Short Abstract

This interdisciplinary panel exposed how colonial and postcolonial violence in Africa has been visualised, narrated and remembered, asking how images, art and life writing shape contested histories of suffering, legitimacy, memory and historical authority.

Long Abstract

This interdisciplinary panel, rooted in historical approaches, examines how colonial and postcolonial state violence in Africa has been visualised, narrated, and remembered across photography, visual art, life writing, and other forms of testimony. Violence itself resists a single lens: the colonial archive's photographic record, the artist's reimagining of atrocity, and the participant's memoir each produce distinct, sometimes contradictory, accounts of the same historical rupture. The panel asks how representations of violence construct particular narratives of suffering, responsibility, legitimacy, and historical authority.

We are particularly interested in the afterlives of colonial violence and how images, memoirs, and testimonies have been reused, reinterpreted, and contested across different political moments. How have former combatants, victims, collaborators, colonial officials, artists and subsequent generations sought to claim ownership over the past? How have visual and autobiographical forms reinforced, complicated, or challenged official histories of conquest, extraction, and repression? And how contemporary artists and writers rework images and stories to unsettle their original evidentiary claims.

Particular attention will be paid to questions of positionality and voice: who is permitted to depict suffering, for what audience, and with what ethical stakes? We welcome papers on archival photography and its afterlives, war art and memorialisation, testimonial and autobiographical writing, and contested memories of violence. By bringing historians into conversation with art historians, literary scholars, and visual culture specialists, this panel aims to treat representation itself as a site of power, asking not just what violence looked like, but who controlled its telling, then and now.

Propose paper