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Visual Cultures of Postcolonial Print: Materials\/Archives, Technologies, Transfers<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Organized by Josephine McDonagh and Laetitia Zecchini in the framework of the International Research Network on Postcolonial Print Cultures<\/a><\/p>\n November 5-6, 2026 This conference will explore the interplay between the materiality of print and the various media associated with visuality.\u00a0 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. \u00a0In 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 \u201creading experience\u201d.\u00a0 But how is this visual print culture produced, circulated and consumed?\u00a0\u00a0 What conditions of production shape its particular forms?\u00a0\u00a0 What technologies have determined the way print culture looks and the purposes it serves?\u00a0 How have these visual print forms been studied \u2013 and how should we study them now?<\/p>\n We invite papers on all aspects of the visual print cultures of the postcolonial world.\u00a0\u00a0 We are especially interested in the idea of transfers and crossings<\/strong>.\u00a0 By this we mean the transfer of techniques of representation between media \u2013 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.\u00a0 But we are also interested in other kinds of transfers \u2013 including the transfers that occur when people, things and ideas travel.\u00a0 How have visual or hybrid cultures of print & media moved in different colonial and post-colonial contexts? \u00a0Through what means, intermediaries and technologies? \u00a0And for what purposes? \u00a0How have they adapted in new local conditions and contexts?\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 What methods do we need to examine the specificities of postcolonial print culture?\u00a0\u00a0 How do we conceptualize the many kinds of mixtures that constitute this mixture (e.g. we are suggesting \u201ctransfers\u201d is an appropriate metaphor, but is it?\u00a0\u00a0 What are its possibilities and limits?)\u00a0 And how do we theorise what happens when these materials move from their \u201cnatural\u201d milieus to an archive, a book, an institution, or a new medium or platform?\u00a0\u00a0 And what happens when it moves from an informal \u201carchive\u201d to be the focus of the scholarly gaze, when things get re-signified and also erased or lost?<\/p>\n The conference builds on the workshop \u201cExhibition-making, Museography and the textual\/visual interaction\u201d<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n Day 1 \u2013 Thursday, Nov 5, 2026<\/strong><\/p>\n Session 1: 9.30 – 10.45 | Chair: Raji Sunder Rajan<\/p>\n Introduction –<\/strong> Jo McDonagh and Laetitia Zecchini<\/p>\n Paulo Lemos Horta (NYU Abu Dhabi) | <\/strong>Passing Strange: Parables of Assimilation from Film to Text<\/p>\n Mar\u00eda Jos\u00e9 Delpiano K. (Universidad Alberto Hurtado) | <\/strong>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.<\/p>\n Coffee: 10.45 – 11 <\/em><\/p>\n Session 2: 11.00 – 12.30 | Chair: Ghenwa Hayek (UChicago)<\/p>\n Khalid Lyamlahy (UChicago) | <\/strong>Retracing Moroccan Itineraries: The Visual Legacies and Material Afterlives of Souffles-Anfas<\/em> & Other Journals<\/p>\n Kate Cowcher (University of St Andrews) | <\/strong>“Hot Plates and Turpentine”: Modernist Printmaking in and Beyond Independent Uganda<\/p>\n Laetitia Zecchini (CNRS-UChicago) | <\/strong>Taking Playfulness Seriously: Doodles, Marginalia, and Visual-Textual Traffics in the Archives of Indian Modernism<\/p>\n Lunch: 1-2.30<\/em><\/p>\n Session 3: 2.30 \u2013 4 | Chair: Lynda Nead (Courtauld Institute of Art)<\/p>\n Tanya Agathocleous (CUNY) | <\/strong>\u00a0\u201cA Unique Gift to American Art\u201d: Race as Art in Black Internationalist Newspapers<\/p>\n Sergio Delgado Moya (UChicago) | <\/strong>Tearing It Apart, Burning Right Through It: John M. Valadez Goes to Work on the Encyclopedia <\/em><\/p>\n Vania Montgomery (University of London) | <\/strong>Found Matter: Faces, Figures, and Bodies Reprinted by Eugenio Dittborn<\/p>\n Kate Highman (University of Cape Town) \u00a0| <\/strong>Remaking \u2018the Colonial Book\u2019: Visual Poetics in Contemporary Writing from South Africa<\/p>\n Exhibition and Drinks: 4.30-6<\/em><\/p>\n Day 2 \u2013 <\/strong>Friday, Nov 6, 2026<\/strong><\/p>\n Session 1 (Zoom): 9.45 -11 | Chair: Toral Gajarawala (NYU)<\/p>\n Sangeeta Bhagawati (King\u2019s College) | <\/strong>Visual Satire, Multilingual Publics: Cartoon<\/em> (1968), a Periodical from North-East India<\/p>\n Eve Tignol (CNRS) | <\/strong>Reading \u201cin place\u201d: Visual and Textual Entanglements in Colonial Indian Children\u2019s Periodicals<\/p>\n Coffee: 11 \u2013 11.15<\/em><\/p>\n Session 2: 11.15 – 12.45 | Chair: Toraj Gajarawala (NYU)<\/p>\n Jo McDonagh (UChicago) and Jonathan Sachs (Concordia University) | <\/strong>Fading: Empire, Lithography, and the Wash of History<\/p>\n Ulrike Stark (UChicago) | <\/strong>Listener, Learner, Reader, Teacher: Visualizing the Reading Woman in Hindi-Urdu Print Culture<\/p>\n Shrutakirti Dutta (UChicago) | <\/strong>Bazaar Brouhaha: Battala<\/em> Woodcuts and Chromolithographs from Colonial Bengal<\/p>\n Lunch: 1-2.30<\/em><\/p>\n Session 3: 2.30 \u2013 4<\/p>\n Neelam Srivastava (Newcastle University) | <\/strong>Reading Periodicals in Prison: Gramsci\u2019s Contrapuntal Readings of Italian Literature<\/p>\n Pragya Dhital (University of London) | <\/strong>The anti-imperial optic: political martyrdom and extra-legal testimony in photographs of the Dinshaway executions<\/p>\n End of Conference<\/strong><\/p>\n 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 … Continue reading Chicago | Nov 5-6, 2026<\/span>
\nFranke Institute, University of Chicago
\n<\/strong>Program below.<\/strong><\/p>\n
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