Ambivalent

Patricia Hayes is National Research Foundation SARChI (South African Research Chairs Initiative) Chair in Visual History and Theory at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape in South Africa. She has published extensively on colonial and documentary photography in southern Africa.Gary Minkley is National Research Foundation SARChI (South African Research Chairs Initiative) Chair in Social Change in the History Department at the University of Fort Hare in South Africa. Recent publications include the coauthored Unsettled History: Making South African Public Pasts.

“Ambivalent develops a powerful and coherent set of arguments about the inherent ambiguities of photographs and photographic interpretations, in both colonial and post-colonial settings. These arguments are especially impressive in the ways in which they both draw on ‘classic’ photographic theory and engage with contemporary debates in the field of African visual studies, unsettling received wisdoms about African histories, governance, and ‘modern’ personhood.” - Richard Vokes, University of Western Australia “Scholars interested in further understanding the ways in which photography can be used as a historical source will be inspired and motivated by the diversity of approaches within this book. While this volume is not necessarily a handbook for beginning scholars, its significance, nonetheless, lies in its critical approach and in the new questions it raises regarding the theorization of visibility, photography, and African History.” (H/Soz/Kult)

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction Africa and the Ambivalence of Seeing (patricia hayes and gary minkley)PART 1 UNFIXING RACE AND VISUALITY: THE COLONIAL TEMPORARYChapter 1 Ambivalent Mediations: Photographic Desire, Anxiety, and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Central Africa (isabelle de rezende)Chapter 2 Empty Photographs: Ethnography and the Lacunae of African History (patricia hayes)Chapter 3 Unstable FormsPhotography, Race, and the Identity Document in South Africa (ingrid masondo)Chapter 4 The Pass Photograph and the Intimate Photographic Event in South Africa (gary minkley)Chapter 5 Photographic Genres and Alternate Histories of Independence in Mozambique (drew thompson)Chapter 6 Photography, Mass Violence, and Survivors: The Cassinga Massacre of 1978 (vilho shigwedha)PART 2 OSCILLATIONS: SURFACES AND DEPTHSChapter 7 Images of Ambivalence: Photography in the Making of Omhedi, Northern Namibia (napandulwe shiweda)Chapter 8 The Profane and the Prophetic at a South African Beach (phindi mnyaka)Chapter 9 Photographing Aso. Ebì Of Surfacism and Digitality (okechukwu nwafor)Chapter 10 Boko Haram Insurgency and a New Mode of War in Nigeria (george emeka agbo)Chapter 11 Mirrors and Waters: the Practice and the Visual in Beninese Mami Wata Cults (jung ran forte)An Expanded MilieuSelected BibliographyContributorsIndex