From Canvas to Cartography: Visual Regimes of Colonialism and Resistance in the Industrial Age

Nineteenth-century imperialism represented the apex of centuries of exploration, military campaigning, and economic competition between colonial powers. The Scottish physician and missionary David Livingstone suggested that western colonialism rested on “the three Cs [...]: commerce, Christianity and civilization.”[1] This presentation suggests that visual regimes played a crucial part in propping up—and tearing down—all three of these pillars. Colonization of foreign places, I argue, was not just affirmed and celebrated through visual cultures. Importantly, exploration also happened through visual discourses of normative and Othered identities.

The presentation stresses the need to understand how colonialists, colonial audiences, and colonized peoples portrayed and perceived the imperial respatialization of their world during the industrial age, many of whose after-images remain alive today. To illustrate these processes, I will use a broad bandwidth of sources that provide valuable insights into nineteenth-century visual regimes and that include maps, paintings, photographs, advertisements, and material artifacts. I propose that these sources—many of which are still present in public spaces such as museums, galleries, and archives—played a crucial part in western and nonwestern discourses of exploration and resistance and continue to shape the ways in which people imagine their historical legacies and future trajectories.

[1] Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “Visual Colonialism.” In The Visual Culture Reader, edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff, 473–480. Abingdon: Routledge, 2002, p. 474.