Overwhelming inheritance: family pictures in Sitaara Stodel’s photo-collages

Being one of the most ritualised and coded images we have, the family photo has maintained its status and privilege as the visual, self-acclaimed collective family heirloom throughout the decades. In spite of the fact that new family forms have challenged the conventional nuclear family structure and function, the family picture has predominantly remained the same: smiling children, parents, uncles and aunts at unmistakably happy moments. Today, all Norwegian teenagers have their own camera telephone, which facilitates a multiplicity of ways that family narratives can be maintained, expanded and perpetuated. Parents are no longer the sole editors and custodians of the family's visual memories. As young people demand a place as historiographers and intervene in the mediation of family memories and ideologies, the practice of the presentation of the family, its social function and significance are undergoing changes. Based on analysis of in-depth interviews with twenty-three Norwegian teenagers and a sample of their camphone family pictures, this article examines how camphone family pictures make possible new articulations of the family, articulations that perhaps are more in accordance with the changes that already are underway in the functions of families. In terms of these phenomena the article discusses how new technologies of the self affect conventions and understandings of the family and how “new” and plural family pictures, filed in each individual's private digital archives, affect the coming family narratives.

Nikky Finney, a native of Carolina and a professor of English at University of Kentucky, is a founding member of Affrilachian Poets, a collective of Appalachian poets of African descent who incorporate into their work themes of regional as well as transnational identities, local as well as global communities. Although she hails from Carolina and not geographical region traditionally associated with Appalachia, Finney, along with other members of group, including writer Gurney Norman and adopted member Nikki Giovanni, focus on intersection of history and culture that is central to vast region called Appalachia. Finney's perspective on being Affrilachian is a global one. In Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers, Finney writes of the geographical evolutionary theory, which contends that, at one point in time, all land masses were one. She explains that if one were to pull all countries of world in together one would discover Appalachian mountain range melds perfectly into long green valleys of Africa like one single sacred ground. Finney sees same connection between coastal Palmetto State of her birth and continent of her ancestors. However, she laments in her Introduction to collection Rice (1995) that South Carolina has disregarded much of its African heritage. Through her poetry, Finney seeks to remedy that neglect by examining what melds sandy land of Carolina to continent of Africa--the tradition of planting and harvesting rice. (1) Rice combines poems and photographs. The photographs appear to be family pictures, some taken professionally, some by amateurs. There is an elegant studio portrait of a woman, her high-collared blouse trimmed and tucked in lace, tied neatly at neck, and fastened with an ornate brooch. There is a photo of a man and a woman, a couple in their sixties perhaps, standing in a dirt field. There are miscellaneous family photos: a mother and a son, two pairs of women--in first, an older woman poses before a car alongside a younger woman. The second pair is young girls, sisters perhaps, in a professional photo from last century. There are handsome men: a teen in knickers, a headshot that could be a graduation photo. A beautiful young woman holds a bouquet. A couple kisses before backdrop of a seaside resort in one of those shots solicited by photographers who prowl boardwalks for vacationers. None of pictures has captions. We have no sense of who these people are or where and how they fit into Finney's narrative. They seem to tell a story--are they parents and children, second, third, even fourth generation? Are they Finney's mother, father, grandparents? In Rice, shadows of Africa and of slavery in Finney's poems undercut seeming innocence of family photos. Family photographs, however, are far from innocent. They are instrumental in constructing what Marianne Hirsch defines as gaze--that is, the ideology, mythology, of family as an institution. The power of this myth is evident in Hirsch's description of familial gaze as hegemonic (8). Family photographs create an image of unity, a moment of cohesion, a protection from discord that most families cannot uphold. Here Hirsch echoes Roland Barthes, who also recognizes disturbing, insidious, and astonishing power of photograph. (2) In his discussion of signifying function of photography, Barthes tells us, on one level, photographic image is full of meaning. On another, it is form, emptied of meaning and waiting for context, all in service of myth. Family photographs, such as those that appear in Rice, reproduce dominant mythology of family. Claude Levi-Strauss describes purpose of myth as provid[ing] a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (Levi-Strauss 229). Myths, in other words, make a fragmented world understandable and habitable. …

