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
Franke Institute, University of Chicago
Program below.
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.
Day 1 – Thursday, Nov 5, 2026
Session 1: 9.30 – 10.45 | Chair: Raji Sunder Rajan
Introduction – Jo McDonagh and Laetitia Zecchini
Paulo Lemos Horta (NYU Abu Dhabi) | Passing Strange: Parables of Assimilation from Film to Text
María José Delpiano K. (Universidad Alberto Hurtado) | 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.
Coffee: 10.45 – 11
Session 2: 11.00 – 12.30 | Chair: Ghenwa Hayek (UChicago)
Khalid Lyamlahy (UChicago) | Retracing Moroccan Itineraries: The Visual Legacies and Material Afterlives of Souffles-Anfas & Other Journals
Kate Cowcher (University of St Andrews) | “Hot Plates and Turpentine”: Modernist Printmaking in and Beyond Independent Uganda
Laetitia Zecchini (CNRS-UChicago) | Taking Playfulness Seriously: Doodles, Marginalia, and Visual-Textual Traffics in the Archives of Indian Modernism
Lunch: 1-2.30
Session 3: 2.30 – 4 | Chair: Lynda Nead (Courtauld Institute of Art)
Tanya Agathocleous (CUNY) | “A Unique Gift to American Art”: Race as Art in Black Internationalist Newspapers
Sergio Delgado Moya (UChicago) | Tearing It Apart, Burning Right Through It: John M. Valadez Goes to Work on the Encyclopedia
Vania Montgomery (University of London) | Found Matter: Faces, Figures, and Bodies Reprinted by Eugenio Dittborn
Kate Highman (University of Cape Town) | Remaking ‘the Colonial Book’: Visual Poetics in Contemporary Writing from South Africa
Exhibition and Drinks: 4.30-6
Day 2 – Friday, Nov 6, 2026
Session 1 (Zoom): 9.45 -11 | Chair: Toral Gajarawala (NYU)
Sangeeta Bhagawati (King’s College) | Visual Satire, Multilingual Publics: Cartoon (1968), a Periodical from North-East India
Eve Tignol (CNRS) | Reading “in place”: Visual and Textual Entanglements in Colonial Indian Children’s Periodicals
Coffee: 11 – 11.15
Session 2: 11.15 – 12.45 | Chair: Toraj Gajarawala (NYU)
Jo McDonagh (UChicago) and Jonathan Sachs (Concordia University) | Fading: Empire, Lithography, and the Wash of History
Ulrike Stark (UChicago) | Listener, Learner, Reader, Teacher: Visualizing the Reading Woman in Hindi-Urdu Print Culture
Shrutakirti Dutta (UChicago) | Bazaar Brouhaha: Battala Woodcuts and Chromolithographs from Colonial Bengal
Lunch: 1-2.30
Session 3: 2.30 – 4
Neelam Srivastava (Newcastle University) | Reading Periodicals in Prison: Gramsci’s Contrapuntal Readings of Italian Literature
Pragya Dhital (University of London) | The anti-imperial optic: political martyrdom and extra-legal testimony in photographs of the Dinshaway executions
End of Conference