The object lesson picture books are filled with images that produce the modern/colonial gaze. This gaze produces racial difference and white supremacy and was central to the subject formation of imperial subject formation during the turn of the century, but continues to reverberate in the present. When mobilising the images during my research process, I was faced with the challenge of finding educational and research strategies to analyse and criticise this modern/colonial gaze without simply reproducing its violence.
Seloua Luste Boulbina argues that it is not enough to mark an image that speaks to, or rather performs modern/colonial violence, as negative when it is displayed over and over again: “ […] first in physical reality, then in photographic or pictographic form, and finally in scholarship within a publication presented as ‘academic’. Indeed, a pattern of repetition is at work here. At its core is not a critique that deconstructs, but a trial that condemns. It is all about exhibiting the crime, showing the evil. But doing so does not articulate the injury nor consider the position of the present-day viewers or readers.” (Boulbina, 2021, p. 114). Boulbina questions the transformative potential of displaying images of racist violence (Boulbina, 2021, p. 113).
In her text on how black political organisations in Portugal negotiated the First Portuguese Colonial Exposition (1934) that included a “human zoo”, the sociologist Cristina Roldão offers a counter-narrative to the history/memory of the colonial exposition in Porto. Roldão reflects on the importance and necessity of such counter-narrative in the face of one of the most violent aspects of the colonial white supremacy that lives on in the present, namely: “the copious re-exposure of photographs of these colonial exhibitions, with the justification that (white) people and institutions (white) people and institutions need to ‘re-see’ in order to ‘re-know’ the violence of empire.” (Roldão, 2021, p. 36).
Roldão quotes the letter of the afrofeminist collective Cases Rebelles with the title Les corps épuisés du spectacle colonial (2018) that rises the following questions that who works as teacher, academic, activist, archivist or any other organic intellectual with images of colonial (and other, related) violences: “what is the potential for transformation of this re-exposure in a visual culture saturated with images of violated black bodies? What are the risks of realising of the colonial and sexist voyeurism that it aims to criticise? What kind of scientific ethics that goes beyond the image rights of these people and does not anonymise their faces or their bodies? Is there no alternative to ‘re-exposure’ of the “zoo”?” (Roldão, 2021, p. 36).
Boulbina argues in her discussion on textbooks and similar educational materials and tools that contemporary artworks could serve as counterpoints to images that rehearse and perform colonial gazes (p. 114). Thus, grasping the act of seeing as a performative act, and the modern/colonial gaze as producing imperial subjects, I attempt not to reproduce the violence that is inscribed into the object lesson picture books and yet aim to analyse the production of that very modern/colonial gaze. In order to find ways of doing so, I turned towards contemporary artistic interventions that work with/against colonial archival materials.
In the video performance Unearthing. In Conversation (2017) and its artistic research process, artist and writer Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński tries to come to terms with the hauntings that followed her encounter with photographs made by Paul Schebesta (1887-1967), an Austro-Czech missionary and ethnologist in the Belgian Congo (nowadays the Democratic Republic of Congo) at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Seeking to bring into focus the colonial agent Schebesta and trying to protect the colonised persons in the photographs from the voyeuristic gaze inscribed into the photograph and reenacted by the spectators coming across it, Kazeem-Kamiński covered the colonised persons with coloured cardboard paper. This move is not without contradiction, as she reflects, because it also makes the looking back of the person as a counter gesture impossible. She tries other strategies such as cutting the persons out and placing a mirror behind the now empty spaces for the spectator to envision their own presence, imaginations, thoughts and knowledges when looking at the picture (Kazeem-Kamiński, 2018).
Kazeem-Kamiński handles the pictures with care, caring for the cut-outs of the photographs, shifting her emphasis on guarding them until a time emerges in which she can find a surrounding that can be a home to them (Kazeem-Kamiński, 2018).
There is no single or definite way of how to confront images of the modern/colonial gaze, each strategy bears its own limits (Kazeem-Kamiński, 2018, p. 90). Contradictions and impossibilities are inscribed into the very process of unlearning that gaze, particularly for white persons like me.
Kazeem-Kamiński chose the colours of the flags of the Congo to cover the persons photographed by Schebesta, simultaneously questioning the idea of the nation. In the case of Walther’s and Staub’s picture book, most often not an exact local is defined but rather a more generic colonial imaginary of the tropics and the colonised parts of the world invoked. Furthermore, my research is concerned with the study of how a nation is being made and imagined through visual educational materials, which is why reinscribing a national logic through a strong national symbol of a flag did not align with this attempt. I chose to cover all the persons with coloured shapes, not repeating any of the colours, in order to stress the individuality pertaining to each person, the diversity of interrelated stories.
Kazeem-Kamiński reflects on the tensions involved in the act of covering that I have chosen to adapt in my research as well. While covering the photographs/pictures ensures that the Black persons cannot be looked at the way the photographer/illustrator intended, it also takes away their ability to look back, to confront and to communicate (Kazeem-Kamiński, 2018, p. 87). Illustrations differ here from photographs: both feed the colonial imaginary, and both harm black subjects by reproducing violent racial stereotypes, yet the potential for a resistant look or posture is far more limited in an illustration in which the colonial agent is literally drawing the modern/colonial Other. This imaginative encounter happens only according to the rules made by him who is in power. This is not to say that these images are contradiction-free or that moments of resistance cannot be found (see video).
Kazeem-Kamiński stresses the conversational aspect of her artistic research. She addresses the persons in the photographs, searching for a decolonial grammar and an oppositional gaze. Her subject position as a Black European researcher and artist is significantly different to mine as a White European one. What can an oppositional gaze mean for me as a white German woman? How do I trace that which is suppressed by the subject position that I inhabit?
I locate my task, inscribed to the same movement against white European ignorance of colonial pasts and racist presences, in the interruption of the modern/colonial gaze and the sharing of research and contemporary made by BIPOC artists and researchers that are indebted to the same task and to whom I open myself to be challenged in the sticky, continuous work of unlearning my ways of seeing and the systems of visuality that reinscribe white hegemony.
Boulbina, Seloua Luste. (2021). Diagnosis, Chronicle and Critique of a Certain Form of Blindness. In Aïcha Diallo, Annika Niemann, & Miriam Shabafrouz (Eds), Untie to Tie. Colonial Fragments in School Contexts. (pp. 112–118). Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung/bpb.
Kazeem-Kamiński, Belinda. (2023). H(a)untings/Heim-Suchungen. Sternberg Press; Kunsthalle Wien.
Kazeem-Kamiński, Belinda. (2018). Unearthing. In Conversation: On Listening and Caring. Critical Ethnic Studies, 4(2), 75–99. https://doi.org/10.5749/jcritethnstud.4.2.0075
Roldão, Cristina. (2021). Resistir à Exposição: O olhar da imprensa negra sobre os “zoos humanos” coloniais. In Um Elefante no Palácio de Cristal (pp. 36–42). Galeria Municipal do Porto / Ágora – Cultura e Desporto do Porto, E.M.