A decentred lens: decolonising historical photography between China and Ireland

Historical photography – ‘the living image of a dead thing’, in Barthes’s phrase – is often overlooked in discussions of cultural heritage decolonisation (Barthes, 1981, pp. 78-79). This paper focuses on the Robert Hart photography collection, a little-known collection of historical photographs of China accumulated by the Irishman Robert Hart during his half-century as a British imperial administrator (De Angeli and Reisz, 2017). Like many such collections, it resists easy categorisation, and sits uneasily between coloniser and colonised, Europe and Asia, native and foreign, imperial and anti-imperial. In this paper, I want to locate colonial photography within Homi Bhabha’s liminal ‘Third Space’ of hybridity (Bhabha, 2004, p. 64, pp. 159-160, p. 316 & passim) and to suggest that the plural, multiplicious histories of coloniality in both Ireland and China present possibilities for historical and curatorial decolonisation of photography beyond colonial binaries.