Tina M. Campt is Director of the Africana Studies Program and Professor of Africana and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich.

Image Matters

ARCHIVE, PHOTOGRAPHY, and the AFRICAN DIASPORA IN EUROPEBy Tina M. Campt

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5074-3

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………1INTRODUCTION On Family Tales and Photographic Records…………………21PART 1 Family Matters: Sight, Sense, Touch……………………………35CHAPTER 1 Family Touches……………………………………………71INTERSTITIAL The Girl and/in the Gaze………………………………..83CHAPTER 2 Orphan Photos, Fugitive Images……………………………..115PART 2 Image Matters: Sight, Sound, Score…………………………….117INTERSTITIAL “Thingyness”; or, The Matter of the Image…………………129CHAPTER 3 The Lyric of the Archive…………………………………..199EPILOGUE………………………………………………………….205Notes…………………………………………………………….223Bibliography………………………………………………………231Illustration Credits……………………………………………….233

Chapter One

FAMILY TOUCHES

Prequel: “Three Soldiers Named Hans …”

SPRING 1943. Three soldiers. Brothers in arms. Identically placed caps, belts, buckles, and boots signal military uniformity. Hands clasped behind backs erect; feet planted deliberately astride. Neither iconic, nor heroic, nor ceremonious, they capture an ordinary moment in the lives of soldiers, idle and “at ease.” In the background, an unidentified structure surrounded by trees. A sunny day? Perhaps. It is difficult to judge in the sepia tones of the photograph. The warm glow of light through fuzzy branches moves our attention downward to the face of the young man at the left of the photo. Like those of his compatriots, his eyes are fixed intently on the camera. Unlike theirs, his expression seems just on the verge of a smile. The slight upward turn at the corner of his mouth gives the impression of satisfaction, of barely suppressed mirth percolating just beneath the surface of a more serious façade. It cracks the solemnity and solidity of military performance this photograph presents, leading us to other ruptures in the image’s composition.

The photo offers contradictory signs of unanimity. Military uniforms intended to camouflage, erase, or dissolve distinction, amplify difference in the process. For what is as striking as the apparent youth of this whiskerless trio are the chromatics of their constellation. Left to right: a brunette, a blond, and their darker-skinned companion. Shot somewhere along Germany’s eastern border in or near Poland, the image was retained by the brown-skinned young man to the right—Hans Hauck, an Afro-German man born in 1920 to a German mother and an Algerian father.

Archive, Photography, Diaspora

The archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events. —MICHEL FOUCAULT, THE ARCHEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE

Archives assemble. Their assembly work is not limited to a more or less passive act of collecting. Rather it is an active act of production that prepares facts for historical intelligibility. … [Archives] convey authority and set the rules for credibility and interdependence; they help select the stories that matter. —MICHEL-ROLPH TROUILLOT, SILENCING THE PAST

What constitutes the visual, or more specifically, the photographic archive of the African diaspora? What images comprise this body of visual knowledge and pass the test of what Jacques Derrida has described as a process of “consignation”—the act through which the archive unifies, identifies, and classifies a set of objects or signs into a “single corpus, in a system or a synchrony, in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration”? Beyond a simple notion of an inert repository or collection of disparate images, how should we understand the “law” of the photographic archive of the African diaspora?

In his seminal text Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot urges scholars of history to engage not the existence of omissions or historical silences per se, but the active processes of silencing (and absenting) in the production of historical narratives. Such a historiographical intervention is more than a project of recovery and more than simply a substitution of new narratives in the face of silences in the historical record. It is a project of disruption, one that disorders the rule that constitutes the existing historical record and makes visible the logic that structures the archive and authorizes its validity as a source of historical knowledge, meaning, and veracity. The visual archive of the African diaspora does not lie outside the institutional matrix of power described in the quotations cited above. It constitutes its own equally authoritative and selective corpus of stories that matter, and that matter differentially in relation to one another. What kinds of disruptive and disorderly historical accounts does this archive produce at the same time that it constitutes a law of diasporic visibility? How does it engender a set of narratives that might challenge or shift the existing logic of intelligibility that governs what can and cannot be said about the subaltern diasporic subjects that haunt, unsettle, and emerge ambivalently in and through this visual archive?