The Family Snaps Representing the Family. Deborah Chambers. Sage. 2001 In her new book, Representing the Family, Deborah Chambers offers an ambitious and quite comprehensive attempt to chronicle progressive perspectives on resistance to the nuclear family ideal. She represents the ideal both in massmediated discourse and as it is presented in private individuals and families. The strongest part of the book is the original research Chambers presents on private family photo albums and photographs. The book covers a great deal of important material, but ultimately and unfortunately fails to make a strong case for a perspective of its very own and is sadly beset by a plodding, passive writing style that at its worst drives the reader into a rather restless state of semi-somnolence and at best, blocks the way to Chambers' most crucial points. In the best part of the book, Chambers allows us a peek inside her own rather unusual upbringing and the sad tale of how many of her family pictures were destroyed in the '70s by seawater that leaked into a ship's hold during the family's many travels. It may have been this traumatic loss that peaked Chambers' interest in the whole notion of familial representation. She cannot replace her own photos (excepting some strays that relatives kindly donated on hearing of the tragedy). And yes, Chambers goes on to say: to most families, such a loss would indeed be considered a true 'tragedy.' Such an event would certainly not match the loss of a real, flesh and blood, live person, but it ranks very high among families with whom she spoke for an earlier research project dedicated solely to this subject. I agree with those individuals who say that the one thing they would grab first in a natural disaster is a family photo album. Some of my own dearest familial representations are now posted in a remote and 'hidden' part of the World Wide Web. When given permission to share them with the world, I will. At the point when people decide to share their private photos with an anonymous audience, most distinctions Chambers draws between private representation and the massmediated variety vanish. This has vast implications for the nature of late modernity and post-modernity, but Chambers does not adequately explore the changing nature of visual representation in what many call the Information Age. As much as I enjoyed the mid section of the book when Chambers explores the implications of family photos and photo albums, I have profound problems with many other aspects. Most glaring, for me are the startling grammatical lapses that made it through the editing process. I find this puzzling. Chambers uses the 'passive voice' writing style constantly throughout the work; it not only grates, but also drains the book of the excitement the material should reliably induce. …

Reparative Remembering Sonali Thakkar (bio) In the opening pages of "Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory," Marianne Hirsch (1992–93) describes a photograph of a woman who sits on a bench in front of a pretty house, surrounded by trees in bloom, a newspaper in hand. It is a photograph of her husband's aunt Frieda, dispatched to relatives in England and Bolivia in 1945 as an announcement that she, Frieda, had survived the Riga ghetto and concentration camp. I want to begin with a few observations about Hirsch's reading of this photograph, since it economically conveys the key elements of her approach. It also opens up what I will argue is the most generative aspect of her theorization of postmemory—namely, the identification and description of a practice of reparative remembering that speaks to ongoing debates in literary and cultural theory about the politics of futurity and negativity. Nothing in Frieda's photograph refers directly to the Holocaust; it includes no sign of the camps, yet Hirsch argues that it is a Holocaust photograph. In turning our attention to such family photos, Hirsch asks how the history and memory of the Holocaust is transmitted and mediated by the familial and the intimate. Hirsch's formulation of this question initially seems to depend on a familiar and problematic contrast, even opposition, between history and memory: the newspaper in Frieda's hand, Hirsch observes, is a "curious prop—perhaps representing the public history which is the official alternative to the private memory she, as a witness, brings to her addressees" (1992–93, 5). But Hirsch's juxtaposition of history and memory is not organized around dichotomies of objectivity and authenticity, or archive and testimony.1 Rather, she maps history/memory onto the public/private distinction that, in the tradition of feminist scholarship, [End Page 137] she posits in order to undo. In a 2018 forum on "Holocaust and the History of Gender and Sexuality," the historian Atina Grossman observes that "it may well have been feminists' facility with teasing out and contextualizing the 'personal' in the 'political'—or historical—that generated the distinctive insights of our scholarship on the Holocaust" (Farges et al. 2018, 82). Hirsch's reflection on what it would have meant for Frieda's relatives, "sitting around their kitchen table in La Paz," to receive this picture is a meditation on history as it is lived in the relations between partners, between parents and children, and among extended family networks (1992–93, 4). Hirsch's emphasis on how familial relations mediate memory offers a theory of traumatic transmission that is constitutively structured by a feminist perspective and that therefore differs substantially from other influential accounts of trauma and testimony from the same period. For example, Hirsch draws on Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub's nearly contemporaneous Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Unlike Felman and Laub, however, whose work focuses on the dyads of analyst and patient, and critic and text, Hirsch focuses on familial form and pays more attention to the intergenerational inheritance of trauma. She also attends to the way testimony might circulate in ordinary encounters, amid the banality of the everyday (I think here of Maus, and of Vladek narrating his story to Artie as he pedals furiously on his exercise bike). In Hirsch's account, the existence of the second generation complicates the meaning of the past, which does not lose its gravitational pull but is no "black hole" either—a term Laub borrows from Nadine Fresco's work on the children of survivors (Felman and Laub 1992, 64). Instead, the past is transformed by the present and future as they come into being. In my reading, the contribution of Hirsch's article is to show how the extension and reproduction of the familial redistributes trauma and its negativity without necessarily weakening or ameliorating them. We see these dynamics at work in Hirsch's reading of Frieda's photograph: "Frieda's picture," Hirsch writes, "says only 'I am alive,' or perhaps, 'I have survived'" (1992–93, 5). There is an extraordinary drama to this missive, which announces a survival that defies all odds. But it is not just Frieda...

Family connections are maintained through sharing reminiscences, often supported by family photographs which easily prompt memories. This is increasingly important as we age, as picture-based reminiscence has been shown to reduce older adults' social isolation. However, there is a gap between sharing memories from physical pictures and the limited support for oral social reminiscence afforded by digital tools. PhotoFlow supports older adults' picture-mediated social storytelling of family memories using an intuitive metaphor mirroring sharing physical family pictures on a table top. The app uses the speech of oral storytelling to automatically organize pictures based only on what has been said. This simplifies the overall process of family picture interactions by leveraging one enjoyable aspect to ease a more effortful one. In particular, the familiar table top interaction metaphor has the potential to bridge the gap between physical picture reminiscence and managing digital picture collections.

