Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire
  • omnibus

BAR Book Forum: Jennifer Bajorek’s “Unfixed”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
07 Oct 2020
BAR Book Forum: Jennifer Bajorek’s “Unfixed”
BAR Book Forum: Jennifer Bajorek’s “Unfixed”

Through photography, the author asks questions about the meaning and nature of liberation.

“Particular images can have, in themselves, political and social effects.”

In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Jennifer Bajorek. Bajorek is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Visual Studies at Hampshire College and Research Associate in the VIAD Research Centre, in the Faculty of Art, Design, and Architecture at the University of Johannesburg. Her book is Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa.

Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?

Jennifer Bajorek: My book looks at what particular photographs did, or meant, at the moment of decolonization in Africa—a historical moment when, like today, the world was in the midst of rapid political and social transformation. So it is about images that are both in and of the world, and it explores how particular images interact with their world, how they can have, in themselves, political and social effects. I look at the images and experiences of African photographers in the years leading up to and following independence from French colonial rule (1960) in four cities in West Africa: Saint-Louis, Dakar, Porto-Novo, and Cotonou. Through photography, I ask questions about the meaning and nature of liberation; about our capacities to connect and find solidarity across difference; and about the tools that we have to seize or create spaces of collective action and imagination that are not bound by geography, nationality, language, or by imperial or colonial histories. These spaces are always shaped by these forces and these histories, but they cannot be bound by them.

By focusing on images made by African photographers, my book is about images in, and of, a distinctly African  world. The photographers with whom I worked in my research (it is also their research) were members of what is called the “independence generation” in West Africa. They understood themselves as making images and participating in practices that were global, cosmopolitan, and hyper-connected to other places. They also understood these images and practices as African, and that photography allowed them to produce a distinctly African vision of the world. To ask what it means to modify, subtly or dramatically, the meaning of Africanness or of blackness visually,  and how such visual experimentation might be linked to liberation—this is, of course, also a totally contemporary project, and one that is not confined to the diaspora. It also has a history on the continent, as my research shows.

What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?

The imaginative  dimensions of the photographs I write about cannot be overstated. These images, and the stories that accompany them, bring us closer to a moment in African history that challenges us to imagine a world, and life, beyond both colonialism and capitalism. The first thing I hope that readers (and all the better if they are activists and community organizers) will take away is a feeling of being a bit closer to this history, and a reflection on the power of these imaginative acts. At the same time, we know that decolonization was not, in the end, a huge success. The events and the period I write about are associated both with this euphoria, this sense of limitless possibility, and also with bitter failure and disappointment. I hope that through the book and the photographs in it, readers will sit with those conjoined feelings of euphoria and disappointment, which I believe can be experienced through photographs in a heightened way. An image can contain both this sudden opening and this sudden narrowing of a horizon. I think, again, that we are all very in touch with this dual temporality in this moment. My students and my friends who are going out into the streets to protest the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, in our heightened awareness of these multiple pandemics, we are all very in touch with this. In a way, it is the only thing we are talking about right now.

We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?

Almost everything we ever hear about photography is totally Eurocentric, how it was invented, what it is supposed to be, what it can become. I hope that readers will unlearn this Eurocentrism. That said, my work is not primarily an argument about, or with, this Eurocentrism. I seek instead to show readers a glimpse of these other histories of photography, specifically African ones, to which we have—thanks to this Eurocentrism—been blind. Temporally, materially, photographs are unique: they elicit aesthetic responses, affective and embodied responses, forms of memory, and stories that differ from those elicited by other images and other historical sources. These responses are often culturally specific, and they are grounded in particular places and times. Methodologically, my book asks what can happen when we tell and listen to African histories in a way that counters this Eurocentrism, by centering African images and practices.

In addition, in the scholarship, there has been an overwhelming focus on how European colonizers used the camera to do violence in Africa. There has been a particularly strong focus on ethnographic and anthropometric photographs, which were used by European colonizers to rationalize racist and white supremacist ideologies, and to produce and reproduce anti-blackness as a visual artifact. This history is real, and it is most definitely not over yet. 

