Tanya Agathocleous
“A Unique Gift to American Art”: Race as Art in Black Internationalist Newspapers
This paper examines the way visual culture and performance were used to promote transnational antiracist publishing practices in journals such as Duse Muhamed Ali’s African Times and Orient Review (1912-1920) and Marcus Garvey’s The Negro World (1914-1933). After looking at how layout in these periodicals contributed to a form of reading I call “critical compression,” I focus in particular on the art criticism of Duse Muhamed Ali and H.G. Mudgal, an Indian editor who worked for Black newspapers such as The Negro World and the New Pittsburgh Courier. Both editors, I will show, drew attention to race as performance and thus to their editorial practice as a kind of artistic anti-racism. For example, in an article by Mudgal entitled “A Unique Gift to American Art,” he profiles the work of Maurice Hunter, a Bantu man who worked as an artist’s model known as the “Man of 1000 Faces.” Mudgal is enamored of Hunter’s ability to inhabit different races and turns the blurring or obviating of race into an aesthetic value in itself. Unusual in its attention to that which is generally effaced in art criticism—the labor and artistry of the artist’s model—Mudgal’s warm appreciation of Hunter seems to save him from objectification, from being reduced to either his race (since he can inhabit all races) or his body, when serving as a model (since his work is active artistry). The real insight of Mudgal’s article, however, is that Hunter doesn’t need saving because he has been in control all along, using his modeling as a series of opportunities to refine and enhance both his art and his agency. The artistic editorship of Mudgal and Ali demonstrates what Afro-Asian solidarity could look like on the page in the hands of creative writers and editors: an erotics of appreciation and camaraderie that excoriates the dominant order so as to establish a new one in its place.
Sangeeta Bhagawati
Visual Satire, Multilingual Publics: Cartoon (1968), a Periodical from North-East India
The first cartoon periodical of North-East India was published from 1968 onwards under the editorship of artist-filmmaker Pulak Gogoi (1938-2022). This publication was named Cartoon, and it focused on gag and editorial cartoons, comic strips, visual caricatures, and satirical writings by prominent Assamese authors of the time. During Cartoon‘s active period, the authority of the Indian National Congress (founded in 1885) was increasingly questioned both nationally and within Assam. The periodical’s visual material, representing the contemporary political environment, was a medium through which discontent with representative democracy was made publicly legible. This paper studies Cartoon as a neglected archive of visual print culture in postcolonial North-East India, situating the magazine within the political climate that followed the fragmentation of the Congress under Indira Gandhi (1917-1984) and the growing disillusionment with state institutions in Assam. Public debate in 1960s North-East India was already shaped by anxieties around issues like migration, the failing economic and employment infrastructure in the state, the linguistic identity of migrants, and citizenship. Cartoon transformed these concerns into a visual language that heavily relied on regional cultural tropes to depict political leaders as self-serving beneficiaries of the nationalist legacy while representing ordinary people as excluded from the promises of India’s independence in 1947. Such images provided an effective means through which the public could imagine the failure of Congress-led democratic governance and the widening distance between the state and the public. It is noteworthy that Cartoon’s visual material was undeniably influenced by popular Bengali magazines like the Anandabazar Patrika (1922).
But there was a conscious refashioning of the material for a public characterised by multilingualism and low literacy. Political authority and regional belonging were contested in linguistic terms in North-East India, and Cartoon’s visual aspect could circulate independently of script.The periodical was sold at 2 rupees (approximately 0.021 USD) per copy and was printed at a press on the historic Sitaram Ghosh Street in Kolkata. It was then circulated within the neighbouring state of Assam. This circuit of production and circulation of Assamese vernacular periodicals depended on West Bengal’s more established print infrastructure. The printing of Cartoon was further impacted by editor Pulak Gogoi’s personal financial crisis and the absence offunding bodies. By studying Cartoon as a material object, the paper will also ask how these factors of production shaped the circulation of the periodical. The paper also reflects on the difficulties of working with such a source: not all of Cartoon‘s issues have survived because of its editor’s financial inability to preserve them for posterity. Currently, only a handful of issues are available through a recent digitisation initiative in Assam, resulting in a fragmentary archive of the periodical, and its transition into an object of scholarly attention raises questions about what is lost and flattened. Engaging with PPC network’s broader interest in transfers and archival afterlives, the paper argues that periodicals like Cartoon deserve attention as sites where the specific material, economic, and technical conditions of print production shaped political critique in forms beyond
text alone.
