Description:

Lecture by Joseph M. Pierce, Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University.

Photography has https://www.josephmpierce.com/aboutplayed an important role in creating national subjects, defining intimate relationships, and establishing a visual grammar of race, pathology, culture, and modernity. The popularization of photography in the late 19th century coincided with the rise of both anthropology and scientific racism across the Americas—often in concert with nascent museological archives—and was a crucial tool in the portrayal of Indigenous peoples as destined for extinction. But Indigenous peoples were not simply passive subjects in this process of photographic documentation. At the margins of the frame, in minute and subtle gestures, but also in overt and direct staging techniques, Indigenous subjects of this anthropological gaze resisted the colonial paradigm of Native elimination. This presentation dwells on moments of gestural resistance in the anthropological archive to open up future possibilities for reading images against the colonial paradigm that has so often served to fix Indigenous peoples as part of a romanticized past. 

The events is co-sponsored by CNAIR.