How Do I Bring You Home? is an expression of the author's intellectual and affective vulnerabilities that emerged while engaging with a colonial photo archive, the L. A. Waddell Collection (ca. 1890). Currently housed at the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, the collection has sixty photographs of thirty men and women categorized as “types of Natives” of Nepal, Tibet, and Sikkim. This ongoing work is a self-conscious attempt at seeking different ways of experiencing colonial archives informed by the author's Khambu Rai ontology. The centrality of the mundum, the Rai cosmology, guides the poetics here. It includes an imagined visual and oral reconstruction. The visual is a bricolage of sorts—a juxtaposition of photographs from different archives, individual and institutional, and from the author's own family albums. The oral is in the form of conversations—reflective of their internal dilemmas and oscillations.
This article connects early photographic practices in India to the social worlds of music, dance, and theater. It argues that the female performer or courtesan, long recognized as the central figure in the evolution of the expressive arts in the nineteenth century, also spurred the development of photography. To explore the identity of one historical figure pictured in an orphaned photograph, the article brings together a number of photographic portraits and postcards made of her. It also traces her appearance in official court records and local histories. This research-intensive, multidisciplinary method shows the value of juxtaposing distinct archives, visual and nonvisual, to complicate the reading of individual images. The project demonstrates how courtesans—as subjects, consumers, and creators of early photography—contributed significantly to photography's flourishing and expansion.
This short paper takes as its starting point a photograph titled Chinese Brides. It is an image orphaned by the archive, stored on its own in a folder within the Liverpool Evening Express newspaper photographic archive in the Liverpool Record Office, a local city and county archive in the northwest of England. In response to limited information about the subjects in the photograph, the author proposes a methodology of “diasporic vision” as a situated, experimental and multiple reading, drawing on album-making, speculative writing, and visual tracing. The resulting visions challenge conceptualizations of Chinese diasporic communities and identities, calling attention to their local specificities and historical contexts.
In 1927, during a period of tense relations between the United States and Japan, former missionary Sydney Gulick launched a cross-cultural goodwill campaign that involved sending 12,739 “friendship dolls” from American schoolchildren to Japan. The arrival of these “blue-eyed dolls” prompted the reciprocal exchange of 58 traditional Japanese “dolls of gratitude” to the States. A rare historical photograph—of unknown provenance—depicting the local reception of some of these American dolls among elementary school principals in Saitama is the subject of both a personal mediation as well as historical scrutiny in order to fill in the blank spots of its origin.
