1 Berger, John, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC and Penguin, 1972), p. 11Google Scholar.

2 Pushpamala N. and Clare Arni, ‘Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs (2000–2004)’, at www.pushpamala.com/projects/native-women-of-south-india-manners-and-customs-2000-2004, accessed 6 December 2017.

3 Pushpamala, N. and Arni, Clare, Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs (New Delhi, New York and Mumbai: Nature Morte, Bose Pacia and Chemould Prescott, 2004)Google Scholar, front flap.

4 This paper does not concern itself with the question whether Native Women as a photo-performance interrogates the possibilities of the form with respect to the fantasy/real binary, psychoanalysis and modern cinephilia; this has been covered adeptly in the work of Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Madhava Prasad and Ajay Sinha. Of their studies, I will only be engaging with Sinha's, since his notion of transcultural bordercrossing offers us a useful path into articulating the concerns of this paper, namely that this emphatically transnational collaboration attempts a haptic notion of feminist solidarity, and form-as-citation is a more useful way, in this regard, to think of the performance than mimesis.

5 Wilson, Siona, Art Labor, Sex Politics: Feminist Effects in 1970s British Art and Performance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), p. xxCrossRefGoogle Scholar. I borrow Siona Wilson's use of the term here not only to clarify that my interest is not in making claims for the work as ‘feminist’ or otherwise, but also to scrutinize the ongoing aftermath of the nature of photo-performance work. While Wilson's use of the term attends to the difference between the politics of – self-identified – explicitly feminist work and work involving women that is engaged with feminist debates in the context of 1970s British art and performance, I use ‘feminist effects’ to rely on the potential of the effects of form and narrative, particularly, in Pushpamala and Arni's work. I will do so drawing on the artists’ concerns with colonial ethnography as the locus around which these effects will be discussed.

6 See Harney, Stefano and Moten, Fred, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013)Google Scholar. Harney and Moten theorize the undercommons in the eponymous text as a relation/realm of refuge and resistance emerging from the black radical tradition, wherein critical engagement with the aporia of reforming and rejecting late capitalism and its associated institutions such as the state, the university, sexism and racism becomes a form of study and practice. While the text itself takes off with the contemporary neo-liberal university as its starting point, it details the undercommons as a practice/people far more harmonized to a (dis)location ‘where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong’ (p. 26). In an early interview, Stefano Harney notes, ‘I don't see the undercommons as having any necessary relationship to the university. And, given the fact that, to me, the undercommons is a kind of comportment or ongoing experiment with and as the general antagonism, a kind of way of being with others’. See Stevphen Shukaitis, ‘Studying through the Undercommons: Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’, at https://classwaru.org/2012/11/12/studying-through-the-undercommons-stefano-harney-fred-moten-interviewed-by-stevphen-shukaitis, accessed 16 September 2018. They note in the context of transatlantic enslavement, but with the undercommons furthermore at large, towards a definition of hapticality that embraces solidarity in difference, ‘To have been shipped is to have been moved by others, with others. It is to feel at home with the homeless, at ease with the fugitive, at peace with the pursued, at rest with the ones who consent not to be one’ (Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, p. 97).

7 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, p. 98. They note, ‘Hapticality, the capacity to feel through others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you, this feel of the shipped is not regulated, at least not successfully, by a state, a religion, a people, an empire, a piece of land, a totem’. Ibid.

8 British Museum Collection, ‘As, Portman, B29.15’, at www.britishmuseum.org/collection, accessed 6 December 2017.

9 Although the Native Women catalogue credits another text (see Dehejia, Vidya, ed., India through the Lens (Washington, DC, Ahmedabad and Cologne: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Mapin Publishing, Prestel Verlag, 2000)Google Scholar) and the collection of Oriole Henry as the ‘base’ for the image of the islander, and a cover story from the Kannada magazine Sudha on Todas along with the collection of artist M. B. Patil, as a ‘further reference’ (p. 34), the connection between Portman's image and Pushpamala and Arni's work is further clarified by Christopher Pinney. See Pinney, Christopher, Photography and Anthropology (London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2011)Google Scholar.

10 British Museum Collection, ‘As, Portman, B29.15’, at www.britishmuseum.org/collection, accessed 6 December 2017.

11 Ibid.

12 See Banta, Melissa and Hinsley, Curtis M., From Site to Sight: Anthropology, Photography and the Power of Imagery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Edwards, Elizabeth, ed., Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1920 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press and the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1992)Google Scholar; Hight, Eleanor M. and Sampson, Gary D., eds., Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place (New York: Routledge, 2002)Google Scholar; Pinney, Photography and Anthropology.

13 Pinney, Photography and Anthropology, p. 15.

14 Ibid., p. 41. See also Portman, M. V., ‘Photography for Anthropologists’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 25 (1896), p. 86Google Scholar.

15 Charles John Canning, the first viceroy, began the ‘first state-sanctioned archival photographic practice in India’ through the British Army. See Chaudhary, Zahid R., Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-century India (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), p. 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Ibid., p. 4.

17 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Feminism without Borders (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 See Swarr, Amanda Lock and Nagar, Richa, ‘Introduction: Theorizing Transnational Feminist Praxis’, in Swarr, Lock and Nagar, , eds., Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), pp. 1–20, here p. 5Google Scholar. Also see Colin, Noyale and Sachsenmaier, Stefanie, eds., Collaboration in Performance Practice: Premises, Workings and Failures (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Genealogy here echoes Foucault's response to Nietzschean morals; writing against the metaphysics of origin, he notes that a genealogical endeavour ‘seeks to reestablish the various systems of subjection: not the anticipatory power of meaning, but the hazardous play of dominations’. See Foucault, Michel, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Rabinow, Paul (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 83Google Scholar.