Kate Cowcher
“Hot Plates and Turpentine”: Modernist Printmaking In and Beyond Independent Uganda
In the early 1960s, Royal College of Art-trained artist Michael Adams was invited to the art school at Makerere College (Kampala, Uganda) to set up a new course in printmaking. He installed equipment for woodcuts, lithography and etching, all technical processes new to Makerere’s growing art student population. Despite several notable mishaps–including, for example, the young artist Berlings L. Kaunda later recalling a trip to sick bay after burning his fingers on the acid–modernist printmaking flourished in the early years of Ugandan independence. As a soon-central component of the undergraduate degree, many of Makerere’s major artists of the 1960s, including Theresa Musoke, developed distinctive styles, particularly in etching, that were nurtured alongside related painting or sculptural practices. At the same time, Kampala was home to a thriving literary and intellectual scene, and printmaking staff and students were soon actively contributing critical illustrations and accompaniments to journals like Roho and Transition. The first graphic cover of the latter, for example, featured Dorothy Sekkade’s print, Death, in 1963. Transition was a pan-African publication with continental circulation; Makerere, too, was an international university, attracting students from across east and southern African region. The reach of its printmaking curriculum, therefore, far exceeded Uganda’s newly defined national borders. In the 1960s Makerere provided foundational training to students like Henry Tayali, for example, who later returned to Zambia and made powerful prints responding to social deprivation and, later, the Soweto uprising. This paper will trace the development of modernist printmaking education in Uganda, and the critical role that it played in the wider pan-African literary, intellectual and political scenes in the wake of colonial independence.
María José Delpiano K.
Manufacturing a popular and mass media visuality. Cultural and technical transfers in the beginnings of printing industry in Chile: The case of Empresas Zig-Zag.
In 1905, a young Agustín Edwards McClure founded one of the most prominent publishing initiatives of 20th century in Chile: Empresas Zig-Zag. This publishing house aimed to foster a popular and mass entertainment culture through the establishment of a market for illustrated publications and magazines. Over the course of the 20th century, Zig-Zag became the leading enterprise in its field, operating strictly under an industrial, capitalist, and mass-consumption logic.
This presentation focuses on a fundamental factor for understanding how Chilean mass visual culture began to take shape within the printing industry. This factor concerns the transfer of technologies, agencies, discursive structures, and cultural signs from the United States to the Chilean context at the beginning of the 20th century. Thus, the underlying question is how Edwards McClure’s company facilitated the interaction between resources provided by a metropolitan technical and cultural system and those produced domestically, thereby establishing the foundations of a popular and mass visuality in Chile.
Sergio Delgado Moya
Tearing It Apart, Burning Right Through It: John M. Valadez Goes to Work on the Encyclopedia
The Encyclopedia Britannica – the oldest universalist compendium of “ACCURATE DEFINITIONS AND EXPLANATIONS, of all the Terms as they occur in the Order of the Alphabet”[1] – is nothing if not an exercise in “getting it together”: getting it all together, all the facts and figures that, in the eyes of the 18th century “society of gentlemen in Scotland” who published it, a man of reason needs to masterfully understand the world. A few decades into the 20th century, the vaunted publication could only manage to keep it all together (all the facts and notable figures, plus the torrent of news and stories disseminated by modern media) by publishing an annual supplement between runs of the multiple-volume regular editions it printed between 1768 and 2010. Sometime in 1971, the artist John M. Valadez picked up a copy of this Britannica Book of the Yearfrom a pile of books stacked on the free table outside the Centro de La Raza in Long Beach, California. He turned the book into a journal, a “book of moments,” and got to work painting, slashing, burning, collaging, and mostly silk screening the pages of this publication. My paper catalogues, situates, and parses through these interventions. Along the way, it makes a case for Valadez’s Book of Moments as potent compendium of the many and contradictory transfers and crossings a subject like Valadez might perform in the face of the Encyclopedia’s constitutive exclusions.
[1] Advertisement, Caledonian Mercury and the Edinburgh Evening Courant (December 10, 1768).
Pragya Dhital
The Anti-Imperial Optic: Political Martyrdom and Extra-legal Testimony in Photographs of the Dinshaway Executions
The amateur photographers are pressing the buttons of their kodaks. They are waiting for the last condemned to death, the brigand.
Atrocities of justice under British rule in Egypt, Wilfrid Blunt, 1906.
