L’Appareil colonial : Création et subversions photographiques de l'Empire visuel français
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Le Guelte, Johann
- Graduate Program:
- French and Francophone Studies
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- April 29, 2019
- Committee Members:
- Jennifer Boittin, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Jennifer Boittin, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Jean-Claude Vuillemin, Committee Member
Emmanuel Bruno Jean-Francois, Committee Member
Nancy Elizabeth Locke, Outside Member - Keywords:
- Photography
Colonialism
France
Senegal
Anti-imperialism
Resistance
Visual
Propaganda
Representation
Interwar years - Abstract:
- My work is situated in France and West Africa between the two World Wars and engages with visual discourses of race, ethnicity, representation and power. More specifically, I examine how photography—both as practice and medium—was used, on the one hand, as a powerful weapon of structural oppression when operated by the colonial state, but on the other hand as a means for enhancing democratic expression for colonial subjects. In this dissertation, I identify and theorize how innovative forms of photographic propaganda were deployed by the French colonial state after the Great War, through new agencies whose job was to gather, classify, and massively distribute stereotypical photographs of colonial populations. The objective was to justify the existence of an empire that was being put into question more and more seriously with every passing year. I call this visual politics and practice l’appareil colonial, a term which I have developed to identify the power of the state-held camera in the context of empire. Yet, my work also argues that colonial subjects appropriated the camera and found ways to signal defiance when they were the subjects of photographic sessions. They did so in order to challenge the state’s representations of an empire in need of civilizing because its African subjects were so often photographed as naked, scarified, or in poverty, all alleged signs of inferiority. My dissertation uncovers transnational and transimperial instances of photographic resistance happening simultaneously in metropolitan France, among antiimperialist groups in Paris and Marseilles, in French West Africa, where early Senegalese photographers challenged imperial aesthetics, and also on the waterways between metropole and colony, on the boats where dozens of undocumented migrants developed a thriving market for fraudulent identification documents so as to work and move freely around the empire.