The legacy of colonial era postcards from British Malaya to the present : the visuals of empire / Farish A. Noor.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Farish A. Noor (Farish Ahmad Noor), 1967- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Postcards--Malaysia--History.

Postcards.

Asians in art.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Leiden : Leiden University Press, [2025]

Summary:

"By the closing decades of the 19th century, photography and postcard-production arrived in British Malaya. The colonial-era postcards that were produced up to the 1940s captured virtually all aspects of life in the British colony and remain as visual testimonies of how the colonial subjects at the time lived and worked, as well as their relationship to the land. And yet, despite the developments in photography and postcard-production, the images that were produced also reiterated and reproduced visuals of the land and its people in debilitating terms that were similar to earlier depictions of Southeast Asians that date back to the 17th century. This book looks at the production of postcards in the colonial era and argues that, in many ways, colonial postcards replicated and perpetuated Eurocentric understandings about human society and the natural world in the colonized East and shows how the images corresponded to established understandings about development and colonial intervention. Though colonial-era postcard-makers may not have been at the vanguard of colonial expansion, they did play a role in helping to build the order of knowledge and power upon which racialized colonial capitalism rested. This work also considers the enduring legacy of these images today and raises the question of why similar visuals remain in circulation in the postcolonial present."-- From JSTOR.

Contents:

Introduction: The legacy of colonial images of British Malaya, from past to present

Frozen before the camera: Visual depictions of Southeast Asia and Southeast Asians from the time of Sebastian Munster to the era of the postcard

The baskets they weave: The reproduction of the stereotype of the agrarian Malay in colonial‑era photo‑postcards

Everyone, to your positions: ‘Racial‑ethnic’ postcards and the reproduction of colonial multiculturalism in British Malaya

Forever caught: The legacy of the visuals of empire in the postcolonial present.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (JSTOR, viewed on May 14, 2026).

Other Format:

Print version; Farish A. Noor. legacy of colonial era postcards from British Malaya to the present.

ISBN:

9789400604803

9400604807

OCLC:

1541741428

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license