20 Pushpamala's creation of the character N. Rajyalakshmi is referenced across a variety of sources. For instance, she refers to it directly in an interview with The Hindu, and continues the convention of the interview with the figure of Rajyalakshmi in a piece titled ‘Play’ for an anthology commemorating John Berger, wherein Rajyalakshmi is described as ‘the world's leading authority’ on Pushpamala. See Aditi De, ‘Portrait of an Artist as an Actress’, The Hindu, 16 December 2002, at www.thehindu.com/thehindu/mp/2002/12/16/stories/2002121601140100.htm, accessed 21 March 2019. See also Pushpamala, N., ‘Play’, in Gunaratnam, Yasmin and Chandan, Amarjit, eds., A Jar of Wild Flowers: Essays in Celebration of John Berger (London: Zed Books, 2016), pp. 338–45Google Scholar.

21 Pushpamala and Arni, Native Women, p. 135.

22 See Sinha, Ajay, ‘Pushpamala N. and the “Art” of Cinephilia in India’, in Brosius, Christiane and Wenzlhuemer, Roland, eds., Transcultural Turbulences towards a Multi-sited Reading of Image Flows (Heidelberg: Springer, 2011), pp. 221–48, here p. 226Google Scholar.

23 Pushpamala and Arni, Native Women, p. 135.

24 I am so grateful to the members of the Feminist Research Working Group, especially the convenors of the group, Aoife Monks and Charlotte Canning, for their comments in response to an early draft of this paper that was presented at IFTR 2018, Belgrade. My colleagues Evelyn O'Malley and Jonathan Venn have been integral to my conceptualizing hapticality in the context of this work. I also thank the anonymous peer reviewers for their valuable insights.

25 Pushpamala and Arni, Native Women, p. 140.

26 Ibid., p. 26.

27 Susie Tharu, ‘This Is Not an Inventory: Norm and Performance in Everyday Femininity’, in Pushpamala and Arni, Native Women, pp. 9–23, here p. 21.

28 Pushpamala and Arni, Native Women, p. 136.

29 Iversen, Margaret, ‘Auto-maticity: Ruscha and Performative Photography’, Art History, 32, 5 (December 2009), pp. 836–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here pp. 839–40.

30 An important work that sits alongside Native Women of South India with procedural and political resonances is a devised tableaux performance by Guillermo Gómez-Peña. His photo-performance Documented/Undocumented (1980s–present) is a precursor to Pushpamala's work in its exaggerated and improvised referencing of colonial documentation of indigenous people, undertaken over a long stretch of time. Another later noteworthy performance that should be mentioned here for its kinship with the project of performing transnational citational tableaux is Canadian playwright Marie Clements's show The Edward Curtis Project (2010), performed as part of the 2010 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival and the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad. The performance sets up a dialogue between a Métis woman, who is a news correspondent, and various other characters. One of these characters includes the character of the infamous photographer Edward Curtis, who is known for his stylized images of the First Nations people taken in the early twentieth century in order to ‘preserve’ a people he thought were vanishing. A component of this performance includes Clements's collaboration with the photojournalist Rita Leistner and several people from First Nation communities in Canada and the United States. Leistner undertook a photographic examination retracing Curtis's endeavour, but fundamentally inverting its colonial roots: where Curtis was trained in studio photographic portraiture practices and brought the hierarchies of that gaze into his work on – and notably not with – the First Nations people, Leistner's images are haunted with the hum of relationships and conversations that were the basis for and translated into the circumstances of the photographs, paving the way for a powerful response to colonial photographic conventions. The project of collaboration does not elide the uneven terrain of consent and gazing in a collaboration but in fact underscores the persistent gaze of the First Nations subject, whose presence exceeds the boundaries of the frame.

31 Tharu, ‘This Is Not an Inventory’, p. 17

32 Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, p. 104.

33 Pushpamala and Arni, Native Women, p. 44.

34 Ahmed, Sara, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Pushpamala and Arni, Native Women, p. 135.

36 Hooker, Juliet, Race and the Politics of Solidarity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Pushpamala and Arni, Native Women, p. 135.

38 Ibid., p. 137, emphasis mine.

39 Hooker, Race and the Politics of Solidarity, p. 26.

40 Hartman, Saidiya V., Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 19Google Scholar.

41 Rizvana Bradley, ‘Other Sensualities’, Women & Performance, 24, 2–3 (2015), at www.womenandperformance.org/ampersand/rizvana-bradley-1, accessed 28 May 2018.

42 Building on the critique of capitalist conditions for creative work and ‘study’ that Moten and Harney invoke, it is worth noting the location of the artists’ sociocultural capital and the circulation of this collaboration within the neo-liberal global art circuit, where performance work acquires capital in being produced through institutional structures commodifying collaboration. Native Women was supported by the Arts Collaboration Grant from the India Foundation for the Arts. Also see Simon Murray, ‘Contemporary Collaborations and Cautionary Tales’, in Colin and Sachsenmaier, Collaboration in Performance Practice, pp. 27–50, on how collaborations serve neo-liberal performance network agendas.

43 Murray, ‘Contemporary Collaborations and Cautionary Tales’, p. 34.

44 Wilson, Art Labor, p. 105.

45 See Barthes, Roland, ‘Rhetoric of the Image’ (1964), Image Music Text, trans. and selected by Heath, Stephen (London: Fontana Press, 1977), pp. 32–51Google Scholar.