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.

Photography has visualized international relations and conflicts from the midnineteenth century onwards and continues to be an important medium in framing the worlds of distant, suffering others. Although photojournalism has been challenged in recent decades, claims that it is dead are premature. The Violence of the Image examines the roles of image producers and the functions of photographic imagery in the documentation of wars, violent conflicts and human rights issues; tackling controversial ideas such as 'witnessing', the making of appeals based on displays of human suffering and the much-cited concept of 'compassion fatigue'. In the twenty-first century, the advent of digital photography, camera phones and socialmedia platforms has altered the relationship between photographers, the medium and the audience- as well as contributing to an ongoing blurring of the boundaries between news and entertainment and professional and amateur journalism. The Violence of the Image explores how new vernacular and artistic modes of photographic production articulate international friction.This innovative, timely book makes a major contribution to discussions about the power of the image in conflict.

How the colonial photograph revolutionized the very nature of perception

Publisher Description

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.

In Islam and Gender in Colonial Northeast Africa, Silvia Bruzzi provides an account of Islamic movements and gender dynamics in the context of colonial rule in Northeast Africa. The thread that runs through the book is the life and times of Sittī ‘Alawiyya al-Mīrġanī (1892-1940), a representative of a well-established transnational Sufi order in the Red Sea region. Silvia Bruzzi gives us not only a social history of the colonial encounter in the Eritrean colony, but also a wider historical account of supra-regional dynamics across the Red Sea, the Ethiopian hinterland, and the Mediterranean region, using a wide range of fragmentary historical materials to make an important contribution towards filling the gap that currently exists in women's and gender history in Muslim societies.

A passionately urgent call for all of us to unlearn imperialism and repair the violent world we share, from one of our most compelling political theorists In this theoretical tour-de-force, renowned scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls on us to recognize the imperial foundations of knowledge and to refuse its strictures and its many violences. Azoulay argues that the institutions that make our world, from archives and museums to ideas of sovereignty and human rights to history itself, are all dependent on imperial modes of thinking. Imperialism has segmented populations into differentially governed groups, continually emphasized the possibility of progress while it tries to destroy what came before, and voraciously seeks out the new by sealing the past away in dusty archival boxes and the glass vitrines of museums. By practicing what she calls potential history, Azoulay argues that we can still refuse the original imperial violence that shattered communities, lives, and worlds, from native peoples in the Americas at the moment of conquest to the Congo ruled by Belgium's brutal King Léopold II, from dispossessed Palestinians in 1948 to displaced refugees in our own day. In Potential History, Azoulay travels alongside historical companions—an old Palestinian man who refused to leave his village in 1948, an anonymous woman in war-ravaged Berlin, looted objects and documents torn from their worlds and now housed in archives and museums—to chart the ways imperialism has sought to order time, space, and politics. Rather than looking for a new future, Azoulay calls upon us to rewind history and unlearn our imperial rights, to continue to refuse imperial violence by making present what was invented as “past” and making the repair of torn worlds the substance of politics.

4e de couverture : This book investigates the historical practice of producing stereotyped spectacles of colonized peoples at the great exhibitions and in colonial photography, and relates it to the shaping of European and settler identities. In doing so, it singles out the homogeneous aspects of colonialism's culture as well as distinguishing its discontinuities. By comparing the images produced in Britain and France with those produced in North America, Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific, Japan, and China, it proposes that differences in representations of colonized peoples between the imperial centres and the colonies were the result of different social and political agendas. By focusing on the images connected to anthropology, dying race theory, travel, tourism, and portraiture, Maxwell argues that while some photographs were directed at naturalizing the precept of colonialism, others were used to criticize it and to empower indigenous subjects. Written from a postcolonial perspective, and pursuing an interdisciplinary approach, this book will be of interest to scholars, students, and researchers intent on knowing more about the images of racial and cultural difference that shaped our immediate past.

How does Edward Said’s Orientalism speak to us today? What relevance did and does it have politically and intellectually? How and in what modes does Orientalism engage with new, intersecting fields of inquiry?At the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Orientalism these questions shape the essays collected in the present volume. The “after” of the title does not only guide the contributions in a look on past discussions, but specifically points at future research as well. Orientalism’s critical entanglements are thus connected to productive looks; these productive looks make us read differently, but only after we recognize our struggle with the dominant notions that we live by, that divide and unite us. More specifically, this volume addresses three fields of research enabling productive looks: visual culture; the body, sexuality and the performative; and national identities, modernity and gender. All articles, weaving delicate, new analytical and theoretical textures, maintain vital links with at least two of the fields mentioned. Orientalism’s role as a cultural catalyst is gauged in the analysis of materials such as Iranian film, 16th and 17th century Venetian representations of “the Turk,” Barthes’ take on Japanese culture, modern Arab travel narratives, Palestinian popular culture, photography on and of the Maghreb, Japanese queer and gay culture, the 19th century Illustrated London News, theories on migration and exile, postcolonial cinema, and Hanan al-Shaykh’s and Mai Ghoussoub’s writing on civil war in Lebanon.Authors include: Karina Eileraas, Belgin Turan Özkaya, Joshua Paul Dale, John Potvin, Mark McLelland, Tina Sherwell, Nasrin Rahimieh, Stephen Morton, Anastasia Vallasopoulos, Suha Kudsieh and Kate McInturff.