About Time: Historical Reading, Historicity, and the Photograph

Author(s): Sara Blair

Source: PMLA, Vol. 125, No. 1 (Jan., 2010), pp. 161-171
Published by: Modern Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25614445
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 12 5-1 ]

theories and
methodologies

About Time:
Historical Reading,
IN WHAT IS OF LATE ONE OF THE MOST QUOTED PASSAGES IN AMERICAN
Historicity, and the
LETTERS, W. E. B. DUBOIS DESCRIBES THE DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS THAT Photograph
makes the Negro "a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted
with second-sight in this American world" (5). Paradoxically, given SARA BLAIR
the visual logic of his accounting, the very power of DuBois's notion
has obscured the incident whose recounting generates it. Describ
ing his boyhood initiation into racial self-knowledge in his early life
"as a little thing, away up in the hills of New England ... in a wee
wooden school-house," DuBois focuses on a moment in which he
and his schoolmates splurge on "gorgeous visiting-cards?ten cents
a package?and exchange." The social ritual is "merry" until an au
thoritative onlooker, a "tall girl, a newcomer," "refused my card
refused it peremptorily, with a glance" (4). At this precise moment,
we re meant to believe, the boys individualist faith in character as
destiny is "forever shattered" (Lewis 33). With the girl's refusal,
"the shadow swept across me"; "it dawned upon me that I was dif
ferent from the others,... shut out from their world by a vast veil"
(DuBois 4).
During the 1870s, the era of the boy's enlightenment, visiting
cards were known as cartes de visite or cabinet cards, and they cir SARA BLAIR teaches in the English depart
ment and the programs in American cul
culated in the United States by the millions, part of a nation-making
ture and Judaic studies at the University
"photomania" (Newhall 62). Typically they featured the engraved
of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her recent work
name of the giver beneath his or her carefully composed studio pho on visual culture includes Harlem Cross
tograph. In the incident described by DuBois, the schoolgirl's cut roads: Black Writers and the Photograph in
ting glance?directed not at the boy himself, DuBois suggests, but the Twentieth Century (Princeton UP, 2007)
at his photograph?marks his difference as the sole black student and the forthcoming volume Documentary

in his school from all "the [white] others" and thus reveals his per Reconsidered, cowritten with Eric Rosen
berg for the series Defining Moments in
durable status as Other.1 An object of uncanny fidelity to character
American Photography (U of California P).
(or so Americans present at the birth of their modern image culture
Her current project, titled "The View
had long supposed), the photograph as a technology does its distinc
from Below," focuses on the long history
tive work of exposing truths of identity all too well here; it enables of photographic encounters on the Lower
the enforcement of the color line, as it occasions the boy's wounding East Side and their role in shaping the im

recognition of that reality. age of American modernity.

l ? 2010 BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA J l6l

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162 About Time: Historical Reading, Historicity, and the Photograph [ PMLA

timeliness
Yet even as the photograph marks of the photograph as
the boy
M
o as an African American subject andobject,
used thus asas a kind of text and
o inopen
subject to a punitive gaze, its uses texts. Actively organizing soc
a space
0 of experience in which the operations of his
as they passively document every
?
ings,being
tory and the conditions of historical materializing
can the past as a p
E be made visible, realized. Located simultane
a futurity they help condition, p
shape
ously in memory, in a presettlement the historical narrative an
landscape
C
(Z ("where the dark Housatonic winds between
experience of historicity?which is
Hoosac and Taghkanic to the experience
sea") overlaid
</>
of social being?for th
*z by histories of nation buildingand viewers by
(embodied alike. Roland Barthes
o
the wooden schoolhouse), and in the material
reader of the historical effects of
graph, (with
object world of American modernity identifies
its photography's un
"gorgeous" machine-produced images),
power the our relations to
to change
speaker of spiritual strivings as
enacts his own
a determinative landmark of mod
distinctive modernity, a "two-ness" that of
the advent is photographic imagi
both racial and powerfully temporal.
