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This talk traces the emergence of citizenship as a photographable subject in the British Empire at the beginning of the twen tieth century\, taking as its focus an archive of 6\,700 images produced by the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee: an unusual education pro ject\, developed by the British government\, that used photographic lantern slides to teach viewers what it meant to look and to feel like imperial cit izens. Photographs of migration were central to COVIC’s picturing of imperi al citizenship\, a non-legal category of belonging that promised British su bjects equal rights in spite of the differences – of race\, class\, ethnici ty\, and gender – that photography had so forcefully contributed to solidif ying and visualizing in the past. Beginning from close readings of several photographs included in the lectures on Canada\, published in 1913\, and te lescoping out to consider how these images responded to (and often contradi cted) contemporaneous representations of immigrants and other non- or would -be citizens\, the lecture considers how photography has shaped what Sukany a Banerjee terms the “extra-legal dimensions of citizenship” for racialized subjects in Canada.
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Gabrielle Moser is currently a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHR C) postdoctoral fellow in art history at the University of British Columbia and is a Fulbright Visiting Scholar in the department of Modern Culture an d Media at Brown University in Winter 2017. She holds a PhD from the art hi story and visual culture program at York University and is an Adjunct Profe ssor in art history at OCAD University.
Image: Alfred Hugh Fisher \, Snake Charmers on the Desasumay Ghat at Benares\, India\, 1908
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