Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Tangled Trajectories: Chinese Migrants, Portrait Photography and the Borders of Exclusion in Early-20th-Century Australasia

Sun, March 19, 10:45am to 12:45pm, Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, Floor: 2nd Floor, Provincial Ballroom South

Abstract

In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida describes an archive as a “pledge, and like every pledge, a token of the future.” This paper interrogates the pledges posited by state archives responsible for the preservation, and production, of national narratives of belonging and inclusion. To do so, I consider two collections of photographs: one preserved at the National Archives of Australia and the other at Archives New Zealand. Respectively, they consist of photographs attached to Certificates of Exemption issued by the government of Australia from 1901 to 1958 and a discrete collection of portrait photographs from the early 1900s, described as “Chinese returned from China”. Both collections of photographs were produced as part of efforts by white settler societies to exclude Chinese migrants from permanent settlement. In reading these discrete collections as part of a singular landscape of exclusion, I suggest that it is possible to unearth the faultlines in state efforts to regulate migration. Critically, the preservation of these records points to the pivotal role that archives play in shaping our understanding of the migrant experience. Although the preservation of photographs by state archives has conventionally suggested a degree of authority in the pursuit of exclusionary projects, I suggest that read in tandem, the two collections suggest a very different account of the migrant experience in the face of exclusion; one that was shaped by primarily by migrants themselves as well as the photographers behind the camera. This reading aims to complicate the future suggested by the photographs’ official preservation.

Author