A colleague and mentor once told me that the average amount of time between an academic author completing the manuscript to their first book and its actual publication was 9 years. That number was a helpful mile marker over the last several years as I moved through revisions, acquiring image permissions, addressing reader reports, making copy edits, approving indexes, and proofreading. And though it did not take the full 9 years, I am still astonished by all the other numbers — of hours of help and support, advice, laughter and friendship from mentors, friends, colleagues, students and family — that it took to realize this project.
I’m feeling incredibly grateful to that team of humans, and the wonderful editorial staff at Penn State University Press, for making this book a reality. Projecting Citizenship: Photography and Belonging in the British Empire is set to be published Dec 20, 2018 and is available for pre-order through Penn State University Press’s website, as is a short excerpt from the “Introduction: Citizenship In and Out of Sight”:
There is no such thing as a photograph of citizenship. Despite systematic attempts to construct it, and exhaustive efforts to define its parameters, citizenship evades the grasp of the visual. As a practice, a claim, a legal category, a tool of governmentality, and an ideal, citizenship lies just beyond our peripheral vision, coming in and out of view as an object of study in disciplines as diverse as education, geography, legal studies, history, postcolonial studies, and, more recently, the history and theory of photography. Because it must be conferred relationally, by other citizens or by a sovereign, citizenship is invisible, difficult to disentangle from other categories of belonging, and taken up by a wide range of actors to achieve often oppositional aims. Citizenship is used to justify tools of control and surveillance employed by the state for population management, in liberal discourses of social improvement through welfare and education, and as a key term for contesting these very practices by their critics (in postcolonial studies, cultural criticism, and photography theory, in particular). Given how difficult it is to conjure a consistent vision of the citizen, and how often scholars struggle to establish a more precise definition of citizenship, it seems strange that the past decade has seen a whole body of research emerge that tries to link photography—an inherently visual medium—with the discourses and practices of citizenship. This research not only makes a case for photography’s role in defining citizenship in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries but argues that there is something unique that photography shows us about this often-invisible category of belonging. The problem of photographing citizenship is perhaps a problem of photographic representation itself. It illuminates what Shawn Michelle Smith has described as a paradoxical desire, and a failure, to see—a desire that lies at the very heart of the medium.
This disparity between the difficulty of pinning down the definition of citizenship and scholars’ sudden desire to see it in photographs raises questions about the limits of visually securing and communicating identities, and about how viewers come to recognize subjects as fellow citizens despite these limitations. A rich body of critical scholarship has explored the processes through which categorical differences (such as race, class, gender, ability, and sexuality) were visualized and solidified through photographic representations in the twentieth century, but more attention needs to be paid to how spectators come to identify and empathize with subjects in spite and in excess of these socially constructed distinctions. These processes of spectatorial recognition are, of course, culturally specific, but they are also profoundly influenced by colonial ways of knowing and seeing. By locating the trouble of picturing citizenship in the colonial context—a historical moment in which race was being legitimated as a scientific as well as social, political, and legal category—the question of what can be seen, or recognized, through photographs is thrown into sharp relief. If, as Stephen Sheehi has argued, all photographs express social relations, but do so according to different temporal logics based on their proximity to colonial power, the entangled histories of citizenship, colonialism, and photography might only be legible to us retrospectively, as afterimages.
I am particularly interested in how the temporal lag that photography introduces—between production and reception, between its manifest and latent content, between its users’ desires and the limitations of what it produces, between the archiving of its documents and the histories that are written from them—might open up the possibility for acts of contestation, negotiation, resistance, and reclamation on the part of the viewer. These enactments of a disobedient gaze insist on reading past the manifest content of photographs for their latent meanings: the histories that were occluded and elided by what the colonial state wanted viewers to see, the unruly and proliferating meanings that archival subject headings attempted to suppress. Practicing a disobedient gaze, then, is a mode of looking that refuses the readings imposed on photographs by the colonial state and insists on activating photographic evidence for resistant and oppositional political purposes. It is a practice deployed both by historical viewers of colonial photographs and by researchers in the present, as a resistant method of historiography that can be activated in the archive to recuperate these afterimages. Projecting Citizenship enacts just such an unruly and disobedient mode of looking to interrogate how citizenship and photography were concomitantly shaped by colonial epistemologies.
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