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The Politics of the Plane: On Fatimah
Tuggar's Working Woman
Yates McKee
a
a
Department of Art History, Columbia University
Version of record first published: 01 Feb 2007.
To cite this article: Yates McKee (2006): The Politics of the Plane: On Fatimah Tuggar's Working
Woman , Visual Anthropology: Published in cooperation with the Commission on Visual Anthropology,
19:5, 417-422
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Visual Anthropology, 19: 417–422, 2006
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DOI: 10.1080/08949460600959525
The Politics of the Plane: On Fatimah Tuggar’s
Working Woman
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Yates McKee
In her digital photomontage Working Woman (1997), U.S.-based Nigerian artist
Fatimah Tuggar stages a disjunctive encounter between the aesthetic procedures of
the historical avant-garde and a postcolonial feminist critique of the visual imagery
of the ‘‘Afro-optimism’’ that became prominent in the late 1990s. Treating the
‘‘modern African woman’’ as a mediatic phantom rather than a taken-for-granted
subject-position, Tuggar’s work evokes the universal ‘‘right to communicate’’ increasingly claimed by anti-neo-liberal activists in the Global South over the past decade.
‘‘The coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them . . . ’’
Max Ernst, ‘‘What is the Mechanism of Collage?’’
‘‘Changes in the way we communicate and the way we invest . . . have enabled the world
to come together as a single, integrated, open plane.’’
Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree
Dressed in colorfully patterned African fabrics and a headscarf, a middle-aged black
woman sits barefoot on the floor of a rural-vernacular architectural enclosure, smiling
at something or someone that lies outside the frame of the image in which she appears.
Yet this figure does not merely appear ‘‘in’’ the image, but rather as an image; an image
that appears within another image as an image, a photographic fragment whose infinite
capacity for re-appearance exposes it to a certain kind of abysmal disappearance . . . This
mise-en-abyme unfolds on the screen of a personal computer that hyperbolically interrupts the apparently ‘‘traditional’’ domestic environment in which the woman is situated.
Indeed, in place of an implement pertaining to cooking or cleaning, for instance, the
woman holds the computer’s mouse, presenting a number of narrative possibilities—is
she the author of her ‘‘own’’ image? Is she in a position to alter that image? Is she posing
for or being posed by someone or something other than herself? The woman’s milieu is
marked by several other conspicuous details, such as a bright orange weekly planner superimposed on the thatched wall of the enclosure, a sparkling designer handbag that sits at the
YATES McKEE is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Art History at Columbia University.
His articles have appeared in publications such as October and Flash Art.
417
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Y. McKee
woman’s side, and a telephone and lamp which, like the computer itself, appear to be
disconnected from any power outlet, and, by extension, any larger infrastructural grids . . .
European avant-garde and postcolonial periphery, work and home, public and
private, dislocation and settlement, technology and body, globe and village . . . On
the visual plane of her digital photocollage Working Woman [1997] Fatimah
Tuggar stages a ‘‘coupling’’ of apparently irreconcilable terms, conjuring an
ambivalent figure of modern African womanhood in which media and mediacy
are shown to be irreducible—and irreducibly political.
Formally, the work employs procedures first developed by Dada and Surrealism, which cut apart and rearranged already-existing texts and images ‘‘upon a
plane that apparently does not suit them,’’ in order to generate unexpected
historical, psychic and political resonances between disparate elements. Tuggar’s
inheritance of these strategies is mediated by what has been called the ‘‘capitalist
surrealism’’ [Myers 2000] of the Independent Group (IG), a cluster of postwar
British pop artists who responded to the futuristic imaginary of technological
modernization, mass mediation, and consumer abundance of the 1950s and
’60s. More fetishistic than critical, exhibitions such as This is Tomorrow (1956)
and works such as Richard Hamilton’s collage Just What Is It That Makes Today’s
Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1957) nonetheless provide an important point
of art-historical reference for Tuggar, especially in their frequent citation of the
figure of the automated kitchen and its promise to liberate women from the
‘‘drudgery of housework.’’ Historically and geopolitically, the collage-plane of
Working Woman displaces these problems in order to address the gendering of
the international division of labor and the techno-utopian narratives that have
often served to obscure or legitimize its massively uneven configuration.
