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Dark Play: The Ethnographic Archive as Site of Embodiment in Zanele Muholi’s Somnyana Ngonyama Series
Author(s) -
Farber Leora
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
visual anthropology review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.346
H-Index - 18
eISSN - 1548-7458
pISSN - 1058-7187
DOI - 10.1111/var.12200
Subject(s) - ethnography , white (mutation) , relation (database) , portrait , power (physics) , series (stratigraphy) , art , visual arts , sociology , anthropology , computer science , paleontology , biochemistry , chemistry , physics , quantum mechanics , database , biology , gene
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.