Photographing Existence in the Americas: Race, Gender, Migration, and the Diasporic Lens

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

This panel looks at the photography work produced and collected by journalists, artists, and activists to examine the ways in which marginalized communities, particularly those rooted in migrant and diasporic histories, have used the medium of photography to showcase particular histories, events, people, and demands often viewed as inconsequential and non-existing. To what extent, this panel asks, does photography allow for a recuperative process? What discourses might the photographic lens reproduce, discredit, or silence? What can photography make visible, and can the overproduction of certain images negate certain imaginative potentials? Lastly, what can photographs, on their own and in conversation with other mediums of production, tell us about the way that we understand truth, reality, and existence?

Inspired by Tina Campt’s call to examine the “social life” of photographs, the papers in this panel seek to address questions of intentionality, “historical work,” portrayal, and imagination as these are present in the photographs collected and produced in three disparate but interconnected spaces (Image Matters, 6, 19). These photographic works include the collections in an Afro-Caribbean news weekly in Panama, the documentary photography of black women in Miami, and a photo series focused on New York City-based immigrant workers. Like Campt, the members of this panel are invested in exploring the “equally powerful positive and negative impact of photography” and assessing the importance of this medium to communities of color (5). Our panel, moreover, asks for a deep exploration of how members of migrant and diasporic communities have struggled to navigate through and beyond histories of erasure and exclusion using photography, while also producing their own photographic narratives of independence and redemption. It also pays attention at how these narratives have, and continue to, negotiate against the very constrains of framing, both in photographic production and in the making of historical and socio-political frames of reference.

The panel begins with Kaysha Corinealdi’s examination of how Afro-Caribbean Panamanian journalists used photographs to counter fatalistic and dismissive interpretations of Afro-Caribbean and Afro-diasporic life within and beyond Panama. The paper likewise investigates what these photographs reveal in terms of historicizing ongoing tensions present in defining and depicting community making. Lara Stein Pardo then takes us to the documentation of day-to-day public life in Miami by artists rooted in an Afro-diasporic world view. The paper particularly asks for a re-examination of the gendering of both documentary photography and public space in the production of archives. Irene Mata wraps up the panel with her study of the photo series “Superheroes” and the ways in which the series, through its imaginative potential, challenges mainstream depictions of immigrant workers as individuals naively seduced by the promises of limitless opportunities. The paper also suggest the ways in which photography can counter stereotypes routinely reproduced in other cultural and informational mediums. Vanessa K Valdés, a scholar of race, language, and cultural production in the Americas, will serve as chair and commentator for the panel.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• To Be Announced, NA

Individual Presentations

• Documenting Afro-Caribbean Lives and Afro-Diasporic Possibilities in Panama - Kaysha Corinealdi, Columbia University (NY)

• Shooting in the Streets: Black Women Photographers and Documentary Practices - Lara Stein Pardo, University of Colorado, Boulder (CO)

• Pictures of Resistance: Recasting Labor and Immigration in the Global City - Irene Mata, Wellesley College (MA)