ariella azoulay potential history unlearning imperialism

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. 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. Camera Ethica aims to revise current understandings of the Indies reforms by re-examining them through a significant yet neglected photographic source base, and in the process to introduce the Ethical Policy to a wider community of scholars on European colonialism. Yet despite the Ethical Policy’s ideological resonance and temporal coincidence with other forms of European liberal imperialism ¬– notably the “white man’s burden” of the Anglophone world and the French mission civilisatrice – the Dutch program in the Indies is little known outside a narrow specialist field. The reforms have a well-established intellectual history in the Dutch-language literature, where their social and cultural trajectory has conventionally been traced through the words and texts of (mainly Dutch) elites. 1901–1942), then the Netherlands East Indies. “Ethical Policy” (Ethische Politiek) is the term frequently used by historians to indicate the suite of liberal-developmentalist reforms debated and implemented by Dutch colonial elites in early twentieth-century Indonesia (c.

Ariella azoulay potential history unlearning imperialism