Picturing the Modern Self: Politics Identity and Self Fashioning in Lagos, 1861-1934 公开

Gbadegesin, Olubukola Abimbola (2010)

Permanent URL: https://etd.library.emory.edu/concern/etds/6682x419x?locale=zh
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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




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