“European colonizers used the camera to do violence in Africa.”

Anti-blackness, primitivizing and dehumanizing images of people of African descent, images of black death, these continue to be produced and to function, very powerfully, in contemporary culture, and photography has most definitely played a role in this. But this is not the whole story. These visual logics of colonial and white supremacist domination have, until recently, eclipsed the richness and complexity of African photography histories. Without wanting to diminish or distract from these histories of visual and photographic violence, I want to fill in the gaps of these other histories, which are less familiar. There are other images, and other practices, that are not oriented either by a colonial gaze, or an anti-black ideology, or even necessarily by a response to it. We need to learn other ways of looking and of seeing, and I think these photographs can teach us some of these ways.

Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?

My intellectual heroes are, first of all, the photographers and families who shared their photographs and knowledge with me. I name them all in the book. It is a truly astonishing thing to go and knock on someone’s door and ask if they will share with you, a total stranger, something intimate and cherished from a lifetime ago, and they say “Yes.” This willingness to share their images and memories and to think with me, with us, across cultural, linguistic, racial, generational, geographic, and geopolitical divides, to point out sources for further research, to broker introductions, even to train me as a researcher—this, to me, makes them intellectual giants. To be sure, these transactions are complex on both sides, and I write about some of these complexities in the book (on my side, I am a white scholar, gender plays a role, language is an important factor, people always expected me to be or assumed that I was French, but I am not French, I am not an art historian, and I have a different relationship to the market from most art historians, etc.). But the bottom line is, they did not have to say yes. They always said yes.

“It is a truly astonishing thing to go and knock on someone’s door and ask if they will share something intimate.”

My debt is also profound to several generations of museum and cultural heritage professionals, who are the most immediate inheritors of these collections. Their struggles to preserve West African collections and ensure that they will be available to future generations are truly daunting, yet their openness and will to collaboration are unparalleled: El Hadj Adama Sylla, Fatima Fall, Karim Fall, Ismaïla Camara, AbdouKhadre Sarr, Djibril Sy in Saint-Louis; Franck Ogou, Alphonse Olibé, Sonia Mahamé, and their colleagues in Porto-Novo. I could list the names of other writers and thinkers whose names you would recognize, and whose books your readers are likely to have read, but I would prefer to give credit, here, to our colleagues in Africa, whose work remains unsung. I conclude the book with a list of recent preservation initiatives, led by African curators and cultural heritage professionals, that open new pathways for thinking about the future of photographs and photographic collections in Africa—and, really, all over the world. We are standing on their shoulders. They are light years ahead of us.

In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?

Every photograph that I include or discuss in the book is just such an imagining. What I write, the stories I share, can provide context for or elaborate on this imagining a little, but it is actually the photographs themselves that do this imaginative work, and that invite us to continue it.

Roberto Sirvent is Professor of Political and Social Ethics at Hope International University in Fullerton, CA, and an Affiliate Scholar at Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, where he directs the Race, Bioethics, and Public Health Project. He is co-author, with fellow BAR contributor Danny Haiphong, of the book, American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News—From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror.

COMMENTS?

Please join the conversation on Black Agenda Report's Facebook page at http://facebook.com/blackagendareport

Or, you can comment by emailing us at [email protected]

BAR Book Forum

Trending

Elizabeth Warren Wants Green Bombs, not a Green New Deal
Parallels Between Black and Palestinian Struggles
Cory Booker Hates Public Schools
Bill Cosby Should Have Been Denounced by Black America Long Ago
The Black Wall Around Barack Obama: Who Does It Protect Him Against?
How Complacency, Complicity of Black Misleadership Class Led to Supreme Court Evisceration of the Voting Rights Act

