The Contours of Agency

Abstract

This chapter examines photographs of Pacific Island women laboring in fields in Queensland in the late 1890s, arguing that colonial photography can be a critical means of filling archival silences. It reflects on how we may read this photography in layers, both as a candid snapshot of the physical world of the past, as well as a more subtle register of that world's ideological composition. This is significant in the context of colonial histories in the western Pacific and Australia where indigenous and colonized women's labor, and their contribution to colonial and colonized societies, has been subjected to the violence of a structural amnesia. Photography offers not only visual evidence of a barely told history of Pacific Islander women's labor as told through the agency of their physical presentation. In addition, the medium itself, the photograph and its visual language, points in interesting ways to the discursive contours that shaped indigenous and colonized women's agency.