alters the Dwell
forms of our encounter w
ing "behind the veil," in a territory
he notes,
defined
it thereby
by "divides the his
contesting temporal scales and histories,
world" (87). the
Theorists of modernit
narrator of The Souls of Black accepted that cameras are, as Bar
Folk embodies
"clocks
the paradox of a radically unstable for seeing," instruments
historicity:
first as an American, one of the time tell asof
"exponents a bodily and imagina
the pure human spirit of the enceDeclaration
(15). But ofthey have been less
Independence," and last in thein march of hu
the power of actual or specific p
to inform
man civilizations, "after the Egyptian andourtheunderstandings of
Indian, the Greek and Roman, being
the Teuton and or don't, with oth
we share,
of modernity. Photography, leadi
Mongolian" (5). If the girls extraterritorializ
tell us, marks
ing look puts the boy in this temporal limbo, the origins of a regim
ally; enacts the modern subject's
outside a shared history or contemporaneity,
Souls is DuBoiss clear-eyed look back: a bidrepresentations fr
distinguishing
things (Michaels);
to recount the history of this temporal condi instantiates the
tion and to tell for America and its twentieth
unprecedentedly "citational struc
century another kind of time. tory" after the end of history (C
Under the sign of textual work, focusingwe might say, has com
Photography,
on this photographic moment in Souls mightfor the problem of
as a metonym
enable us to read the lyrics and our historically
sorrow songs inflected relations t
reproduced in musical notationbecome a conceptual,
at the head of if not gener
for critics'
each chapter as indexes to DuBoiss and theorists' thinkin
abiding
to way
interest in time signatures: in the understand
histori historicity in the
tory's by
cal subjects mark time and are marked much lamented decline.
it; in
Against this drift I want to argu
the problem of creating narrative frameworks
ticular
in which incommensurable histories photographs,
might be in all their
plenitude,
put in dialogue or made productively can make sharply visibl
discor
experience
dant. But the shadow image that occasions ofthe
history, the irreducib
ties
boys entry into the racial order is,ofI belonging
want to or unbelonging to
argue, more broadly enabling for asliterary
well as the effects of a critical acc
stud
ies because it calls attention to the instructive
the place of the subject in time. In

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the photograph, the experience of temporality
intersects with the act of historical accounting
(always a matter of naming the experience of
others). Made artifact, material object, stuff
of everyday rituals and practices, the timely
photographic image opens a distinctive view
onto the production and meaning of historic
ity, particularly in social contexts in which the
subjects place in history is urgently at issue.
Even if we have reached the end of history,
photographs offer themselves as powerful re
sources for apprehending its effects?in par
ticular, the ongoing legacy of a still-contested
modernity. By way of a trio of photographs,
I want to consider two contexts of moment
to literary studies in which the placement of
subjects in time has been a fraught project. In
so doing, I aim to raise larger questions: How
I.=
ff~~
~~~~~~-M... ' '. : ...l. w
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i25.i ] Sara Blair 163
might looking at photographs help us see his
tory, lived and constructed, as the condition
and limit of possibility for the making of sub
jects in their times? When pressed beyond the
bounds of historical evidence, what kind of
Fig, i
insight into contests over temporality can the
photograph afford? And how might the read Ben Shahn, untitled
ing of photographs bespeak the offices of liter (Lower East Side,
New York City),
ary studies in the twenty-first century?
1936. Gelatin silver
print, 19.5 x 24.8
Let me begin with an apparently straight cm. Harvard Art
forward, apparently documentary photograph Museum, Fogg Art
(fig. 1). Shot at close range, in an urban land Museum, gift of
scape, the image features three men well past Bernarda Bryson
the middle years standing in front of an over Shahn (P1970.2881).
Photo by Imaging
sized billboard for women's undergarments.
Dept. ? President
Or so we surmise: "rsets" suggests "corsets";
and Fellows of
"s er s," "brassieres"; "s ett s," "corselettes,"
Harvard College.
 164 About Time: Historical Reading, Historicity, and the Photograph [ PMLA
2J the Jazz Ages stylish reinvention of the de
w>
o finitively Victorian corset. But the implied
o progression from whalebone constriction to
"O
0 streamlined modern lingerie seems under
e
cut by the presence of the human subjects.
