The main argument underpinning this reflection is that German colonies were increasingly present in colonial pictures. Alongside state actors, colonial institutions and private entrepreneurs played a prominent role in gathering and expanding images from the colonies. Colonial images showed what it looked like, what was growing there, what the living conditions were like and what the colonial administration seemed to be achieving. The aim of this essay is to examine the colonial hierarchy in colonial encounter. Using the example of German colonial images in Cameroon that have labour and porter scenes as their motif, the essay shows that the body of the colonised was a place where colonial power was expressed or inscribed. In so doing, colonial labour and porter scenes locate colonialism as hegemonic inscription of Foucauldian power/knowledge on the colonized body. The body appears as one of the most important mediating instances that internalises values and meanings of a social system and in this way turns them into categories of individual experience and identity. Following the German historian Andreas Eckert, bodies, together with space, are the main targets of any system of domination. Domination, to be effective, must become inscribed in the body, and it, to be visible, must become inscribed in space. This nexus has also become the focus of research in the context of colonial domination for some time now. The locals subjected to the visual exposure have been frozen by the colonial gaze, and the photos do remind us of routinized forms of violence endured by many subjects under colonialism.
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