Related Stories

BAR Book Forum: Zakiya Luna’s “Reproductive Rights as Human Rights”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Zakiya Luna’s “Reproductive Rights as Human Rights”
13 January 2021
This book is a story about a group of (mostly) women who wanted to make change and understood that liberation is an inside job.  
BAR Book Forum: Chris A. Barcelos’ “Distributing Condoms and Hope”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Chris A. Barcelos’ “Distributing Condoms and Hope”
13 January 2021
Replacing cops with social workers could “reproduce the same kinds of harm,” as this author explains.
BAR Book Forum: Yelena Bailey’s “How the Streets Were Made”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Yelena Bailey’s “How the Streets Were Made”
16 December 2020
The streets permeate dominant understandings of Blackness, and the life-and-death consequences of these perceptions are at the heart of this book.
BAR Book Forum: Grace A. Musila’s Book, “Wangari Maathai's Registers of Freedom”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Grace A. Musila’s Book, “Wangari Maathai's Registers of Freedom”
16 December 2020
Maathai’s approach to environmental conservation centers poor rural communities, especially women, and their need for fuel, fodder and income
BAR Book Forum: B. Brian Foster’s “I Don’t Like the Blues”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: B. Brian Foster’s “I Don’t Like the Blues”
10 December 2020
What happens if we really pay attention to what black folks in the rural South are saying and doing in their everyday lives?
BAR Book Forum: Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s “Collective Courage”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s “Collective Courage”
02 December 2020
Many of the great African American thinkers, movers, and shakers were also leaders in the Black cooperative movement.
BAR Book Forum: Ana-Maurine Lara’s “Queer Freedom : Black Sovereignty” and “Streetwalking”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Ana-Maurine Lara’s “Queer Freedom : Black Sovereignty” and “Streetwalking”
02 December 2020
The author wants us to deepen our analysis of how power moves through the world to constrain Black life, and how queer Black people resist these co
BAR Book Forum: Erin Manning’s “For a Pragmatics of the Useless”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Erin Manning’s “For a Pragmatics of the Useless”
25 November 2020
Schizoanalysis opens up new alliances (approximations) in the uneasy overlaps of neurodiversity and black life.
BAR Book Forum: David Vine’s “The United States of War”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: David Vine’s “The United States of War”
18 November 2020
American warfare has been waged almost exclusively against people of color, dating to independence and 1492.
BAR Book Forum: Pamela Ayo Yetunde and Cheryl A. Giles’s “Black and Buddhist”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Pamela Ayo Yetunde and Cheryl A. Giles’s “Black and Buddhist”
18 November 2020
Activists and community organizers have never known the precariousness of the threats they face today.

More Stories


  • White Settler Uprising at the Capitol
    Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor
    White Settler Uprising at the Capitol
    14 Jan 2021
    Last week’s assault on the Capitol was essentially a race riot, the product of white racial grievance.
  • Max Blumenthal: Breach of Capitol Security Was Like a Military Operation
    Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
    Max Blumenthal: Breach of Capitol Security Was Like a Military Operation
    13 Jan 2021
    The Grayzone founder notes that “such a disproportionate percentage” of the Capitol building attackers were former military, former law enforcement, or current law enforcement that began rappelling
  • Freedom Rider: Capitol Riot Brings U.S. Foreign Policy Home
    Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist
    Freedom Rider: Capitol Riot Brings U.S. Foreign Policy Home
    13 Jan 2021
    There needs to be soul searching and truth telling about invasions, interventions, coups and sanctions that are far more destructive than the Trump lovers could ever be.
  • Black Citizenship Forum: Black Intellectuals and the Violence of Citizenship
    Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    Black Citizenship Forum: Black Intellectuals and the Violence of Citizenship
    13 Jan 2021
    Not just in the White Settler States, but throughout the Black world the very possibility of Black citizenship has been gutted.
  • The other side of duopoly.
    Ben Passmore
    Ben Passmore's Latest for Black Agenda Report
    13 Jan 2021
    The other side of duopoly.
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us