Sans Parole: Reflections on Camera Lucida, Part 2

Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 68.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Hill and Wang, 1981), 4. All subsequent page references to this source are given inline. All emphasis in original unless otherwise noted.

Fred Moten, “Black Mo’nin’,” in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, ed. David Eng and David Kazanjian (University of California Press, 2003), 66. Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (Routledge, 1996), 164.

Tina Campt, “The Lyric of the Archive,” in Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (Duke University Press, 2012), 130.

Campt, “Lyric of the Archive,” 134.

Campt, “Lyric of the Archive,” 134.

Campt, “Lyric of the Archive,” 135.

Campt, “Lyric of the Archive,” 135.

Campt, “Lyric of the Archive,” 135–36.

Campt, “Lyric of the Archive,” 136.

Campt, “Lyric of the Archive,” 136.

Campt, “Lyric of the Archive,” 136.

Campt, “Lyric of the Archive,” 139.

Moten, “Black Mo’nin’,” 59.

Campt, “Lyric of the Archive,” 172, 173, 174. Emphasis in original.

Campt, “Lyric of the Archive,” 174. Emphasis in original.

Fred Moten, Black and Blur (Duke University Press, 2017), 106. Emphasis mine. See also Denise Ferreira da Silva, “On Difference without Separability,” in Incerteza Viva: 32nd Bienal de São Paulo (Fundaçao Bienal de São Paulo, 2016).

Campt, “Lyric of the Archive,” 139.

Moten, “Black Mo’nin’,” 68.

Moten, “Black Mo’nin’,” 68. Emphasis in original.

Moten, “Black Mo’nin’,” 64.

Moten, “Black Mo’nin’,” 64.

Moten, “Black Mo’nin’,” 64.

See Jacqueline Goldsby, “The High and Low Tech of It: The Meaning of Lynching and the Death of Emmett Till,” Yale Journal of Criticism 9, no. 2 (Fall 1996).

Moten, “Black Mo’nin’,” 63–64.

Moten, “Black Mo’nin’,” 61.

Moten, “Black Mo’nin’,” 61.

Moten, “Black Mo’nin’,” 64.

Silverman, Threshold of the Visible World, 189.

Silverman, Threshold of the Visible World, 189.

Silverman, Threshold of the Visible World, 189.

Margaret Olin, “Touching Photographs: Roland Barthes’s ‘Mistaken’ Identification,” in Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida,” ed. Geoffrey Batchen (MIT Press, 2009, 2011), 79.

Shawn Michelle Smith, “Race and Reproduction in Camera Lucida,” in At the Edge of Sight: Photography and The Unseen (Duke University Press, 2013), 27.

Olin, “Touching Photographs,” 79.

Olin, “Touching Photographs,” 80.

Olin, “Touching Photographs,” 83.

Smith, “Race and Reproduction in Camera Lucida,” 34.

Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 67. Emphasis in original.

Hartman writes: “If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery.” Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2007), 7.

Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Duke University Press, 2017), 60.

Campt, Listening to Images, 32. Emphasis in original.

Campt, Listening to Images, 17. Emphasis in original.

Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 69.

We should recall here Barthes’s fanciful claim about his mother, that “during the whole of our life together, she never made a single ‘observation’” (69). His claims, throughout Camera Lucida, and the possessive and declarative force of the punctum as a device for naming and valuing, are all consonant with this proprietary, exclusionary, and exclusive impulse. Together, these common factors in the book model a (white) perceptual subject who comes fruitfully into themselves through acts of dispossession. See Elisa Marder The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction (Fordham University Press, 2012).

Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1.

Moten, “Black Mo’nin’,” 67.

See bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Routledge, 2015).

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave. Written by Himself (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 25.

Hafizah Geter, “Black Phenomena: On Afropessimism & Camp,” BOMB, no. 157 (Fall 2021) →.

The original text reads “… in the silence of technologies.” Jonathan Beller, “Camera Obscura After All: The Racist Writing with Light,” chap. 6 in The Message Is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital (Pluto Press, 2018), 99.

Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 65.

Oxford English Dictionary, online ed., 2019.

Hortense Spillers, “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 74.