Mimicry and Misrecognition: Re-dressing the Colonial Relation in Annu Palakunnathu Matthew’s Photographic Transformations

Abstract

Annu Palakunnathu Matthew’s work “re-dresses” the legacies of nineteenth-century modes of imaging “Indians,” that is, both Native Americans and South Asian Americans. She honours the self-fashioning buried in nineteenth-century photographs of “native types” by restaging photographs with her own body, re-dressed in a construction of what an “Indian from India” is expected to be, all the while subtly pushing back at those expectations. For Matthew, photographs emerge as active participants in re-dressing and redressing the colonial and diasporic relation by demonstrating the ways in which Brown bodies continue to be forced into particular kinds of self-presentation; enacting the exhausting demand to assert oneself as Indian, American, human, legitimate, and belonging, and presenting these struggles as intimately linked to nineteenth-century legacies of representations of colonized, Brown bodies.