How should we understand the relationship between the family, the photograph, and the African diaspora? As one of the most accessible objects through which complicated processes of projection, desire, and identification come into view, the photograph frames the family in ways that affirm its apparent self-evidence and, at the same time, render it open to interrogation. Photographs, and family photographs in particular, provide a unique vantage point from which to consider some of the dynamics of race in the African diaspora -- dynamics of difference, specificity, relationality, and belonging that reveal our deep investment in seeing both the family and diaspora as spaces of belonging that often paper over less hospitable issues of difference and divergence within and among black communities transnationally.
Issue 98: Spring 2009
Family Matters: Diaspora, Difference, and the Visual Archive
Abstract:
When and where do we "see" the emergence of a black German subject? Where do we encounter a visual instantiation of a black subject who is internal to German society and partakes of a relationship to this society that is neither transplanted, transitional, nor transitory, but instead firmly grounded within it? In early-twentieth-century Germany, one important site where this subject emerges is through the medium of photography--specifically, black German family photography. Often considered one of the most mundane forms of photographic imaging, family photos function as a complex site of black European diasporic formation. This essay analyzes a series of images that register blacks as Europeans, yet framed through the lens of national and familial idioms that presents them as undeniable members of German society. In so doing, the article highlights both the tensions of diasporic formation, as well as the coconstitution of racial and gendered subjects therein.
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