Colonial Imagery Research Articles

From Model to Sitter

This paper focuses on historic anthropological photographs, meant to depict Indigenous individuals as generic models of colonial stereotypes, and examines their later reclamation as portraits. Applying an intention-based account of portraiture, we discuss the historical context and contemporary examples of the utilisation of these images in order to address several questions. What happens when the depicted persons in colonial imagery are treated and presented as sitters, rather than model specimens? Does this change the nature of the image? If a photograph was not originally intended as a portrait, can it come to function as such at a later stage? Regardless of whether they fulfill all the requirements necessary for portraiture, these colonial photographs represent a vital resource for the reclamation of Indigenous cultural heritage. As such, this paper serves as an introductory discussion into the complex issues surrounding the recategorisation, repatriation, and restitution of colonial photographic archives.

Drawing the “color line”: Race, ethnicity and religion in Diu

ABSTRACT This article explores how the ideas of race, ethnicity and religion shifted with modernity in Diu. While it concentrates on findings about Diu, the arguments it develops are more wide-ranging and have a series of architectural, urbanistic, and anthropological implications. It addresses the construction of identity by exploring the multiplicities and slippages of colonial imagery, social histories, and spatial production in the management of populations and colonial cities. We argue that the Portuguese shared ideologies rooted in race, ethnicity and religion that provide a consistent, detectable structure for a specific interpretation of spatial-morphological arrangements in Diu (the city’s buildings, architecture, urban layout, and spatial structure) in the context of the European colonial city in South Asia. We analyze the discourse with which the Portuguese created knowledge through cartography, tracing how ideologies linked to race, ethnicity and religion were historically internalized, and how they worked in conjunction with social structures and practices to produce the colonial city of Diu.

Monument Public Address System AR

Monument Public Address System AR is an interactive augmented reality (AR) documentary revolving around an expanding collection of audio interviews about the past, present, and future of confederate and colonial monuments across the United States. The interviewees include activists, scholars, students, planners, community organizers, and other artists. Some have discussed feelings of exclusion when they see confederate and colonial imagery. Others have evaluated the symbolic violence of the monuments in relation to ongoing racist systems. And others have described potential liberatory sculptural works as replacements. The main goal of the project is to engender thoughtful individual and collective experiences and to support critical and ongoing engagement with public memory and the political, social, and cultural processes responsible for public spaces. As Ana Lucia Araujo, historian and professor at Howard University, writes, “All monuments emerge and disappear because of political battles that take place in the public arena. Likewise, public memory is always political” (Lucia Araujo, 2020). In terms of a participant’s experience of the AR media, once they download and open Monument Public Address System AR on their mobile devices, they will discover 3D virtual objects and animations superimposed on the world around them. When they interact with these objects, short sections of the audio interviews are triggered and play. As they listen to the interviewee’s narratives, participants can explore the virtual animations in relation to the surrounding physical space. It is important to the author-artist that the app is accessible to as many people as possible. While the augmentations are geo-located, and the intention is for participants to circumnavigate confederate and colonial monuments – and the empty spaces where they once stood – while experiencing the AR, the app can be opened anywhere. Moreover, the app is mobile AR, released on both Google Play and the Apple App Store, so that it can be used on a large variety of hand-held devices. It is not dependent on expensive technology. As a cis-gendered middle-class white woman from the southeast of the United States, the author-artist recognizes that her perspective regarding the racist history carried by these monuments is limited. She has initiated the project as a way of discovering, and undoing, her blindspots. The author-artist sets out to support critical thinking about the future of public monuments and spark conversations on the history of slavery and racism in the United States. Monument Public Address System AR is offered as a platform for visual and aural expressions of frustration, anger, sadness, fear, and confusion regarding the racist, unjust and violent narratives that have shaped, and continue to shape, our present and future. It is also built for the enunciation of anti-racist hopes, activities and initiatives.

