ABSTRACT
Over the past decade, the study of Germany’s colonial past has experienced a dramatic transformation in its scope of inquiry. Infl uenced by new theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of race, nationalism, and globalization, these new studies are reevaluating and redefi ning the parameters within which to understand German colonialism.1 Despite the signifi cant changes in the study of Germany’s imperial ambitions, however, research has almost completely neglected the history of its visual representation. While Anglophone research has long experienced what has been termed the pictorial or visual turn,2 scholars of visual culture studies pertaining to German history-and especially German colonialism-have hardly considered, often derided as unworthy of attention, or simply dismissed images as irrelevant for understanding the history of German colonialism.3 Until the end of the 1990s, scholars of German history on either side of the Atlantic used images primarily as mere supplements to a more important textual reference, and treated them like illustrative quotations, instead of perceiving them as objects that signify histories of their own.4 Research subordinated visuality to textuality, a distinction grounded and empirically validated by reference to documents and sources from the privileged site of the archive.5