This chapter actively and self-consciously participates in the process of consignation Derrida described and simultaneously seeks to unsettle other prior or potential acts of consignation. It engages a series of images that I would like to consign to the photographic archive of the African diaspora, though in a way that makes visible the logic of what counts as both diasporic visuality and diasporic visibility. They are a selection of images that, to my knowledge, have only an anomalous or exceptional status in a single official archive and no place at all in any existing archive of the African diaspora. In this way, the chapter and the larger project of which it forms a part performs some of the initial work of consignation, through my own piecemeal attempts to assemble, narrate, and transform a disparate collection of images into a larger corpus under the sign of the knowledge they might produce about a black German diasporic subject.

These images trouble both a dominant narrative of diasporic displacement and resettlement and any straightforward understanding of diaspora as a shared collectivity. They challenge us instead to think diaspora in the frame of Stuart Hall’s conception of it as an inherent relation of “difference within unity” and as an effortful and intentional articulation that invokes a relationship that is at once an expressive linkage and a recruiting or joining up to a unity constituted in the differences of its constituent, articulated parts. Taking inspiration from Hall, Jacqueline Nassy Brown offers an equally compelling framework for understanding the articulation of diaspora as difference. It is an articulation Brown (citing David Scott) describes as “a situated argument” in which blacks recognize each other and contest the meaning of their relationship as “counterparts” vis-à-vis moments of difference and similarity constituted through gender, generation, sexuality, and class. Yet Brown expands the concept of a counterpart by way of a backslash, defining diaspora as itself a “counter/part relation built on cultural and historical equivalences.” “To posit equivalences is to put meaningful differences (such as distinct colonial histories) on the same analytical plane at the start, in order then to expose the ways they come to bear in social practice. The backslash in counter/part and the stress that may be put on either side of it index shifting relations of antagonism and affinity; these latter terms depend equally on difference while highlighting two possibilities for what people can do with it.”

Moving the discussion of diaspora to the terrain of visual culture, Leigh Raiford queries more specifically what a “photographic practice of diaspora” might look like by posing the question of photography’s status as an often overlooked “diasporic resource”: “How [has] photography been used to articulate—to join up and express—transnational collective black communities and identities. Or to paraphrase Paul Gilroy, ‘What forms of belonging have been nurtured by visual cultures?'” Positing a provisional answer to these questions, Raiford contends that “photography’s capacity to build or envision community across geographical locations, its capacity to engage its viewers on both critical and expressive or emotional registers” makes it particularly well suited as a medium of diasporic mobilization. Yet it is equally important to question the racialized index or the legibility of race that is often implicitly assumed as the resource on which the photographic articulation of diaspora is postulated. As Raiford emphasizes, “The diasporic work of photography is a labor that takes for granted the indexicality of the photograph, the visual ‘fact of blackness,’ and makes of it easily translatable, highly mobile ways of knowing.”

Pushing Raiford’s inquiry a step further, I want to ask a more far-reaching question: to what extent does the presumed legibility of race provide the governing logic of the photographic archive of the African diaspora? The aim of my question is to provoke a critical reflection on the relationship between photography, the archive, and diaspora that conceptualizes this relation not as a question of absence or presence but as quite centrally about the dynamics of historiographical authority and visibility. Put more concretely, the implicit and at times explicit question I invite readers to consider in this chapter is the following: Would or should this photo and those that follow be consigned to the visual archive of the African diaspora? If so, on what basis? And if not, what is the rule or law that would question its inclusion or constitute the basis of its exclusion?

SPRING 1921 or 1922. A baby photo—innocent, cherubic, endearing. Typical of so many others taken by countless families present and past, there seems little that is remarkable about such an image. A proud parent or family member most probably shot it attempting to capture an early moment in the life of a recent addition to the family. Looking more closely, the photo frames the infant as the undeniable center of attention. The child sits barefoot in a chair in a garden. Dressed in a nondescript, everyday garment, his clothing is anything but meticulous. One side of the garment is not quite properly placed, exposing his shoulder as if he had just wriggled out of a sleeve.

The image is at once casual and haphazard and, at the same time, effortful and intentional. The cushion on which the baby is seated slides forward off the chair, suggesting the playful or willful squirming that preceded this exposure. Although it may appear a spontaneous snapshot, the portrait of this child could not have been anything but labored. Indeed, as most parents will attest, even the brief moment it takes to shoot such a photo would have required far more time getting a child of this age to be still, even for the split second of a shutter snap.

