This special section, with texts by six researchers, three of whom are also the volume’s editors, spans diverse geographical spaces – Portugal, Angola, São Tomé and Príncipe, Indonesia, and the Netherlands – and a long chronology from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The authors employ diverse methodologies to examine the meanings and uses of photographic images and archives within the Portuguese and Dutch colonial contexts, across religion, medicine, state bureaucracy, independence wars, ethnology, and private and commercial uses. Most contributions focus on specific archival collections or on tracing photographic materials dispersed across different repositories. Together, they examine how photographic images are produced, circulated, and revisited, and how they shape intimate, historical, and political understandings of the colonial past. “Imagining” – the play between image and imagining that inspired our title – reminds us that the past is always approached from the present, even as the present itself becomes history.
This paper examines the life narratives by and about queer youth in Sweden and Switzerland through the lens of scholarship on queer temporality. The analysis focuses on two questions: Firstly, how do queer youth narrate their childhood (past) and adolescence (present), and how do they imagine their adulthood (future)? Secondly, how do these narratives stick to or challenge heteronormative modes of narration such as progress, linearity, and teleology? We therefore analyzed interviews with queer youth in Sweden (N = 27), conducted between 2022 and 2023, and texts from the queer youth magazine Milchbüechli (N = 22) in Switzerland, published between 2017 and 2023. The results from the analysis of the queer youth magazine Milchbüechli reveal that queer youth subcultures use their own shared tropes and stages to construct life narratives from childhood to adolescence. These queer life narratives begin with the experience of being “out of time,” and are followed by a turning point that leads to the “death of the straight life” and end in pride. The coming-out narratives from the interviews suggest greater complexity than the linear trajectory from repression to pride found in issues of the magazine Milchbüechli: Coming-out is narrated as a lifelong process, as unnecessary, or as impossible. The visions of the future articulated in the interviews often stick to the “straight line” (marriage, a stable job, a family). However, given contemporary anti-gender backlash, “heteronormative” futures can also be understood as a radical act, while linear narratives that end in pride may encourage queer youth to change their futures in the present. Nevertheless, we argue for the necessity of queer life narratives that imagine new and different futures beyond the straight line.
This article analyses the practice and presence of photography in Goa, and by Goan photographers outside of Goa, from the 1850s to the 1900s. One of the aims of this text is to draw a preliminary mapping of Goan photographic histories beyond its most well-known chronologies and geographies – beyond Souza & Paul’s photographic studio dominating visuality of Goa from the 1890s onwards and beyond Goa itself. To write a history of Goan photographers in this period – and not only of photographers in Goa – means necessarily to leave Goa’s borders and address questions of transnational and transimperial mobilities and diasporic identities. Therefore, after an introduction where I map what I consider to be the main lenses of analysis when approaching the subject, the article is divided into three parts which correspond to three geographical spaces: the first one concentrates on Goa, on the early traces of photographic practices before the 1890s, the date when the photographic studio Souza & Paul publishes a catalogue of images for sale and starts leading the local visual culture; the second and third parts analyse the references to Goan photographers away from Goa, in two significant geographies of the Goan diaspora – in Bombay (now Mumbai), a major city of neighbouring British India, and in the East African coastline, across the Indian ocean. My approach will entail crossing those physical and colonial borders that were also crossed by photography and photographers, while also placing Goan photographic practices within the wider history of photography in India and in the coastal port cities of the Indian ocean. By doing so, it argues that the history of photographic studios can also be analysed though the lenses of an Indian Ocean history, one with thriving ports with cosmopolitan communities, and individual and collective histories of mobility and migration. Mobility itself is a major characteristic of 19th and 20th century professional photographers. This explains the enormous quantity of photographers who make images of places that are very far from their original places of birth. Goan early photographers are exemplary of this need to go beyond national histories of photography and acknowledge the diasporic characteristics of photography.
Cryptids – animals that are sometimes observed but have not been scientifically verified – can be said to belong to the realms of myth or imagination. They are often strongly associated with particular regions and landscapes, and are therefore frequently used for tourism, marketing, and regional branding purposes. Consequently, public authorities and government agencies must sometime navigate their relationship to these animals that may – or may not – exist. In this article, we discuss the Jämtland County Administrative Board’s decision in 1986 to safeguard a local cryptid, the Great Lake Monster. By following the Board’s handling of the case, we show how authorities, organizations, and private individuals apply conventional laws to an unconventional case, in unconventional ways. We introduce the term “playful legal space” to describe the space established by the Board in their attempt to navigate the tension of two simultaneously overlapping social frameworks – nature conservation of verified species and heritage preservation of a culturally important cryptid. The term introduced offers great potential to scholarship of various fields, and in further developments in understanding creativity in cultural and social life.
Borders cannot be avoided and will always be present in everyday life. Border issues may vary, starting from politics, geography, socio-economics, culture, and nature. Not to mention, much literature and films expose border issues as the main themes. Maleficent (2014) and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019) depict the division between humans and nature, with humans representing the kingdom and the Moorland creatures as nature. This research employed a qualitative descriptive method with a thematic approach to identify and explore the main ideas underlying the films. This research found that the films highlight human behaviors like envy, lust, greed, and craftiness, while fairies are marginalized. Understanding and trust are needed to overcome border conflict, as seen in Phillip and Aurora’s wedding. This article contributes to ecosystem preservation and future research in ecocriticism and border issues. However, since this article only focuses on the ecological and border issues, any other issues are ruled out.
