A01=Jennifer Bajorek
African Studies Association book awards
Arnold Rubin Book Award winner
Arts Council of the African Studies Association
Author_Jennifer Bajorek
Category=AGA
Category=AJ
Category=NHH
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Product details
- ISBN 9781478003922
- Weight: 862g
- Dimensions: 178 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 07 Feb 2020
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
In Unfixed Jennifer Bajorek traces the relationship between photography and decolonial political imagination in Francophone west Africa in the years immediately leading up to and following independence from French colonial rule in 1960. Focusing on images created by photographers based in Senegal and Benin, Bajorek draws on formal analyses of images and ethnographic fieldwork with photographers to show how photography not only reflected but also actively contributed to social and political change. The proliferation of photographic imagery-through studio portraiture, bureaucratic ID cards, political reportage and photojournalism, magazines, and more-provided the means for west Africans to express their experiences, shape public and political discourse, and reimagine their world. In delineating how west Africans' embrace of photography was associated with and helped spur the democratization of political participation and the development of labor and liberation movements, Bajorek tells a new history of photography in west Africa-one that theorizes photography's capacity for doing decolonial work.
Jennifer 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. She is also author of Counterfeit Capital: Poetic Labor and Revolutionary Irony.
