Tanya Agathocleous<\/b><\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/span>\u201cA Unique Gift to American Art\u201d: 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\u2019s African Times and Orient Review<\/span><\/i> (1912-1920) and Marcus Garvey\u2019s <\/span>The Negro World<\/span><\/i> (1914-1933). After looking at how layout in these periodicals contributed to a form of reading I call \u201ccritical compression,\u201d 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 <\/span>The Negro World<\/span><\/i> and the <\/span>New Pittsburgh Courier<\/span><\/i>. Both editors, I will show, drew attention to race as performance and thus to their editorial practice as a kind of artistic anti-racism. <\/span>For example, in an article by Mudgal entitled \u201cA Unique Gift to American Art,\u201d he profiles the work of<\/span> Maurice Hunter, a Bantu man who worked as an artist\u2019s model known as the \u201cMan of 1000 Faces.\u201d Mudgal is enamored of Hunter\u2019s 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\u2014the labor and artistry of the artist\u2019s model\u2014Mudgal\u2019s 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\u2019s article, however, is that Hunter doesn\u2019t 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Sangeeta Bhagawati<\/b> 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 <\/span>Cartoon<\/span><\/i>\u2019s 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 <\/span>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 <\/span>Cartoon<\/span><\/i> was further impacted by editor Pulak Gogoi’s personal financial crisis and the absence offunding bodies. By studying <\/span>Cartoon<\/span><\/i> 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 <\/span>Cartoon<\/span><\/i>‘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 <\/span>Cartoon<\/span><\/i> deserve attention as sites where the specific material, economic, and technical conditions of print production shaped political critique in forms beyond <\/span><\/p>\n text alone.<\/span><\/p>\n Kate Cowcher<\/b> Mar\u00eda Jos\u00e9 Delpiano K. 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 20<\/span>th<\/span> century. Thus, the underlying question is how Edwards McClure\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Sergio Delgado Moya<\/b> [1]<\/span> Advertisement, <\/span>Caledonian Mercury and the Edinburgh Evening Courant<\/span><\/i> (December 10, 1768).<\/span><\/p>\n The amateur photographers are pressing the buttons of their kodaks. They are waiting for the last condemned to death, the brigand.<\/span> 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, <\/span>The Graphic<\/span><\/i>. 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Kate Highman<\/b> 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 \u2018visual poetics\u2019 — a term I take from Johanna Drucker. Focussing on Putuma\u2019s book <\/span>Collective Amnesia <\/span><\/i>(2017) and Mohale\u2019s <\/span>Everything Is A Deathly Flower <\/span><\/i>(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 \u2018print performance\u2019 (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 \u2018the colonial book\u2019 and \u2018Literature with a capital L\u2019 have come to be raced in South Africa. After all, as scholars from WEB du Bois onwards have argued, \u2018race\u2019 is imbricated in the field of visual culture, and print culture too is part of visual culture (Shawn Michelle Smith).<\/span><\/p>\n Finally, with reference to the conference focus on \u2018transfers and crossings\u2019, I argue that both collections situate themselves, and the book as historical artefact more generally, as what Leigh Star describes as \u2018boundary objects\u2019 \u2013 sites of cultural and interpretive contestations. Mohale opens her acknowledgements page with the statement that \u2018this book is made and held by many hands\u2019, drawing our attention to the book as historical, human artefact and one that continues to be \u2018held\u2019 and remade by readers. Putuma\u2019s opening poem \u2018Storytelling\u2019 conjoins orature and the written word, blurring their supposedly binary demarcation through visual strategies that enable us to reconsider the bounds of \u2018the colonial book\u2019. Together, these collections allow us to see \u2018the book\u2019\u00a0 as a place of transfer and crossings where new cultural authorities are being scripted.<\/span><\/p>\n Paulo Lemos Horta 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 <\/span>which these novels mirror, echo and call out specific beats in Sirk’s <\/span>Imitation of Life<\/span><\/i> or Kazan’s <\/span>Pinky<\/span><\/i>: 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 <\/span>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 <\/span>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.<\/span><\/p>\n Khalid Lyamlahy <\/b>In 1966, a group of Moroccan poets and artists founded <\/span>Souffles-Anfas<\/span><\/i>, 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 <\/span>Souffles-Anfas<\/span><\/i> (1966-1972), several journals, such as <\/span>Lamalif <\/span><\/i>(1966-1988), <\/span>Int\u00e9gral<\/span><\/i> (1971-1977), <\/span>Aqlam<\/span><\/i> (1964-1982), and <\/span>Al-Thaqafa al-Jadida<\/span><\/i> (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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Jo McDonagh and Jonathan Sachs<\/b> This paper builds on our previous discussion (in Paris, 2025) of the visual paratexts of Oscar Wilde\u2019s story, \u201cThe Birthday of the Infanta\u201d. \u00a0 The first book edition of the story, in Wilde\u2019s collection <\/span>The House of Pomegranates <\/span><\/i>(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\u2019s (mainly decorative) wood cuts remain strongly visible in editions preserved in library and private collections, Shannon\u2019s (more discursive) lithographs have faded to the extent that today one can barely see them.