Raoul J. Granqvist – författare

This book is the first to question both why and how the colonialist mythologies represented by the work of photographer Eliot Elisofon persist. It documents and discusses a heterogeneous practice of American coloniality of power as it explores Elisofon’s career as war photographer-correspondent and staff photographer for LIFE, filmmaker, author, artist, and collector of “primitive art” and sculpture. It focuses on three areas: Elisofon’s narcissism, voyeurism, and sexism; his involvement in the homogenizing of Western social orders and colonial legacies; and his enthused mission of “sending home” a mass of still-life photographs, annexed African artifacts, and assumed vintage knowledge. The book does not challenge his artistic merit or his fascinating personality; what it does question is his production and imagining of “difference.” As the text travels from World War II to colonialism, postcolonialism, and the Cold War, from Casablanca to Leopoldville (Kinshasa), it proves to be a necessarily strenuous and provocative trip.

The present collection of essays sits in a broad "cultural studies" cum "visual studies" field of topical interest connecting the visual with a whole range of disciplines: art history, literary and historical analysis, aesthetic criticism, post-colonialism, media studies, gender studies, psychology, sociology - in their complex offerings and dressings. Image-making and its consumption are interrelated physical or sensuous acts that engage the total reservoir of our faculties. In this performative there is no ocularcentrism, this book claims; sight occupies no hegemony over the other senses. Touching, seeing, viewing, listening collaborate; the hand/eye of the "producer" and the eye/ear to the "viewer" co-operate and collapse into a moment of mutuality that lacks closure. The book points out visuality's co-operative, sensory and reconciling function in the everyday routines and the aesthetical manifestations of seeing, speaking, writing, and acting. It is also concerned with the socio-historical and colonial realm of visual experiences, from discussions of the power relations in portrait making (ingress, Madame de Senonnes), photography (Strömholm's photos of transsexuals), fashion companies (Sisley) to colonial iconography in South African autobiographies. The book should be useful for both students of visuality in culture formation as well as general readers interested in this new terrain of the multiperspective.

Nyskrivet förord av litteraturvetaren Raoul J. Granqvist till Elechi Amadis De stora dammarna. Om De stora dammarna: De stora dammarna är en roman om kriget och dess effekter. Två byar, Chiolu och Aliakoro, vars krigare förut stridit sida vid sida, befinner sig i fejd med varandra över rättigheterna till fisket i dammen Wagaba. Konflikten eskalerar genom en rad dramatiska händelser, gestaltad av en författare lika hemvan i romantraditionen som i dramatiken.