Lecture by ROBERT DECKER,Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of French and Italian, USC.

In 1802, the French revolutionary army officer Louis Delgrès led a heroic but unsuccessful resistance to Napoleon’s reimposition of slavery in the Caribbean. Dismissed by French colonial historians as an insignificant rabble-rouser, Delgrès might have been forgotten were it not for the creative work of anticolonial historians, writers, and visual artists from the 1930s to the present, a period which has seen numerous representations of Delgrès in a variety of media: literature, public monuments, art, bande dessinée, postage stamps, and film. Retracing the visual genealogies of images of Delgrès, this talk will consider collage as both a formal and conceptual practice in which disparate material and media cohere in new compositions. Examining collage as a method of historical intervention opens onto broader questions about how we visualize France’s colonial past and present. What images of and from the colonial past persist in the contemporary imaginary? How can collage supplement the lacuna of the colonial archive?

Hosted by the Visual Studies Research Institute. Please RSVP to [email protected].