Can the Subaltern be seen? Photography and the affects of nationalism

HAHR - Hispanic American Historical Review

Volumn 84, Issue 1, 2004, Pages

  Grandin, Greg ^a  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 60949846298     PISSN: 00182168     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00182168-84-1-83     Document Type: Article

References (44)

1. Information on the life of Zanotti comes from a series of interviews conducted with photographers currently working in Quetzaltenango, as well as miscellaneous documents found in the CIRMA collection. Information on his family is found in the record office of Quetzaltenango's public cemetery. This essay is an elaboration of a short discussion in my book, The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 185-190
2. See Cristraud M. Geary, Images from Bamum: German Colonial Photography at the Court of King Njoya, Cameroon, West Africa, 1902-1915 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute, 1988)
3. Catherine Lutz and Jane Lou Collins, Reading National Geographic (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993)
4. Christopher M. Lyman, The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions: Photographs of Edward S. Curtis (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982)
5. and Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993)
6. For anthropology, see Elizabeth Edwards, ed., Anthropology and Photography, 1860-1920 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1992)
7. See also Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturalism (New York: Routledge, 1992)
8. Deborah Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997), 214
9. Poole offers only a brief reading of how peasant and working-class families may have engaged the new technology, focusing primarily on elite and foreign involvement in visual production and exchange. Vision, Race, and Modernity, 209-12
10. For Curtis, see Lyman, The Vanishing Race
11. Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity, 202
12. Alan Trachtenberg uses Sigmund Freud's notion of the "uncanny" - as "something familiar and old-established in the mind" that has been estranged in the mind in an act of repression - to reflect on how the first daguerreotypes were received: "Freud's insight into the way the psyche allows itself pleasurable terrors of the uncanny in order to reinforce its defensive repressions suggests a role for the daguerreotype, particularly with its overtones of alchemy, in initiating Americans into a new age of science and industrial technology, in which railroads, telegraphs, and steam-powered machinery also seemed driven by magical, perhaps demonic, forces"; Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 23
13. David McCreery, Rural Guatemala, 1760-1940 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1994)
14. See Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala, chaps. 3, 6, and 7, for a more detailed discussion of the summary that follows
15. See also Marta Casaús Arzú, Guatemala: Linaje y racismo (Guatemala City: Facultad Latinoamerica de Ciencas Sociales, 1995)
16. For a useful discussion of the analytical utility of the concept of race, see Alan Knight, "Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910-1940," in The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940, ed. Richard Graham (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1994), 72
17. For similar constructions of racial identity, see Marisol de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919-1991 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2000)
18. See Nancy Leys Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), 84
19. Antonio Batres Jáuregui, Los indios: Su historia y su civilización (Guatemala: Tipografía La Unión, 1894), 177-78
20. Archivo Histórico de Quetzaltenango, caja 1894. For a more detailed discussion of various manifestations of this alternative nationalism, see Grandin, Blood of Guatemala, chaps. 6 and 7
21. See also the 1879 Ley para las municipalidades, which charged municipal authorities with ending the practice of "carrying goods on the head and the back," Recopilación de las leyes emitidas por el gobierno democrático de la República de Guatemala, 2 vols. (Guatemala City: Tipografía El Progreso, 1881), 2: 283-93
22. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994), 120
23. John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in the Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1841), 2:219-21
24. William Tufts Brigham, Guatemala: The Land of the Quetzal; A Sketch (New York: Scribner, 1887), 147
25. The only previous recorded instance of photography in Quetzaltenango confirms this. In 1875, the famous photographer Eadweard Muybridge was greeted in the plaza of Quetzaltenango by a martial band and a crowd of hundreds. See E. Bradford Burns, Eadweard Muybridge in Guatemala, 1875: The Photographer As Social Recorder (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986)
26. Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 26
27. See Carol Elaine Hendrickson, Weaving Identities: Construction of Dress and Self in a Highland Guatemalan Town (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1995), chap. 2, for the diversity of factors that inform the decisions women make as to what kind of blouse or huipil to wear
28. See also Irma Otzoy, "Identidad y trajes mayas," Mesoamérica 23 (1992): 95-112
29. For other discussions on the relationship between identity and clothing, see Terrence Turner, "The Social Skin," in Not Work Alone: A Cross-Cultural View of Activities Superfluous to Survival, ed. Jeremy Cherfas and Roger Lewin (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1980), 112-40
30. as well as the essays in Joanne B. Eicher, ed., Dress and Ethnicity (Oxford: Berg, 1995)
31. and Hildi Hendrickson, ed., Clothing and Difference: Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1996)
32. Manifestación que la sociedad "El Adelanto" de indígenas de Quetzaltenango . . . hacen al señor presidente, Museo de Historia, Quetzaltenango
33. Hendrickson, Weaving Identities, 99
34. Jeffrey L. Gould, To Die in This Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880-1965 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1998), 59, 177
35. Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, "Introduction: From the Moment of Social History to the Work of Cultural Representation," in Becoming National: A Reader, ed. Eley and Suny (New York: Oxford Univ. Press 1996)
36. See Manu Goswami, "Rethinking the Modular Nation Form: Toward a Sociohistorical Conception of Nationalism," Comparative Studies in Society and History 44, no. 4 (2002): 770-99
37. as well as her Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, forthcoming)
38. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota, 1986), 40-42
39. See also Homi Bhabha's concern with the ways in which colonial authority depends on the splitting of subjectivity by forcing its subjects to adopt its values, traditions, and language, in "Conclusion: 'Race,' Time, and the Revision of Modernity," in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994)
40. For the quote, see Sherry Ortner, "Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal," Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 1 (1995): 183
41. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1994), 102
42. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000)
43. The first generation of subaltern studies, particularly its application of Gramscian theories of hegemony, greatly enriched Latin American historiography. See Florencia Mallon, "The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History," American Historical Review 99 (1994): 1491-1515
44. See Ileana Rodríguez, ed., The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2001), for current attempts to apply postcolonial studies - less by historians than by literary theorists and cultural philosophers - to Latin America