Prita Meier

Bound to the Earth: Colonial Photography and Fugitive Being in the Zanzibar Archipelago

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Abstract:

This article examines the intertwining of bodies and land in colonial photography in Africa, focusing on a series by Austrian geographer Oscar Baumann in Zanzibar during the 1890s. Baumann’s photographs often depict solitary African men and children enveloped in Zanzibar’s coastal topographies. They are posed to look diminutive and are crouching and touching the earth with their knees and hands. These images are analyzed not just as representations but as natural artifacts akin to soil samples, fossils, and seeds. I consider how Africans were fused to and equated with the earth in extractive knowledge production, yet the photographs also reveal indigenous connections to the land that transcend colonial intentions. The grounding poses suggest alternative relationalities that challenge colonial epistemologies.

Biography:

Prita Meier is Associate Professor of African Art History at New York University. Her research focuses on the visual cultures of Africa’s coastal and oceanic worlds, with particular attention to mobility, empire, and Indian Ocean networks. She is the author of Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere (Indiana University Press, 2016) and The Surface of Things: A History of Photography from the Swahili Coast (Princeton University Press, 2024). She co-curated World on the Horizon and co-led the Getty-funded Indian Ocean Exchanges program. Meier’s scholarship is grounded in long-term fieldwork and archival research in Kenya, Tanzania, and the wider region.