The Catholic schoolgirl & the wet nurse: On the ecology of oppression, trauma and crisis

Authors

Jade E. Davis, CUNY LaGuardia Community CollegeFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2014

Abstract

This paper explores the idea of facing oppression by exploring how two photographs, one of a Catholic schoolgirl and one of a wet nurse, were received as they made their way through social media. In addition, the paper looks at a blog post that was made about photographs from a similar time period as the photos. By exploring how the photos were received through Fanon, visual studies, and psychoanalytic theory, the paper proposes a new way to view these photographs outside of the narratives of Oppression and Trauma. Instead, by understanding the re-inscription of the dominant narratives as an ongoing crisis, we allow for a reparative reading of this type of imagery that complicates our relationship with the past.

Comments

This article was originally published in Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, available at http://decolonization.org/index.php/des/article/view/19997/17325.

This work is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 3.0)