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This session will address Africa’s colonial-era visual culture. The four papers will explore objects and images that were produced by—and often in spite of—the asymmetrical power dynamics of European colonialism in Africa, using examples from a variety of geographic regions and colonial regimes. The research presented here approaches colonial contexts through a wide variety of media: architecture and photography, weavings and patronage, headrests and mass media, textiles and technology. The authors also address an array of colonial intersections: France in West Africa; North Africa in France, Belgium in Congo, and the Apartheid system’s colonization of majority South Africa from within. In order to account for the reach of imperial structures, the panel expands the field of Africa’s colonial visual culture beyond objects produced in Africa and beyond the conventional temporal limits of modern colonial empires. Our papers take up the challenge of elucidating not just African visual culture produced incolonial settings, but the nuances of visual culture produced throughthe asymmetrical power structures of European imperialism in Africa. Several of the papers address the unexamined creativity of African actors in colonial contexts, who responded to the cultural transformations imposed by administrators, military officials, and others with innovations, adaptations, and subtle forms of resistance.