Response to Brent Edwards’s “The Taste of the Archive”

One thing about reading Brent Edwards’s work is that we develop a great sense of the ways in which we have a tremendous amount of intellectual work to do in terms of translating the visual. The semiotic aspect of “Taste of the Archive” is important to my own work. As some of you know I teach and write about race, ethnicity, and gender in graphic novels. One of the challenges in this work is—and I don’t know if archival research is always a dead end, I don’t do enough of it to make that kind of judgment—I feel like translation sometimes is a dead end. And particularly when we are trying to translate visual narrativity, we are up against that feeling of “the end” or essentially what’s always already there in the image. In “Taste of the Archive” my sense is that Professor Edwards moved a bit beyond some of those limitations and my response is really more an attempt to generate a few questions that emerged for me after reading and thinking about the piece in relationship to my own work. Note here as well that hearing the essay in the author’s voice generates a strong sense of perspective, which is a key component of interpreting visual narrativity. Early on in the essay, Brent, you decide to pick your battles in terms of which aspects of the photograph you’re going to interpret and what you’re going to dissect. One of the things you toss aside is the actual turn of the neck of Charles Henri Ford in the original photo and I wonder if you might revisit this move. What I’m thinking about here is that one of the ways in which we interpret visual narrativity is through focalization and through the perspective of who sees or who is not seeing. I think the turn of the neck of Ford in that particular image gives us an opportunity not just to have a sense of the photographer’s focalization but also some sense of the focalization of the subject of that image and I wonder how you might wrestle with those two components.

Another question that was raised, and this actually emerged from your reading of the paper, is: I wonder if you’re equating the dynamic of history with the dialectic of history? Obviously some archival work falls outside of those issues, but I wonder if this particular photograph might put into relief some of the tensions, if not distinctions, between what you might consider to be some of the dynamics of history versus what some of the historical dialectics are in this particular essay. And there are a couple of characters or figures in the piece that I think also point to this and are suggestive of this tension. To be clear, I do not know if it is a tension necessarily, but maybe more of a question that I have about how you are reading history or reading the text, and/or reading the aspects of the image outside of history. Obviously one of the more intriguing characters is Miss Allah, and there is a long passage in the piece where you discuss the sexual politics amongst Muslim men around issues of age. It’s hard for me, not knowing this history, not knowing this moment, to get a good sense of the ways in which Miss Allah and McKay fit into that particular paradigm and I wonder about how some of these issues interact with each other and if you may be able to shed a little bit more light on them. Also, I wonder about the juxtaposition of these three, or maybe there’s four, scenes of public movement in the piece and I’m sure Régine is probably thinking a little about this as well. I don’t want to take too much from that, but I’d love to think about the penultimate scene where the sheik leads this group of folk and they sacrifice the lamb in an attempt to try to attain...