Richly illustrated with black and white photographs, this book brings together provocative and exciting new material on Namibia's colonial past. An eight-page colour section looks at how present day Namibians view themselves. It includes contributions from the editors, Wolfram Hartman, Jeremy Silvester and Patricia Hayes, as well as Michel Bollig, Jan Bart Gewald, Robert Gordon, Brent Harris, Paul Landau, Rick Rohde, Margo Timm and Marion Wallace.
Decolonising the Camera trains Mark Sealy's sharp critical eye on the racial politics at work within photography, in the context of heated discussions around race and representation, the legacies of colonialism, and the importance of decolonising the university. Sealy analyses a series of images within and against the violent political reality of Western imperialism, and aims to extract new meanings and develop new ways of seeing that bring the Other into focus. The book demonstrates that if we do not recognise the historical and political conjunctures of racial politics at work within photography, and their effects on those that have been culturally erased, made invisible or less than human by such images, then we remain hemmed within established orthodoxies of colonial thought concerning the racialised body, the subaltern and the politics of human recognition. With detailed analyses of photographs - included in an insert - by Alice Seeley Harris, Joy Gregory, Rotimi Fani-Kayode and others, and spanning more than 100 years of photographic history, Decolonising the Camera contains vital visual and written material for readers interested in photography, race, human rights and the effects of colonial violence.
The late nineteenth century saw a rapid increase in colonial conflicts throughout the French and British empires. It was also the period in which the camera began to be widely available. Colonial authorities were quick to recognise the power of this new technology, which they used to humiliate defeated opponents and to project an image of supremacy across the world. Drawing on a wealth of visual materials, from soldiers’ personal albums to the collections of press agencies and government archives, this book offers a new account of how conflict photography developed in the decades leading up to the First World War. It explores the various ways in which the camera was used to impose order on subject populations in Africa and Asia and to generate propaganda for the public in Europe, where a visual economy of violence was rapidly taking shape. At the same time, it reveals how photographs could escape the intentions of their creators, offering a means for colonial subjects to push back against oppression.
This book studies the relationship between photography and history in colonial Southern Africa, using a series of encounters with Southern African photographic archives to reflect on photography as a distinct historical form. Through use of private and public archives, images produced by African itinerant photographers, white settlers, and colonial state institutions, this book explores the relationship between photography and history in colonial Southern Africa. Late nineteenth century Cape Colonial prison albums, police photographs from German Southwest Africa, African studio portraits, identity documents, travel permits and passports from the 1920s and 1930s, visual studies of whiteness and blackness authored by settler photographers, South African dompas photographs from the 1950s and 1960s, and aerial photography from the Eastern Cape in the mid-twentieth century are examined to highlight the ways in which photographic images cut across conventional institutional boundaries and complicate rigid distinctions between the private and the public, the political and the aesthetic, the colonial and the vernacular, or the subject and the object. Photography and History in Colonial Southern Africa argues that rather than understanding photographs as a means of preserving and recreating the past in the present, we can value them for how they evoke at once the need for and the limits of historical reconstruction. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of colonial history, photographic history, visual media, and African studies.
This edited collection presents the first critical and historical overview of photography in Portuguese colonial Africa to an English-speaking audience. Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860–1975 brings together sixteen scholars from interdisciplinary fields as varied as history, anthropology, art history, visual culture and museum studies, to consider some of the key aspects in the visual representation of the longest-lasting European colonial empire in the African continent. The chapters span over two centuries and cover five formerly colonial territories – Angola, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe – deploying a range of methodologies to explore the multiple meanings and the contested uses of the photographic image across the realms of politics, science, culture and war. This book responds to a marked surge of international interest in the relationship between photography and colonialism, which has hitherto largely overlooked the Portuguese imperial context, by delivering the most recent scholarly findings to a broad readership.
Breaking new ground in the study of European colonialism, this book focuses on a nation historically positioned between the Western and Eastern Empires of Europe – Finland. Although Finland never had overseas colonies, the authors argue that the country was undeniably involved in the colonial world, with Finns adopting ideologies and identities that cannot easily be disentangled from colonialism. This book explores the concepts of ‘colonial complicity’ and ‘colonialism without colonies’ in relation to Finland, a nation that was oppressed, but also itself complicit in colonialism. It offers insights into European colonialism on the margins of the continent and within a nation that has traditionally declared its innocence and exceptionalism. The book shows that Finns were active participants in various colonial contexts, including Southern Africa and Sápmi in the North. Demonstrating that colonialism was a common practice shared by all European nations, with or without formal colonies, this book provides essential reading for anyone interested in European colonial history. Chapters 1, 7 and 8 are available open access under a via link.springer.com.>
Refiguring the Archive at once expresses cutting-edge debates on `the archive' in South Africa and internationally, and pushes the boundaries of those debates. It brings together prominent thinkers from a range of disciplines, mainly South Africans but a number from other countries. Traditionally archives have been seen as preserving memory and as holding the past. The contributors to this book question this orthodoxy, unfolding the ways in which archives construct, sanctify, and bury pasts. In his contribution, Jacques Derrida (an instantly recognisable name in intellectual discourse worldwide) shows how remembering can never be separated from forgetting, and argues that the archive is about the future rather than the past. Collectively the contributors demonstrate the degree to which thinking about archives is embracing new realities and new possibilities. The book expresses a confidence in claiming for archival discourse previously unentered terrains. It serves as an early manual for a time that has already begun.
