Germany developed a large colonial empire over the last thirty years of
the 19th century, spanning regions of the west coast of Africa to its
east coast and beyond. Largely forgotten for many years, recent intense
debates about Africa's cultural heritage in European museums have
brought this period of African and German history back into the
spotlight.
German Colonialism in Africa and its Legacies brings much-needed
context to these debates, exploring perspectives on the architecture,
art, urbanism, and visual culture of German colonialism in Africa, and
its legacies in postcolonial and present-day Namibia, Cameroon, and
Germany.
The first in-depth exploration of the designed and visual aspects of
German colonialism, the book presents a series of essays combining
formal analyses of painting, photography, performance art, buildings,
and space with the discourse analysis approach associated with
postcolonial theory. Covering the entire period from the build-up to
colonialism in the early-19th century to the present, subjects covered
range from late-19th-century German colonial paintings of African
landscapes and people to German land appropriation through planning and
architectural mechanisms, and from indigenous African responses to
colonial architecture, to explorations of the legacies of German
colonialism by contemporary artists today.
This powerful and revealing collection of essays will encourage new
research on this under-explored topic, and demonstrate the importance of
historical research to the present, especially with regards to ongoing
debates about the presence of material legacies of colonialism in
Western culture, museum collections, and immigration policies.
