Imagined pasts: photography, colonialism, and archives

This special section, with texts by six researchers, three of whom are also the volume’s editors, spans diverse geographical spaces – Portugal, Angola, São Tomé and Príncipe, Indonesia, and the Netherlands – and a long chronology from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The authors employ diverse methodologies to examine the meanings and uses of photographic images and archives within the Portuguese and Dutch colonial contexts, across religion, medicine, state bureaucracy, independence wars, ethnology, and private and commercial uses. Most contributions focus on specific archival collections or on tracing photographic materials dispersed across different repositories. Together, they examine how photographic images are produced, circulated, and revisited, and how they shape intimate, historical, and political understandings of the colonial past. “Imagining” – the play between image and imagining that inspired our title – reminds us that the past is always approached from the present, even as the present itself becomes history.