E Given their age, sober apparel, and framing,
C
they appear out of joint, unconnected to the
fB social context of advertisement for women's
</>
4> intimate apparel (and, perhaps, the bodies it
la
0 only partially conceals). Even the most casual
4>
JC viewer of this photograph would be likely to
register the fact that its time signatures are
strikingly variable; the effects of its location
of its subjects in history are as rebuslike as
the broken commercial text.
On further investigation, it becomes clear
that temporal twoness is precisely and conse
quentially the matter here. Shot in April 1936
by the socially conscious painter and some
time photographer Ben Shahn, this street
image formed part of an intensive series of
photographs he made on New York City's
Lower East Side. That location was undoubt
edly organic for Shahn; the son of an immi
grant Lithuanian Jewish family that settled in
New York City, he made the Lower East Side
his place of apprenticeship and a resource for
his best-known art. But he also chose it self
consciously and with a clear sense of its time
liness for the changing offices of photography.
More specifically, Shahn returned to the ur
space of Jewish America at a moment when
photography's defining project?embodied
by the photographic arm of the Farm Secu
rity Administration, for which he would go
on to work?was that of imaging so-called
forgotten men and women of a rural America
in collapse, to enable their "rehabilitation":
an extreme makeover for modern times.
(That documentary image making would be
the preferred mode of helping Americans
confront "the terrors and obligations of the
thirties" was, as another Jewish American na
tive son, Alfred Kazin, put it, as "obvious as a
breadline" [287,286].) Broadly speaking, pho
tography under the sign of the New Deal was
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charged with rescuing citizens who had been
left behind by history. Photographic exposure
of their impoverishment was embraced as a
powerful agency for giving migrant moth
ers, dispossessed tenant farmers, and Dust
Bowl refugees a shot at belonging to the new
liberal-industrial order, at finding a place in a
time of unprecedented social change.
In this context of expectation, Shahn's
East Side photographs look especially timely,
especially concerned with questions of be
latedness and belonging. At least since Jacob
Riiss definitive photo text How the Other Half
Lives (1890), the Lower East Side had been en
trenched as a national icon of poverty, alterity,
and the felt unfitness of its inhabitants for the
American century.2 By the mid-1930s, several
generations of immigrant Jews had confronted
the debilitating effects of that iconicity as they
struggled in literary venues, the Yiddish press,
and everyday life to make visible the collective
experiences of exile, displacement, translation,
internal migration, urbanization, transna
tional subjectivity, and social and technologi
cal adaptation that made them, in their view,
exemplary citizens of modernity, second to
none. Thus, the dean of Yiddish-language let
ters, Abraham Cahan, bemoaned the state of
late-nineteenth-century "native" writers, with
their "hopelessly romantic, unreal, and unde
veloped ... literary tastes and standards" (qtd.
in Hapgood 226); the storied East Side Yiddish
poet and critic Abraham Tabachnik noted
acerbically a half-century later that curious
uptowners "come to the East Side expecting
to find gefilte fish" and "instead ... find T.S.
Eliot" (qtd. in Wakefield 461). Shahn s photo
graphs of the Lower East Side not only join
this chorus of responses confronting the felt
effects of assignment to a space outside living
history and shared time. They also exemplify
an interest in photography as a new agency for
making the effect of competing temporalities
visible, for seeing modes of being in history
ill served by the hardening view of what the
media mogul Henry Luce, in his ubiquitous

radio and film series, had dubbed "the march
of time" (Baughman 134).
