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Southern Looks? A History of African American Missionary Photography of Africa, 1890s–1930s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 May 2018

ELISABETH ENGEL
ELISABETH ENGEL*
Affiliation:
German Historical Institute. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

This article traces and analyzes the missionary photography of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), the most important independent black American institution that began to operate in colonial South Africa at the onset of the politics of racial segregation in the 1890s. It argues that AME missionary photography presents a neglected archive, from which a history of black photographic encounters and a subaltern perspective on the dominant visual cultures of European imperialism and Christian missions in Africa can be retrieved. Focussing in particular on how AME missionaries deployed tropes of the culturally refined “New Negro” and the US South in their visual description of South Africa, this article demonstrates that photography was an important tool for black subjects to define their image beyond the representations of black inferiority that established visual traditions constructed.

Type
Forum: The US South and the Black Atlantic
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , May 2018 , pp. 390 - 417
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2018 

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References

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12 The AME missionary department, for example, donated its files in the 1980s to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (hereafter SCRBC), whereas AME publications and periodicals can be found in the Missionary Research Library in New York and the Moorland Spingarn Research Center at Howard University in Washington, DC.

13 International Missionary Photography Archive, at http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/about/collection/p15799coll123, accessed 1 June 2017.

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21 Quoted in John A. Gregg, “The Land of the Southern Cross” (1910?), in Dennis C. Dickerson, ed., The Land of the Southern Cross: John A. Gregg and South Africa (n.p., 1990?), 29.

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26 The Bishop William Tecumseh Vernon Collection and the Bishop John A. Gregg Collection are in the Kansas Collection of the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries, hereafter abbreviated KSRL.

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28 The label is drawn from Gregg's scrapbook. Box 1, Folder 1, Bishop John A. Gregg Collection, Kansas Collection, RH MS P 1284 (f), KSRL.

29 For examples of these outtakes see Box 2, Folder 6, Bishop William Tecumseh Vernon Collection, Kansas Collection, RH MS-P 529, KSRL.

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35 First in Coppin, Observations, 61, 79, and 93; and later in Box 2, Folders 19, 21, and 22, Bishop William Tecumseh Vernon Collection, Kansas Collection, RH MS-P 529, KSPRL.

36 Smith, 7.

37 Haney, “Emptying the Gallery,” 129.

38 Geary, Christaud, “Different Visions? Postcards from Africa by European and African Photographers and Sponsors,” in Geary, Christaud and Webb, Virginia-Lee, eds., Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), 163–76Google Scholar.

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46 The images are in Box 1, Folder 12, Bishop John A. Gregg Collection, Kansas Collection, RH MS P 1284 (f), KSRL.

47 Christopher Morton, “Double Alienation: Evan-Pritchard's Zande and Nuer Photographs in Comparative Perspective,” in Vokes, Photography in Africa, 35–55, 40.

48 “Philips' News,” 23 Aug. 1922, Box 3, Folder 12, Bishop William Tecumseh Vernon Collection, Kansas Collection, RH MS 529, KSRL.

49 Vernon, 1.

50 Ibid., 11; Newbury, Defiant Images, 16.

51 Smith, Glimpses, 174.

52 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7.

53 Eves, Richard, “‘Black and White, a Significant Contrast’: Race Humanism and Missionary Photography in the Pacific,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 29 (2006), 725–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 740–41.

54 Original caption: “‘Mother’ Vernon and her South African ‘Children’,” in Vernon, 9.

55 Original caption: “Bishop Vernon and a ‘Lamd’ [sic] found in a Basuto Kraal, South Africa,” in William T. Vernon, “South Africa: A Challenge to the Christian Church,” AME Church Review, April 1922, 164–71, 164.

56 Voice of Missions, June 1931, cover page.

57 Wilberforce Institute (Transvaal, South Africa). Leaflet for Wilberforce Institute, c.1925, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312), Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.

58 For a groundbreaking account of the transnational history of Tuskegee see Zimmerman, Andrew, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 Cf., amongst others, Newbury; Minkley and Rassool, “Photography with a Difference”; and Godby, “Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin's Photographs.”

60 Published in Voice of Missions, April 1939, 9, and Voice of Missions, July 1939, 27.

61 Thomas, Lynn M., “The Modern Girl and Racial Respectability in 1930s South Africa,” Journal of African History, 47 (2006), 461–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 462; for the parallel development in the US see Gill, Tiffany M., “‘The First Thing Every Negro Girl Does': Black Beauty Culture, Racial Politics, and the Construction of Modern Black Womanhood, 1905–1925,” in Brown, Elspeth H., Gudis, Catherine, and Moskowitz, Marina, eds., Cultures of Commerce: Representation and American Business Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 143–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 147–48.