Abstract
This chapter argues that photographs are important yet neglected cultural artifacts that can lay bear technologies of modern power and the making of citizen subjects. Photographs serve as visual entries into U. S. history, curriculum and policy, and their broader interrelationships with colonialism, diaspora, race, ethnicity, patriarchy, class, and citizen. The author comes to the subject matter from a postfoundationalist, multi-theoretic and cross-disciplinary approach to counter the prevalent hegemonic trend in the field of educational research that aim to promote what Baez and Boyles (The politics of inquiry: Education research and the “culture of science.” State University of New York Press, Albany, 2009) call a “science of education” that attempts to measure the worth of inquiry, learning, teaching, and knowledge in terms of their immediate utility. The focus on three women of Filipino and Polynesian heritage is particularly noteworthy since these communities are relatively invisible in mainstream education discourse.
The simple act of viewing an image inevitably calls on numerous visual points of reference that recur in the imaginary and the discourses and narratives that surround us as viewers. Our vision, therefore, is somewhat framed even prior to the act of viewing. Shaping our vision are concepts that are central to the epistemological premises of modernity , the historical frame within which our cognitive responses are formed(Nair 2011, p. 41).
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Notes
- 1.
Agbayani and Ching note the U. S. Census counts AAPIs in two major race categories: (1) Asian and (2) Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islander. At least 24 separate groups have been identified for each category, for a combined total of 48 ethnic groups. The Asian American ethnic categories include Bangladeshi, Butanese, Burmese, Cambodian, Chinese, Filipino, Hmong, Indian, Indo Chinese, Iwo Jiman, Japanese, Korean, Laotian, Malaysian, Maldivian, Nepalese, Okinawan, Pakistani, Singaporean, Sri Lankan, Taiwanese, Thai, Vietnamese, and other Asian. The Pacific Islander ethnic categories include Carolinian, Chamorro, Chuukese, Fijian, Guamanian, I-Kiribati, Kosraean, Mariana Islander, Marshallese, Native Hawaiian, Ni-Vanuatu, Palauan, Papua New Guinean, Pohnpeian, Saipanese, Samoan, Solomon Islander, Tahitian, Tokelauan, Tongan, Yapese, Polynesian, Micronesian, and Melanesian.
- 2.
Wendy Brown describes neoliberalism as “a market-political rationality that exceeds its peculiarly American instantiation” and “does not align exclusively with any political persuasion” (2006, p. 691). As a political rationality it “involves a specific and consequential organization of the social, the subject, and the state” and “governs the sayable, the intelligible, and the truth criteria of these domains” (p. 693).
- 3.
See Michel Foucault, “Interview with Lucette Finas” in Michel Foucault Power, Truth, Strategy (1979, p. 72).
- 4.
Kenneth Surin underscores this point as it relates to humanities and interpretive social sciences in the United States.
- 5.
See “White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Key Facts and Figures” at www.whitehouse.gov/administration/epo/aapi/date/facts-and-figures
- 6.
I take this significant point from Sian Sullivan.
- 7.
Tagg notes that, “The closing of the rhetoric of historiography at the level of the fact and the closing of the meaning of the photograph at the level of its indexicality have operated in fields of historical and photographic discourse they have never saturated. Whatever their ambitions, they have remained local ploys, whose grounds have always been in dispute” (p. 213).
- 8.
Kamehameha School opened in 1887, 6 years before the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom by U. S. naval forces. The school was built under the terms of the Will of Bernice Pauahi Paki Bishop, a descendent of King Kamehameha I and the inheritor of the Kamehameha family estates totaling 369,699 acres (approximately 9 % of all the land in Hawaiʻi). The landholdings of the Kamehameha chiefs were consolidated into the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Estate and the revenues generated from the estate were to be used to fund the establishment and maintenance of the Kamehameha School and subsequent schools. As a descendent of Kamehameha I, Pauahi was entitled to an education in a Protestant mission-run boarding school along with other children of her status. At the age of eighteen she wed Charles Reed Bishop, the first banker of Honolulu. The Will of Pauahi directed the trustees “to erect and maintain in the Hawaiian Islands two schools, each for boarding and day scholars, one for boys and one for girls, to be known as, and called the Kamehameha Schools[.]” (Will, Article 13). The first of these schools, the Kamehameha School for Boys opened in 1887. In 1894, the school for girls was built. Today, Kamehameha School is a private co-educational college preparatory institution believed to have the largest endowment (about nine billion) of any primary and secondary school in the United States. It remains the largest private landowner in the state.
- 9.
I take the concept from David Scott (2004), p. 4.
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Tavares, H.M. (2016). Why Photo-Archives. In: Pedagogies of the Image. SpringerBriefs in Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7619-6_1
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