Review: Contesting Modernity: Informalism in Venezuela, 1955–1975, edited by Mari Carmen Ramírez and Tahía Rivero, and El Techo de la Ballena: Retro-Modernity in Venezuela, by María C. Gaztambide

Review: <i>Contesting Modernity: Informalism in Venezuela, 1955–1975</i>, edited by Mari Carmen Ramírez and Tahía Rivero, and <i>El Techo de la Ballena: Retro-Modernity in Venezuela</i>, by María C. Gaztambide

Parameters of Disavowal: Colonial Representation in South Korean Cinema

Parameters of Disavowal: Colonial Representation in South Korean Cinema

Memorie del meraviglioso. Mostri e creature fantastiche nella percezione europea in età coloniale

Starting in the Middle Ages, the marvelous included unknown and mysterious creatures living in unexplored places. They were referred to as monsters and belonged to a dimension halfway between fantasy and reality. The understanding and description of these creatures gradually changed as a result of the colonization in the 19th century, when they became part of the colonial imaginary of Western explorers (Surdich, 2003). Gabrielli has suggested that the colonial imaginary of Africa reinterpreted some stereotypes of the Middle Ages. It developed a «duality between positive and negative: history-nature, technological-primitive, religion-superstition» (Gabrielli, 1998, p. 25). The present paper provides a critical assessment of the changes which occurred in the 19th-century colonial imagery. It focuses on how the representation of monsters evolved and investigates into history of imaginary, understood as a cultural history of education (De Giorgi, 2004, p. 265).

The Italian coffee triangle: From Brazilian colonos to Ethiopian colonialisti

This article investigates the history of coffee culture across three continents during the Fascist ventennio (1922–45.) By using the novel framework of coffee, from the bean in the field to the machine in the caffè, it connects interwar histories that previously have been explored independently. Specifically, it examines the transnational economics of coffee bean trade routes and the colonial imagery of coffee advertising to argue that caffès emerged as key sites for promoting the Fascist imperial projects in East Africa – an architectural and artistic legacy that remains in place today. Ultimately, this trajectory broadens the way that we understand how food and farming became politicised during the Fascist period. By untangling the interwar trade of beans and bodies between Italy, Brazil, and Ethiopia, this article brings to light an untold story of caffeinated imperial aggression and resistance.

Dismissing class: Media representations of workers’ conditions in the Global South

Abstract Neoliberal globalisation has expanded transnational corporations’ (TNCs) boundaries of operation and sphere of exploitation, particularly in the Global South where much of the production of traditional TNC manufacturing now occurs. In this article, using a longitudinal approach, I conduct a detailed critical discourse analysis of a large Swedish press corpus reporting on TNC activities in Global South countries. The analysis suggests that the issue of workers’ conditions is made relevant to the Swedish public through a “consumer framework” that not only confers proximity and relevance on the topic, but also effectively recontextualises agency and responsibility towards particular or individual social actors, obscuring the class dimension of labour relations and global production. Moreover, rooted in a highly problematic colonial imagery, exploitation in the Global South is seen as a “cultural problem” of “them” rather than a problem related to the social and spatial relations of global capitalism.

Colonialism and its Regimes of Visibility: Edgard Imbert’s Views of the French Empire

ABSTRACT This article explores some of the mechanisms underlying the photographic visualisations of the French Empire between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, This study focuses in particular on Edgard Imbert’s photographic work, a collection of albums, glass plates, and loose photographs held at the Etablissement de Communication et de Production Audiovisuelle de la Défense in Ivry, Franc. Imbert was one of the most prolific photographers of French colonisation in Madagascar and Indochina. The thousands of negatives he made offer a unique perspective on the visual economies of French expansionism in these territories. Through a thorough analysis of what Imbert kept to himself, showed to his family circle, or published with a view to propagandise French colonialism in Asia and Africa, this work shows how careful historians should be in their analyses of colonial-era photographs. Those who were most involved in fashioning the colonial imaginary effectively constructed a visual repertoire to promote their vision, and not just for their contemporaries but also for posterity. A large part of the colonial images that circulate more than a century later are drawn for these registers of self-representation. Leading figures of French colonialism, such as Hubert Lyautey and Joseph Gallieni, were very familiar with the structure of the colonial archive in construction. They anticipated which effect the photographic elaboration of the colonies would have in the long term. The agency of French archives generally favoured the conservation of albums and views that are the direct inheritors from this colonial self-fashioning. Such an archival effect tends to distort heavily the repertoire of French colonial imagery. Imbert’s collection therefore offers a rare insight on the various regimes of in/visibility of French colonial activities in the early twentieth century and their subsequent curatorial itineraries.

The 5th Lawrence R. Schehr Memorial Award Winning Essay

During the colonial era, visual representations of Morocco were controlled by the French, who exported imagery of Morocco as an exotic and backwards locale in need of intervention and modernization. While many Moroccans rejected colonial imagery in the immediate aftermath of independence, in the 1980s Moroccan scholars and institutions began reappropriating these images and reinterpreting them as a means of reclaiming the colonial past. This article analyzes the legacy of colonial imagery in post-colonial Morocco through the 1928 and 1956 publications of French photographer Marcelin Flandrin, Casablanca de 1889 a nos jours: album de photographies retrospectives et modernes montrant le developpement de la ville, subsequently reinterpreted and republished in 1988 by the Groupe de Recherches et d’Etudes sur Casablanca (GREC) as Casablanca retro. Through the intersection of imagery and inscription, these scholars avoid the uncritical and nostalgic view of the past that affect other reprints of colonial imager...

