In the winter of 2013-14, I undertook a series of internships with multiple NGOs in Kolkata, India. Back then I was pursuing undergraduate studies in English at a city college, and belonged to a small group of "well-educated but underemployed individuals" privileged with formal education, male body, confidence, street-smarts and the ability to navigate the contours of Kolkata. Given these characteristics, I worked as a fieldworker and translator for a documentary shoot on street children, while volunteering for an international NGO based in Kolkata. I was tasked with accompanying the filmmakers, journalists and researchers to different locations in the city where the children transacted their daily trade and formed their precarious livelihood. This article is a critical, reflexive exercise of analysing the embodied racialisation of working as a Brown fieldworker for White bodies in a postcolonial setting of Kolkata. It builds on the lived experiences of a Brown man, acting as a fieldworker or fixer or translator, rubbing shoulders with the White Man, while at the same time, the fieldworker is being hawk-eyed or very closely and critically looked at by the Brown Men around him, albeit with periodic interventions (seldom violent), engendering the precarity and price of such association.
This article examines the Philippine Regional Exposition of 1895, held in Manila during the final years of Spanish colonial rule, as a space in which multiple colonial and decolonial futures were imagined. By focusing on the concept of 'futurity', we analyse how Spanish authorities sought to represent the Philippines as a dynamic site of colonial modernity, while exploring how the exposition expressed possibilities for alternative futures. Using a Critical Heritage Studies framework, we demonstrate how the exposition's infrastructure, exhibits, and spatial organisation were curated to project a European future for the archipelago, emphasising technological and cultural innovation. However, this vision coexisted with participants' clear decolonial aspirations, expressed both in intellectual discourses and public spaces. These alternative futures, shaped by Filipino intellectuals and within the context of emerging revolutionary movements, challenge traditional narratives of colonial power and offer new insights into decolonisation in the Philippines. Our analysis of the exposition highlights the importance of exhibitions as sites of contested heritage, where multiple imagined futures intersect. We conclude by arguing that heritage practices in such expositions not only preserved the past, but shaped and articulated complex visions of the immediate future, offering rich ground for further inquiry into coloniality, resistance, and futurity.
This article scrutinizes how the historical and mnemonic narrative about the 'discovery' of Portuguese Guinea was invented, narrated and established publicly as official history, even though the sources and the chronicles of the time do not corroborate, with thorough accuracy, that fact. It explores the commemoration of the Portuguese Guinea Centennial, highlighting the ceremonies carried out in the metropolis and in the colony, the institutional contexts of its production, the cultural technologies engineered to promote the image of the colony, as well as the strategies executed to forge the concept of the 'discovery' of Portuguese Guinea. This article reveals, on one hand, how the Portuguese commemorative colonial enterprise in Africa acted in the invention of imperial historical facts. On the other, it proves that the colonial Portuguese Guinea commemorated in 1946 was not nor did it correspond in historical, geographical and semantic terms to the territory of the West African coast approached by the Portuguese explorers of the fifteenth century. The 'discovery' narrative of so-called Portuguese Guinea was an invention promoted by the Portuguese colonial authorities and scholars who forged the memory of the colony and contributed to influence, even in post-colonial period, the global understanding of that fact.
In der deutschen Touristikindustrie gibt es bisher wenig beachtete koloniale Kontinuitäten: Restaurants und Themenparks, die mit Afrikabildern werben. Die Autorinnen werfen einen Blick auf die Präsenz afrikanischer Sprachen an diesen Orten und liefern eine performative, auf Erfahrung und Embodiment basierende Analyse der Eindrücke, die Tourist*innen dort gewinnen können. Dabei zeigen sie, dass Tourismusforschung und Afrikanistik nicht länger ohne ein vertieftes Verständnis von Kolonialismus als einer im Eigenen wirksamen Machtkonstellation betrieben werden können.
Namibia’s colonial history casts a long shadow over the country’s present. Contemporary authors and artists confront the legacies of German and South African colonial rule and engage creatively with the persistent remnants of the past. In their works, the archive remains both an invaluable and fraught resource for accessing obscured histories. Julia Rensing examines how writers and artists from Namibia and South Africa navigate archival silences, omissions, and power structures to renegotiate historical narratives and address intergenerational trauma. Their creative practices challenge conventional understandings of archives and forms of commemoration, highlighting the diverse experiences that shape Namibian society and memory cultures.
