Colonial Visions and Their Rearticulations: Ways of Looking at Early Twentieth-Century Medical Images of Skin Difference in Malawi

summary: This article examines the specific uses and meanings of medical photographs depicting skin color variation produced by Dr. Hugh Stannus Stannus in early twentieth-century colonial Malawi. The sociopolitical environments in which the images were produced and interpreted rendered Black bodies as objects of medical inquiry, and the images stood as evidence for a range of racialized scientific ideas. This article advocates for an analysis of historic photographs such as these that attends to their historic functions, the visceral responses they evoke for the contemporary viewer, as well as the afterlives of the medical images. This leads to new understandings of the relationships between race, colonialism, and medicine in past and present perspectives, including “new ways of seeing” that emerge following rereading of Stannus’s photographs with contemporary concerns. This, in turn, raises questions of how we can ethically study the past and develop approaches of looking at historic images in ways that are sensitive to the violence enacted on the bodies of the colonized.