Groet uit Java: Picture Postcards and the Transnational Making of the Colony around 1900

This article explores the transnational visual language of picture postcards and the international business networks responsible for producing and disseminating the image of Dutch colonialism around 1900. Following a microhistorical approach, I consider the multilayered representation and transnational production of one particular postcard sent from colonial Indonesia to the Netherlands in 1900. The postcard established, visualised, and catalysed colonialism through its use of a European visual language. Colonialist meaning was attached to the image in Germany and was reinforced through the process of the postcard’s delivery from colony to metropolis. This article moves beyond a nation-based framework and instead analyses the meanings of colonial imagery in transnational contexts.

Casual Empire: Video Games as Neocolonial Praxis

As a media form entwined in the U.S. military-industrial complex, video games continue to celebrate imperialist imagery and Western-centric narratives of the great white explorer (Breger, 2008; Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009; Geyser & Tshalabala, 2011; Mukherjee, 2016). While much ink has been spilt on the detrimental effects of colonial imagery on those it objectifies and dehumanises, the question is why these games still get made, and what mechanisms are at work in the enjoyment of empire-themed play experiences. To explore this question, this article develops the concept of ‘casual empire’, suggesting that the wish to play games as a casual pastime expedites the incidental circulation of imperialist ideology. Three examples – Resident Evil V (2009), The Conquest: Colonization (2015) and Playing History: Slave Trade (2013) – are used to demonstrate the production and consumption of casual empire across multiple platforms, genres and player bases. Following a brief contextualisation of postcolonial (game) studies, this article addresses casual design, by which I understand game designers’ casual reproduction of inferential racism (Hall, 1995) for the sake of entertainment. I then look at casual play, and players’ attitudes to games as rational commodities continuing a history of commodity racism (McClintock, 1995). Finally, the article investigates the casual involvement of formalist game studies in the construction of imperial values. These three dimensions of the casual – design, play and academia – make up the three pillars of the casual empire that must be challenged to undermine video games’ neocolonialist praxis.

Moving up in the world: Japan’s manipulation of colonial imagery at the 1910 Japan–British Exhibition

ABSTRACTThis article uses 1910 Japan–British Exhibition as a case study for examining the strategies employed by Japanese leaders to win Western acceptance for Japan as a ‘great power’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like other contemporaneous imperial powers, Japanese leaders employed colonial imagery and discourses of otherness at large expositions to raise their status compared to ostensibly inferior colonised peoples. This article argues that contrary to some previous assertions, Japan presented its history and traditional culture at Western expositions not as an intentional concession to Western Orientalism but rather in an attempt to show that an alternative path to modernity was possible. Though largely successful in winning Western recognition as an important empire, Japanese leaders were nonetheless unable to fully escape becoming victim to the very colonial tools they sought to employ.

Re-examining Settler Discourse in Alexandra Fuller’s Autobiographical Writing

ABSTRACTSince 2000, a large number of memoirs by white Zimbabwean writers have emerged, often focusing on the complex relationship between history and the present, between personal and collective identity, and on displacement and nostalgia. One such memoir is Don’t Let’s Go To the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller (published in 2002). Recent criticism has focused on the discourse in the memoir, arguing that it represents settler discourse (or Rhodesian discourse) and draws on colonial imagery and ideology. This view is based on the memoir’s representation of nostalgia and belonging in southern Africa. This article challenges some of these notions and suggests that the question is whether the memoir performs or portrays colonial ideology, and in what ways. Furthermore, “settler discourse” has not been properly defined in this context, despite being widely applied. Redefining settler discourse in the context of Fuller’s memoir raises questions about white Zimbabwean writing in general, and demonstrates how inherently controversial the literature remains. Fuller’s narrative voice, which switches between that of the child and the adult, is central to the analysis. My discussion shows that the child’s voice performs Rhodesian discourse to a large extent, but that the adult narrator merely portrays such discourse and ideology.