By the mid-1930s, Jewish Americans had
largely bought into the onward-and-upward
paradigm, embracing the dominant success
story (arrival, first-generation struggle, full
assimilation and flight to the gilded ghettos of
Brooklyn) that would later earn them the du
bious accolade of model minority. But many
were skeptical about this plot, both as an ide
alization of lived experience and as an account
of meaningful belonging to American moder
nity. That skepticism?rather, the attempt to
make visible an alternative reading of Jew
ish American identity as an effect of being in
time?is the point of Shahns Lower East Side
photographs. So how might we read his single,
representative, distinctive street portrait in the
light of this will to history? The three figures
caught by the camera against their tight com
mercial backdrop might seem to be figures
from a mythic past?that is, from the Lower
East Side as a lieu de memoire, the whole a tab
leau of a history and a historicity rapidly van
ishing, as doomed to extinction as the shtetls
from which such subjects must have come. But
such an assimilation of the time signatures of
the image to the familiar historical narrative
is insufficient to its dynamics. The postures of
the men suggest neither a past tense nor pas
sivity but complex lived relations: a nearness
without intimacy. Although the bodies of the
two men on the right of the image touch, their
gazes and stances underscore the felt disjunc
tures between them; they confront the viewer,
as so many of Shahn s collective subjects do,
not as an obvious collective but as urban sub
jects alone together.3
On lingering inspection, the visible gaps
between Shahns subjects assert themselves
as primarily temporal rather than spatial and tion. A native speaker of Yiddish, Shahn often
have an effect not just of twoness but also of made reverse prints of his negatives, experi
multiplicity. Despite the rhyming across the menting with the shift between a left-to-right
visual field of the men s hats, these objects bear
the weight of distinctive relations to historic
ity and time. The man on the right, his heavily
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i25-i ] Sara Blair 165
lidded eyes almost closed, wears a black wool
fedora of a kind associated with Orthodox Ju o
-5
daism; with his flowing beard, he might well sr
be a figure of prayer or meditation in a tradi a>
tional Jewish context. The man beside him, in a
the middle of the trio and the image, wears
3
a light-gray hat, also felt or wool but sport <&
ST
ing a wide black ribbon. His shaded gaze and 0
a
closely trimmed beard place him in a differ o
ent temporal order altogether, that of an am o
w
biguous secularity and assimilation. And the 5*
figure at the left of the image, separated from
his fellow subjects by a small gap as well as his
posture (he alone consumes the goods of the
modern city) moves further still along the im
plied historical continuum. With his jaunty,
fashionable panama hat and his clean-shaven
chin, with the glossy sheen of his neatly knot
ted tie and the starched precision of his dress
collar, this subject bespeaks full belonging to
secular urban modernity, with all the goods it
brokenly promises. Against the inward gaze of
the black hat and the wary gaze of the middle
man, his gaze alone asserts a power to exam
ine their shared lifeworld, to judge or scruti
nize the novelties it puts on offer.
Grouped as they are, these figures sug
gest not the arrested time scheme of trauma
or nostalgia so often associated with Judaism
and the Lower East Side or even a studied con
trast, a la DuBois, between a thoroughly mod
ern America and its temporally challenged
citizens. Rather, they embody a shifting
temporality, a space of experience in which
competing frames of historical reference are
simultaneously in play.4 Shahns image raises
the problem of reading the presence in history
and the historical trajectory of Jewish Ameri
cans; it does so photographically, through
questions about the viewer s visual orienta
orientation (as in English-language reading)
and a right-to-left one (as in Yiddish and He
brew texts). Intrinsic to the rhetoric of this
 166 About Time: Historical Reading, Historicity, and the Photograph [ PMLA
Fig, 2 image is an ambiguity about which orienta
Walker Evans, tion applies. The dominant narrative in inter
License Photo Studio, war America?unimpeded assimilation and
1934. Gelatin silver
access to cultural citizenship?would dictate
print, 18.9 x 147
a celebratory reading of Shahn's subjects: ex
cm. Metropolitan
emplars in a confident progression from time
Museum of Art, gift
of Lincoln Kirstein,
less, archaic subjectivity to the figure of the
1950 (50.539.12). new American, self-possessed in the secular
? Walker Evans Ar metropolis. Ironically, however, this reading
chive, Metropolitan depends on the viewers adoption of a Yid
Museum of Art.
dish (or "Jewish") orientation, reading from
right to left. And the dynamics of the image
resist such accounting; they send the viewer's
eye back to the "timeless" figure, whose in
wardness resonates as a meaningful response
to the unstable temporality of American mo
dernity. That the reader achieves this insight
through an English-language (or "American")
orientation, moving from left to right, attests
to Shahns interest in the play of time frames
and histories that the Lower East Side opens
for apprehension.