Preliminary Material -- INTRODUCTION: WRITING RACE AND ASIA-PACIFIC MOBILITIES - CONSTRUCTIONS AND CONTESTATIONS /Robbie B.H. Goh -- VIVAN SUNDARAM'S “AMRITA”: TOWARDS A STYLE OF THE BODY /Tania Roy -- THE RETURN OF THE SCIENTIST: ESSENTIAL KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL TRIBALISM IN AMITAV GHOSH'S THE HUNGRY TIDE AND THE CALCUTTA CHROMOSOME /Robbie B.H. Goh -- ETHNICITY AND THE SOUTHEAST ASIAN DIASPORA IN LI-YOUNG LEE'S THE WINGED SEED /Walter S.H. Lim -- NARRATING RACE, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY IN R.K. NARAYAN'S THE PAINTER OF SIGNS /Chitra Sankaran -- CHINESE ETHNICITY IN POST-REFORMATION INDONESIAN WOMEN'S FICTION: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF TWO NOVELS BY AYU UTAMI AND DEWI LESTARI /Harry Aveling -- RESI(G)NIFYING THE CHINESE AND FILIPINO IN CINEMATIC NARRATIVES /Caroline S. Hau -- PERFORMING ETHNICITY, ETHNICIZING HISTORY: THE EURASIANS OF SINGAPORE IN REX SHELLEY'S THE SHRIMP PEOPLE /Lily Rose Tope -- PERFORMING THE SELF: RACE AND IDENTITY IN TWO HONG KONG ENGLISH-LANGUAGE PLAYS /Kwok-Kan Tam -- BORDER CROSSING: PLACE, IDENTITY AND DIS/LOCATION OF THE SELF IN XU XI'S THE UNWALLED CITY /Terry Siu-Han Yip -- HYBRID BROWN GAIJIN IS A “DISTINGUISHED ALIEN” IN SAKOKU JAPAN /Julie Mehta -- UGLY AMERICANS AND LITTLE BROWN BROTHERS: SPECTACLES OF IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY PHILIPPINE DRAMA /Judy Celine Ick -- DISAPPEARING RACE: NORMATIVE WHITENESS AND CULTURAL APPROPRIATION IN AUSTRALIAN REFUGEE NARRATIVES /Wenche Ommundsen -- RACE IN ASIAN POETRY IN ENGLISH: ETHNIC, NATIONAL AND COSMOPOLITAN REPRESENTATIONS /Agnes S.L. Lam -- NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS -- INDEX.
This book is a collection of essays written by emerging scholars at the University of Basel on the basis of their subjective encounters with a specific archival collection housed in the Basler Afrika Bibliographien in Basel. The Ernst and Ruth Dammann collection consists of around 8100 images, 750 audio recordings and numerous manuscripts, diaries and notes. The German couple conducted research on Namibian oral literatures and languages as they were spoken and performed across the country in the early 1950s. Based on in-depth engagement with the textual, visual and audio records assembled in this intricate collection, the authors of this book critically interrogated the implications of opening a colonial archive, exploring alternative ways of reading and understanding the historical material. As unique examples of close reading and listening, the essays propose creative ways of attending to the politics of race, gender, famine, ethnography, biography and fiction in colonial knowledge production.
Animals were vital to the British colonization of Myanmar. In this pathbreaking history of British imperialism in Myanmar from the early nineteenth century to 1942, Jonathan Saha argues that animals were impacted and transformed by colonial subjugation. By examining the writings of Burmese nationalists and the experiences of subaltern groups, he also shows how animals were mobilized by Burmese anticolonial activists in opposition to imperial rule. In demonstrating how animals - such as elephants, crocodiles, and rats - were important actors never fully under the control of humans, Saha uncovers a history of how British colonialism transformed ecologies and fostered new relationships with animals in Myanmar. Colonizing Animals introduces the reader to an innovative historical methodology for exploring interspecies relationships in the imperial past, using innovative concepts for studying interspecies empires that draw on postcolonial theory and critical animal studies.