The title Working Woman evokes a classic trope of capitalist modernization—
the upward mobility and personal independence supposedly to be achieved by
women upon entering the formal labor market. What does it mean for Tuggar
to combine this trope with the disjointed home-work environment featured in
her image? And what does it mean in relation to the grin of the female figure
reproduced therein?
On the one hand, this facial expression is at odds with the dominant iconography of so-called ‘‘Afro-pessimism,’’ in which the pleading eyes of the starving,
helpless refugee are typically made to stand in for a general state of continental
crisis and suffering. Repudiating this iconography was a crucial dimension of
‘‘Afro-optimism’’ in the late 1990s, when leaders such as Thabo Mbeki proclaimed an African Renaissance that would combine political democratization,
‘‘good governance,’’ and neo-liberal deregulation to attract foreign investment
and to integrate the continent into the ‘‘international community.’’ Tuggar’s
photocollage exaggeratedly echoes this ‘‘optimistic’’ re-tooling of Africa’s image,
marking the exclusions and contradictions that haunt what Walter Benjamin
would have called the ‘‘phantasmagoria’’ of development mobilized by neo-liberal
elites, whose faith in privatization and market-mechanisms is in large part
continuous with the structural adjustment programs required of sundry national
governments throughout the 1980s and ’90s by the IMF.1 Questioning the implications of this phantasmagoria for the multiply-burdened realm of domestic labor,
Working Woman pertains to what has been called ‘‘Afro-futurism,’’2 a critical
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Tuggar’s Working Woman 419
Figure 1 Working Woman. (Computer montage, inkjet on vinyl, 1997; Q Fatimah Tuggar. Courtesy
of BintaZarah studios).
aesthetic impulse that at once inhabits and interrogates rhetorics of historical and
technological innovation, illuminating patterns of ‘‘Transiency without progress, a
relentless pursuit of novelty that brings about nothing new in history’’ [BuckMorss 1989: 96].
While certainly concerned with uneven access to technological and infrastructural resources—the computer is, after all, disconnected—Tuggar’s work is not a
mere illustrational commentary on the digital divide, a concept that emerged in
development discourses of the late 1990s, the dominant version of which posits
the dissemination of information technology as the driving force of ‘‘empowerment’’ for poor people, and especially poor women, in the Global South.3 Tuggar
neither celebrates the ideal of digital empowerment nor denounces it; rather, in her
use of mise-en-abyme and photocollage, Tuggar foregrounds the problem of
representation in both the aesthetic and political sense of the term, suggesting that
information technologies are never simply informational or technological, and that
people’s relation to them is not a straightforward matter of access or lack thereof.
Or, to put it another way, issues of material access are inseparably marked by the
discursive figures, narrative scripts, and imagistic projections that surround
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Y. McKee
technology itself, including the ways in which its users and supposed beneficiaries
are imagined, such as the ubiquitous figure of the disconnected, ‘‘info-poor’’ rural
African woman that appears throughout World Bank and UN reports.4
Short-circuiting—though not simply negating—the imperatives of documentary realism, the female figure in Tuggar’s photocollage is cited precisely as a
figure, though one whose meaning is unstable, mobile, and infinitely deferred.
