Dr Xavier Guégan: A visual colonial Anthropophagy

The Department of Historical Sociology, Faculty of Humanities is pleased to invite you to the lecture „A visual colonial Anthropophagy: Photography and public opinion’s reaction to the 1860s-1870s famines in French Algeria and British India“ which will be delivered by Dr Xavier Guégan, University of Winchester, UK.

The lecture is part of the lecture series Historical Sociology Confrontations of the Historical Sociology Department.

Annotation: In the 1860s and 1870s Algeria and India experienced severe waves of famines. Millions of Algerians and Indians suffered and died in the colonial states that were supposedly looking after their new subjects. It has been argued that the causes of these massive human catastrophes were due to the establishment of global economic patterns that had recently changed the nature of local industries and agricultural traditions into cash crop systems orientated towards the metropoles’ economy. The political response, or lack of, to these famines has also been incriminated into what Mike Davis has called a ‘Victorian Holocaust’ in the case of British India. In that period, however, we also see the emergence of modern humanitarian campaigning, that linked undernourished and emaciated victims to ethical concerns and a dehumanisation initiated by modern colonialism. This paper will explore how for the first time the use of photographs and engraving representations of the victims of colonial famines were challenging the public opinion on the rightfulness of the French and British respective presence in Algeria and India. Through this comparative analysis, I will aim to demonstrate the global and transnational cultural and political societal reactions to these human crises that defied the notion of Western modern economic and scientific benefits to the colonial world in the second half of the nineteenth century. I will explore the metaphorical concept of visual colonial anthropophagy mainly through Alfred Sarrault’s, Willoughby Wallace Hooper’s and Lala Deen Dayal’s photographs.

Dr Xavier Guégan is a Senior Lecturer in Colonial and Postcolonial History at the University of Winchester. Dr Guégan researches, publishes and lectures on South Asian history under British colonial rule and North African history under French colonial rule, including imperial culture and ideologies, as well as on violence and anti-colonial resistance. Dr Guégan also has expertise on the correlation between photography and history. He is on the editorial board (Book Review Editor) of Britain and the World, an academic journal published by Edinburgh University Press, which focusses on Britain’s relations with the wider world since the seventeenth century. Dr Xavier Guégan is also the convenor of the Modern History Research Centre, based at the Department of History at the University of Winchester.