Reviewed by:

• To Be Nsala’s Daughter: Decomposing the Colonial Gaze by Chérie N. Rivers
• Rachel Kabukala

To Be Nsala’s Daughter: Decomposing the Colonial Gaze is the second book from interdisciplinary scholar Chérie N. Rivers and builds upon ideas found in her first, Necessary Noise: Music, Film, and Charitable Imperialism in the East of Congo (published under the name Chérie Rivers Ndaliko). Her most recent monograph centers on a colonial-era image of a Congolese man identified as Nsala made by English missionary and documentary photographer Alice Seeley Harris. The photograph in question features Nsala, who sits looking at the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter, who was murdered by ABIR militia (Anglo-Belgian India Rubber company). The haunting image circulated widely as part of the Congo Reform Association’s campaign to alert the world to the atrocities taking place in King Leopold II’s Congo Free State (present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC).

As a response to Harris’s photographic archive, Rivers collaboratively developed and co-taught a workshop titled “Decomposing the Colonial Gaze” as part of her work as executive director of Yole!Africa, a Congolese-led educational and cultural center in Goma, DRC. The workshop involved “recalibrating one’s imagination” to produce art that makes visible systems of power, enacting conscious and creative change (xii). Participants activated the Harris archive through their contemporary interpretations of the historical images. Some engaged in photographic reenactments. Some produced collages or manipulated reprints of the original images. All “interrupted established ways of representing and intervening in Congolese life” (xii). By highlighting the archival interventions offered by the Congolese artists, Rivers reveals a potential path forward for those seeking to decompose colonial systems and the normalized violence that is their undercurrent through critical creativity informed by Rivers’s methods of decomposing, disremembering, and re-remembering, which I return to later in greater detail.

The book is divided into seven chapters. The first serves as a brief, two-page elegy for Nsala, in which Rivers writes about how she came to work with Nsala’s image. She explains how the photograph haunted her and dedicates the book to Nsala and his daughter, sharing her hope that others might also be haunted as an antidote to inaction. The remaining chapter titles employ action verbs: to see, to decompose, to replicate, to contradict, to create, and to love. This play with language and subsequent explanation of each term’s role in decomposing the colonial gaze aligns with the author’s penchant for using active learning and slow scholarship as methodological approaches. Chapter 6, for instance, asks: “What if to see is not to believe but rather to create?” Imagination becomes, for Rivers, a vehicle for rupturing and refusing systems of normalized violence; a tool that can allow one to create new ways of seeing and being beyond the constraints [End Page 583] of colonial logic. Throughout, she incorporates the creative production of contemporary artists in DRC to compel the reader to take stock of their own complicity in the continuation of colonial logic and proposes a shift towards a shared future that rejects violence and instead sustains life.

In chapters 2 and 3, Rivers discusses how producing art that compels viewers to imagine an existence outside of colonial logic involves the futuristic discipline of “seeing against the grain of everything we are taught to believe” (5–7). It also requires changing our habits of perception so we might decompose the colonial gaze. Chapter 2, “To See Nsala’s Daughter,” introduces the reader to the concept of “seeing the dead,” which is a technique Rivers suggests in order to see differently, and considers critical to exposing the violence of colonialism. The author describes seeing the dead as, “looking for the possibilities rendered invisible by systems of normalized violence. This is, quite literally, a matter of seeing ghosts, of seeing what once was or could have been, what isn’t but still could be” (5). Chapter 3, “To Decompose,” focuses on the concept of decomposing the...

审阅者：

• 成为恩萨拉的女儿：分解殖民凝视Chérie N. Rivers
• 雷切尔·卡布卡拉

《成为恩萨拉的女儿：分解殖民凝视》是跨学科学者 Chérie N. Rivers 的第二本书，以她的第一本书《必要的噪音：刚果东部的音乐、电影和慈善帝国主义》（以 Chérie 名义出版）中的思想为基础。恩达里科河）。她最近的专着以英国传教士兼纪实摄影师爱丽丝·西利·哈里斯 (Alice Seeley Harris) 拍摄的殖民时代刚果男子恩萨拉 (Nsala) 的照片为中心。这张照片中，恩萨拉坐在那儿看着他五岁女儿被砍断的手脚，女儿被 ABIR 民兵（英比印度橡胶公司）谋杀。作为刚果改革协会运动的一部分，这张令人难忘的照片广泛流传，该运动旨在提醒世界注意利奥波德二世国王的刚果自由邦（现刚果民主共和国，或刚果民主共和国）发生的暴行。

作为对哈里斯摄影档案的回应，里弗斯合作开发并共同教授了一个题为“分解殖民凝视”的研讨会，这是她担任 Yole!Africa（位于刚果民主共和国戈马的刚果人领导的教育和文化中心）执行董事工作的一部分。该研讨会涉及“重新调整想象力”来创作艺术，使权力系统变得可见，实现有意识和创造性的变革（xii）。参与者通过对历史图像的当代诠释激活了哈里斯档案。有些人从事摄影重演。有些人制作了原始图像的拼贴画或经过处理的重印品。所有这些都“中断了代表和干预刚果人生活的既定方式”（xii）。通过强调刚果艺术家提供的档案干预，里弗斯通过里弗斯的分解、解体和重新记忆方法所启发的批判性创造力，为那些寻求分解殖民体系和常态化暴力的人揭示了一条潜在的前进道路，这是他们的暗流。我稍后会更详细地讨论。

本书分为七章。第一篇是对恩萨拉的简短的两页挽歌，里弗斯在其中写了她如何开始与恩萨拉的形象合作。她解释了这张照片如何困扰着她，并将这本书献给恩萨拉和他的女儿，并分享了她希望其他人也可能被困扰作为无所作为的解药。其余章节标题使用动作动词：看、分解、复制、矛盾、创造和爱。这种语言游戏以及随后对每个术语在分解殖民凝视中的作用的解释，与作者使用主动学习和缓慢学术作为方法论的倾向相一致。例如，第六章问道：“如果亲眼所见不是相信而是创造怎么办？” 对于里弗斯来说，想象力成为了打破和拒绝正常化暴力体系的工具。一种工具，可以让人们创造新的观察方式并超越殖民逻辑的限制[第583页]。自始至终，她都融入了刚果民主共和国当代艺术家的创意作品，迫使读者反思他们自己在殖民逻辑延续中的共谋，并提出转向拒绝暴力、维持生命的共同未来。

在第二章和第三章中，里弗斯讨论了如何创作迫使观众想象殖民逻辑之外的存在的艺术，涉及“以我们被教导相信的一切的方式来看待”的未来主义纪律（5-7）。它还需要改变我们的感知习惯，这样我们就可以分解殖民主义的目光。第二章“看到恩萨拉的女儿”向读者介绍了“看到死者”的概念，这是里弗斯为了以不同的方式看待而提出的一种技巧，并认为对于揭露殖民主义的暴力至关重要。作者将看待死者描述为“寻找被正常化的暴力系统所掩盖的可能性。从字面上看，这就是看到鬼魂、看到曾经是什么或可能是什么、什么不是但仍然可能是的问题”（5）。第 3 章“分解”重点介绍分解的概念……