SUMMER 1926. Like that of the previous image, the date here is an approximation, as the owner of the image, his family, and contemporaries who might offer a more detailed account of this photograph and the larger archive of which it is part are no longer with us. But the image remains. A material trace of a life and a past, its preservation marks its value in someone’s life. It had a place in a home in a shoebox or a drawer, in a wallet or a frame—it was kept, it was treasured, it was retained. It is an artifact with a history at once material and ephemeral, visual and sensory, tactile and affective.

Nestled in a garden, lush and in full bloom, three generations assemble in a single frame. The verdant, untamed setting competes with the stern expressions of the sister and brother pictured in the upper right and the center back. Their taciturn demeanor is offset by the lighthearted look of their sibling to the left. Her face is warm and comfortable, open and inviting. She seems to enjoy the attention of the camera. Seated between them, a regal figure poses with head slightly askew, revealing a partial profile. Was she turning her attention toward the young child whose weight her body supports? Or was she turning away to return the gaze of the camera following a brief exchange? Her grandson rests comfortably at her side, leaning in with confidence, assured of the balance and support she seems so clearly to provide.

The image composes family as a symmetry that balances height, gender, and generation. Two sisters flanking a brother enact the family bond through the touch of outstretched arms that link the generations and complete the kinship circle. A matriarch is seated center frame with a grandchild to her left, his hand clasped inside hers. Their touch registers the sensuous relations of kin. In this image the configuration of family relies on visualizing a family touch. Relation is evidenced through the tactility of corporeal contact as family physically attaches and coheres.

What happens when we linger on such images? What do they reveal and what do they simultaneously conceal in the very moment of revelation? What invisible forms of labor—domestic labor, semiotic labor, affective labor—do they make visible as practices of diasporic formation? And what are the technologies of vision, the politics of reading, and the sensual practices of archival creation, collection, and circulation that render this labor visible?

Rather than moving in for a closer look, perhaps we should first step back to appreciate more of the labor these images perform. All three are photographs of Hans Hauck, who was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and grew up in Dudweiler-Saarbrücken. Pictured here as a child between two and six years old, he spent most of his life in Dudweiler until late in the Second World War. He returned several years after the war ended and lived out the rest of his life in Dudweiler until his death in 2002. Stepping back even further, what is not apparent in this image is the fact that his father was one of the French colonial forces deployed in the occupation of the German Rhineland following the First World War. The photo tells us nothing of the public and diplomatic controversy surrounding this cohort of children and the ensuing propaganda campaign waged in German, French, and British newspapers that denounced the presence of these African troops and their biracial offspring as “the black scourge of European culture and civilization.” It gives no indication that eleven years later, the child pictured in this photo was sterilized as one of the so-called Rhineland bastards vilified both in the interwar years and later in the National Socialist regime.

Here we must give voice to another dimension of this photograph’s impact. For the addition of this historical framing initiates a subtle shift in our view of the image. We refocus our gaze on skin color, hair texture, and the question of blackness. We attempt to apply our own regional and cultural criteria for assessing the legibility of race in this image. Questioning the optics of the photograph’s rendering of race, some might ask how “black,” “brown,” or “colored” he is or was? One strains to see how this photo might index the traces of race or the historical moment at which it was taken. Does it give us any indication of Hauck’s ultimate fate as a German of African descent under the Nazis? Does it “color” or inscribe him as a “Rhineland Bastard”—the discourse we assume indelibly shaped and circumscribed his life at the time?

How should we read the desire to visualize race in this image? We must read it through three critical registers: historical, affective, and archival. The desire to visualize race registers historically as a desire to “see” Hauck’s heritage as a child of an African occupation soldier. Yet the photo registers with equal force affectively, as an image that constitutes its subject through the cultivation of a nurturing and affectionate gaze that constructs a domestic relationship between the image and its viewer. We are drawn in by the image’s relation to so many other photos like them—family photos that figure proud parents and loved ones as visible or implied presences; family photos that evoke fond memories of tenderness or affirmation, comfort or safety; family photos that make us bristle by recalling tense relations of vulnerability or rebellion, discipline or scrutiny, judgment or rejection. We are drawn in and interpellated by the forms of familial attachment that resonate in them, both positively and negatively, implicitly and explicitly, and in excess of the particular individuals or scenes they depict. They are family photos that hail us regardless of their anonymity through the structures of intimacy and relation they depict and project.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from Image Mattersby Tina M. Campt Copyright © 2012 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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