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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the genealogy of the term "punitive expedition" before considering the scale of this particular form of colonial violence in German colonial contexts in Africa. From this macro-history, an analysis of the use of strikethrough as a tool for colonial censorship follows.

Paper long abstract:

The debate on restitution of African cultural heritage has brought greater attention to the violent colonial pasts, especially to the dispatch of so-called "punitive" expeditions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Expanding knowledge on the genealogy of this particularly brutal form of military campaign, this article explores the historical semantics of the German term ‘Strafexpedition’ and its contextual use in archives of militarist colonial propaganda at the time, namely military reports to the Colonial Department of the Foreign Office and its official publication, the Deutsches Kolonialblatt. Through a content analysis of the occurrence of the term, this study aims to bridge the fields of semantics and postcolonial historiography and lay the groundwork for a macro-history of events of spoliation and plunder in German colonial contexts. Besides, these colonial archives are fraught with the use of strikethrough, a tool for censorship that demonstrates that clerks and administrators were well-aware that unfiltered military reports could generate public outrage in the metropole. By examining different examples of such blatant erasure, I argue that this apparatus of propaganda participated in fuelling colonial amnesia and apahasia until today. The paper ends by discussing this textual cancelling technique for the future of critical historiographies of colonial violence.