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"...fetishism itself, which is the jungle of jungles, an aggregation of incoherent beliefs" (Milligan 1904:137)
The camera never lies." Once viewed as empirical and evidential inscriptions, nineteenth century colonial photographs, despite their diverse manifestations, are no longer seen as a simple, candid, colonial aesthetic reflection of a captured "authentic" and "exotic" Africa. In actual fact, as "material histories" produced for bom private and public consumption, colonial photographs can be regarded as highly constructed documents that performed distinct discursive functions in the shaping of popular Victorian imagination and, in particular, the production, re-production, and maintenance of European colonial forms of knowledge. Colonial photographs are worth unpacking for the information they reveal about the people who took and used such photographs as much as for the subjects themselves - notably, the underlying politics behind the production of images, especially the triadic relationship between photographer, subject/object, and viewer, which suggests the motivational forces behind the production of such images, simultaneously assuming its influence on content and form. I have come to view colonial photographs- circulated extensively and trafficked indiscriminately as a "tool of the empire" and a technology of both representation and power- as material signatures that represent the flow of movement of people, objects, images and ideas, within the shifting ethnoscapes, ideoscapes, and mediascapes (Appadurai 1990) of capitalist modernity and colonialism, underscoring the ambiguities, contradictions, and, to a large extent, incoherence inherent in the "fetish" and "fetishism" discourse. As such, the terms "fetish" and "fetishism" must be located within the broader context of a Euro-imperialist preoccupation with ontological and epistemologica! distinctions between Africa and the Occident, as well as an Occidental discourse of West African religious traditions, materiality, and the material world. Using British colonial photographs of Asante women, I have sought to excavate a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the concepts of "fetish" and "fetishism." Inspired by postcolonial theory's engagement with colonial discourse and representation (Bhabha 1983; Mohanty 1988; Said 1978, 1993; Spivak 1988) psychoanalysis (Fanon 1963), critical theory's notion of "discourse," notably the production of power and knowledge (Foucault 1972, Mudimbe 1988) in the "contact zone" as a space where people once geographically and historically alienated come into contact with each other (Pratt 1992)» and insights from social constructionism (Meskell 2002), I argue it...