Fashion at the Frontier: Photography, Time and Colonial Modernity on Brazil's Madeira-Mamoré Railroad

Fashion on the Frontier: Photography, Time and Colonial Modernity on the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad, Brazil (2026) examines the relationship between fashion, photography and the temporal regimes of colonial modernity in the Brazilian Amazon. It explores how land was demarcated with the expansion of the North American frontier in South America, but also how the contours of different ethnic and racialised bodies were delineated and articulated through fashion and via the pseudo-scientific medium of photography. It moves across diverse fields of thought to consider histories and theories of photography and fashion, modernity and coloniality, labour and domesticity, gender and whiteness, whilst deploying innovative and pertinent historical methodologies for thinking about archival hegemonies and silences. By interrogating History as a critical practice in the fashioning of Latin America, her research questions the emphases and erasures that haunt Brazilian fashion histories.