We tend to think of photography and citizenship as having a positive relationship to one another. National identification cards and passport photographs confer citizenship on an individual and confirm that individual's belonging to a particular political polity. Yet, photographs have also been used to unbind nationals, to undo citizenship, make non-citizens or even construct no-man's lands. This workshop explores this very particular relationship of photograph and citizenship in four very different historical moments and geographies.
The event will be held in person, and is free and open to the public. To attend, please RSVP at developingroom@gmail.com
Sponsors
Center for Cultural Analysis
Art History Department, Rutgers University
David Goldblatt, Young Men with Dompas, 1972
Schedule
1:00 Introduction
1:15 Zeynep Devrim Gürsel
1:45 Q&A
2:00 Lily Cho
2:30 Q&A
2:45 Break
3:00 Juan Carlos Mazariegos
3:30 Q&A
3:45 Kylie Thomas
4:15 Q&A
4:30 Break
4:45: Roundtable
5:30 Dinner
Talks
Portraits of Unbelonging: Photography, the Ottoman State, and the unmaking of Armenian subjects, 1896-1908
Portraits of Unbelonging: Photography, the Ottoman State, and the unmaking of Armenian subjects, 1896-1908
Zeynep Devrim Gürsel, Rutgers University
Boyakjian family expatriation photograph
ABSTRACT
In 1896 the Ottoman sultan issued a decree that allowed Ottoman Armenians to emigrate on the condition that they never return. A key step in this process was sitting for a photograph. While these photographs look like family portraits and were often produced by professional Armenian studio photographers, they are binding legal documents of exclusion. Portraits of Unbelonging traces the stories of the families in these photographs over a century – in the bureaucratic files that unmake them as Ottoman subjects, on the ship manifests that track their migration routes, in the censuses and naturalization records that document their new lives as immigrants then citizens, and finally in the family albums and stories of their descendants living today. It is a history of mass migration told on an intimate scale that interrogatesnationality and subjecthood and the rise of the document-based global security regimes that govern citizenship and mobility today. This talk specifically addresses the ramifications of photography for the purpose of documenting those who are no longer Ottoman subjects by analyzing portraits in which photographic subjects are no longer political subjects.
BIO
Zeynep Devrim Gürsel is a media anthropologist and Associate Professor in the department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. She is the author of Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation (University of California Press, 2016), an ethnography of the international photojournalism industry. For the last decade she has beenresearching photography as a tool of governmentality in the late Ottoman period. Specifically, she is investigating photography during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid (1876-1909) to understand emerging forms of the state and the changing contours of Ottoman subjecthood.
Quiet Violence: Photography and Chinese Exclusion
Quiet Violence: Photography and Chinese Exclusion
Lily Cho, York University
ABSTRACT
On the eve of the centenary anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act in Canada. In May 1923, the Government of Canada passed into law the exclusion of Chinese migrants. The law was not repealed until 1949 and the aftershocks of this long period of exclusion remain today. The law separated families and cleaved communities. A system of mass surveillance, relying heavily on identification photography, was central to the enforcement of exclusion. Considering photographs drawn from this archive of state surveillance, I argue that these identification photographs constitute a form of quiet violence that continues to resonate in the anti-Asian violence that remains a frightening and tragic fact of everyday life now. I will focus specifically on photographs of children captured in this archive in order to follow the traces of family separation as one of the “loudest” forms of quiet violence. Drawing from Tina Campt’s exhortation to listen to images, and Judith Butler and David Eng’s calls for rethinking kinship, this talk examines identification photographs from this era in order to listen for registers of violence that cannot be heard even when they are deeply felt.
BIO
Lily Cho is an Associate Professor of English and Associate Dean, Global & Community Engagement in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her book, Mass Capture: Chinese Head Tax and the Making of Non-citizens (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021) has won the Association for Asian American Studies’ 2023 Outstanding Achievement Award in the Multidisciplinary/Interdisciplinary Category. It also received an 2022 Honourable Mention by the Photography Network Book Prize Committee.
