Article:
Unruly Images: Representing India in the Calwer Bilder-Tafeln zur Länder- und Völker-Kunde (1883)

dc.creatorBornet, Philippe
dc.date.accessioned2023-05-23T09:43:57Z
dc.date.available2023-05-23T09:43:57Z
dc.date.issued2021
dc.description.abstractThe contribution focuses on a volume published by a German Christian press related to a missionary society in 1883 and offering a visual panorama of all the world’s cultures in 1,690 engravings. Most images were reproductions of original documents that had initially appeared in different editorial contexts, ranging from missionary periodicals to secular travel magazines and British colonial literature. This study examines the message that the volume’s editors wanted to convey: a message presenting the extra-European world as devoid of historical agency, non-Christian religions as false, and the presence of western agents – in particular, missionaries – as providential. Retracing the life story of a few images, I show that some of them communicated these notions better than others. For example, engravings manufactured after photographs were often not as polemical as those made after drawings, for the simple reason of the mediatic characteristics of photography. Complicating the critical reading of the images as simply representing missionary propaganda, I argue that a volume like the one examined here is best understood when placed within a transnational (or connected) history of visual practices.en
dc.identifier.doi10.25364/05.7:2021.2.4
dc.identifier.doihttp://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/19551
dc.identifier.urihttps://www.jrfm.eu/index.php/ojs_jrfm/article/view/261
dc.identifier.urihttps://mediarep.org/handle/doc/20747
dc.languageeng
dc.publisherSchüren
dc.publisher.placeMarburg
dc.relation.isPartOfissn:2617-3697
dc.relation.ispartofseriesJournal for Religion, Film and Media
dc.rightsCreative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 Generic
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
dc.subjectUnruly Imagesen
dc.subjectRepresentionen
dc.subjectIndiaen
dc.subject.ddcddc:300
dc.titleUnruly Images: Representing India in the Calwer Bilder-Tafeln zur Länder- und Völker-Kunde (1883)en
dc.typearticle
dc.type.statuspublishedVersion
dspace.entity.typeArticleen
local.coverpage2023-05-23T12:00:12
local.source.epage86
local.source.issue2
local.source.issueTitleMedia and Religion in (Post)Colonial Societies: Dynamics of Power and Resistance
local.source.spage55
local.source.volume7

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