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theses

Bodies of Evidence is a study of the transnational optics of anti-blackness across German and U.S. settler colonial projects, with a particular attention to the afterlives of visual discourses in present-day politics and memory. This dissertation analyzes case studies from the U.S., Germany, and German South West Africa, what is present-day Namibia, to track the trace of settler colonial and racial ideologies across seemingly discrete and ruptural violences. Rather than continue to treat these histories and archives as distinct or hierarchical instances of violence, I argue for the importance of interpreting them as part of a broader, uninterrupted narrative. Bodies of Evidence adopts a transnational scope that places settler colonial violence—including the Herero and Nama genocide in German South West Africa—alongside European genocide, framing these events as part of the same ideological and scopic regime. My interdisciplinary analysis builds upon critical race theory, critical visual studies, postcolonial and Black feminist scholarship, museum studies, biological anthropology, among other interdisciplinary and theoretical threads. I critically interpret visual and material evidence with a methodological emphasis on framing the positionality of the viewer in relation to questions about the gaze and modes of looking. Thinking through the looped gaze, parallactic witnessing, and the ethics of looking, I argue that we can transform the act of looking if we understand how the circulation and containment of colonial violences continue to shape ways of seeing.

ETD_8853

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Jenna R. Brager

doi:10.7282/T30005HW

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.