Transnationalism of French Colonial and Post-Colonial Visual Culture

France was the second-largest colonial Empire after the British Empire. While a plethora of research has been conducted on visual culture in the latter, few studies have focused on visual culture in the French Empire. Two recent books, Visualizing Empire: Africa, Europe, and the Politics of Representation and The Portrait and the Colonial Imaginary: Photography between France and Africa, 1900–1939, highlight the emphasis on the African continent when dealing with French colonization. In contrast, Asia was part of the “colonial imaginary,” as attested by the multiple representations of Angkor Wat, which became the symbol of the French Empire during the 1931 Paris International Colonial Exhibition.

To go beyond a siloed understanding of the French Empire's practices and visual cultures, more research needs to be conducted on the interactions between its diverse territories across continents. Contemporary artists, such as Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn, with the 2019 video installation The Specter of Ancestors Becoming, are going in such direction in dealing with colonial subjects and colonization’s aftermath in Senegal and Vietnam. To develop a more complex understanding of the artistic production within the French Empire and its postcolonial legacies, this session seeks to emphasize the transnationalism and cross-cultural artistic exchanges between its diverse territories from the nineteenth century to the present. Presentations dealing with interactions between Asia, the Caribbeans, the Pacific, Africa, and Europe within the French Empire or between different Empires are solicited.