\u00a0 Yet the latter are images that portray the Spanish imperial court, which is the setting for the story.\u00a0 Indeed, the lithographs evoke Vel\u00e1zquez\u2019s portraits from the seventeenth century, including \u2018Las Meninas\u2019 (1656), which are directly referenced by Wilde.\u00a0 Curiously and coincidentally, the fade of the lithograph seems appropriate:\u00a0 the idea that the Spanish empire faded in its glory had been in circulation through the century – most prominently articulated in Byron\u2019s satirical epic and critique of empires, <\/span>Don Juan<\/span><\/i>\u00a0 (1819-24).<\/span> The fade of the lithograph \u2013 a technology which in the 1820s was relatively new, and which Tom Young calls a “technological force driving nineteenth-century globalization\u201d –<\/span> comes to reflect and even enhance a strand of meaning in Wilde\u2019s 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).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/b><\/p>\n
\n<\/b>Visual Satire, Multilingual Publics: <\/b>Cartoon<\/i><\/b> (1968), a Periodical from North-East India
\n<\/b>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 <\/span>Cartoon<\/span><\/i>, and it focused on gag and editorial cartoons, comic strips, visual caricatures, and satirical writings by prominent Assamese authors of the time. During <\/span>Cartoon<\/span><\/i>‘s active period, the authority of the <\/span>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 <\/span>Cartoon<\/span><\/i> as a neglected archive of visual print culture in <\/span>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. <\/span>Cartoon<\/span><\/i> 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\u2019s visual material was undeniably influenced by popular Bengali magazines like the <\/span>Anandabazar Patrika<\/span><\/i> (1922).<\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/b>“Hot Plates and Turpentine”: Modernist Printmaking In and Beyond Independent Uganda
\n<\/b>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\u2019s growing art student population. Despite several notable mishaps\u2013including, for example, the young artist Berlings L. Kaunda later recalling a trip to sick bay after burning his fingers on the acid\u2013modernist printmaking flourished in the early years of Ugandan independence. As a soon-central component of the undergraduate degree, many of Makerere\u2019s 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 <\/span>Roho <\/span><\/i>and <\/span>Transition<\/span><\/i>. The first graphic cover of the latter, for example, featured Dorothy Sekkade\u2019s print, <\/span>Death<\/span><\/i>, in 1963. <\/span>Transition <\/span><\/i>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\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/b>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.
\n<\/b>In 1905, a young Agust\u00edn Edwards McClure founded one of the most prominent publishing initiatives of 20<\/span>th<\/span> 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 20<\/span>th<\/span> century, Zig-Zag became the leading enterprise in its field, operating strictly under an industrial, capitalist, and mass-consumption logic.<\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/b>Tearing It Apart, Burning Right Through It: John M. Valadez Goes to Work on the <\/b>Encyclopedia
\n<\/i><\/b>The <\/span>Encyclopedia Britannica<\/span><\/i> \u2013 the oldest universalist compendium of \u201cACCURATE DEFINITIONS AND EXPLANATIONS, of all the Terms as they occur in the Order of the Alphabet\u201d<\/span>[1]<\/span> \u2013 is nothing if not an exercise in \u201cgetting it together\u201d: getting it <\/span>all<\/span><\/i> together, all the facts and figures that, in the eyes of the 18<\/span>th<\/span> century \u201csociety of gentlemen in Scotland\u201d who published it, a man of reason needs to masterfully understand the world. A few decades into the 20<\/span>th<\/span> 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 <\/span>Britannica Book of the Year<\/span><\/i>from 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 \u201cbook of moments,\u201d 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\u2019s <\/span>Book of Moments<\/span><\/i> as potent compendium of the many and contradictory transfers and crossings a subject like Valadez might perform in the face of the <\/span>Encyclopedia<\/span><\/i>\u2019s constitutive exclusions.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nPragya Dhital<\/b>
\n<\/b>The Anti-Imperial Optic: Political Martyrdom and Extra-legal Testimony in Photographs of the Dinshaway Executions\u00a0<\/b><\/span><\/h1>\n
\n<\/span>Atrocities of justice under British rule in Egypt<\/span><\/i>, Wilfrid Blunt, 1906.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/b>Remaking \u2018the Colonial Book\u2019: Visual Poetics in Contemporary Writing from South Africa\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n
\n<\/b>Passing Strange: Parables of Assimilation from Film to Text<\/b><\/p>\n
\n<\/b>Retracing Moroccan Itineraries: The Visual Legacies and Material Afterlives of <\/b>Souffles-Anfas<\/i><\/b> & Other Journals<\/b><\/p>\n
\n<\/b>Fading: Empire, Lithography, and the Wash of History<\/b><\/p>\n