Hemispheric Thinking and Queer Kin

Made Visible: Contemporary South African Fashion and Identity curated by Kathryn Gunsch

This article explores aspects of the “unfinished” using notions of human‐centered design in African public infrastructure and the importance of involving the “users” and “beneficiaries” in infrastructure development and delivery. Infrastructure, both conceptually as an idea and in its constructed material reality, has a huge impact on society, socially and economically, and has been promised as one of the most effective drivers of economic growth in South Africa. Increasingly in South Africa, facilities are falling into disrepair. Infrastructure is being adapted and used in unintended ways that often do not provide the socio‐economic benefits intended. In considering medical infrastructure across three sites in post‐apartheid South Africa, my argument asks how factors such as statecraft, governance and funding models, design considerations, project implementation methodologies, operational and maintenance policies affect the promise of infrastructural change in contemporary South Africa?

African Vernacular Symbols of Black Intersex Children in Sinethemba Ngubane's Installations (2007-2016)

The nature of history, the practice of historicization and the processes of memory pose special problems for postmodern thought. While postmodern and poststructuralist thought have often been simply characterized as negating history, they can actually be seen as deeply engaged with the question of how to understand our relationship to the past. Particularly central to late twentieth-century thought are the questions of how we remember and what is rendered as history amid an understanding of the role played by the image in mediating memory and history. Documentary photographs, family photographs, television and film images and the personal expression inherent in painting, photography and installation are forms through which we mediate our histories, both personal and cultural. If modernism believed the image of the past to be a trace of reality, a form through which the past could be reexperienced and memories relived, postmodernism allows no such easy reverie. The relationship of images to the past has become problematic and the role of the image in producing memory and allowing for forgetting is central to this shift. The origin of this change toward an ironic view of the past and its representations can be seen to have been given its most symptomatic invocation in two primary texts: Theodor Adorno's famous statement that To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric(l) and Roland Barthes's analysis of the image in Camera Lucida as both shock and death, in which he asks Is History not simply that time when we were not born?(2) Adorno's statement, with its implication that the horror of the Holocaust made aesthetic representation deeply problematic, has haunted theoretical work about the conflict of memory and history and of fact and fiction in relationship to the Holocaust. Barthes influenced a broad range of work on the role of the photograph in depicting and producing the past as a means to deconstruct identity and as counter-memory. Marianne Hirsch's Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, Andrea Liss's Trespassing through Shadows: Memory, Photography & the Holocaust and Ernst van Alphen's Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory each offer complex and useful new ways to understand our desire for and mediation of memory and history. Indeed, all three authors arrive at the conclusion that traditional forms of history will not provide an understanding of the past. Instead, they embrace nontraditional, formerly delegitimated forms such as autobiography, visual arts, personal and family photographs and historical comic books as means to examine past experiences and retell history. While Liss and van Alphen examine the relationship of the documentary and the artistic, or to use van Alphen's term, the imaginary, specifically relating to the Holocaust, Hirsch is concerned with the role of family pictures in the construction of individual and familial identity and as a means through which the past, including the traumatic events of the Holocaust, is negotiated, framed and reframed. Hirsch uses the term as a means to understand the complexities not only of the memories of the children of survivors, but the process of cultural memory itself. She argues that postmemory is related to issues of the diaspora and temporal and spatial exile; it is an essential means to understanding memory precisely because it is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection. Postmemory is a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation. . . . Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated. …

The Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics of Migration in Contemporary Art from Angola and Its Diaspora

David Nthubu Koloane (1938–2019)

L'influence des chasseurs-cueilleurs en Afrique du Sud est a l'origine de l'expression artistique des concepts et des rites religieux des fermiers africains, resultant d'un echange de culture et d'ideologie entre les 2 groupes

“Where Shall We Place Our Hope?”: COVID-19 and the Imperiled National Body in South Africa's “Lockdown Collection”

At the risk of seeming to make exaggerated claims for visual methodologies, what I set out to do is lay bare some of the key elements of working with the visual as a set of methodologies and practices. In particular, I address educational research in South Africa at a time when questions of the social responsibility of the academic researcher (including postgraduate students as new researchers, as well as experienced researchers expanding their repertoire of being and doing) are critical. In so doing I seek to ensure that the term “visual methodologies” is not simply reduced to one practice or to one set of tools, and, at the same time, to ensure that this set of methodologies and practices is appreciated within its full complexity. I focus on the doing, and, in particular, on the various approaches to doing through drawings, photo-voice, photo-elicitation, researcher as photographer, working with family photos, cinematic texts, video production, material culture, advertising campaigns as nine key areas within visual methodologies. Keywords : educational research; social change; visual methodologies South African Journal of Education Vol. 28 (3) 2008: pp. 365-383