CISH 2026
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Racialized Images: Historical, Archival and Artist Interventions in Problematic Practices

  • Date

    II. Thursday, 27.08.2026, 08:30-10:30

  • Location
    House 3 - SR224
  • Theme
    D - (Overcoming) Marginalization, Bias and Inequality in Historiography

Abstract

For historians of race and racial ideas in the nineteenth and twentieth century, photographs and videography of individuals and groups that were meant to show racial types are aplenty. These photographs were taken in a variety of contexts – within studios or while conducting anthropological research; for private, public or scholarly purposes – and were then circulated and used as evidence of ‘race’ (Lee 2020; Bautze 2020). This panel explores these two related strands of historical research, the history of ideas of race and the history of photography and moving images, to investigate how photographs and audiovisual media were constructed as evidence of racial types and the suppression and elision of alternate narratives that would complicate the reading of the photograph. Racialized images are not merely something stuck in the past, but continue to influence current visual culture through the photographs, videos and their captions being made available through archival institutions and in their use by artists, encouraging a renewed circulation of these images (see Supartono and Moschovi 2020). The panel speakers will investigate how these historical images came into being as evidence of racial types as well as how current historians, archivists and artists deal with this legacy while making such images available to the public.

Convenor

  • Sandra Khor Manickam (Erasmus University Rotterdam)

Panelists

  • Sandra Khor Manickam (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
  • Charlotte Bruns (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
  • Lise Zurné (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
  • Chiel Rozendaal (Erasmus University Rotterdam)

Papers

  • Race and the photographic archive: a short history of racialized photography in British Malaya and Malaysia

    Sandra Khor Manickam

  • Contemporary approaches of contextualising racialized photography in photographic archives and exhibitions

    Charlotte Bruns

  • Humanizing the War of Independence: Dutch government journalists and the visual management’ of information, 1945-1949

    Lise Zurné

  • Racialized Labor in the Rural South: Sharecropping in the Farm Security Administration Photographic Archive (1937–1943)

    Chiel Rozendaal