Modernism, Decolonization, and the Visual Book

Writers in the era of decolonization loaded their books with illustrations, allusions to the visual arts, and ekphrases, or descriptions of visual images. They collaborated with artists and intermixed their narratives with elements of the book arts, such as endpapers, frontispieces, and dust jackets, that presented the book itself as a visual object. Relying on extensive archival research into the print cultures of decolonization between the early 1950s and the late 1960s, Emily Hyde identifies the “visual book” as a crucial but overlooked aesthetic of that era, one that theorized seeing as a collective, historical, and potentially transformative experience. Modernism, Decolonization, and the Visual Book examines four collaborations between writers and artists: George Lamming and Denis Williams; Doris Lessing and Paul Hogarth; Chinua Achebe and Uche Okeke; and V.S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott. Some of these collaborations were deliberate and intentional, some more pragmatic, and some downright hostile, but in each case the visual books they produced participated in the work of the era of decolonization by imagining it as an ongoing process of learning to see. Ranging across the decolonizing world, Modernism, Decolonization, and the Visual Book reveals that by requisitioning four elements of visual modernism-figure, sketch, line, and copy-writers and artists produced a bookish interplay of word and image that moved backward and forward in time with the aim of making us see the world anew.