In displacing the ‘‘rural African woman’’ from being a taken-for-granted target
of development discourse to a kind of mediatized phantom, Tuggar marks the
figure as a site of potential contestation and reimagination, not least of all by African women ‘‘themselves.’’ I put ‘‘themselves’’ in quotation marks to suggest that
for Tuggar the term is at once necessary and impossible—necessary as an imperative of auto-representation for those whose voices have been marginalized, but
impossible in that African women are never simply African women; not only
because of crucial empirical differences of region, language, religion, and class,
but because the imperative of auto-representation itself bears within it an interruptive restaging of established modes of universality,5 as suggested by the
‘‘right to communicate’’ invoked by L. Muntholi Wanyeki (of the African
Women’s Development and Communication Network) in the context of the
highly contested World Summit of the Information Society (WSIS):
The global community media and information and communication technologies (ICTs)
movements have . . . evolved the term ‘‘the right to communicate,’’ which goes beyond
the rights to express oneself and to access public and private information to claim the right
to access and control the means of communication. Although this right is not legally protected, it implies recognition of the fact that the frequency spectrum is a public resource
and should therefore be regulated as a public resource at both the international and
national levels.6
Rather than an ideological ruse to be demystified, the smiling, technologically
equipped, digitally multiplied figure conjured by Tuggar should be understood
in relation to this plane of planetary rights=claims, which interrupts the ‘‘integrated, open plane’’ imagined, in different ways, by both Friedman and the more
specialized managers of fora such as the WSIS. Yet even as we may be tempted to
invest this figure with the prophetic aura of a subaltern ‘‘global village,’’ her
smile, and the pleasure, desire or affirmation it would index, remain enigmatic
to us, perhaps on the order of what Gayatri Spivak calls ‘‘the secret.’’ This is
not something that is simply concealed, but a ‘‘sense that something has not gone
across,’’ a structural gap in knowledge of others that demands a relation of
responsibility and accountability that is only ‘‘approached when responses flow
from both sides. Otherwise, the idea that if the person I am doing good to resembles me and has my rights, he or she will be better off, does not begin to approach
an ethical relation’’ [Spivak 1998].
NOTES
1. James Ferguson traces the discourse of ‘‘Afro-optimism’’ in Global Shadows: Africa in
the Neoliberal World Order [2006], which more generally discusses ‘‘Africa’’ as an
Tuggar’s Working Woman 421
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2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
‘‘inconvenient continent’’ for critical theorizations of globalization that emphasize
capitalism as a geographically all-encompassing network. For Ferguson, Africa is obviously not excluded from global capital flows in any simple sense, but the primary patterns of its integration, while heterogeneous and uneven between countries and
regions, nevertheless create a general divide between what colonial administrators once
referred to as ‘‘useable’’ enclaves of intensive resource extraction and ‘‘useless’’ swaths
of territory and population that have been largely abandoned by structurally adjusted
and war-torn governments.
A series of Tuggar’s images appeared in a special issue of Social Text [Summer 2002]
devoted to Afro-futurism, which the editor Alondra Nelson posits as a diasporic concept that challenges the racist-evolutionary opposition between ‘‘blackness’’ and ‘‘technology’’ in general.
For an exemplary statement, see Hammond [2001].
On the visual cultures of ‘‘developmentalism,’’ see Escobar [1995].
For Judith Butler, appeals to the universal by marginalized agents do not simply
call for inclusion in a pre-constituted political space, but disrupt and reconfigure
political space itself, exposing it to unforseen democratic possibilities. See Butler
[2000].
‘‘African Women’s Development and Communication Network (FEMNET) Statement
for the General Debate at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)’’
[http:==www.itu.int=wsis=geneva=coverage=statements=femnet=c02.doc]. For a critical
account of the first two installations of the WSIS (2002 and 2005) and the struggles of
Southern NGOs to reframe the parameters of the forum in terms of social justice rather
than the market-centric arrangements that are promoted by Northern governments,
transnational corporations, and multilateral agencies such as the World Bank and
WTO, see ‘‘WSIS: Bridging the Digital Divide?’’ special issue of Third World Resurgence
[December 2005].
REFERENCES
Buck-Morss, Susan
1989 The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press.
Butler, Judith
2000 Restaging the Universal. In Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj
Zizek, eds. Pp. 11–43. New York: Verso.
Escobar, Arturo
1995 Power and Visibility: Tales of Peasants, Women, and the Environment.
In his Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third
World. Pp. 154–211. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ferguson, James
2006 Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Hammond, Allen L.
2001 Digitally Empowered Development. Foreign Affairs, (March=April):
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Myers, Julian
2000 The Future as Fetish: The Capitalist Surrealism of the Independent
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Spivak, Gayatri
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