Visual Cultures of Postcolonial Print: Materials/Archives, Technologies, Transfers

Organized by Josephine McDonagh and Laetitia Zecchini in the framework of the International Research Network on Postcolonial Print Cultures

November 5-6, 2026
University of Chicago 

This conference will explore the interplay between the materiality of print and the various media associated with visuality.  In postcolonial contexts, visual print forms serve multiple cultural, communicative, dissenting and sometimes propagandistic purposes: displayed and circulated in public spaces, for instance, as billboards, posters, election flyers, advertisements, banners, slogans, calendars, graffiti, wall art, pamphlets; or secreted in private as devotional texts, family photographs, underground zines, political manifestos subject to censorship, or pornographic magazines.  In countries that are multilingual or have low rates of literacy, visual texts, whether print or digital, are also important conveyors of information. And the more ephemeral forms of print (little magazines, e-zines, etc.) include material that purposefully make the visual register an integral part of the “reading experience”.  But how is this visual print culture produced, circulated and consumed?   What conditions of production shape its particular forms?   What technologies have determined the way print culture looks and the purposes it serves?  How have these visual print forms been studied – and how should we study them now?

We invite papers on all aspects of the visual print cultures of the postcolonial world.   We are especially interested in the idea of transfers and crossings.  By this we mean the transfer of techniques of representation between media – for instance, the transfer that takes place between photography and print, or the transfers that occur when print is on film, or the kinds of transfers that take place when print is digitized.  But we are also interested in other kinds of transfers – including the transfers that occur when people, things and ideas travel.  How have visual or hybrid cultures of print & media moved in different colonial and post-colonial contexts?  Through what means, intermediaries and technologies?  And for what purposes?  How have they adapted in new local conditions and contexts?  We are thinking especially about techniques and technologies of print, for instance lithography, mimeograph, offset printing, gestetner machine, all of which have interesting colonial and postcolonial histories.

We also invite participants to adopt a self-reflective perspective and to interrogate how such mixed media and hybrid materials move in – and into – scholarship.  What methods do we need to examine the specificities of postcolonial print culture?   How do we conceptualize the many kinds of mixtures that constitute this mixture (e.g. we are suggesting “transfers” is an appropriate metaphor, but is it?   What are its possibilities and limits?)  And how do we theorise what happens when these materials move from their “natural” milieus to an archive, a book, an institution, or a new medium or platform?   And what happens when it moves from an informal “archive” to be the focus of the scholarly gaze, when things get re-signified and also erased or lost?

The conference builds on the workshop “Exhibition-making, Museography and the textual/visual interaction” (Paris, September 2025), which focused on practices of exhibition-making and publishing in colonial and postcolonial contexts and on the ways visual and print archives, collections, ephemera, and periodicals are curated, displayed, preserved and conserved, framed, and re-purposed. Papers that connect to the work carried out in this workshop are especially welcomed.