A transient presence: black visitors and sojourners in Imperial Germany, 1884-1914

The onset of German colonial rule in Africa brought increasing numbers of Black men and women to Germany. Pre-1914 the vast majority of these Africans can best be described as visitors or sojourners and the Black population as a whole was a transient one. This makes recovering their presence in the archival record exceptionally difficult and it is not surprising that the existing historiography almost exclusively focuses on individual biographies of well documented lives. Through utilising a number of newly digitised archival materials, particularly the Hamburg Passenger Lists, this article draws upon a database with information on 1092 individuals from sub-Saharan Africa who spent time in Germany over the period 1884-1914 in order to add considerable bread and depth to our understanding of the Black presence as a whole. It provides increasing empirical detail about the make-up and character of this fluid population - where visitors came from, why they came to Germany, their age on arrival - as well as more accurate detail on the temporal and, to a lesser extent, spatial distribution of visitors

The Romanticized Māori – Māori Portraits on Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Postcards and Photographs

In New Zealand, daguerrotypes since the 1850s and later on wet-plate photography already had Māori portraiture as an important motif. The 1860s saw a dramatic rise in cartes de visite, and since the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, photos and postcards representing Māori men, women and children boomed. Mainly produced by Pākehā (European settler) photographers for a Pākehā audience, these portraits depicted Māori in a stereotypical way which also characterised photography on the Pacific Islands of the time: often propped with emblematic weapons or jewellery, men were staged as fierce warriors, women either as innocent belles or, like men, as very old, often with the allusion of a ‘dying race’. New Zealand tourism, especially in the Rotorua area with its thermal attractions, was thriving by the 1890s and brought along a souvenir production which already proved so large and lucrative that it was partly outsourced to companies in Germany. Cartes de visite and postcards were sent overseas in large numbers, evidence for 1909 shows a peak of nine million cards posted from New Zealand. Their impact as a form of popular media must have been immense, creating and perpetuating stereotyped images of Māori people in Aotearoa (the Māori name for New Zealand) and all over the Western world. However, the 1890s brought an increasing acceptance and appropriation of photographs by Māori people themselves. Especially in the tangi mourning ceremonies, photos of the deceased took a prominent part. Furthermore, the photos of important ancestors were given their place in the whare whakairo meeting houses

»From Samoa with Love? Samoa-Völkerschauen im Deutschen Kaiserreich. Eine Spurensuche«

Große Teile der Samoa-Sammlung des Münchner Museums Fünf Kontinente stammen aus dem Umfeld von Völkerschauen. Als Rekruteure und Impresarios fungierten die Brüder Marquardt, die zugleich um 1900 einen schwunghaften Handel mit Ethnographica betrieben. Ein am Museum initiiertes Forschungsprojekt widmete sich der detaillierten Rekonstruktion dieser Samoa- Völkerschauen und der von den Marquardts erworbenen Sammlungen. Neben der Auswertung hiesiger Archivalien stand dabei besonders die Erschließung samoanischer Schriftquellen und mündlicher Überlieferungen im Zentrum der Untersuchung. Zeitgenössische samoanische Zeugnisse und Interviews mit Nachfahren der Völkerschau-Reisenden eröffneten Perspektiven und historisch-kulturelle Facetten, die in den europäischen Quellen völlig fehlen. Die Herausforderungen der aus dem Projekt resultierenden Ausstellung sind ebenfalls Thema dieses Beitrags: die Zusammenführung europäischer und samoanischer Perspektiven, die Gewichtung konkurrierender samoanischer Stimmen und die symbolische Anerkennung kolonialen Unrechts

Switzerland and 'Colonialism without Colonies'. Reflections on the Status of Colonial Outsiders.

In this essay the theoretical focus of postcolonial theory has been shifted from the cultures and societies of former formal colonies to those countries that have an explicit self-understanding as an outsider within the European colonial power constellation. Using the example of Switzerland, it analyses the presence and perseverance of colonial structures and power relations in a country that has never been regarded as or understood itself as an official colonial power. In a first step, we compare present debates on colonialism in Switzerland with those in neighbouring countries, i.e. France, Germany, Italy and Austria. In a second step, we trace previous research that postulates a link between Switzerland and colonialism, and apply the concept of ‘colonialism without colonies’, which, in contrast, engages with methods and themes that have emerged from postcolonial studies. Finally, we present a specific case study on ‘Swiss commodity racism’ in order to elucidate the concept ‘colonialism without colonies’