Lorena Rizzo

Deals with colonialism in a Namibian periphery and considers both the German colonial period as well as South African rule in the country. The main is to develop an understanding of the dynamics and vectors of change in the Kaoko's African societies gradually being placed under colonial rule. With a focus on socio-economic processes the thesis explores the continuous reconstitution of gender roles and relations and anchors its argument on an integrated analysis of archival written and visual sources as well as on oral knowledge.

A History of Kaoko in North-western Namibia, 1870s-1950s

Gender and Colonialism

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.

Shades of Empire

Photography and History in Colonial Southern Africa

Darren Newbury

Kylie Thomas

This collection explores women’s multifaceted historical and contemporary involvement in photography in Africa. The book offers new ways of thinking about the history of photography, exploring through case studies the complex and historically specific articulations of gender and photography on the continent, and attending to the challenge and potential of contemporary feminist and postcolonial engagements with the medium. The volume is organised in thematic sections that present the lives and work of historically significant yet overlooked women photographers, as well as the work of acclaimed contemporary African women photographers such as Héla Ammar, Fatoumata Diabaté, Lebohang Kganye and Zanele Muholi. The book offers critical reflections on the politics of gendered knowledge production and the production of racialised and gendered identities and alternative and subaltern subjectivities. Several chapters illuminate how contemporary African women photographers, collectors and curators are engaging with colonial photographic archives to contest stereotypical forms of representation and produce powerful counter-histories. Raising critical questions about race, gender and the history of photography, the collection provides a model for interdisciplinary feminist approaches for scholars and students of art history, visual studies and African history.

Lorena Rizzo

Books

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