Bildpostkarten in der visuellen Ökonomie des Black Atlantic um 1900: Kontraste, Bewegung, Migration

Abstract

Picture Postcards and the visual Economy of the Black Atlantic around 1900: Contrast, Movement, MigrationThe article focuses on the picture postcard as an everyday object of written and visual communication, which, by around 1900, had become a very popular mass medium. Within a time of accelerated mobility and internal as much as external migration, it worked as a cultural signifier within what Paul Gilroy has termed the Black Atlantic. Referring critically to W.J.T. Mitchell's differentiation between a circulation and a migration of images, the article elaborates the political dimensions that lie in the potential loss of control which processes of migration generally entail; i.e., the risk that the meaning projected onto the given-to-be-seen is always already different from the meaning that was intended or to be communicated – as it is the case with the popular motif of black-and-white couples.