A Death Squad Dossier: Undoing Political Recognizability
A Death Squad Dossier: Undoing Political Recognizability
Juan Carlos Mazariegos, Columbia University
Diario Militar 1983-1985, National Security Archive (NSA), 1-2.
ABSTRACT
On May 1999, the National Security Archive (NSA), in Washington D.C., made public a secret dossier elaborated by the Presidential Intelligence Unit of the Guatemalan army between 1983 and 1985. The dossier, known as Diario Militar [Military Diary] or Dosier de la muerte [Death’s Dossier], registers the events that led to the illegal detention, torture, extrajudicial execution, and forced disappearance of 183 political leaders accused of being part of the Guatemalan guerrillas. To date, no other document of this nature is known in Latin America. The Diario Militar includes an ample register of ID photographs commonly used for passports, unions, high school, and university and citizenship IDs (also known as cédulas de vecindad) that conferred legal recognizability, political belonging, and institutional verifiability. This talk elaborates on the multiple marks and traces that are indicative of the violent de-contextualization and re-appropriation these ID photographs were subjected to in the Diario Militar, where their putative verifiability was mobilized to simultaneously identify and strip away these presumed guerrillas from their forms of social belonging and political recognizability. In this regard, this talk expands and problematizes photography’s capacity to confer citizenship and political identification, both as a means of state surveillance and the subjects’ self-fashioning; and explores a moment in Guatemala’s history in which the relationship between ID photography, political belonging, and citizenship became murderous.
BIO
Juan Carlos Mazariegos’ research focuses on contemporary social imaginaries of violent pasts in post-genocide Guatemala, expanding to visual and affective cultures in the aftermath of political violence in Latin America. He is currently working on a book manuscript provisionally entitled A War of Proper Names. The Politics of Naming, Indigenous Insurrection, and Genocidal Violence During Guatemala’s Civil War, that examines the relationship between genocidal violence, the symbolic and imaginary constitution of the Guatemalan finca-state [plantation state] and the politics of naming and anonymity among Ixil communities of Mayan descent during Guatemala’s armed conflict (1960-1996). Juan Carlos Mazariegos is a historically informed sociocultural anthropologist and sociologist who has conducted extensive archival and ethnographic research in Guatemala since 2005. He is currently a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University in the City of New York.
Photography – Apartheid – Erasure
Photography – Apartheid – Erasure
Kylie Thomas, University College Cork
Matthews_Mabelane
ABSTRACT
This talk will focus on a series of photographs taken by members of the South African Police force during apartheid that were used as part of inquest proceedings to affirm the innocence of police officers accused of torturing and murdering activists held in detention. I read these photographs alongside a related series of portraits of activists used by the apartheid regime to identify those they targeted for disappearance, torture and death. I consider these images in relation to identification photographs that were included in the infamous ‘passbooks’ that marked Black South Africans as non-citizens. Bringing this material into relation serves as a reminder of how apartheid was not only a series of human rights violations, but a crime against humanity that operated through the systematic erasure of citizenship rights and the obliteration of personhood.
BIO
Kylie Thomas is a Senior Lecturer at the Radical Humanities Laboratory and Art History at University College Cork, Ireland. She is also a Senior Researcher at NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
She writes about photography, visual activism, feminist, LGBT and anti-racist movements, resistance and protest, and South Africa during and after apartheid. She is the author of Impossible Mourning: HIV/AIDS and Visuality after apartheid (Wits University Press & Bucknell University Press, 2014) and co-editor of Photography in and out of Africa: Iterations with Difference (Routledge, 2016) and Women and Photography in Africa: Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges (Routledge, 2020). She has held numerous research fellowships, including a European Institutes for Advanced Study Junior Fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, Austria; a British Academy International Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Brighton, UK; and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at NIOD. From April-September 2022 she was a Visiting Scholar at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz. She currently co-directs the NIOD ImageLab, which focuses on war and visual culture from the time of the Second World War to the present.