The distinctive logic of this image, its seri
ally and temporal movement in tension with
the instantaneity of the photograph, charac
terizes Shahns imaging on the Lower East
Side, which suggests how that site lent itself to
experiments with the camera as a technique
for doing time, making the effects of historic
ity visible. Its instructive to compare Shahn's
portfolio with that of his onetime studio mate
and fellow downtown prowler Walker Evans,
whose images of the Lower East Side exploit
its nostalgic iconicity and temporal instabil
ity to stake quite different claims for modern
photography (fig. 2). Subjects like the Baxter
Street license-photo studio, as if preparing
the way for Evans's fabled Alabama share
croppers, offer up their own superannuation,
their insufficiency to a jump-started, retooled
social order, as the foundation for the modern
camera's ability "to find out what any present
time will look like as the past" (Evans, qtd. in
Hill and Thompson 151). The radical detach
ment that enables such images, becomes their
aesthetic purpose, is sharply at odds with
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Shahns: creating an encounter in which view
ers experience the same temporal instability,
the same discomfort with the prospect of en
tering into history, as the subjects on view do.
Cultural histories of photography, and
more specifically of the reign of documen
tary imaging, stand to benefit from such situ
ated readings, which have largely been absent
from their accounts. From a more famil
iar vantage point, that of readers interested
in apprehending historicity, we might well
ask, Whose modernism was it anyway? And
whose modernity? In what ways does the per
spective of the alien, the structurally belated,
expose and even anticipate the historicity of
the privileged subject? Confronted with such
evidence of subjects' negotiating their place
in history and their being in time, how might
our historical accounting for them reflect its
anticipatory apprehension?
If such questions arise around the culture
of Jewish America and its place in American
histories, they resonate all the more vibrantly
with postcolonial studies. Arguably, no proj
ect of literary inquiry has struggled so cen
trally with the problem of temporal scales,
identities, and disjunctures or with the effects
of temporal binaries and dualities. Taking
shape only in a context where "postcolonial'
. . . ceased to be a historical category" (La
zarus 3), the field has gone on to explore the
fraught being in history of subjects formed
by conditions of liminality, hybridity, and
"loss of meaning" in modernity's evolving
world order (Bhabha 171). In other words,
postcolonial studies has configured its work
around the rejection of historiographies of
development (and often, it might be added, of
Marxist struggle), even as it has focused on
the phenomenology or subjective experience
of temporal gaps and ruptures. Given this
double project?historicity meets historiog
raphy?one might expect photographs, with
their labile temporality, to play a supporting
role. Yet until recently, and for the most part
 i25.i ] Sara Blair 167

Hft
0
Z

w
ft

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 168 About Time: Historical Reading, Historicity, and the Photograph [ PMLA

still, photography has been understood in the misrepresentation, historical consciousness,

postcolonialist context as irremediably fixed and temporal agency (Pinney 1-2). In partic
by its colonialist inceptions?a presumption ular, photographs may help clarify what V. Y.
exemplified by Malek Alloulas description of Mudimbe calls "the ambiguous extension" of
photography in Algeria as "the fertilizer of the Western histories, Western arts of time and
colonial vision," producing "stereotypes in the representation, to ostensibly prehistorical
manner of great seabirds producing guano" (post)colonial contexts (154).
