Dark Play: The Ethnographic Archive as Site of Embodiment in Zanele Muholi’s Somnyana Ngonyama Series

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Abstract

In this article, I explore the affective responses that Zanele Muholi’s Somnyana Ngonyama series of photographic (self-)portraits evoke for me as a white, South African woman. In this provocative series, Muholi presents a body of images that form an archive in and of itself, and uses her body as an “archive of personal experience.” In so doing, she creates a “new” archival body through the figuration of her own body. This new archival form offers possibilities for the imagination of what a decolonial (an)archive might look like. I suggest that the series’ importance as a decolonial (an)archive is strongly connected to what it reveals to me in relation to how I view the work through the lenses of racialized, gendered, and classed power, as a result of my (white) positionality.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)40-63
Number of pages24
JournalVisual Anthropology Review
Volume36
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Mar 2020

Keywords

  • archive of personal experience
  • decolonial (an)archive
  • positionality
  • refigurations

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Anthropology
  • Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)

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