Research
Allie Tsubota, film still from I am not sand, they told me (2023).
Methodology
In his foundational text Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot laid out his argument that historiography—the chronicling of past events into a narrative—is a result of decisions by the author, whose every choice is an opportunity for mediation and the official and unofficial exercise of power. In my work, I combine archival research, media theory, and social design to identify traces of authorship in the construction of history, which present an opportunity to intervene in that process.My current research focuses on the social history of photography, and how various actors have used the technology to author an official narrative of the United States. Photographs are an especially useful mechanism for this inquiry because they carry the values of the moment of their creation, and can therefore be read closer to social objects, in Ariella Azoulay’s words, than as strict analogues of a relative past.
While photographers have always had tools to manipulate their images, today we see how new technologies such as artificial intelligence can produce wide-reaching disinformation campaigns with serious political effects. Nevertheless, photography’s claim to verisimilitude is easily exploitable by those wishing to hand down the idea that history is immutable, and its surveillance capabilities can uphold oppressive hierarchies in American social life. The public has also never had easier access to the medium, via social media and the vast archive of the Internet. For this reason, I work in new media as well as traditional media, to attempt my own interventions and reach audiences where they are.
Past projects
Since 2021, I have managed archival research into the history of the land at Forge Project as part of the organization’s obligation to support Indigenous placemaking within Mohican homelands. Unlike other areas of the United States where tribes have access to land bases, the Hudson Valley is a site of near total physical and narrative Indigenous erasure. This is emphasized in art movements like the Hudson River School (which imagined landscapes absent of Indigenous peoples) to the use of narrative past-tense when referring to peoples of place. The public is largely uninformed on this history, making non-Native claims to territory appear self-evident and unquestioned. Bringing these histories into the center of a contemporary public discourse can support more compelling arguments for return. This research is supported by the Mellon Foundation’s Humanities for All Times Initiative.
Topics of interest
Collective memory and public history, digital humanities, media theory and criticism, United States imperialism, Indigenous epistemology and anti-colonial methodologies, histories of settlement and land privatization, Black visuality and material culture, architectural preservation, social design, American society, monuments and memorials, cultural belongings and material redress, photography and social objects, historiography, museums, and archives