta, Pictures from Here, 122 – 1 23. 58 I refer here to Sunil Gupta’s photographic collection Exiles (1986). See https://www.sunilgupta.net/exiles.html. 59 Mary Sue Sweeney Price, “Director’s Statement,” in Sinha and Sternberger, India, 7. 60 Sinha and Sternberger, India, 163. See also front matter of catalogue for funders of the exhibition. South Asian Americans constitute the largest

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

Asian immigrant population of New Jersey, with those who identify as “Asian Indian” accounting for 40.3 percent of the total Asian population. Sen-­Yuan Wu, “New Jersey’s Asian Population by Asian Group: 2010,” NJ Labor Market Views, no. 18, February 17, 2012, https://www.nj.gov/labor /lpa/pub/lmv/lmv_18.pdf. 61 On South Asian Americans in the motel industry, see Pawan Dhingra, Life behind the Lobby: Indian American Motel Owners and the American Dream (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). 62 Many thanks to Suvir Kaul for alerting me to Manoj Kumar’s presence in this print. 63 For critical readings of Purab aur Paschim as a narrative of diaspora and as a projection of East-­West relations, see Anirudh Deshpande, “Indian Cinema and the Bourgeois Nation State,” Economic and Political Weekly 42, no. 15 (December 15 – 21, 2007): 95 – 101; and Rashmi Doraiswamy, “Image and Imagination: Reconstructing the Nation in Cinema,” India International Centre Quarterly 29, nos. 3 – 4 (winter 2002 – spring 2003): 211 – 223. 64 Bakirathi Mani, “Viewing South Asia, Seeing America: Gauri Gill’s The Americans,” American Quarterly 16, no. 1 (2010): 135 – 150. 65 “In Conversation.”

Epilogue: Curating Photography, Seeing Community

1 “Mission Statement,” Twelve Gates Arts, accessed August 22, 2018, http:// www.twelvegatesarts.org.

2 I discussed curating, funding, and conceptualizing the exhibition in Bakirathi Mani, “Intimate Collaborations: Curating South Asian Photography,” paper given at the American Studies Association Annual Conference, Toronto, October 9, 2015. 3 On Fields of Sight, see Inderpal Grewal, “Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad, Fields of Sight,” Trans Asia Photography Review 5, no. 2 (spring 2015), https://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tap/7977573.0005.205?view=text;rgn =main; and Rashmi Meenakshi Viswanathan, “An Architecture of Memory,” Third Text, n.d., accessed June 29, 2018, http://www.thirdtext.org /?location_id=645. 4 Daniela Wertheimer, “Professor Mani Curates Photography Exhibit in Philadelphia,” The Phoenix, November 12, 2015, http://swarthmorephoenix .com/tag/bakirathi-­mani/.

5 Picture This: Contemporary Photography and India, curated by Nathaniel Stein, Philadelphia Museum of Art, December 6, 2015 – April 3, 2016, https://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/836.html.

6 “Annu Palakunnathu Matthew and Bakirathi Mani,” Twelve Gates Arts, December 4, 2015, http://www.twelvegatesarts.org/programs-­and -­events-­1/2015/12/4/annu-­palakunnathu-­matthew-­and-­bakirathi-­mani.

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Abichandani, Jaishri: Fatal Love: South Asian American Art Now, 1 – 2, 5 – 6, 9 – 10, 21, 26; Lucid Dreams and Distant Visions, 10, 21 abjection, 66 – 67, 138, 192, 213; queerness

archives of diaspora, 11, 31, 167, 190, 196 – 203, 213 archives of empire, 7, 18 – 19, 78, 115, 121; challenges to, 30, 162, 203; Choate’s work as, 151; Curtis’s work as, 73, 76,

and, 177 – 178; racial, 30, 39, 41 – 45, 116,

98; desire for representation in, 8, 17,

128 – 130, 156 – 157

29, 35, 69, 73, 80, 107; diasporic mime-

Adivasis, 101 – 104, 117, 168, 209,

sis and, 35, 186; museums as, 118, 138

232n85. See also indigenous people;

archivists, 54, 58, 73, 119

Kurukh (Oraons); Newars; Sonthals;

Arizona, 146

Warlis

Arondekar, Anjali, 218n37

Afghanistan, 29, 35, 63, 136, 168, 186

Art Basel, 220

Ahmed, Sara, 43, 68, 127

Artwallah, 216n9

Alkazi, Ebrahim, 95 – 96

Asian American studies, 21 – 25, 78, 116,

Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, 95 American exceptionalism, 24, 79 American Historical Association, 59 Americans, The. See Frank, Robert: The Americans; Gill, Gauri: The Americans

121, 132; South Asian American studies, 236n39 Asia Society Museum: Asia/America, 218n44, 234n5; Edge of Desire: Recent Art from India, 9 – 10; Hanging Fire:

Angeline, Princess, 80, 82, 84

Contemporary Art from Pakistan,

Anishinaabe, 85

216n11; Lucid Dreams and Distant Vi-

anticolonialism, 18, 24 – 25, 63, 129, 200. See also decolonization antiracism, 136

sions, 10, 21 Australia, 132, 224n64; Sydney, 34 Avini Avittam, 174

Apache, 94, 150; Chiricahua, 154 architecture, 63 – 64, 110, 221n8, 223n41;

