Meet the Jury: Colonial Complex. Visual Culture and Colonialism from the Margins

December 12, 2025, 10.00-13.00, MTC1 02.13 (Maria-Theresiacollege Sint-Michielsstraat 6, 3000 Leuven)

Colonial Complex. Visual Culture and Colonialism from the Margins – workshop

Speaker: Łukasz Zaremba, University of Warsaw

The investigation of Poland’s position on the map of the colonial and postcolonial world reveals a broad spectrum of theoretical interpretations of colonialism without colonisation and colonial engagement without colonies. Despite having no history of oversees colonies, direct transatlantic engagements or Black enslavement, like many other semi-peripheral countries Poland seems to be deeply invested in the colonial culture with its indispensable racial hierarchies. Fantasies of an imperial position or at least close proximity to the centres of power – strangely paired with a mix of “white innocence” and “colonial exceptionalism” and thus a sense of moral superiority over traditional colonial empires – must be constantly reconciled with “self-colonisation” and multiple instances of being treated as a quasi-colonial subject by the actual empires.

The main aim of the workshop is to identify various manifestations of colonial culture in non-colonial, semi-peripheral societies, with a focus on imagery and ways of seeing as primary and often overlooked manifestations of both colonial imagination and modern processes of racialisation. By examining the limitations and advantages of different theoretical conceptualisations of “colonialism without colonies” we will attempt to recognise modes through which colonial practices are reproduced, reinvented and concealed in the visual field.

Suggested reading

Gloria Wekker, Introduction, in: White Innocence. Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race, Duke University Press 2016.

Ulla Vuorela, Colonial Complicity. The ‘Postcolonial’ in the Nordic Context, in: Complying with Colonialism, ed. E. Keskinen et al., Routledge 2009.