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

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.

Theologies of Fulfillment in a Reciprocal Study of Relationships between John Laughton and Rua Kēnana in Aotearoa New Zealand

“…Her examination of African American missionary photography demonstrates that subjects can redefine their image and challenge established representations. 2 In Aotearoa New Zealand, photographs were essential in researching the life of the Māori prophet Rua Kēnana. The researchers found that showing photographs to indigenous people who knew Kēnana elicited "powerful associations .…”