This chapter proceeds from the counterintuitive contention that stasis is a continual balancing of multiple forces in equilibrium, a temporal modality of diasporic motion held in suspension, hovering between stillness and movement. It juxtaposes late nineteenth-century ethnographic photos of rural Africans in the Eastern Cape with early twentieth-century studio portraits of African Christians in South African urban centers. These images visualize a tense grammar of colonization and black self-fashioning, and the tense relations of photographic subjects to the ethnographic gazes engendered by the history of colonial dispossession. Engaging these portraits as depictions of stasis rather than stillness means that what...