This study examines the complicated role that works of art play in colonial remembrance, and the ways in which they sustain stereotypes, biases and power relations over the passage of time. It takes as its case study Thomas Rowlandson’s hand-coloured etching, Rachel Pringle of Barbadoes (1796), which has been used as visual evidence for the fragmented biography of an Afro- Caribbean entrepreneur, mythologised as a brothel-keeper servicing the British navy, against the backdrop of slavery. Since the story of Rachael Pringle Polgreen (c.1753–1791) is well known, I focus on an analysis of the artwork and its unusual composition, speculating reasons for its appearance in London’s print culture. Tracing the spectral afterlives of this print, I also argue that the image functions as a colonial keepsake, treasured as evidence of intimate connection between metropole and (post) colony. 

This article sketches key concerns surrounding the digital reproduction of enslaved and colonized subjects held in cultural heritage collections. It centralizes one photograph of a crying Afro-Caribbean child from St. Croix, housed in the Royal Danish Library, to demonstrate the unresolved ethical matters present in retrospective attempts to visualize colonialism. Working with affect and haunting as research material, the inquiry questions how museums and other cultural heritage institutions are caretaking historical violations, identifying themselves as hosting agents, and navigating issues of trust and accountability as they make their colonial collections available online. Speculating about what an ethics of care in representation could look like, the article draws on reparatory artistic engagements with such imagery and proposes how metadata could be rethought as a cataloging space with the potential to alter historical imbalances of power.

This article provides a reflective overview of What Lies Unspoken: Sounding the Colonial Archive, a sound intervention which I initiated and produced in collaboration with curators at the Statens Museum for Kunst and Royal Library of Denmark, whilst conducting artistic research within the Living Archives Research Project at Malmö University. The project was part of commemorative activities during 2017, marking the centennial of the sale and transfer of Denmark’s former Caribbean sugar colonies (St Croix, St Thomas, and St John) to the United States. The intervention aimed to address the uncomfortable silences surrounding institutional and societal engagements with colonial history in Denmark. In the article I describe how and under what particular cultural conditions this project was developed, share some of the thinking that underpinned its making, and finally reflect on the realities of what it takes for cultural heritage institutions to share interpretive power.

Between 1769 and 1819 London experienced an unprecedented growth in the proliferation of texts and images in the popular sphere, engaging learned citizens in discussion and commentary on the most pressing social and political issues of the day. From the repeal of the Stamp Act to the French revolution, the local Westminster election or the abolition of the slave trade, these prints, political pamphlets, plays, novels and periodicals collaborated (sometimes intentionally) in critique, praise and assessment of the country's changing socio-economic climate. African people were a critical aspect of this world of images, and their presence conveyed much about the implications of travel, colonialism and slavery on the collective psyche. Whether encountered on the streets of the city, in opulent stately homes, or in tracts describing the horrors of the slave trade, the British paid attention to Africans (consciously or not), and developed a means of expressing the impact of these encounters through images. Scholarship has begun to interrogate the presence of Africans in British art of this period, but very little has been written about their place in visual and literary humour created in a metropolitan context. This book fills this scholarly lacuna, exploring how and why satirical artists both mocked and utilized these characters as subversive comic weaponry.

I den multimediala installationen Milk & Honey utforskar Temi Odumosu teman som minnen, identitet och tillhörighet med utgångspunkt i hembygdsarkiven. Milk & Honey kretsar kring ett fotografi från 1957 där performance-artisten Josephine Baker (1906-1975) mjölkar kor i Hamra gård, Botkyrka. Det är ett dokument som visar en annan sida av denna världskända afroamerikanska personlighet, samtidigt som det ur ett historiskt perspektiv lyfter frågan om Sveriges öppenhet och inkludering. Installationen består av fotografier, video, ljud och objekt. I ljudverket får vi ta del av en konversation mellan Temi Odumosu och Ylva Habel (lektor i medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap vid Södertörns högskola). Temi Odumosu är konsthistoriker och forskare med bas i Köpenhamn. Under hösten och vintern 2016-17 deltar hon i Residence Botkyrkas program ”Developing Nordic Cities” med stöd från Kulturkontakt Nord.

Milk & Honey was a situated, mixed-media installation that explored how local heritage archives could activate global crosscurrents, through themes of memory, identity and belonging. The focus of the installation was a photograph representing the performance artist Josephine Baker (1906-1975) milking cows at the farm Hamra Gård (Botkyrka municipality), in 1957. This archival document presented an alternative view of this well known Black personality, whilst raising questions about openness and inclusion in Sweden historically. The installation comprised mixed media components: photography, video, and sound, in combination with physical artefacts. The sonic component was a recorded conversation between curator Temi Odumosu and media and communications scholar Dr Ylva Habel. The installation Milk & Honey was a research-based intervention produced as part of Residence Botkyrka’s programme ”Developing Nordic Cities” supported by Nordic Culture Point. It featured in the Övergångar / Transitions New Biennial for Art & Architecture.

This article reveals a multi layered design process that occurs at the intersection between postcolonial/decolonial theory and a version of digital sketching called Embodied Digital Sketching (EDS). The result of this particular intersection of theory and practice is called Bitter & Sweet, a Mixed Reality design prototype using cultural heritage material. Postcolonial and decolonial strategies informed both analytic and practical phases of the design process. A further contribution to the design field is the reminder that design interventions in the current political and economic climate are frequently bi-directional: designers may enact, but simultaneously external events intervene in design processes. Bitter & Sweet reveals intersecting layers of power and control when design processes deal with sensitive cultural topics.