(4). Photography as stultifying waste, as nat With due recognition that the exemplar
ural disaster, as an ecology gone awry from ity of any postcolonial situation is fraught,
above?the resonances are suggestive. But the just as the representativeness of any given
fact remains that photography is structurally photograph is troubled, let me turn for provo
Fig. 3
a form of doubling or mimicry; it thus lends cation to a photograph at least visually akin
Seydou Kefta,
itself to explorations of mimetic subjectivity, to Shahn s (fig. 3). It too features three frontal
untitled, c. 1950-60.
subjects, but they have not been
found by chance. Rather, they
.. . .....a ..:::
........ ..H<^v Z i. ,
entered the makeshift studio of a
portrait photographer in 1959 or
1960 in Bamako, the colonial capi
tal of then-French Sudan, on the
verge of becoming independent
Mali. If Shahn's subjects initially
appear to consign themselves to
mythic time, these figures, with
their fashionable clothes and self
conscious postures, are patently
eager to "pass the test of moder
nity" (Diawara 241). Enabling their
self-representation is a distinctive
mise-en-scene: careful framing
and lighting, foreshortening of the
depth of field, pronounced visual
rhythms in the grouping. These
pictorial features mark the image
as the work of Seydou Keita, the
most fabled African portrait pho
tographer of the era and the most
celebrated in the West since.
By the late 1950s, Keita was
well known in Bamako and be
yond; his clientele reached as far
as neighboring Cote dTvoire and
Senegal and even Benin. The ex
perience of being photographed
by Keita was reputed to produce
not only flattering images but "a
new sensation" for citizens at all

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ranks of decolonization (Lamuniere, Keita,
and Sidibe 14). The floor of Keita's studio?a
space in the courtyard of his home?was bare
earth, and his trademark backdrop was ini
tially his own bedspread. But he offered his
subjects the accoutrements of mid-century
Western fashion to aid them in their signify
ing: fashionable suits; pens and artificial flow
ers; a radio; bicycles, a scooter, an automobile.
Located hard by the colonial capitals train
station, central market, prison, and cinema in
the bustling area of Bamako-Koura (New Ba
mako), Keita's studio became a port of call for
self-styling bamakois, metropolitan subjects
in the making. Their choice of props, whether
owned or borrowed, enabled them to "look in
the mirror" of Western modernity and "see
[their] own face[s]" (13). The success of Keitas
studio suggests that they beheld themselves
with the force of the popular Malian expres
sion he offered as a kind of motto for his prac
tice: '7 ka nye tan' ("You look beautiful like
that"; Keita 12).
Given the currency in postcolonial stud
ies of notions of mimicry and belatedness, its
worth investigating the logic of the likeness?
and the "that."5 Critical readers of Keita's
work have emphasized the role his studio and
his images played in the development of a
proto-postcolonial urban culture, a Bamako
"at the birth of modernity" (Diawara 236).
Such readings focus on the uses for African
self-definition of photographic portraiture?
an enterprise, Allan Sekula has influentially
argued, haunted by its history of creating
bourgeois subjectivity over and against a
"shadow archive' of subjugated others (347).
In Keita's practice, the photographic act is
said to allow for the expression of a histori
cally emerging identity; the resulting images
provide us, Western viewers from a distance,
lasting evidence of that emergence.
Such claims about African self
presentation predicate a certain understand
ing of photographic technology, one that takes
photography's effects, we might say, at face
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i25.i ] Sara Blair 169
value. They tend to involve claims that Keitas 3T
ft
subjects and his representations of them are 0
characterized by "extreme immobility," a "for
mality" that verges on stasis and abstraction tu
3
(Vogel 116; Bigham 57-58). Thus framed, as if a
caught at the moment of their entry into mo
3
dernity, the figures in Keitas images are made ft
to embody, even index, a defining condition of ?
a
belatedness. Proudly displaying wristwatches, o
as other subjects pose with radios and table o
w
clocks, the young men only underscore the
poignant asynchrony of their historical being
with "the normative [Western] temporality of
clock and calendar" (Ganguly 162). In read
ings of Keitas images that emphasize their fi
delity to their historical (proto-postcolonial)
moment, evidence of development meets
photographic arrest: the more deliberately
Keitas subjects enact or evidence their will to
modernity, the more powerfully they embody
the temporal alterity said to define, or rather
to constrain, postcolonial subjectivity.
But what kind of temporal experience or
temporality is actually visible in Keitas im
age? On closer inspection, this portrait sug
gests the opposite of "extreme immobility."