Baird, Spencer Fullerton, 238n55

Indo-­Saracenic, 39, 49 – 55, 58 – 59, 65,

Balachandran, Aparna, 59

224n55; in Shah’s work, 19, 28 – 29,

Banerjee, Prathama, 103

33 – 34, 37 – 39, 43 – 48, 56 – 58, 162,

Bangladesh, 9, 108, 124

221n14

Barbie, 92 – 93

Barthes, Roland, 44, 64

221n8, 223n46; legacy of, 26, 36, 63;

Bartholomew, Pablo, 31, 197 – 198; The

photography of, 6, 17 – 18, 24, 28 – 29,

Chinese in Calcutta, 242n48; The

33, 36 – 61, 72 – 75, 79, 87, 95 – 107, 112,

Emigres/Indians in America, 190 – 196;

116, 162, 232n89. See also British

An Indian Labor Contractor Pays

Crown; British East India Company;

a Mexican Worker, 191; Indians in

British India; Delhi Durbars; Great

France, 242n48; Mixed Blood Indian

Britain

American Marrying a Venezuelan

British Foreign Office, 104 – 105

Woman, 191; Mr. and Mrs. Ohri, a

British India, 49

Hindu and Sindhi Couple, 191; One of

British Library, 46

the Many Patel Motels, 192, 195 – 196;

Brown, Elspeth H., 27, 127

Second-­Generation Mixed Blood In-

Brown, Kimberly Juanita, 13

dian American Marrying a Venezuelan

Brownie cameras, 54

Woman, 191

Buddhism, 99, 101 – 102, 109, 125

Beaux Arts, 137

Burma, 55

Belgium, Brussels, 34, 46

Burton, Antoinette, 38

Benjamin, Walter, 159

Byrd, Jodi, 78

Bhai, Praveen, 171 – 173, 171

Byzantine Empire, 53

Bharatanatyam, 172, 173 Bhardwaj, Mohini, 139 – 1 40 Bhutan, 99, 101

262

California, 161, 175, 206; Fremont, 174, 181, plate 13; Fresno, 192; Silicon Val-

biennales, 9, 27, 168, 226n6

ley, 30, 174, 179 – 181, plates 13 – 14; Yuba

Birmingham Photographic Archives, 46

City, 187 – 188, 191, plate 15

Bishnois, 168

Camerawork Delhi, 242n53

Blackness, 13, 77, 108, 129, 189, 192, 211;

Campt, Tina, 13, 128

Black feminism, 13; enslavement and,

Canada, 84, 108, 111, 193, 233n98; Haida

48, 229n51; visual culture and, 6 – 7, 12,

Gwaii, 85; Montreal, 193 – 194; To-

121, 128 – 130, 182 – 185

ronto, 2, 26, 78, 107, 110, 208; Van­

Blinder, Caroline, 184 Bollywood, 76, 201, 232n85; Beyond Bollywood, 19 – 20, 30, 119 – 158, 163, 188, 213, 235nn12 – 13 Bose Pacia Gallery, 182, 220n2; The Americans, 159 – 163, 194, 202; Transparent Studio, 239n1 Brahmins, 101, 174 – 175, 181, 185, plate 13 Brassaï, 177 – 178 British Crown, 50 – 51, 55, 57, 98 – 99. See also British Empire; Great Britain British East India Company, 51, 98. See

couver, 85 Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, 110 Canning, Charles, 96 capitalism, 65, 103, 117, 229n42. See also neoliberalism Caribbean, 18, 77, 124, 183 Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 148, 150 – 151, 154, 237n52 Case, William Howard, 87, 229n45 caste, 96, 103, 124, 175 – 176, 185; codification and, 29, 96, 98 – 99, 101, 231n74.

also Sepoy Mutiny of 1857/Uprising/

See also Brahmins; Jogi; Other Back-

First War of Independence

ward Classes (OBC); Scheduled Castes/

British Empire, 35, 136, 157, 215n6, 220n1,

Scheduled Tribes (SC/ST)

