Abstract

In this article, I am going to explore the connection between settling (the large-scale imperial enterprise of appropriation by means of legislation, technology, and violence) and settling-in (the creation of intimate domestic spaces meant to forge settler identity). The settler was not only conquering the frontier but also “settling into,” nesting within it. How are domestic histories and their architectures nested within the histories of colonial progress and heroic narratives of nation-building? I will look at what can be termed domestic photography—domestic milieus as a peripheral imperial cultural practice at empire’s margins, whose function was to negotiate relationships between the (feminine) domain of the home and the (masculine) imperial dominion with its governmental technologies of dispossession.