In the stances and spacing of the subjects,
as in their sartorial effects, a progressive
rhythm is created. The young men on the left
and in the center form a kind of couplet, a
powerful visual rhyme. The effects attesting
to their individuation?the folded handker
chief peeking out of the pocket of the man
on the left, the bend in the middle ones left
arm and hand?only emphasize their shared
self-presentation: trim dark trousers and un
buttoned white shirts, the uniform of mod
ern bamakois youth. The subject on the right,
however, breaks the visual sequence. Our eyes
inevitably come to rest on his monochromatic
ensemble, the more acute angle of his body
and the slope of his torso, the crook of his
far knee and the tilt of his head, the insouci
ant hand in his pocket, the cigarette holder
dangling from his lips. Even the gazes of the
subjects imply progression, from the guarded,
170 About Time: Historical Reading, Historicity, and the Photograph | PMLA
Mi
wary expression of the youth on the left to the
franker gaze of the middle figure to the self
? consciously posed, even cinematic, look back
0 of the third man.6 Shaped for a reading from
X
left to right, in the manner of a written text,
E Keita s portrait offers itself up as a moving
image: it anticipates the viewers projection
?
of an arc of development for a culture in the
process of decolonization.
2!
o Yet Keitas images were never intended
X to circulate beyond the African contexts of
+#
their production. Only through the effects of
multiple colonizations, in a postcolonialist
context, did they enter into Western critical
accounting?through a gallery in New York's
SoHo (naturally), once part of the downtown
lifeworld Shahn and Evans had been eager to
explore photographically.7 It's all the more re
markable, then, that Keita's subjects appear to
anticipate their status as subjects of a dubious
historicity. (Here we might recall that montre,
in French, the colonial language of Sudan, sig
nifies both "wristwatch" and the act of "show
ing" or "showing oneself" or "showing oneself
to be.") The implied progression that struc
tures the image, from eager mimesis to full
blown mimicry in the Bhabhaian sense, hails
and presupposes viewers like us, for whom
the confrontation with such figures of belated
modernity and arrested time is less a confir
mation of progress or its inevitability than an
uncanny mirroring of our own unstable being
in history. Cut loose from its organic contexts
of use and exchange, installed at monumen
tal scale on the walls of the Western gallery
and reproduced in art volumes (if not PMLA),
Keita's image has the effect not of making the
three young men coeval with Western view
ers but rather of making us coeval with them:
we too are subjects of an unstable historicity,
whose gaps and flows we hope to forestall by
trading in goods and images.
To view an image in this way, in its multi
ple trajectories of production and circulation
and with emphasis on its temporal twoness,
is to court a dialectical experience of this his
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toricity, to foreground not the relation of the
Western present to the prehistorical or oth
erwise invisible past but, as Walter Benjamin
put it, the relation of "what-has-been to the
now" (462). That dialectic can only enrich
conversations, like those defining postcolo
nial studies, that focus on what it means "to
be con-temporary," what it means to question
the logic of our representations of temporal
being and temporal scales (Osborne 15). At
this juncture, when literary studies is broadly
reconfiguring itself around the reading of ex
pressive forms as responses to social and ex
periential histories, or as self-conscious ways
of telling social time, the photograph offers
itself as a powerful resource. Conversely,
literary-critical modes of reading can make
photographs tell, and bespeak historical be
ing, in boldly distinctive ways. For our more
considered engagement with photographs and
historicity, it's about time.
Notes
1. On the sociology of Great Barrington, the social
effects of the unprecedented public high school that the
town built in 1869, and the intersection of both with
DuBois's unstable family life, see Lewis 19, 31-33.
2. Mele surveys the production of the Lower East Side
as a space of the "different and inferior" (31).
3. See Natanson on Shahn's African American sub
jects of the Farm Security Administration photo project.
4. On traumatic time and/or as Jewish time, see Bau
man 34-35 and Boyarin 81.
5. See Ganguly 163 and Fabian.
6. Diawara notes the proximity of Keita's studio to
Bamako's Soudan Cine and argues for the cinematic self
consciousness of Keita's subjects and mise-en-scene (236).
7. On the appropriation of Keita's work for Western
markets, see Rips.
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