230n71, 230n73; architecture and, 19,

Chandra, Kanta, 135 – 136, 135

34, 39 – 61, 65; archives of, 16, 46, 150,

Chaudhary, Zahid, 24 – 25, 38, 104 – 105,

154; classification of groups, 97 – 107,

INDEX

230n66

Chawla, Kalpana, 139

Indian, 70 – 76, 80 – 91, 98, 107, 110,

Cheng, Anne Anlin, 123, 165

112 – 117, 148; Princess Angeline, 80,

Chickasaw Nation, 78

82, 84; Two Moons—Cheyenne,

Chillar, Brandon, 139, 141 China, 216n10

112 – 113, 113 Curzon, George, 50 – 51, 55, 223n41

Choate, J. N., 149 – 151 Chopra, Priyanka, 232n85

Dadi, Iftikhar, 40 – 41, 169, 190

Christianity, 53, 91, 125, 159, 191, 199

Dasgupta, Sangeeta, 102

Chuh, Kandice, 8, 16, 165

Dastagir, Sabu, 151, 152

citizenship, 22, 167, 180; in Beyond

Davuluri, Nina, 139, 142, 143, 237n42

Bolly ­wood, 125, 127 – 130, 135 – 137,

Day, Iyko, 78, 229n42

139 – 1 40, 145, 147, 154 – 155; racialized,

Dayal, Raja Deen, 224n62

78, 135 – 137, 154, 189, 236n39

décalage, 115

Clements, Marie: The Edward Curtis Project, 84 – 85

decolonization, 26, 36, 78. See also anticolonialism

Codell, Julie, 54, 224n67

defiant indigeneity, 84

Cohn, Bernard, 223n46

Delhi Durbars, 33, 39, 43 – 4 4, 47 – 62,

College Art Association, 95 Columbus, Christopher, 77

194, 220n1, 223n41, 223n46, 224n64, 225n72

Comanche, 85, 110

Delhi School of Art, 168

Comanche Indian Veterans Associa-

detective paradigm in photography, 97

tion, 85 Confederacy (U.S.), 59 Coombes, Annie, 132 Corinne, Tee, 119 Coronation Park, 59, 60 Cree, 85, 109

Devi Art Foundation, 220n3 Dewan, Deepali, 55; Generations, 3, 107 – 109, 111, 113 – 115, 113 Dhingra, Pawan: Beyond Bollywood, 19 – 20, 30, 119 – 158, 163, 188, 213, 235nn12 – 13

critical race and ethnic studies, 22, 76

Diasporadics, 216n9

curation, 9, 21, 46, 108, 134, 148, 167,

diasporic visuality, 13

169, 179, 241n32; curators, 10, 19,

Diné, 76, 84, 148, 154; in Choate’s pho-

23, 25, 55, 83, 85, 95, 107, 117, 182,

tography, 150 – 151; in Curtis’s pho-

192, 195; diasporic archives and, 11;

tography, 88 – 90, 94; in Leistner’s

as methodology of book, 27 – 2 8,

photography, 85; in Matthew’s pho-

205 – 2 14; in natural history museums, 110 – 1 13, 115, 120 – 1 21, 132; salvage photography and, 97; South Asian representation and, 6 – 7, 10, 30, 117, 120 – 1 27, 131, 134 – 1 45, 150, 154 – 157, 190 Curtis, Edward, 29, 106, 111, 149, 232n89; The Blanket Maker, 89 – 90, 89; Cheyenne Girl, 112 – 113; The Clam

tography, 88, 150 – 151 disidentification, 106. See also misidentification disorientation, 74, 114 – 115, 129; diasporic, 3, 34, 36, 48 – 49, 134, 157 – 158, 165; the uncanny and, 39 – 45, 58, 66 – 68, 112 Dobson, G. E.: Group of Five Young Andamanese Women, 230n66

Digger, 80, 81; colonial photogra-

Documenta 14, 168

phy by, 17, 29, 76 – 7 7, 79, 93 – 94, 99,

Draper, Horace H., 87, 229n45

104; A Navaho Smile, 88 – 90; Navajo

Duwamish, 80

Woman, 89, 89; The North American

dwelling in the archive, 38

INDEX

263

Eaton, Natasha, 39, 44, 49

Mississippi River, 185; New York City,

Edwards, Brent Hayes, 115

1955, 183

Edward VII (king), 50, 220n1

Freud, Sigmund, 39, 41 – 43, 45, 66, 68

empires of vision, 86

Fusco, Coco, 134

Eng, David, 12, 14, 23, 36, 66 England, 1, 3 – 4, 94, 96, 107; London,

George V (king), 47, 50, 53, 57, 59, 220n1

34, 104 – 105, 193, 201, 224n55;

Ghadar Party, 136

Stourport-­on-­Severn, 76. See also

Ghalib, Mirza, 223n49

British Empire

Gifford, B. A., 87; Oregon’s Indian

Enwezor, Okwui, 61 – 62, 68 epistemology, 21, 44, 55; colonial, 17 – 18, 20, 103, 120 – 1 21, 131 – 134

Madonna/Indian Madonna, 91 – 93 Gill, Gauri, 6, 19, 206 – 207; Acts of Appearance, 169; The Americans, 20,

Epstein, Esa, 95

30 – 31, 159 – 203, plates 12 – 17; Balika

ethnography, 31, 122 – 1 23, 132, 164, 170,

Mela, 168, 212 – 213; Bharatanatyam

232n92; autoethnography, 167, 190;

Arengatram performance, for fam-

colonial, 25, 71 – 95, 107, 111, 114 – 116,

ily and friends, on the 16th birthday,

162, 223n46, 230n71; as methodology

172 – 173, 173; Bonnie Singh at home,

of book, 27 – 28, 78, 212; photography

Bonnie is a cook at Taste of India res-

and, 7, 18, 104, 172, 175, 191, 196

taurant, 200, plate 17; Brahmin Samaj

Evans, Brad, 83

of North America Convention, 185;