Seeds of a Future World: Science and Technology in the Digital Art of Elizabeth LaPensée

This article examines how the decolonial practice of digital artist Elizabeth LaPensee deals with colonial representations of science and technology. In colonial images, the ideological prejudice that Indigenous people belong in the past and are incapable of a future of higher sciences manifests itself in a pervasive visual language. The colonial imagery that pitches developed versus primitive technology is frequently reproduced in contemporary representations. Creating art that takes into account her Anishinaabe and Metis worldviews, LaPensee challenges these racist notions and dismantles the colonial structures at their roots. This article reads LaPensee’s digital works alongside the artist’s own comments as depictions of Indigenous scientific literacies that do not rely on colonial symbolism. By telling stories about sustainable futures with a recurrent imagery, LaPensee offers viewers a representational, anti-colonial language with which these futures can be imagined.

Student Snapshots: An Alternative Approach to the Visual History of American Indian Boarding Schools

Photographs of American Indian boarding school students have often been usedto illustrate the federal forced assimilation practices of the 1870s–1930s. Taken by officialschool photographers, these propagandistic images were produced to emphasize the“civilizing” benefits of the boarding school system. Although some Native studentsobtained cameras and recorded their own boarding school experiences, the visual historystill relies on the institutionally-produced images. Using a collection of photographscreated by Parker McKenzie (Kiowa) and his classmates while attending Rainy Mountainand Phoenix Indian Schools, this paper intends to rectify that exclusion through a readingof these snapshots as examples of visual sovereignty. The concept of visual sovereigntyinvolves examining Native self-representations as the (re)claiming of indigenous identitiesin order to counter colonial imagery that has dominated the archives.

Here, There, and Now: Deictics and the Transposition of Orality to Image in Colonial Imagery

The conquest of the New World required the translation of its many languages into Spanish, as was foreseen by the fifteenth-century Spanish intellectual Antonio de Nebrija in terms of an Imperial linguistic project. In Mexico, this process of translation, as well as the many new contexts in which speech and image were submitted, meant that the pre-Hispanic relationship between oral discourse and pictorial codices was disrupted. This study looks at how Aztec song/poetry insinuated the pre-Hispanic speaker and listener into the codex through spatiotemporal references (deixis) such that the pictorial narrative became a phenomenological experience, created thorough a specific cultural synesthesia. This unity of experience was destroyed within a campaign of evangelical fervor. It is argued here that what was lost through this process of cultural and linguistic conquest was, at times, reconstituted by a number of innovative figures and compositions in colonial Mexican manuscripts that have a semantic rather than a narrative role.

Photography and Photo-Elicitation after Colonialism

In photo-elicitation studies of colonial imagery, photographs are seen as repositories of historical data. This article examines the author’s experience of photo-elicitation in the postcolonial context of The Gambia, West Africa. Here, Gambian viewers responded to the aesthetic and compositional details of colonial photographs rather than their historical content. This attention to the surface of the photograph and its aesthetic qualities suggests a disconnection or distraction from the colonial history depicted in the images. This photo-elicitation does not engage or resolve a historical relationship with the colonial past. Rather, it reveals an engagement with elements of the photograph in which the visual legacies of colonialism—identification, representation, memorialization—remain absent. The absence of acknowledged connections to the past calls into question the ability of the photograph to represent the colonial past or its subjects to the viewer. In Gambian viewers’ preoccupation with aesthetic details, the photograph becomes a crafted object, rather than a link to colonial subordination. This calls into question the efficacy of photo-elicitation to demonstrate reactions to colonialism that move beyond Eurocentric frameworks.

Symbolism and Use of Maize in Pre‐Hispanic and Colonial Religious Imagery in Mexico

Symbolism and Use of Maize in Pre‐Hispanic and Colonial Religious Imagery in Mexico

A national pride or a colonial construct? Touristic representation and the politics of Fijian identity construction

Identity research in the Pacific region has been dominated in the past by discussions of reconstruction and mobilisation of symbols of cultural tradition as a medium of anti-colonial resistance and nationalism. The present article proposes to widen the scope of this literature by exploring mass tourism as a contested field of collective identification. It outlines the historical making of the colonial and post-colonial imagery of indigenous Fijians and its subsequent reification and essentialisation in the context of twentieth-century mass tourism. It further highlights the implication of this process in colonial, anti-colonial and post-independence national politics, in which indigenous Fijians have been variously located: the imagery has been claimed by Western colonialism, transnational corporate capitalism, ethno-nationalism, and counter-hegemony. The article illustrates that collective identity construction is not political in a uni-dimensional manner but constitutes a dynamic arena of ongoing ‘cultural battle’ where multiple power relations unfold simultaneously.