the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar
Feb
16
Stephen Sheehi
The Arab After-Image or All Photography Expresses Social Relations
6:00 pm | The Great Hall
Prof. Sheehi re-evaluates the history of 19th century Arab photography, particularly portraiture. Many have asserted that vernacular photography, not only in Southwest Asia, seems to have participated in the self-fashioning and self-presentation of the new middle classes in turn producing new knowledge and meaning important for modernity. Contrarily, Prof. Sheehi will argue that even if the utility of the studio portrait served as a means of self-presentation, photography that was patronized, consumed and circulated by local populations did not produce or even codify new forms of knowledge or meaning during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Through its production, exchange, circulation and deployment, photographic portraiture, rather, functioned within a signification system that had already made the subject intelligible within modernity’s new social order. To put it more concisely, photographic portraiture was a performative after-effect of transformations that had already been underway for some time.
About Stephen Sheehi
Stephen Sheehi is an internationally acclaimed author, scholar and activist. Prof. Sheehi is Associate Professor of Arabic and Arab Culture at the University of South Carolina and has taught Arab and Western intellectual and literary history at the University of Utah, Duke University and the American University of Beirut. He received his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In addition to several articles and commentaries in scholarly and mainstream journals, Prof. Sheehi is the author of Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims (2011) and Foundations of Modern Arab Identity (2004). Currently, Prof. Sheehi is writing Arab Imago: A Social History of Indigenous Photography (forthcoming with Princeton University Press), which is a groundbreaking inquiry into the relationship between Arab identity, capitalism, state power and photography in Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt between 1860 and 1930.