The panel is designed to encourage discussion between panelists and audience members, and as such we have selected three panelists who will limit their presentations to seventeen to eighteen minutes each. We will begin the panel with “Natasha Trethewey’s Self-Regard” by Cole Morgan. Morgan examines the recurring allusions to photography recur throughout Natasha Trethewey’s poetry, most often signaling the Poet Laureate’s efforts to recover, reckon with, and reconcile painful memories from her youth. These engagements with photography in her work illuminate the complex relationship between photographic representation and Black poetics of memory and memorialization. Trethewey’s poetic speakers regularly speak to the uncanny limitations of photographic mediation. Photographs figure time and again in Trethewey’s work as texts to be continuously scrutinized and re-interpreted, in spite of their apparent self-evidence. Morgan argues that photographs in Trethewey’s work serve as sites of indeterminate textual exchange, between moments in time, others and the self, and the self and the poetic speaker. Such intervals of evocation, theorized by Fred Moten and Tina Campt as the break, or the rhythmic modality underlying Black aesthetics, constellate Trethewey’s practice of what Leigh Raiford has termed a practice of critical black memory.

Continuing the discussion of indeterminate photographic time, Maite Urcaregui’s paper takes up questions of temporality and photographic interruptions in Deborah Miranda’s (Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen and Chumash) Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (2013). The multi-media memoir situates Miranda’s personal narrative as a “California Mission Indian” within a longer history of settler colonialism, critiquing how the visual mythology of California’s missions aestheticize histories of violence and position Indigenous peoples as relics of a romanticized past. To challenge settler colonial temporalities that fix Indigenous peoples in the past, refuse their present, and foreclosing Native futures, Miranda goes to the past, remixing and sampling documents and images from the colonial archive to create her own counternarrative. Bad Indians turns Bureau of Indian Affairs’ blood quantum charts into visual critiques, reads ethnographic photographs and illustrations for subtle signs of resistance, and collages word and image to create a mosaic that sutures the shards of settler colonial violence. Miranda’s strange narrative temporalities and multi-media texts resist settler colonial time. Urcaregui argues that these conflicting phototextualities act as temporal worm holes that, in their collapsing of settler colonial time, enact Native feminist narrative sovereignty and futurity.

The last paper of the panel resituates these questions of photographic temporality and how they may paradoxically reinforce a culture of forgetting. Anthony Pearce examines Peruvian writer Alonso Cueto’s novel La hora azul (2005), which details the unraveling of a wealthy lawyer’s life after he discovers photographs that implicate his father in military violence during Peru’s internal conflict (1980-2000). The text’s thematic use of the photograph both frames and dramatizes disparate times and spaces simultaneously. In these dramatic combinations of imbricated times and spaces we might recognize a metaphorical wide depth of field framing these tangled connections. The transparent framing of these juxtaposed temporalities centers the novel’s aesthetics around a feigned transparency rather than reforms or reparations, seemingly reinforcing the post-conflict logic that exposing past horrors is all that is needed for justice.