Visual Pedagogies: Decolonizing and Decentering the History of Photography

Abstract

This article discusses strategies to decolonize the classroom through changes in course structure that place postcolonial scholarship into dialogue with emerging scholarship that seeks to unsettle settler colonialism. This pedagogical approach interrogates the very structure of traditional art history to critically explore how systemic Eurocentrism is reproduced in an introductory history of photography course at a public university. As a case study, this article focuses on a history of photography course designed for second-year undergraduate students that provides a broad overview and historicization of one medium. Acknowledging important scholarship in visual culture studies, which has broadened what constitutes important art histories, we contend that more work needs to be done in introducing these complex ideological and methodological innovations in introductory courses. This article proposes methodologies for teaching an undergraduate survey course within the history of art that integrates non-Western and Indigenous knowledge. We argue that a transformed curriculum becomes a catalyst for decolonizing research.

Notes

¹ We define the Middle East loosely as the geopolitical designation western Asia and northeast Africa that includes the nations on the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey. Even though some of these regions, like Iran and Turkey, are not technically a part of the Middle East, our emphases on historiography make it integral to include regions that were connected by empire, culture, and language.

² See Belting, Buddensieg, and Weibel (2013); Brzyski (2007); Dadi and Hassan (2001); Dave-Mukherji (2014); D’Souza and Casid (2014); Elkins (2010); Mercer (2005); Mirzoeff (2014); Nelson (2014); O’Brien et al. (2012); Roxburgh, McWilliams, and Emani (2017); Smith (2011); Tiampo (2011).

³ More information is available on www.firstdayfirstimage.com.

⁴ The definition of the Middle East that we use here is in line with Islamicate methodologies and moves away from area studies. In 1974, Marshall Hodgson coined the term Islamicate as a way of opening up the borders posed by modern scholarship. Hodgson identifies the issue in using the terms Islam and Islamic in unspecific ways, arguing that the more we speak of Islamic art, Islamic literature, or Islamic sexuality, the less we are actually speaking about Islam as a faith. The Islamicate is then not referring directly to the religion of Islam itself, but to the social and cultural complexities historically associated with Islam. It is also inclusive of non-Muslims living within the same regions. Geographically this also opens up the limits of only studying places such as “Middle East” and encompasses other geographic regions where Islam is dominant both religiously and culturally, such as Iran and parts of Asia and Africa (Hodgson, 1974, pp. 57–59).

⁵ Orientalism is defined as the West’s patronizing representations of “The East” and the overall exoticization of the societies and peoples who inhabit countries in Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. According to Said (1978), orientalism is inextricably tied to the imperialist societies who produced it, which makes much Orientalist work inherently political and central to power.

⁶ Mahmood Oskooui, family photograph (ca. 1920s), Iran. Glass Negative. Ali Behdad’s Private Collection. Please note this picture is depicted in: Behdad (2016, p. 104).