Delaney Chieyen Holton

This dissertation charts an array of vernacular, state, and artistic lens-based media alongside histories of counterinsurgency at home and abroad to trace continuities in policies and practices of imperial management across the South and Transpacific in the long twentieth century. The project investigates how lens-based media’s indexical apparatus and attendant discourses of objectivity, immediacy, and transparency made it a critical means of contesting competing visions of reality amid the struggle for Black liberation and the Red Scare, and examines how artists and activists have used lens-based practices to illuminate the linked expenditure of racialized subjects of American empire across Asia and the South. Bringing Asian diasporic artists into dialogue with the visual archive of the region, the dissertation contends that Transpacific-South entanglements constellate generative anticolonial coalitional formations. In doing so, the dissertation advances an understanding of visuality and memory as terrains of (counter)insurgent struggle.