Picturing the Modern Self: Politics Identity and Self Fashioning in Lagos, 1861-1934 Open Access
Gbadegesin, Olubukola Abimbola (2010)
Published
Abstract
Abstract
Picturing the Modern Self: Politics Identity and Self Fashioning in
Lagos, 1861-1934
By Olubukola A. Gbadegesin
This dissertation traces the introduction and deployment of
photograph in colonial Lagos by its varied and diverse populations,
all negotiating "strategies of power" through the medium and its
myriad applications and readings. This project is situated within
the context of other colonial (political and periodic) practices,
such as the British colonial Raj and colonial American slavery that
suggest parallels in the local adaptations of and imperial
struggles with the interpretational opacities of photographs. These
notions of multi-vocality of photography are particularly useful
when thinking about the use of the medium in colonial Lagos, where
populations (consisting of repatriated slaves, Muslims, indigenous
peoples, European colonials and merchants, and other Africans)
inhabited in a complex and ever shifting socio-political landscape.
To this point, this project addresses how photographic portraits
allowed these subjects to express their multi-positionalities and
social projects through a medium which was prone to similar
opacities. These portraits documented and informed the self and
group fashioning projects of black Lagosians and provided
aestheticized readings into the intra- and extra-local negotiations
that these populations undertook in their colonial milieu.
Moreover, this project engages with the ways in which British colonial administration and their agents similarly deployed photography in the attempt to consolidate their colonial project in the city, and gather Lagosians into the colonial archive. Troubling the works of Allan Sekula and John Tagg, I examine how Lagosians who acted as policing agents of the British colonial state were subjected to controlling and surveilling photographic practices, perhaps even more so than the majority of the population. I also consider the ways in which the archive may be read to give meaning to these photographs and the album-collections into which they are often incorporated. Finally, this dissertation engages with the work of the black African photographer, Neils Walwin Holm and the Lagosian portrait painter, Aina Onabolu in an exploration of how, in the process of acting as visually arbiters for their Lagosian clients, these image-makers also pursued and attained their own independent social projects.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Tracing the Trajectories of Photography in Colonial
Contexts: The Concomitant
Cases of India, America, and
Nigeria………......…………………………1
Chapter 2: Unpacking the Visual Economies of Photographic
Portraiture in Colonial Lagos,
1861-1892………………………………………………………………………………..39
Chapter 3: Fashioning Nationalist Political Identities: A Portrait
of Local Protests and
Movements in Lagos,
1890s-1930s………………………………………….86
Chapter 4: Visual Processes of Collective Fashioning: Photographic
Group Portraits and
Albums in Lagos,
1880-1931…………………………….…………………….129
Chapter 5: Life Portraits of Portraitists: Reconstructing the Black
Lagosian Image-Maker,
1888-1934……………………………………………………………………………….152
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………..193
About this Dissertation
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