This paper deals with a violent incident in rural Egypt that provoked a major crisis of legitimacy for the British empire: the public hanging of four Egyptian villagers falsely accused of killing a colonial officer in 1906. It describes how photographs of the executions taken by socially marginal freelance photographers challenged British claims to civilisational superiority and justifications for imperial violence. Its main focus will be a series of photographs taken by an Armenian Egyptian photographer, published in the contemporary picture press and later repurposed in a multilingual photobook distributed as Central Powers propaganda during WW1 and banned as seditious literature by the Government of India. These images will be compared with those taken by an expatriate English photographer, which featured in the illustrated British magazine, The Graphic. I extend the idea of a civil contract between the governed conducted through the medium of photography (Ariella Azoulay 2008), by considering how these photographs evoked a cross-culturally legible repertoire of concepts and images relating to martyrdom and witnessing, which allowed for novel forms of collective judgement and mobilisation.
Kate Highman
Remaking ‘the Colonial Book’: Visual Poetics in Contemporary Writing from South Africa
In this paper I explore how contemporary South African poets Koleka Putuma and Maneo Mohale draw our attention to the contested history of the written word and print culture in South Africa through their use of ‘visual poetics’ — a term I take from Johanna Drucker. Focussing on Putuma’s book Collective Amnesia (2017) and Mohale’s Everything Is A Deathly Flower (2019), I consider how both poets play with the space of the page and the visuality of writing so that the visual elements come to enact a ‘print performance’ (Annel Pieterse) that alerts the reader to their status as print artefacts. Both collections are concerned too with the politics of race, visibility and erasure, and as such invite us to consider how what Isabel Hofmeyr describes as ‘the colonial book’ and ‘Literature with a capital L’ have come to be raced in South Africa. After all, as scholars from WEB du Bois onwards have argued, ‘race’ is imbricated in the field of visual culture, and print culture too is part of visual culture (Shawn Michelle Smith).
Finally, with reference to the conference focus on ‘transfers and crossings’, I argue that both collections situate themselves, and the book as historical artefact more generally, as what Leigh Star describes as ‘boundary objects’ – sites of cultural and interpretive contestations. Mohale opens her acknowledgements page with the statement that ‘this book is made and held by many hands’, drawing our attention to the book as historical, human artefact and one that continues to be ‘held’ and remade by readers. Putuma’s opening poem ‘Storytelling’ conjoins orature and the written word, blurring their supposedly binary demarcation through visual strategies that enable us to reconsider the bounds of ‘the colonial book’. Together, these collections allow us to see ‘the book’ as a place of transfer and crossings where new cultural authorities are being scripted.
Paulo Lemos Horta
Passing Strange: Parables of Assimilation from Film to Text
This paper arises from an archival finding: that key canonical texts of South Asian and British South Asian fiction, from G.V. Desani forward through the 1990s, were originally modelled closely on cinematic tropes drawn from mid-century American films of racial passing. Because their drafts have been understudied or simply neglected, critics remain unaware of the extent to which these novels mirror, echo and call out specific beats in Sirk’s Imitation of Life or Kazan’s Pinky: structural, plot and character arcs, riffs on particular scenes, callbacks to the songs that mark the films’ turning points. Attention to the evolution from draft to finished production, and to the ways these texts were prepared for the American and British markets, makes the debt unmistakable. Yet passing has not figured as prominently as it should in interpretations of these novels. Critics have tended, somewhat anachronistically, to absorb the echoes of these cinematic tropes (more conspicuous in draft than in published form), into the vocabulary of colonial mimicry, sly civility and hybridity. Young’s and Bhabha’s formulations remain very helpful for reading these texts. But factoring in the transfer of a different historical context, the models and frameworks of Black passing for white in mid-century America, adds nuance to our understanding of how concepts, critiques and call-outs resonate, and are theorised differently, once they move from film to page. The paper takes transfer in several of the senses the conference proposes: between media, as techniques of cinematic representation are absorbed into the material and visual imagination of the printed novel; across markets and geographies, as manuscripts are reshaped for transatlantic publication; and between an informal archive of drafts and the scholarly gaze that re-signifies what it recovers. It asks what becomes newly legible, and what is quietly erased, when a novel’s cinematic substrate is restored to view.
Khalid Lyamlahy
Retracing Moroccan Itineraries: The Visual Legacies and Material Afterlives of Souffles-Anfas & Other Journals
In 1966, a group of Moroccan poets and artists founded Souffles-Anfas, a journal of culture and politics that played a major role in cultural decolonization and the promotion of experimental writing, creative art, and political thought from Morocco and beyond. In addition to Souffles-Anfas (1966-1972), several journals, such as Lamalif (1966-1988), Intégral (1971-1977), Aqlam (1964-1982), and Al-Thaqafa al-Jadida (1974-1984), served as platforms for highlighting Moroccan cultural production, including visual art and art criticism, often with distinct political trajectories and editorial choices. This talk examines the circulation of artistic and visual production in Moroccan journals, while also tracing the material afterlives of these publications through transfers such as digitization, translation, anthologization, republication, art exhibitions, and podcasts.
