Paper “Decolonizing the Archive: Re-reading Colonial Postcards”

Presentation at the international conference Caliban Speaks: Recentring Indigenous Thought in the Age of Decolonialism and Technology, held at the International Islamic University Islamabad.

As part of the conference, the head of the “Postal” laboratory, Timur Khusyainov, and third-year student of the “Foreign Languages and Intercultural Business Communication” program Anastasia Orlova presented the paper “Decolonizing the Archive: Re-reading Colonial Postcards”.

The research focuses on colonial postcards from the early twentieth century related to the North-West Frontier Province of British India (the territory of present-day Pakistan). In the presentation, postcards were examined as part of the colonial visual archive and as instruments of knowledge production. The authors analyzed how images and captions shaped stereotyped representations of local communities and participated in mechanisms of colonial classification. Particular attention was paid to the fact that many postcards were printed outside the colonies themselves — for example, in Germany — demonstrating the transnational nature of the production of such visual materials for European audiences.

Special attention was also given to the approach of counter-archival reading — a critical reinterpretation of colonial visual sources through the analysis of visual details, local context, and “archival absences”: the loss of names, biographies, and social connections.

The conference brought together researchers from different countries working in the fields of postcolonial studies, decolonial theory, visual culture, memory, and technology.