Visual Cultures of Empire: India and Australia, 1860-1940

By analysing visual material ranging from caricatures, photographs, propaganda posters, and postcards from late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century colonial Australia and India, this thesis considers the relations and practices of looking and looking back, with intersectional themes of race, gender, domesticity forming the matrix of its analysis. It grounds itself in imperial, South Asian and Australian histories, of which there is a surprising lack of scholarship. Working both to understand these images in their original contexts and to interrogate their salience today with support from the traditional written archive, the project documents an imperial visual narrative that invented, constructed, and repeated various symbols and icons. In using a shared framework for case study analysis, the thesis argues that the images from these two colonies formed a part of the transcolonial networks of colonial image-making that crossed borders, imaginary and real, and that can be used to understand the politics of representation, and changing notions of the body, subjectivity, and identity in these colonies, broadly speaking. This research is based entirely on images that have been digitised — the recent pandemic offered a unique opportunity to make a methodological intervention in discussing the implications of using mobile digital images of colonialism for contemporary transcolonial historical scholarship. It also carefully considers the afterlife of these digital images that reflect (post)colonial visualities as they are reclaimed and re-assessed today by indigenous artists. Overall, the thesis establishes the capaciousness of visual culture as a fertile and productive field of study, and contributes to scholarship in colonial visual histories, transnational histories, and methodologies of working with digitised visual sources.