Jo McDonagh and Jonathan Sachs
Fading: Empire, Lithography, and the Wash of History
This paper builds on our previous discussion (in Paris, 2025) of the visual paratexts of Oscar Wilde’s story, “The Birthday of the Infanta”. The first book edition of the story, in Wilde’s collection The House of Pomegranates (1891), designed for a connoisseur market, includes two types of illustration by two artists: wood cuts by Charles Ricketts and lithographs by his partner Charles Shannon. We are intrigued by the fact that while Ricketts’s (mainly decorative) wood cuts remain strongly visible in editions preserved in library and private collections, Shannon’s (more discursive) lithographs have faded to the extent that today one can barely see them. Yet the latter are images that portray the Spanish imperial court, which is the setting for the story. Indeed, the lithographs evoke Velázquez’s portraits from the seventeenth century, including ‘Las Meninas’ (1656), which are directly referenced by Wilde. Curiously and coincidentally, the fade of the lithograph seems appropriate: the idea that the Spanish empire faded in its glory had been in circulation through the century – most prominently articulated in Byron’s satirical epic and critique of empires, Don Juan (1819-24). The fade of the lithograph – a technology which in the 1820s was relatively new, and which Tom Young calls a “technological force driving nineteenth-century globalization” – comes to reflect and even enhance a strand of meaning in Wilde’s story that connects the fade of empire to its critique of the extractive and violent economies of imperialism (most notably in the figure of the kidnapped dwarf).
In this paper we take up the idea of “fading” as both the material effect of time passing on the printed page – a hazard of certain technologies of print culture; and a term for imperial decline explored by Byron and later by Wilde and connected to the circuits of plunder and return that characterize imperial histories. How might we understand this techno-fade in relation to the temporalities of imperialism and its critiques? And how do technologies’ unintended consequences complicate recent approaches in postcolonial studies that see technological innovations as drivers of globalization and imperialism.
Vania Montgomery
Found Matter: Faces, Figures, and Bodies Reprinted by Eugenio Dittborn
This presentation will discuss some of the results of the research project Las imágenes encontradas de Eugenio Dittborn (The Found Images of Eugenio Dittborn), developed around the “original” photographs found by the artist in sports and crime magazines from the first half of the twentieth century. These press images were later reprinted and intervened by Dittborn throughout his oeuvre, in an operation that can be understood as a transfer between photography and print, and as a way of rethinking, socially and politically, those forgotten and marginalised figures of the past who were photographed and immortalised almost by chance, and later rescued by the artist.
As a specific focus within this project, the presentation will then address one iconic found image that appears in several of the artist’s works: the photograph of a dead body killed by the Chilean dictatorship and mummified in the country’s desert, which appeared on the cover of Fortín Mapocho newspaper in 1990, the first year after the return to democracy. By tracing its movement from press circulation to artistic reappropriation, the presentation will reflect on the relationship between found image, print culture, and political memory.
Neelam Srivastava, Newcastle University
Reading Periodicals in Prison: Gramsci’s Contrapuntal Readings of Italian Literature
This paper examines Antonio Gramsci’s consumption of contemporaneous periodical culture during his prison detention and how this kind of magazine reading shaped the writing of The Prison Notebooks, arguing it is especially relevant for tracing his critique of colonialism. Book reviews of important Italian authors such as the poet Giovanni Pascoli were read and commented on by Gramsci in the Notebooks, leading to a contrapuntal reading of Pascoli’s poetry that acts as a sort of postcolonial criticism before its time. As Joseph Buttigieg notes, Notebook 2 of The Prison Notebooks “contains notes resulting from a systematic review of periodicals that Gramsci had received since the early days of his detention. Articles which appeared in the journal Nuova Antologia between 1927 and 1930, for example, are the source of 89 sections of the Notebook. […] The first half of the notebook was written, most probably, between 1929 and 1930” (Buttigieg 531-32). Across all the Notebooks, Gramsci is in dialogue with an influential body of Italian writing by thinkers and intellectuals, including Pascoli, that had argued in favour of imperial expansion of the young Italian nation. My paper focuses mainly on paragraphs 51 and 52 of Notebook 2, where Gramsci discusses a correspondence that had been recently published between Pascoli and Luigi Mercatelli, an Italian colonial administrator and pro-empire apologist. This commentary forms part of Gramsci’s enduring interest in Pascoli’s colonialist tendencies, which he refers to at various points in the Notebooks. Gramsci’s reading of Pascoli is strongly reminiscent of Edward Said’s idea that “contrapuntal reading must take account of both processes – that of imperialism and that of resistance to it, which can be done by extending our reading of the texts to include what was once forcibly excluded” (78-9). My paper makes a claim for a link between periodical reading, punctuated by episodic attention and symptomatic interpretation, and Gramsci’s incipient forms of postcolonial criticism.
