This research project emerged from an earlier inquiry into colonial archives through Koloniale Grüsse aus Samoa and deepened into a critical investigation of the enduring visual legacies of colonialism in the Pacific. Focusing on Samoa, Performativity of Gaze examines how colonial photography continues to shape representations of Indigenous lands, bodies, and ecologies in contemporary visual culture.
By tracing the spatial contexts, circulation, and contemporary responses to archival images particularly from Samoan communities, the project interrogates the layered power relations embedded in acts of seeing. It explores how different modes of gaze, rooted in colonial histories, still manifest today: in tourism, media, state institutions, and even within everyday encounters.
This thesis engages with questions of memory, cultural sovereignty, and resistance, offering a visual-ethnographic critique of how images can be both tools of domination and sites of potential disruption.
