German Colonialism in Africa and its Legacies - (Visual Cultures and German Contexts) by Itohan Osayimwese (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

German Colonialism in Africa and its Legacies provides welcome histories of German colonial art, architecture and visual culture while offering ground-breaking analyses of how contemporary and historic African and German stakeholders used such materials to forward their own agendas.
Steven Nelson, Dean, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, USA

This book produces a unique and highly informative understanding of the relationship between colonial architecture and urbanism. It persuasively demonstrates how architecture and the visual arts in Germany relied on the innate relationship between architecture, space, and race at the intersection of politics and economics.
- Volker Langbehn, Professor of German in the Department of Modern Languages and Literature, San Francisco State University, USA

About the Author

Itohan Osayimwese is Associate Professor of History of Art & Architecture at Brown University, USA