Imperial Drag: Spectres of Ishi Through Visual and Ethnographic Materials House in Special Collections Bancroft

Kyle Wanberg
Comparative Literature
UC Irvine

The figure we call Ishi wore the fetters of capture and the clothes of culture. Photographs in special collections at the Bancroft library show him in various habits that can be read as a response to a set of divergent imperial desires to see, survey, and document Ishi in different guises. Returning to these images that are now a century old, we can see them as an archive of the contradictions of imperial nostalgia. On the other hand, Ishi left behind a recorded archive of orature, a testament to Yahi knowledge that has never been completely or satisfactorily interpreted. Understanding his photographic representations through theories of performance and drag, I suggest that his voice, and the orature he has left behind, exceeds the narrow understanding of Ishi that casts him in the role of the “noble savage”.