Evans, Walker, 242n47

Brahmin thread tying ceremony for Silicon Valley professionals in a local strip

264

Falconer, John, 96

mall, 174, 181, plate 13; Fields of Sight,

Fanon, Frantz, 129 – 130

168, 209 – 210; Jannat, 169; Ladies

Faris, James, 89 – 90

room at a Bhangra Rap party at a local

feeling empire, 36

nightclub, 240n21; Laljibhai and his

feeling photography, 27, 127 – 130

wife Pushpa Ben Patel work as clean-

feminism, 18, 27, 38, 48, 75 – 76, 91; Black,

ers at Days Inn West, 172 – 174, plate

13; feminist theory, 211; transnational,

12; Motel owner Dhansukh Dan Patel’s

16

parents, in his new home, 195 – 196,

Field Museum, 123, 235n12

196; 1984, 168; Notes From the Desert,

Fiji, 235n12

168; Praveen Bhai, school teacher from

First Friday (Philadelphia), 205

Baroda, and his wife run the Sports-

First Nations peoples, 30, 75, 84,

man Inn so they can get their children

110 – 111, 114, 148. See also indigenous

Green Cards, 171 – 173, 171; Ruined

people

Rainbow Pictures, 169, 209 – 210, 210;

First War of Independence. See Sepoy Mutiny of 1857/Uprising/First War of Independence Flaherty, Robert: Nanook of the North, 109, 232n92

Software engineer Alok Patel-­Pareek; business owner, Sumati Patel-­Pareek, 179 – 180, plate 14; Taxi driver Prem Kumar Walekar, 54 was shot dead at a gas station in Rockville, Montgomery

Fleetwood, Nicole, 13, 121

by a sniper, 189, plate 16; What Re-

France, 129, 190; Paris, 34, 177, 242n48

mains, 168 – 169; Yuba City, California,

Frank, Robert, 6; The Americans, 31,

187 – 188, 191, plate 15

166 – 167, 182 – 186, 189 – 190, 241n32;

Glass, Aaron, 83

Chinese Cemetery—San Francisco, 183;

Gómez-­Peña, Guillermo, 134

INDEX

Gopinath, Gayatri, 13, 48, 78

Holocaust, 76

Gordon, Avery, 8, 33, 80, 222n23

homonormativity, 127

Great Britain, 33, 47, 67, 79, 192, 201. See

Hope Diamond, 134

also British Crown; British East India

Hung, Wu, 95

Company; British Empire; England

hypervisibility, 42 – 43, 45, 66, 147

Great Depression, 190 Green Art Gallery, 220n3

iconomy, 61 – 62

Greenough, Sarah: Looking In, 182

identification, 4, 13; through Beyond

Grewal, Inderpal, 92

Bollywood, 121, 136, 147; colonial ar-

Guggenheim, 184

chives and, 35 – 36, 43, 45, 48 – 49, 79,

Guha-­Thakurta, Tapati, 221n8

206; through Gill’s work, 20, 161 – 162,

Gupta, Sunil, 31, 167, 190, 192, 195, 198,

165 – 166, 170 – 176, 179 – 180, 186,

213; Homelands, 193 – 194, 242n55; Jama

199 – 202; through Gupta’s work, 193;

Masjid, Delhi/Blvd. René Levesque O.,

through Matthew’s work, 79 – 80, 87,

Montreal, 194; Mundia Pamar, Ut-

115, 153; mimetic, 37 – 39, 48, 67, 87, 178,

tar Pradesh/Chesapeake Bay, Mary-

212 – 213; nonmimetic, 11 – 1 2, 16, 28 – 31,

land, 193 – 194, 196 – 197; Where Three

165 – 167, 178, 180 – 182, 200 – 202, 207,

Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photogra-

211 – 213; racialized, 5 – 8, 23, 30, 78,

phy from India, Pakistan, and Bangla-

106, 129 – 130, 153; through Shah’s

desh, 216n11 Guyana, 124

work, 37 – 39, 43, 64 – 67. See also disidentification; misidentification image-­producing objects, 166, 185

Halberstam, Jack, 15, 176 – 178

imperial continuum, 79

Hall, Stuart, 15 – 16, 165

imperial eye, 17

haptics, 97, 128 – 1 29, 146 – 1 47

imperial museum, 128, 131 – 138, 158

Hartman, Saidiya, 48

Independent Curators International, 27

Hashmi, Salima: Hanging Fire: Contem-

Indian American Heritage Project, 123

porary Art from Pakistan, 216n11

Indian Americans, 160; representations

Haudenosaunee, 110

of, 8, 19 – 20, 30, 119 – 158, 163, 175, 188,

haunting, 8, 16, 33, 35, 64, 66, 80, 113, 186;

191, 213, 235nn12 – 13

curation and, 206 – 207, 214; diaspora and, 4, 9, 121, 125, 155, 167, 202 – 203;

Indian cities and states: Amritsar, 225n83; Bangalore/Bengaluru, 3,

empire and, 14, 20, 26 – 31, 40, 48, 58,

76, 93; Bengal, 124; Bhopal, 99, 101,

72, 158; ethnographic photography and,

230n73; Deccan Plateau, 93 – 94; Delhi,

72 – 74, 87, 95, 115. See also uncanny

33 – 34, 52, 52, 64, 160, 168, 193 – 194;

Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 220n3

Jharkhand, 232n85; Kolkata/Calcutta,

hegemonic false categories, 77

49, 51 – 5 3, 56, 56, 160, 190, 223n41;

Hertz, Betti-­Sue: The Matter Within:

Madras/Chennai, 53, 55; Maharashtra,

New Contemporary Art of India, 216n11 Hinduism, 2, 105 – 106, 125; in Bartholo­ mew’s work, 191; in Gill’s work, 159,

168, 209; Manipur, 232n85; Mumbai/ Bombay, 26, 31, 43, 53, 55 – 56, 56, 158, 160 – 161; Mundia Pamar, 193 – 194,

174 – 176, 185, 199; in Gupta’s work, 193;

196 – 197; Punjab, 124, 225n83; Raja­

Hindu temple architecture, 39, 52 – 53,

sthan, 94, 168 – 169, 213; Shahjahanpur,

58; in Matthew’s work, 92. See also

99; Sikkim, 231n83; Uttar Pradesh, 99,

Bishnois; Brahmins; Jogi

194, 196. See also British India; Delhi

Hollywood, 139

Durbars; New Delhi; Partition

INDEX

265

Indian immigrants: in England, 1; in Japan, 4. See also Indian Americans Indian nationalism, 9, 50, 63, 213 Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage, 59 indigenous people, 9, 121, 150 – 154, 209 – 210, 213; colonial photography

Kavuri-­Bauer, Santhi, 48, 224n58 Kaye, William: The People of India, 29, 75, 95 – 104, 106 – 107, 232n89 Kennedy, John F., 136, 137 Kenya, 124, 132 Kerouac, Jack, 184 Khan, Aisha Zia, 206

of, 16 – 17, 29 – 30, 70 – 107, 110, 112 – 117,

Khan, Mahmud, 105 – 106

148, 157; in natural history museums,

Khan, Naeem, 139 – 1 40, 209

109 – 117, 132, 235n12; terminology of,

Khan, Syed Ahmed, 104 – 106, 116

215n6. See also Adivasis; defiant indi-

Khorana, Hargobind, 139

geneity; First Nations peoples; Native

Kim, Elaine, 21

Americans; “natives” (colonial India);

Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, 206

individual nations and communities

Kochi-­Muziris Biennale, 168, 226n6

indigenous studies, 78

Korean War, 23, 184

Indo-­A merican Heritage Museum,

Kumar, Amitava, 116

235n12 Indo-­Saracenic style, 39, 49, 52 – 53, 55, 58 – 59, 65, 224n55 Inuit, 110

Kumar, Manoj, 200 – 202 Kurczynski, Karen, 221n14 Kurukh (Oraons), 99 Kwakwaka’wakw, 85

invisibility, 4

266

Ipai, 134

Lahiri, Jhumpa: The Namesake, 151

Iraq, 186

Lala, Nupur, 143

Iroquois, 84

landscape photography, 6, 17, 24, 36

Islam, 34, 39, 52, 131. See also Muslims

Lange, Dorothea, 242n47

Islamophobia, 237n42

La Roche, Frank, 87, 93 – 94, 229n45

It Gets Better Project, 237n42

Lee, Yoon Sun, 236n28 Leemings, Bill, 242n55

Jackson, Shona, 77 Jain, Kajri, 24

Leistner, Rita: The Edward Curtis Project, 84 – 85

Jama Masjid, 52, 194

Le Monocle, 177 – 178

Japan, 4

Library of Congress, 72

Jay, Martin, 86

lithography, 24, 82

Jentsch, Ernst, 41, 221n16

Lokhandwala, Arshiya: After Midnight:

Jogi, 168 Johnson, Lyndon, 136, 137

Indian Modernism to Contemporary India 1947/1997, 216n11

Joon, Joseph, 236n36

Lowe, Lisa, 12, 17, 70, 117

Jungle Book, The, 153

Luna, James, 134

Kaling, Mindy, 139

Maan, Tej, 188

Kanaka Maoli, 78

Machida, Margo, 218n47; Asia/America,

Kane, Paul, 109

218n44, 234n5

Kapadia, Ronak, 23

MacKenzie, John, 51, 225n72

Karuka, Manu, 79

Malaysia, 124; Kuala Lumpur, 53

Kauanui, J. Kēhaulani, 78, 84

Malvo, Lee Boyd, 189

Kaul, Suvir, 243n62

Mark, Mary Ellen, 168

INDEX

Mary, Queen, 47

MoMA PS 1, 168

Mathur, Saloni, 24, 224n64

Momaya, Masum: Beyond Bollywood,

Mattel, 92. See also Barbie

19 – 20, 30, 119 – 158, 163, 188, 213,

Matthew, Annu Palakunnathu, 19, 30,

235nn12 – 13

104, 162, 206 – 207, 211 – 213, 226n6,

Morgan, J. P., 82

229n42; Belles, 93 – 94, 94; Fabri-

Mozumdar, A. K., 135

cated Memories, 1 – 6, 11, 14, 37, 107,

Mughal Empire, 39, 41, 43, 49 – 50,

208 – 209, plate 1, plate 18; Genera-

52 – 53, 58

tions, 3, 107 – 109, 111, 113, 114 – 115; An

Muhammed, John Allen, 189

Indian from India, 29, 70 – 80, 86 – 96,

Mukerji, Dhan Gopal, 139, 141

106 – 117, 148 – 151, 153 – 155, 185, 195,

Mukherjee, Bharati, 139

198, plates 5 – 7, plates 10 – 11; Madon-

Mukherjee, Siddhartha, 139

nas, 91 – 93, plate 6; Memories of India,

multiculturalism, 23, 108, 128 – 1 29,

107; Noble/Savage, 112, plate 7; Open

237n42; Beyond Bollywood and, 121,

Wounds, 107; ReGeneration, 107, 208;

