Prita Meier will discuss her new book, The Surface of Things: A History of Photography from the Swahili Coast, which repositions Africa’s islands and archipelagos at the center of global photographic histories, showing how people in the African Indian Ocean world experienced photography as both oppression and freedom. Her talk will focus on the book’s broader aim to question conventional ideas about the relationship between territory, visual form and identity in art history.
Bio: Dr. Prita Meier is an Africanist art and architectural historian who looks at visual culture and built space through the lenses of circulation, empire and globalization. She is committed to the formulation of an Indian Ocean art history—with Africa at its center. Her scholarship focuses on maritime regions and port cities because they invite us to question received ideas about cultural boundaries and the nature of identity. Meier's primary research site is the Swahili coast of eastern Africa and she has conducted fieldwork and archival research over the past twenty years in Kenya and Tanzania, including in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Mombasa, Lamu, and Zanzibar.