Reflections on a Complex (and Cosmopolitan) Archive: Postcards and Photography in Early Colonial Uganda, c. 1904-1928 (original) (raw)

This article examines a collection of picture postcards that were published in Uganda between c. 1904 and 1928. Drawing upon recent developments in the anthropology of photography, the article attempts to reconstruct the extended " social archive " of this collection , by exploring the range of relationships through which these image-objects were produced, and through which they have been subsequently circulated and consumed. The approach reveals something of a " concealed " archive of meaning within this collection, one which is indicative both of wider cosmopolitan imaginaries that were at play in the British Empire during this period, and of the official view of the new Uganda colony as an inclusive , even collaborative, social project. A focus on the social agency of the postcards themselves then reveals how these meanings became later " overwritten " , to produce a more recognizable semiotics of colonial representation and power. In a review of the field conducted shortly before his death in 1997, Alfred Gell noted that contemporary writings in the anthropology of art had become preoccupied with aesthetics and, in particular, with the attempt to " define the characteristics of each culture's inherent aesthetic, so that the aesthetic contributions of particular non-Western artists can be correctly evaluated, that is, in relation to their culturally specific aesthetic intentions " (1998: 1–2). While not finding anything wrong with this project per se, Gell argued that the approach was nevertheless too embedded in the