Light in the Shadow of Empire: Visual Witnessing in France and the French Colonies, 1944-1962

This dissertation explores the role of the camera in ushering in what French historian Annette Wieviorka has called a mediatized, globalized "era of the witness" in the middle of the twentieth century. Examining post-Holocaust, colonial, and anticolonial desires to transform spectators into witnesses in the last years of empire in France, French West Africa, Indochina and Algeria, I examine how photographers, filmmakers, television figures, journalists, scholars, civil servants and missionaries strove to envision new futures out of the spectacular and often traumatic realities of the recent past. Combining close readings of photographic, cinematic and televisual images with newspaper and magazine collections and extensive findings from governmental, institutional and private archives, I offer the first detailed history of ideas and practices of visual witnessing. From the development of television programming and the psychological study of spectators in France after World War Two, to African soldiers' testimony of the war in Indochina, rural "ciné-bus" tours by French officials in Algeria and competing visions of the "reality" of Algeria's war of independence, the dissertation challenges the historiographical consensus that the "era of the witness" only emerged following the 1961 Eichmann trial. In its multimedia approach, the project provides both historians and visual theorists alike with new ways of thinking about the ethics and politics of looking. And by bridging metropole and colony, and the history of World War Two and decolonization, the dissertation animates the 'cuts' and 'dissolves' between the European and the global.Ph.D.2021-11-13 00:00:0