Dark Play
The Ethnographic Archive as Site of Embodiment in Zanele Muholi’s Somnyana Ngonyama Series
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12410296 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Leora Farber (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 36 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 40-63 |
| Publication date | 2020-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Visual Anthropology Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1058-7187 • E-ISSN: 1548-7458 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/var.12200 |
| OpenAlex | W3038962930 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 11 |
In this article, I explore the affective responses that Zanele Muholi’s Somnyana Ngonyama series of photographic (self‐)portraits evoke for me as a white, South African woman. In this provocative series, Muholi presents a body of images that form an archive in and of itself, and uses her body as an “archive of personal experience.” In so doing, she creates a “new” archival body through the figuration of her own body. This new archival form offers possibilities for the imagination of what a decolonial (an)archive might look like. I suggest that the series’ importance as a decolonial (an)archive is strongly connected to what it reveals to me in relation to how I view the work through the lenses of racialized, gendered, and classed power, as a result of my (white) positionality
Art · Ethnography · Portrait · Power (physics · Relation (database · Series (stratigraphy · Sociology · Visual arts · White (mutation · Anthropology · Computer Science · Digital and Traditional Archives Management · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Photography and Visual Culture
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,17 |
| Citation span | 2020 - 2020 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |