Abstract

This dissertation investigates the deployment in Africa, within specific colonial contexts, of forms of visual representation such as photographies and cartographies from around 1880 to 1940. During the most intense phase of the European "Scramble for Africa" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Africa was configured through a multiplicity of European visual representations to an unprecedented degree. ;Analysis focuses, in large part, on three fragmentary archives---sets of photographs from quite disparate itineraries in Africa , which were later disseminated in various forms to diverse audiences in England and the USA. Elements of these archives are currently located in collections at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY, in the Zimbabwe National Archives in Harare, Zimbabwe, and in the British Museum and Royal Geographical Society in London, England, as well as elsewhere. They are re-read here in order to elucidate both their initial stagings and the discursive formations through which they were later invested with meaning in Africa and elsewhere