125, 133, 156 – 157; An Indian from

Smiles, 88 – 92, plate 5; Tom & Annu

India and, 111 – 112, 115. See also

After, 148 – 151, plate 11; Tom & Annu

neoliberalism

Before, 148 – 1 49, plate 10; To Majority

Muscogee, 84

Minority, 107

Musée du Quai Branly, 242n48

Menon, Jisha, 47 Menpes, Mortimer, 224n64 Mercer, Kobena, 120, 130

Museum of Modern Art, 206, 220n4. See also MoMA PS 1 Muslims, 2, 40, 104 – 105, 187, 199,

Metcalf, Thomas, 53

230n73; artists, 23, 34; representations

methodology of book, 26 – 28, 205 – 214.

of, 5, 9, 99, 124, 146, 159, 168, 209; sur-

See also curation; ethnography Métis, 84, 110 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 166, 202;

veillance of, 29, 116 – 117, 154, 186. See also Islam Myanmar. See Burma

Looking In, 182 military photography, 17, 38, 54, 73, 96 – 97

Nagas, 99

Miller, Milton, 95

Nair, Mira: Mississippi Masala, 151 – 153;

Mills, Clark, 238n55 mimesis, 23, 125, 140 – 1 41, 158, 174, 178, 180, 185 – 187, 196 – 198, 232n92; colonial photography and, 46 – 50, 58, 70 – 74, 78 – 80, 87 – 91, 103, 111, 150; diasporic, 5, 8 – 9, 20, 35 – 40, 46 – 50, 64 – 69, 73, 87 – 91, 121, 203, 206; nonmimetic identification, 11 – 12, 16, 28 – 31, 165 – 167,

The Namesake, 151 Natarajan, Balu, 144 national archives, 16, 38, 67, 72, 83, 157. See also archives of diaspora nationalism, 10, 47, 76; anticolonial, 18, 63; Indian, 9, 50, 63, 213; postcolonial, 124, 201; U.S., 188; white, 186 Native Americans, 184, 215n6, 229n45,

178, 180 – 182, 200 – 202, 207, 211 – 213;

238n55; colonial photography of, 6 – 7,

photography and, 13, 19; racialized, 4,

17, 19, 29, 70 – 95, 98, 107, 110 – 117,

120, 161 – 162, 208 Min, Susette, 23, 28, 155 – 156 mining the museum, 19 misidentification, 94, 153, 188 – 189, 199. See also disidentification Mohawk, 148

148 – 151, 154. See also indigenous people Native peoples. See indigenous people; Native Americans; “natives” (colonial India); Scheduled Castes/Schedule Tribes (SC/ST)

INDEX

267

“natives” (colonial India), 7, 19, 72 – 73,

Pakistan, 9, 24, 26, 29, 34 – 35, 47, 59, 63,

79, 111, 157, 162; definition, 215n6; in

108, 185 – 186, 208; Lahore, 46, 55. See

The People of India, 95 – 107, 232n89 natural history museums, 6, 19, 30, 109 – 1 26, 131 – 134, 144, 157. See also Royal Ontario Museum (ROM); Smith-

panoramas, 44, 54, 56, 68, 125, 156, 168, 182

sonian National Museum of Natural

Parsons/The New School, 168

History

Partition, 47, 59, 63 – 64, 76, 124, 208,

Nature Morte Gallery, 160, 220n2; From Paper to Monument, 34, 45 – 46

225n83 Partition Museum, 225n83

Navajo. See Diné

Patel, Dansukh Dan, 195 – 197

Ndé. See Apache

Patel, Laljibhai, 173, plate 12

neoliberalism, 16, 23, 127, 147, 156, 161,

Patel, Pushpa Ben, 172 – 173, plate 12

210; colonialism and, 78, 112; Indian,

Patel-­Pareek, Alok, 179 – 181, plate 14

35, 59. See also multiculturalism

Patel-­Pareek, Sumati, 179 – 181, plate 14

Nepal, 101 – 103

Payómkawichum, 134

Newark Museum of Art, 202; India:

