Call for chapters: The Post/Colonial Eye: Visual Discourses of Empire

deadline for submissions: 
January 31, 2025
full name / name of organization: 
TU Dresden / University of Newcastle, Australia

The Post/Colonial Eye: Visual Discourses of Empire

 

With expressed interest from Routledge

 

Please note: At this point, we are only looking for additional chapters focussing on the second part of this volume as highlighted below. To expand our geographical scope, we are, unfortunately, not able to include more contributions studying postcolonial India.  

 

In examining the intersections of (post)colonial studies and visual culture, the proposed volume employs a dual approach. 

 

The first section aims to explore the intersections of visual culture(s) and colonialism, and visual technologies and colonialism, analysing the significance of the visual for the British Empire. We invite contributions that address issues of representation and the self, visual communication between coloniser and colonised, visual technologies, visual subjectivities, forms of gazing, ethics of looking etc. The second section will focus on how these visual discourses have been and are complicated, challenged, appropriated or potentially reversed in decolonial and postcolonial visual discourse. 

 

We, therefore, invite contributions that focus on visual discourses of the British empire, its (neo)imperial visual legacies, as well as strategies of subversion, continuities and disruptions. 

 

In addition to more ‘traditional’ visual material, such as photographs, maps, postcards, political cartoons, we explicitly welcome contributions that engage critically with more ‘contemporary’ visual materials, such as graphic novels, comics, video games, virtual reality etc. We also welcome contributions from those that use novel and innovative methods of working with historical images, whether analogue, or digital.

 

Potential topics may include, but are not strictly limited to:

  • Visuality and other vision-focused approaches to understanding empire

  • Politics of visibility, invisibility and counter-visuality

  • Intersensorial approaches in working with images

  • Visual legacies of the British empire

  • Ethics of looking

  • Forms of gazing

  • The role of the digital, as in digital archives, AI-generated images etc.

  • Decolonial methodologies of using images from the archive

  • ‘Contemporary’ visual materials, such as comics, graphic novels, video games, virtual reality

  • Visual strategies of subversion and (re)appropriation

  • Postcolonial ways of seeing and commemorating

  • Local, national, and global entanglements of images

 

We invite contributions from the fields of: 

  • History

  • Cultural studies

  • Film studies

  • Media studies

  • Postcolonial studies

 

Please send an abstract of 250-300 words as well as a short biographical note of 100 words by January 31, 2025, to visualdiscoursesofempire@gmail.com.

 

The deadline for first draftsis May 31, so that we can hopefully submit the finalised manuscript by autumn/winter 2025.

 

The editors of the volume are: 

  • Srishti Guha, University of Newcastle, Australia 

  • Judith Neder, Dresden University of Technology, Germany

 

We are happy to reply to any questions and queries via the following email address: visualdiscoursesofempire@gmail.com