Abstract
To work with images of atrocity is a fraught project. Sedimented constructs shaped through racist and settler colonial violence continue to define the production and consumption of the visual, as well as memory practice and scopic politics. These retinal sedimentations must be looked at plainly and addressed openly, to name the ways in which history and identity shape the function of the eye. I turn to the understudied visual archive of German colonialism in South West Africa, with an emphasis on colonial photography, with the aim of tying the visuality of colonial violence in German South West Africa to broader studies of colonial photography, images of racial violence, and the ways in which these images circulated as discourse. I am particularly concerned with the location of witnessing, and the ways in which things look differently from different positions—what I refer to through the concept of parallax—and the effects of this on visual consumption. Images of violence travel, through a visceral witnessing that can be grotesquely pornographic—in the words of Claudia Rankine, “the dead body as an object that satisfies an illicit desire”—or evidentiary. I use viscerality in this context to think about a methodology of witnessing that attends to embodiment, experience, and feeling. The resignification of images, however didactic and captioned, depends on the eye and the gut of the viewer—the transhistorical viewer is not a passive or innocent witness. This is especially important in the context of the pornotroping tendency of white supremacist culture to fetishize the image, particularly of Black injury and death, and the ability of images of violence to re-traumatize survivors.
Highlights
Title The Trophy and The Appeal: Colonial Photography and the Ghosts of Witnessing in German Southwest Africa
I turn to the understudied visual archive of German colonialism in southwestern Africa, with an emphasis on colonial photography, with the aim of tying the visuality of colonial violence in German South West Africa to broader studies of colonial photography and images of racial violence, and the ways in which these images circulated as discourse
Writing from a US context, I consider what is particular to photographs in thinking about processes of racialization in colonial contexts; both the United States and German South West Africa represent sites of settler colonialism invested in relational and circulating ideologies, subjugated Black labor forces, and Indigenous genocide
Summary
The Trophy and the Appeal: Colonial Photography and the Ghosts of Witnessing in German South West Africa JB Brager. Some are intentionally repurposed by activists, and the trophy is amended as appeal.[6] The visual archive of German South West Africa is usefully placed in a larger history of photography both as a colonial apparatus and as a technology of picturing the scopic regime of the human as physiognomically European.[7] While often dismissed because of the relatively short period in which Germany was a colonial power, the horrors it perpetrated in South West Africa occurred in a broad landscape of colonial “extermination,” as mass murder and genocidal ideology proliferated in German colonies and in British, Belgian, and Italian colonial projects, and certainly in the United States as a settler colony. Writing from a US context, I consider what is particular to photographs in thinking about processes of racialization in colonial contexts; both the United States and German South West Africa represent sites of settler colonialism invested in relational and circulating ideologies, subjugated Black labor forces, and Indigenous genocide. As a third-generation American, I both carry this familial trauma and benefit from the United States’ own brand of white supremacy
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