Peabody Museum, 72

Public Places, Private Spaces, 167, 190, 195, 197

Pennsylvania, 148, 237n52; Philadelphia, 26 – 27, 67, 205 – 207, 210 – 212

Newars, 101 – 103

personal archives, 4 – 5

New Delhi, 37, 46, 65, 164, 168 – 169,

Phelan, Peggy, 65

225n72; art world in, 6, 26, 29, 31, 34,

phenomenology, 22, 25, 43, 45, 55, 64

67, 72, 95, 158, 160, 206, 220n3

Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA ),

New York City, 5, 13, 46, 98, 170,

268

also Partition Pandya, Sameer, 144

212 – 213

182 – 183, 195, 220n3; art world in,

Philippines, 184

26 – 27, 29, 31, 34, 37, 95, 158 – 163, 166,

photographic sovereignty, 84

202, 206; Brooklyn, 34, 37, 67, 239n1;

photogravures, 73, 82 – 83, 88

Chelsea, 159, 193; Manhattan, 9;

photojournalism, 13, 167, 190, 192

Queens, 1 – 4, 9 – 11, 14, 21, 193, 208;

Phu, Thy, 27, 127 – 1 28

Upper East Side, 193; World Trade

Piatote, Beth, 91

Center, 7, 29, 61 – 65. See also Septem-

picture-­making, 24, 227n15

ber 11, 2001

picturesque, 38, 116, 151, 221n8

Nez Perce, 91

Pinney, Christopher, 24 – 25, 97, 167

Ni:mi:pu. See Nez Perce

postcolonialism/postcoloniality, 31, 37,

9/11. See September 11, 2001

58, 66, 68, 86, 195; indigeneity and, 80,

9-­11: Artists Respond, 146

101, 103 – 104; photography and, 24,

nostalgia, 34, 36, 38, 59, 83

45, 73, 114; postcolonial nationalism, 124, 201

Obama, Michelle, 140

postcolonial studies, 21, 24, 38, 75, 78

O’Brien, Jean M., 82, 111, 227n21

Pratt, Mary Louise, 17

Oglala Lakota, 154

Puerto Rico, 183

Olympics, 51, 138 – 1 42, 232n85

Purab aur Paschim, 201

oral hermeneutics, 218n47 Oraons, 99 Other Backward Classes (OBC), 101, 103, 231n83. See also Newars

INDEX

Queens Museum, 4, 208, plate 1; After Midnight: Indian Modernism to Contemporary India 1947/1997,

216n11; Edge of Desire: Recent Art from India, 9 – 10; Fatal Love: South Asian American Art Now, 1 – 6, 9 – 10, 21, 26 queerness, 9, 13, 124 – 1 25, 128, 216n9, 237n42; queer phenomenology, 43;

San Jose Museum of Art, 206; Postdate: Photography and Inherited History in India, 216n11 Saund, Dalip Singh, 136, 137 Scheduled Castes/Schedule Tribes (SC/ ST),

101, 103, 231n83. See also Adivasis

representations of, 130, 177 – 178, 183,

Scott, Monique, 132

192 – 194

Scripps National Spelling Bee, 142,

queer studies, 10, 12, 16, 20, 179, 211; queer diaspora studies, 78

144 See, Sarita, 23, 111, 132, 182 Seeathl, Chief, 80

racism, 19, 90, 121, 184, 237n42; hate

Seminole, 84

crimes, 129, 146 – 1 47, 186, 188 – 189;

Sen, Aveek, 175

Jim Crow, 182; white nationalism, 186;

Sepia International, 95

white supremacy, 59. See also anti­

Sepoy Mutiny of 1857/Uprising/First

racism; slavery Raheja, Michelle, 110 Raiford, Leigh, 12

War of Independence, 50 – 51, 59, 97 – 98, 220n1 September 11, 2001, 7, 29, 40, 61 – 64,

Ram, Rajeev, 141

67, 162; South Asians after, 5, 9, 80,

Ramaswamy, Sumathi, 24, 86

116 – 117, 146, 154, 186 – 189, 215n4; U.S.

Raqs Media Collective, 72 Reddy, Vanita, 92

Empire after, 19, 65, 186 settler colonialism, 26, 103 – 104, 109,

Red Fort, 52

121, 131, 134, 156 – 158, 184, 215n6; chal-

Red Shirt, 154

lenges to, 7; photography and, 6 – 7,

Renaissance, 53

16 – 19, 29, 69, 70 – 95, 98, 107, 110 – 117,

Rhode Island School of Design, 34

148 – 151, 153 – 154, 162

Riis, Jacob, 242n47

Shah, Seher, 6, 19, 160, 162, 206 – 207,

Rinehart, Frank Albert, 87, 229n45

220n3; From Paper to Monument, 34,

Roman Empire, 53

45 – 46; Geometric Landscapes and the

#ROMfamcam, 108

Spectacle of Force, 28 – 29, 33 – 48, 52,

Roosevelt, Theodore, 82

55 – 57, 61 – 67, 185, plates 2 – 4

Royal Geographic Society, 46

Shaheer, Mohammed, 59

Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), 14, 75,

Shimakawa, Karen, 42, 130

112, 206, 226n6; Daphne Cockwell

Shimizu, Celine Parreñas, 22

Gallery, 109 – 111, 114; Fabricated

Shyamalan, M. Night, 139

Memories, 2 – 3, 3, 6, 11; Generations, 3,

Sikhs, 146, 200; representation and, 8,

107 – 109, 111, 113, 114 – 115; Indigenous

40 – 41, 124, 159, 168 – 169, 187 – 188,

Knowledge Resource teacher, 110; Sir

191, 199

Christopher Ondaatje South Asian

Singh, Bonnie, 200 – 202

Gallery, 108

Singh, Radhika, 242n53

Ruins and Fabrications, 205 – 214, plates 18 – 19

Singh, Randhir, 34 Sinha, Gayatri: India: Public Places, Private Spaces, 167, 190, 195, 197

