Looking in Stereo: School Photography, Interracial Intimacy, and the Pulse of the Archive

Abstract

This article examines the visual genre of the school photograph in order to reflect on the promise of transcolonial methodologies for thinking about the history of race and belonging in Canada. It focuses on four photographs of schoolchildren taken at around the same time in a range of locations across the British Empire. All feature Chinese children in close proximity to black, South Asian, or white peers. Seeking to understand how the photographs resonate with one another as representations of encounters between Asian and other racialized child subjects—divisions of class, location, and migration history notwithstanding—I develop a transcolonial methodology that is attentive to the (counter)institutional workings of rhythm and repetition as engines of community formation. Such a practice, I suggest, allows for rhythms to emerge that resist alignment with the pedagogical dictates of national time, as exemplified by national celebrations of Canada 150.