Postcards and Colonialism

In class, we looked at an article called  “Filth in the Wrong People’s Hands: Postcards and the Expansion of Pornography in Britain and the Atlantic World, 1880-1914". This discussed the way that postcards both enforced and worked against colonial hegemonies. I found an interesting article that explores this topic in a more accessible way, which I will link below.

Here are some of the highlights:

"European colonialism relied on the idea that cultures and ethnicities could be hierarchically categorized, with white Westerners at the top. This belief justified the eradication of “inferior” peoples for the greater good of European evolvement, but also ushered the belief that it was the moral duty of colonists to educate or “uplift” the cultures that already lived in newly conquered colonies, much like a parent would a child."

"Since conquering colonies was one of the ways in which European countries could display their national power and superiority, postcards were also used to brag about the specific colonies they “owned”. These postcards often included maps and images unique to the colonies.

Reminiscent of the typical tourist cards we send today, they were carefully drawn collages of scenery, people and maps of the colony in question."

Let's compare these pieces to some of the postcards from our reading:

Messy Nessy's posts explains that "Although some postcards tried to pass as subjective photographs of native women as they “could be found in the colonies”, these images were typically saturated with the stereotype of women from African and Asian cultures as highly sexual and exotic." The above images from class also support this idea that colonizers tried to portray women from African and Asian countries as highly sexual. Messy Nessy has a few examples of these types of postcards as well: 

View more postcards at the Messy Nessy blog: http://www.messynessychic.com/2015/06/11/greetings-from-the-colonies-postcards-of-a-shameful-past/