History and Anthropology, Vol. 21, No. 4, December 2010, pp. 431–452 ISSN 0275–7206 print/ISSN 1477–2612 online/10/040431–22 © 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/02757206.2010.521554 Of Jumbled Valises and Civil Society: Photography and Political Imagination in Senegal Jennifer Bajorek Taylor and Francis GHAN_A_521554.sgm 10.1080/02757206.2010.521554 History and Anthropology 0275-7206 (print)/1477-2612 (online) Original Article 2010 Taylor & Francis 21 4 000000December 2010 JenniferBajorek j.bajorek@gold.ac.uk; ccs@gold.ac.uk It has long been acknowledged by scholars working in diverse disciplines that both nationalism and the projects of modern state formation have entailed profoundly icon- ographic dimensions. 1 In many instances, both modern states and nationalist move- ments or other mass expressions of nationalist sentiment have explicitly relied on the mobilization and invention of new visual technologies. The distinctions among so- called ethnic and civic nationalisms, political and other nationalisms, or among primordialist, instrumentalist and constructivist conceptions of the nation have not fundamentally altered the larger equation. 2 Whereas the links between nationalism and its visual or optical manifestations are more likely to be taken as given or presumed to be manifestations or “representations” of phenomena existing elsewhere, the resource- fulness of the modern state qua state in relation to the domain of the visual demands new modes of observation and new conceptual models. The place of the state in the domain of the visual has lately become the object of intense theoretical reflection. The most exciting of this scholarship has paid particularly close attention to the immense resourcefulness of the state in its appropriation and deployment of photography. Some but not all of this work is recognizably Foucauldian in inspiration; that is to say, it is characterized by a central concern with the nexus of visuality and power. Foucault famously charted the modification of this nexus in Discipline and Punish [Surveiller et punir], which focused on the broad-based dissemination of its increas- ingly diffuse effects, beyond the sphere of the public display of the body of the sover- eign, where it gave rise to new economies of the visible and produced an ongoing revolution of the visible in the spaces of “science” or of knowledge as such. 3 Even in later texts, including those associated with the much-vaunted turn to governmentality, Correspondence to: Dr Jennifer Bajorek Ph.D., Goldsmiths’ College, Centre for Cultural Studies, University of London, 8 Lewisham Way, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW, UK. Email: j.bajorek@gold.ac.uk