Viewing 'Mother Oromia'

Abstract

Engaging with debates occurring under the broad name of postcolonial visual cultures, this paper provides a reading of 'Mother Oromia', the exilic anti-colonial nationalist picture postcard concerning the ongoing liberation struggle of the Oromo, an oppressed ethnic group within Ethiopia. Analysis of the photo-text provides a means of interrogating various assumptions within the literature concerning the ambiguous relationship of motherhood to nationalism. The discussion also intends to destabilise the modernist subject/object gaze structure that dominates inter-gender and inter-racial looking relations in film and photography. Using Deleuze's idea of 'double capture' as a starting point to engage with Kaplan's, Trinh's and Maxwell's work, the paper describes how a pluralist theory of subjectivity relates to the act of viewing the anti-colonial photo-text.