Visual Cultures and Colonialism: Indigeneity in Local and Transnational Imagery

Another announcement from H-ASIA... This conference sounds interesting, and it is related to our recent class discussion on "what to do with the person" in visual representations and our recent viewing of The Couple in the Cage.

Visual Cultures and Colonialism: Indigeneity in Local and Transnational Imagery

Location: Australia
Call for Papers Date: 2007-12-15
Date Submitted: 2007-10-23
Announcement ID: 159088

A growing body of postcolonial research has established the importance of visual imagery in creating and popularizing ideas about race and cultural difference. Visual representations of Indigenous peoples circulated from local to transnational contexts, participating in colonial networks of global exchange and defining relations of power. One strand of analysis has revealed the complicity of Western scopic regimes with imperialism, tracing the ways that visual cultures express the colonizers’ expansionist gaze. Another seeks to emphasise the role of Indigenous peoples within this relationship, identifying culturally distinct visual traditions and the reformulation of new media such as photography and museum exhibitions. Descendant re-valuation of the colonial archive is inverting colonial exhibitory practices and spectacle, producing new meanings through re-contextualisation of these images. This conference aims to bring together research and thinking on visual cultures and indigeneity that attends to local specificity as well as the global circuits of visual discourse, illuminating both colonial process and attempts at decolonisation.

For more information contact:
Dr. Liz Conor and Dr. Jane Lydon
Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies
Monash University
Clayton VIC 3800
AUSTRALIA
Email: visual.colonialism@gmail.com