Nativism

Although the focus of this chapter is a particular recent photographer, its broader concern is with how performative African identities have been and continue to be imagined as anatomically and culturally generalized bodies. Several writers have identified the simultaneous growth of photography, ethnography, and colonizing projects from the nineteenth century. The photographed subject was frozen as an object for others’ scrutiny, with photography reinforcing the huge divide between the meanings attached to the surfaces of the bodies of African people and ideas about whiteness and the West. The chapter focuses on how anthropological constructs and codes perist in ostensibly postcolonial and counterhegemonic representations. It analyzes the contemporary photographs of the internationally acclaimed South African photographer Zanele Muholi, especially images from her “Faces and Phases” photographs of black lesbians and transmen. On one hand, the portraits are powerful political statements: they portray the dignity and courage of certain lesbians and transmen, make a marginalized community visible in a heterosexist and racist public sphere, and gesture toward meanings of African identities that are radically at odds with both colonial and (patriarchal) nationalist identities. On the other hand, viewers are invited to recognize the agency and public visibility of the subject in ways similar to how viewers of colonial and nationalist performances have been encouraged to recognize and categorize the bodies of authentic African women and men.