French colonisers of the Third Republic claimed not to oppress but to liberate, imagining they were spreading republican ideals to the colonies to make a Greater France. In this book Simon Dell explores the various roles played by portraiture in this colonial imaginary. Anyone interested in the history of colonial Africa will have encountered innumerable portraits of African elites produced during the first half of the twentieth century, yet no book to date has focused on these ubiquitous images. Dell analyses the production and dissemination of such portraits and situates them in a complex and conflicted field of representations. Moving between European and African perspectives, The Portrait and the Colonial Imaginary blends history with art history to provide insights into the larger processes that were transforming the French metropole and colonies during the early twentieth century. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

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.

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.

The Colonial World: A History of European Empires, 1780s to the Present provides the most authoritative, in-depth overview on European imperialism available. It synthesizes recent developments in the study of European empires and provides new perspectives on European colonialism and the challenges to it. With a post-1800 focus and extensive background coverage tracing the subject to the early 1700s, the book charts the rise and eclipse of European empires. Robert Aldrich and Andreas Stucki integrate innovative approaches and findings from the 'new imperial history' and look at both the colonial era and the legacies it left behind for countries around the world after they gained independence. Dividing the text into three complementary sections, Aldrich and Stucki offer an original approach to the subject that allows you to explore: - Different eras of colonisation and decolonisation from early modern European colonialism to the present day - Overarching themes in colonial history, like 'land and sea', 'the body' and 'representations of colonialism' - A global range of snapshot colonial case studies, such as Peru (1780), India (1876), The South Pacific (1903), the Dutch East Indies (1938) and the Portuguese empire in Africa (1971) This is the essential text for anyone seeking to understand the nature and complexities of modern European imperialism and its aftermath.

Germany developed a large colonial empire over the last thirty years of the 19th century, spanning regions of the west coast of Africa to its east coast and beyond. Largely forgotten for many years, recent intense debates about Africa's cultural heritage in European museums have brought this period of African and German history back into the spotlight. German Colonialism in Africa and its Legacies brings much-needed context to these debates, exploring perspectives on the architecture, art, urbanism, and visual culture of German colonialism in Africa, and its legacies in postcolonial and present-day Namibia, Cameroon, and Germany. The first in-depth exploration of the designed and visual aspects of German colonialism, the book presents a series of essays combining formal analyses of painting, photography, performance art, buildings, and space with the discourse analysis approach associated with postcolonial theory. Covering the entire period from the build-up to colonialism in the early-19th century to the present, subjects covered range from late-19th-century German colonial paintings of African landscapes and people to German land appropriation through planning and architectural mechanisms, and from indigenous African responses to colonial architecture, to explorations of the legacies of German colonialism by contemporary artists today. This powerful and revealing collection of essays will encourage new research on this under-explored topic, and demonstrate the importance of historical research to the present, especially with regards to ongoing debates about the presence of material legacies of colonialism in Western culture, museum collections, and immigration policies.

Art, Observation, and an Anthropology of Illustration examines the role of sketches, drawings and other artworks in our understanding of human cultures of the past. Bringing together art historians and anthropologists, it presents a selection of detailed case studies of various bodies of work produced by non-Western and Western artists from different world regions and from different time periods (from Native North America, Cameroon, and Nepal, to Italy, Solomon Islands, and Mexico) to explore the contemporary relevance and challenges implicit in artistic renditions of past peoples and places. In an age when identities are partially constructed on the basis of existing visual records, the book asks important questions about the nature of observation and the inclusion of culturally-relevant information in artistic representations. How reliable are watercolours, paintings, or sketches for the understanding of past ways of life? How do old images of bygone peoples relate to art historical and anthropological canons? How have these images and technologies of representation been used to describe, illustrate, or explain unknown realities? The book is an essential tool for art historians, anthropologists, and anyone who wants to understand how the observation of different realities has impacted upon the production of art and visual cultures. Incorporating current methodological and theoretical tools, the 10 chapters collected here expand the area of connection between the disciplines of art history and anthropology, bringing into sharp focus the multiple intersections of objectivity, evidence, and artistic licence.

In Imaginary Empires, Maria O’Malley examines early American texts published between 1767 and 1867 whose narratives represent women’s engagement in the formation of empire. Her analysis unearths a variety of responses to contact, exchange, and cohabitation in the early United States, stressing the possibilities inherent in the literary to foster participation, resignification, and rapprochement. New readings of The Female American, Leonora Sansay’s Secret History, Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, Lydia Maria Child’s A Romance of the Republic, and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl confound the metaphors of ghosts, haunting, and amnesia that proliferate in many recent studies of early US literary history. Instead, as O’Malley shows, these writings foreground acts of foundational violence involved in the militarization of domestic spaces, the legal impediments to the transfer of property and wealth, and the geopolitical standing of the United States. Racialized and gendered figures in the texts refuse to die, leave, or stay silent. In imagining different kinds of futures, these writers reckon with the ambivalent role of women in empire-building as they negotiate between their own subordinate position in society and their exertion of sovereignty over others. By tracing a thread of virtual history found in works by women, Imaginary Empires explores how reflections of the past offer a means of shaping future sociopolitical formations.