Beth Pyner, Cardiff University and the University of Exeter
Vol. 42, No. 2 (Fall 2023), 281-311
Providing the first sustained scholarly analysis of the Black nanny figure in Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (2001), this article highlights the memoir’s problematic visual economies as a white-written memoir of a colonial Southern African childhood with occluded photographic representations of Black women nannies. The article signals the limitations of hegemonic approaches to images, particularly in materials treated primarily as literary. Only by accounting for Fuller’s use of photography can we appreciate the importance and shape of the memoir’s racial and gender politics. Drawing on theories of family photography and intersectional, Black feminist accounts of visibility, the article analyzes the two images of Black women in Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, revealing a dialectic of whiteness producing Blackness as its abject other, while Blackness remains crucial to, but occluded from, the production of the white colonial family. The article concludes that the co-constitution of visible whiteness and occluded Blackness mirrors the ethnocentric and masculinist hierarchies of colonialism and maps onto hegemonic medial hierarchies that privilege text above image. Where Blackness/images are the denigrated other—necessary but occluded— whiteness/text is a figuration of authority. This dynamic underscores the need for more perceptive and decolonizing methods of reading texts containing images.
