Unnatural Disasters in the Long 19th Century

Between 1876 and 1902, the Global South faced three massive famines that left over ten million
dead. Historians have long referred to these as “El Niño famines”—droughts resulting from the
natural rise and fall of ocean temperatures. In Late Victorian Holocausts, historian Mike Davis
argues that these famines not only coincided with, but were actually the direct result of, the
introduction of colonial capitalism in the Global South. British photographer Willoughby Wallace
Hooper documented one of these famines in unflinching images of the emaciated bodies of
people in “relief camps.” The commercial publication of these images in Britain reveals how the
commercial exploitation of famine victims through the colonizer’s camera mirrors the economic
mechanisms to which Davis attributes such “natural” disasters.

The purpose of this panel is to investigate the visual culture of other “natural” disasters in the
long nineteenth century. What do such images, particularly of and about marginalized communities,
reveal about the ways in which human and environmental destruction have been “naturalized” in
historical narratives? How do images conceal or reveal the impact that systems of oppression
and extraction have on landscapes and their inhabitants? From Käthe Kollwitz’s haunting
Weavers’ Revolt cycle to Winslow Homer’s anodyne Bahamian watercolors, this panel
welcomes papers with any geographic or material focus.