Saini, Romy, 188 salvage paradigm in photography, 97 Samoa, 235n12

slavery, 13, 48, 101, 102, 128, 134, 229n51 Smith, Paul Chaat, 110

INDEX

269

Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, 10; Asian American Portraits of Encounter, 234n1; Beyond Bolly-

Throckmorton, Jodi: Postdate: Photography and Inherited History in India, 216n11

wood, 19 – 20, 30, 119 – 158, 163, 188, 213,

Tibet, 99, 102

235nn12 – 13; I Want the Wide Ameri-

Tom, Hattie, 154

can Earth, 234n1

Tonga, 235n12

Smithsonian Institution, 6, 123, 238n55 Smithsonian National Museum of

Torlino, Tom, 148 – 151, 154 transgender look, 177 – 178

Natural History, 117; Beyond Bolly-

traumatic public memory, 61

wood, 19 – 20, 30, 119 – 158, 163, 188, 213,

Tsimshian, 85

235nn12 – 13

Tsinhnahjinnie, Hulleah J., 84

Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, 154 Sodhi, Balbir Singh, 146 – 1 47, 153, 155, 188 Sonthals, 99

Tulalip, 84 Twelve Gates Arts, 205; Ruins and Fabrications, 205 – 214, plates 18 – 19 Twitter, 108 Two Moons, 112 – 113, 113

South Africa, Pretoria, 53 South Asian studies, 25

Uganda, 124

sovereignty, 51, 120; indigenous, 75, 77,

ugly feelings, 131

84, 93, 154, 210; visual, 110

157, 209, 222n23; colonial photography

Spivak, Gayatri, 77

and, 88, 93, 112; definition, 41, 221n16;

Sri Lanka, 108, 124 Srinivasan, Ragini Tharoor, 140

270

uncanny, 19, 29, 61, 66 – 68, 70, 120, 148,

Spielrein, Sabina, 222n23

Stanford University, 168 Sternberger, Paul: India: Public Places, Private Spaces, 167, 190, 195, 197 Stoler, Ann Laura, 17, 72

empire and, 38 – 45, 48, 58 United Arab Emirates, Dubai, 34, 220n3 University of Rhode Island, 76 Uprising, the. See Sepoy Mutiny of 1857/ Uprising/First War of Independence

Sultan Abdul Samad Building, 53

U.S. Army, 135, 237n52

surveillance, 42, 157, 186; biometric, 7,

U.S. Congress, 136, 140

29, 116; colonial, 11, 31, 54 – 55, 69, 72,

U.S. Declaration of Independence, 136

74, 79; photography as, 4, 25, 54 – 55,

U.S. Empire, 17, 22 – 2 4, 48, 86, 183;

93, 150, 154 – 155, 187 – 188, 206 Sutton, Deborah, 59

post – September 11, 19, 65, 186 U.S. Supreme Court, 135, 236n39

Swinomish, 84 Valentino, Rudolph, 15 Tamez, Margo, 150 Tamils, 174 – 175

Vangad, Rajesh, 168; Fields of Sight, 168, 209 – 210

Taussig, Michael, 35, 64, 232n92

“vanishing Indian” trope, 29, 71, 98, 117

terrorism, 9, 63 – 64

Venice Biennale, 168

Teves, Stephanie Nohelani, 84

Verdesio, Gustavo, 111

Thind, Bhagat Singh, 135 – 136, 135,

Victoria, Queen, 50, 220n1

236n39

Victoria and Albert Museum, 46, 226n6

Thomas, Jeff, 84 – 85

Victoria Memorial, 223n41

Thompson, Krista, 18

Vietnam, 76, 108, 185, 208

INDEX

Vietnam War, 23, 76, 208 Vizenor, Gerald, 85

phy from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, 216n11 Wilbur, Matika: Project 562, 84 – 85

Walekar, Prem Kumar, 189

Wilson, Fred, 19, 134

war, 22 – 23, 28, 63, 85, 97 – 98, 107; ar-

World Trade Center, 7, 29, 61 – 65. See

chives of, 68, 76; veterans, 85, 135. See

also September 11, 2001

also Korean War; Sepoy Mutiny of

World War I, 135

1857/Uprising/First War of Inde-

World War II, 184

pendence; U.S. Army; Vietnam War; World War I; World War II Warlis, 209 Washington, DC, 6, 19, 26, 30, 117, 119 Washington state, 93 Watson, James Forbes: The People of India, 29, 75, 95 – 104, 106 – 107, 232n89

Yakama nation, 93 Yerba Buena Center for the Arts: The Matter Within: New Contemporary Art of India, 216n11 Yoon, Jin-­me: Group of Sixty-­Seven, 229n42

Wexler, Laura, 151, 229n51

Yoruk, 94

White, Louellyn, 148

Young Rajah, The, 151, 153

Whitechapel Gallery: Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photogra-

Zoroastrianism, 125

271

INDEX

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