The event will start with EUI Max Weber Fellow Dr. Gee Semmalar's talk on colonial ethnographic photography and will be followed by an interactive workshop where participants can bring their visual primary sources to be discussed. Archival sources will thus be at centre of both the talk and the discussion to explore queer and postcolonial approaches to historical practice.
Gee Semmalar's talk addresses how gender was produced through visual codes of caste in late 19th century British India through an exploration of colonial ethnographic photography. The talk will focus on the materiality of the two albumen prints, the historical and discursive fields in which they were produced and contemporary archival practices as co-constituting the meaning of these photographs. Inspired by the expansive view of the agential relationality between human, non-human and more-than-human worlds in some indigenous cosmologies like that of the Santhal, Munda, Anishinaabeg, and Maori peoples, Gee Semmalar reads the non-human as elements that constitute the meaning of photographs.
Participants can bring and share one primary source related to the workshop's topic and discuss it together with Gee Semmalar and the other researchers. Each of the presenters will have 5 minutes to present the document and its context and then there will be around 10/15 minutes of discussion. If you want to share a primary source, please send it to the EUI Queer and Feminist Studies Working Group ([email protected]) by 15 April 2024. Due to time constraints, the opportunity to discuss one document will be given on a first-come basis.
Take a look at the other events linked to LGBT+ History Month Italia:
https://www.lgbtplushistorymonth.it/
Please register to get a seat or to receive the ZOOM link.