Jenny Sharpe considers the visual power of the imperial picturesque. Analyzing touristic photography of Indian field workers in the Caribbean, Sharpe argues that a “coolie picturesque” simultaneously reveals and conceals the permanent settlement of Indians and their racial mixing with Afro-Jamaicans.
Analyzing the staging and composition of archival photography of South Asian laborers in 19th-century Jamaica, Anna Arabindan-Kesson reflects upon the role of photography in evoking particular colonial narratives about indenture, the perception of Indian laborers’ assimilability, and Jamaica’s modernization.
Charting incomplete U.S. archives from the Cold War made secret through redacted U.S. State documents, Vang shows how Hmong refugees tell their stories in ways that exist separately from narratives of U.S. empire and that cannot be traditionally archived. In so doing, Vang outlines a methodology for writing histories that foreground refugee epistemologies despite systematic attempts to silence those histories.
Stanford Humanities Center