Ulrike Stark
Listener, learner, reader, teacher: Visualizing the Reading Woman in Hindi-Urdu Print Culture
A cherished subject of European art and popular culture, images of the reading woman appeared relatively late in Hindi print culture. This paper traces the evolution of visual representations of woman and girl readers from the lithographic illustrations found in late nineteenth-century Hindi (and Urdu) books to the pictorial section headings in Hindi periodicals of the early twentieth century and the book cover design of literary fiction produced in postcolonial India in the 1950s and 60s. Drawing on recent work on Indian women’s reading practices by Aakriti Mandhwani and others, I am interested in the historical antecedents of the iconic image of a woman reading for pleasure featured on the cover of Mandhwani’s Everyday Reading (2024). In exploring the transformation from listening to reading subject, from instructional to leisure contexts, and from the sociality of reading to its inwardness, the paper addresses the pedagogic, narrative, and affective meanings conveyed by these images, while it attempts a preliminary typology of the pictured reading woman in print.
Eve Tignol
Reading “in place”: Visual and Textual Entanglements in Colonial Indian Children’s Periodicals
This paper examines the entanglement of material and discursive practices in the role of visuals (advertisements, photographs, illustrations) within the ecology of Urdu children’s magazines from the first half of the twentieth century. Challenging the treatment of visuals as supplementary epitexts, I argue for reading these materials “in place” as integral to the periodical’s production of meaning. Exploring the technical, economic and aesthetic dimensions of visuals as inseparable from textual material, and reflecting on archival and scholarly practices that have historically marginalized them, I analyze how the visual and textual intra-act to produce and negotiate modern subjectivities within colonial periodical culture. Far from being mere “adornments”, visuals were active agents, shaping and being shaped by the conditions of their production, circulation, and reception – conditions I approach through the prism of entanglement and diffraction rather than linear transfer.
Laetitia Zecchini
Taking Playfulness Seriously: Doodles, Marginalia, and Visual-Textual Traffics in the Archives of Indian Modernism
In earlier work on modernist poets-artists and editors of the 50s-70s in India, I became interested in the inventive, DIY practices of collage, assemblage and piracy – the ways, for instance, in which little magazines (damn you, ezra, Tornado, Vrishchik, etc.) displayed their kinship with ‘minor’ arts or ephemeral artefacts of popular culture, ‘plundering’ material from different sources. I would like to push the discussion of this defiantly (and playfully) anti-canonical and experimental ethos further, by turning specifically to the irruption of doodles, sketches, nonsensical drawings or scribbles across letters, little periodicals, and even personal copies of books of several Indian modernists. This presentation takes its cue from the delight of discovering this material, and will showcase examples of these visual-textual traffics. Since these modernists took playfulness seriously, I also take their example as an invitation to do the same. In many cases, these visual elements functioned less as illustrations than as devices that undermined the ‘seriousness’ of the literary field, or the solemnity of culture. They also served as a ‘signature’ of belonging to a transnational community of print that built on a shared, and irreverent, visual-textual ‘vocabulary’ shaped by the countercultural aesthetics of the Mimeo Revolution. In what spaces, through what means and networks did this alternative aesthetics travel? How is the valorization and encroachment of the margins and marginalia meaningful, if at all? And if these visual-textual interactions are often “unpretentious, playful, useless… (drawing) writing towards mocking, childish counterwriting” (Martine Reid), how is this ludic counterwriting nonetheless put to use? By looking closely at personal archives and publications which seem born from a playful tension between text and image, art and non-art, doodles and sketches, work and play, center and margin, ephemerality and permanence, insouciant mischievousness and purposeful artistic practice, I also explore some of the traces left by the anti-hierarchical ‘anarchic freedom’ (Mehrotra) of the 60s in India.