Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java (Objects/Histories)

Karen Strassler

ISBN 10: 0822346117 / ISBN 13: 9780822346111

Edité par Duke University Press, 2010

A propos de cet article

Gently used with minimal wear on the corners and cover. A few pages may contain light highlighting or writing, but the text remains fully legible. Dust jacket may be missing, and supplemental materials like CDs or codes may not be included. May be ex-library with library markings. Ships promptly!

N° de réf. du vendeur DBV.0822346117.G

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java (Objects/Histories)
• Éditeur: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 2010
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 0822346117
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9780822346111
• Reliure: Couverture souple
• État de l'article: good

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis

A young couple poses before a painted backdrop depicting a modern building set in a volcanic landscape; a college student grabs his camera as he heads to a political demonstration; a man poses stiffly for his identity photograph; amateur photographers look for picturesque images in a rural village; an old woman leafs through a family album. In Refracted Visions, Karen Strassler argues that popular photographic practices such as these have played a crucial role in the making of modern national subjects in postcolonial Java. Contending that photographic genres cultivate distinctive ways of seeing and positioning oneself and others within the affective, ideological, and temporal location of Indonesia, she examines genres ranging from state identification photos to pictures documenting family rituals.
Oriented to projects of selfhood, memory, and social affiliation, popular photographs recast national iconographies in an intimate register. They convey the longings of Indonesian national modernity: nostalgia for rural idylls and "tradition," desires for the trappings of modernity and affluence, dreams of historical agency, and hopes for political authenticity. Yet photography also brings people into contact with ideas and images that transcend and at times undermine a strictly national frame. Photography's primary practitioners in the postcolonial era have been Chinese Indonesians. Acting as cultural brokers who translate global and colonial imageries into national idioms, these members of a transnational minority have helped shape the visual contours of Indonesian belonging even as their own place within the nation remains tenuous. Refracted Visions illuminates the ways that everyday photographic practices generate visual habits that in turn give rise to political subjects and communities.

À propos de l?auteur

Karen Strassler is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Queens College, City University of New York.