Visual Culture Archaeology: A Criti/Politi/cal Methodology of Image and Identity

Abstract

This study argues the efficacy of the liberatory cultural work of a visual culture archaeology that reveals a political and critical identity, resistant to domination, authoring social change and its own agency through multiple and incommensurable positions. Built on Foucauldian premises, visual culture archaeology is developed as a methodology for discursive un-naming and renaming and emerges from the inherence and attenuation of inscripted meanings in the reinterpretation of identity during a postmodern confluence of ideas and images. The hybridized representation of the African American in Western visual culture has been unique in the effort by some to define us over significant periods as less than human, less than American, or less than statistically significant in the purpose to maintain an unequal relation of economic and political power. This article continues the author's effort to establish the efficacy of a poststructural and poetic aesthetic in qualitative research writing.

Keywords

image politics critical race theory performance studies autoethnography

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