The Impossible Portrait

Abstract

This article focuses on a portrait of a young Somali man living in Delhi, India. The portrait depicts him in a park in South Delhi wearing a cap distributed by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) during their insurgent 2012‐2013 campaign to establish themselves as an alternative political force. I argue this parodic portrait and the text it accrues in its circulations on Facebook functions as a networked image‐event that evinces the impossible contradictions that Somalis face in India. Tracing this networked image event reveals how a surging antiblackness linked to the rise of the AAP Party in Delhi punctuates the in‐betweenness that Somalis experience while they wait for life elsewhere.