FROM ORIENTS AND AFRICAS: COLONIAL VISUALITIES IN THE IMAGES OF THE POSTCARDS OF THE AUGUSTO OLIVEIRA COLLECTION

Abstract

Between the years of 1906 and 1908, the deltiologist Augusto de Oliveira received more than 300 postcards sent from different parts of the world, from Cairo to Tokyo. Illustrated with photographs of “types” and “landscapes”, these postcards are records of an age immersed in a regime of visuality marked by the technical reproducibility of the image and by European colonialism in Africa and Asia. Based on contemporary studies of Visual Culture and post-colonial readings, the research on this abundant iconographic material opens up new analytical windows for thinking about how the cult of the exotic and the racialized episteme of the time have informed perceptions and produced transnational views about the “Other”.