How Do We Look? Resisting Visual Biopolitics

Through the story of Annah la Javanaise, a trafficked 13-year-old girl who was found wandering the streets of Paris in 1893 and who became the maid and model of painter Paul Gauguin, Fatimah Tobing Rony introduces theories of visual biopolitics to examine those who are allowed to live and those who are allowed to die, in representations of Indonesian women. In her talk she will be reading from her book and screening her short, animated film, Annah la Javanaise.

Fatimah Tobing Rony makes films and writes books about people whose stories have not yet been told. In her first book The Third Eye, Fatimah Tobing Rony wrote about how colonialism created a divide between the Historical and the Ethnographic, the Civilized and the Savage, and how these divides were inscribed in film, photography, and other visual technologies. These categories served biopolitics by producing a logic whereby the life of one group was nourished at the expense of another. Twenty years on, this divide is just as persistent and pernicious in our era of neoliberalism and globalization. In her new book HOW DO WE LOOK? she traces the legacy of one particular aspect of visual biopolitics--the representation of the Indonesian woman--into the twenty-first century of globalization. As a filmmaker, Fatimah also co-directed the feature film CHANTS OF LOTUS [PEREMPUAN PUNYA CERITA] (2008), which was distributed and exhibited in major theaters in Indonesia, and in film festivals around the world. Her short animation film ANNAH LA JAVANAISE, distributed by Women Make Movies, was an Official Selection of the 2020 Annecy International Festival for Animated Film, in Annecy, France, and has won fifteen international film festival awards. Fatimah Tobing Rony is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine.