Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (review)

Images and Empires is a conceptually sophisticated and empirically rich contribution to a growing body of scholarship that challenges the notion that the visual history of colonial and postcolonial Africa can be reduced to the power of the "Western gaze." Through analysis of visual genres and media ranging from advertisements to films, cartoons, ethnographic photography, sculpture, and photographic portraiture, the various authors in this volume seek to discern the meanings and politics of visual images that are produced by and circulate between Africans and Europeans. In his exceptionally erudite and wide-ranging introductory essay, Paul Landau deploys Michel de Montaigne's concept of "amazing distance" to emphasize the crucial role that images play in enabling people to make sense of their own societies and interpret others, particularly in contexts of limited literacy and multiple languages. All of the essays insist on attending to how power relations inform the movement, reception, and influence of images.

The chapters that do the most to challenge commonplace notions of colonial and postcolonial image-making are those that carefully document how Africans have taken visual forms usually associated with the "West," such as margarine wrappers, Tintin comics, and photographic portraiture, and remade them into something else. Hudita Nura Mustafa's essay on popular photography and women's self-fashioning in Dakar is especially effective at demonstrating how the visual history of twentieth-century Africa far exceeds truisms about colonial objectification and subjugation.

From the perspective of Africanist historiography, some of the most innovative and provocative theoretical insights come from contributors' efforts to explore the psychological dimensions of colonial and postcolonial image-making. For example, David Bunn and Nancy Rose Hunt, in their essays on eastern Cape burial sites and Congolese comics, respectively, seek to structure their analyses around Lacanian and Freudian concepts such as abjection, ambivalence, neurosis, and melancholia. Perhaps due to space constraints, neither author fully elaborates on this method for understanding the history of monuments and images through psychical frameworks. The subtlety of their contributions, however, suggests that as historians of Africa become more engaged in the analysis of visual sources, they will have to expand their analytical tool kits.

Deborah Kaspin's conclusion connects the volume's various insights by arguing that together they challenge Roland Barthes's notion of a homogenizing bourgeois mythology by demonstrating how myths are historically contingent, how they provide subversive elements, and how they can be deployed for very personal interests. In a volume premised in highlighting African agency, Kaspin's penultimate observation that European mythologies of cultural supremacy remain largely impervious to innovation serves as a salutary reminder of the political and economic gulfs that structure our new age of imperialism.

The entire volume would have been strengthened by a greater effort in the introduction and conclusion to foreground the collection's cumulative contributions; at times, attention to historical specificities, contextual contingencies, and conceptual nuances bury the volume's overarching themes. The "Empires" of the title provides the reader with fair warning that most chapters will focus on the traffic in images between Europe and Africa. But future studies of visuality in Africa will need to expand beyond the metropole/colony dyad and explore the less obvious international routes—say, between Ghana and Lebanon, Tanzania and India, and South Africa and the United States—through which colonial and postcolonial image-making has taken place. Henry John Drewal's essay on Mami Wata, whose genealogy extends through Hamburg, Southeast Asia, the Niger River Delta, New York City, and Cuba, suggests the possibilities of these more complex circuits. Despite these minor criticisms, Images and Empires stands as a must-read for anyone interested in African studies' ever-more noticeable "visual turn."