Visualizing Empire in Africa: Postage Stamps and Stationery Letterheads as Sites of Affiliation and Subversion

Abstract

Before the website and the text emoji, the postage stamp and the letterhead adorned written communications. The expansion of the post created a system in which the British Empire (like other states and empires), through these forms, was lent visual presence. Here, an historian and an archaeologist investigate the tableaux of this mundane imperial optic. Increasing literate agency, commerce, and tourism placed stamps and printed letterheads throughout the world, which shaped the reception and contestation of Empire. Focusing on the subjectivity of the writer and reader, with the help of some specific, unavoidably particular, examples, the nature of these media’s experiential entanglement is explored.