'Good Intentions' are not enough: Searching the Many Faces of Colonialism in Mass Media
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-06-08

The objective of this presentation is to debate on alternatives to create postcolonial discourses in the media, sensitive to actual archaeological and historical data and the researchers working with it. There has been a growing interest in representing history in a short-video format, which is widely viewed on Social Media. Among the topics, some focused on 1) using historical information to show a nonhistorical knowledge; 2) using archaeological data to show global perspectives of our past, and 3) highlighting the atrocities of colonialism and war. While most of these are probably based on good intentions, some tend to be misleading and inaccurate when it comes to real archaeological and historical evidence. For this debate, I will present a selection of videos that show: 1) how colonialist perspectives can be traced on them; 2) how some of them are actually creating distorted representations of the past and current historical knowledge.

Eduardo Herrera Malatesta (University of Leiden)

TAG Deva 2018
Session: Opening Pandora’s Box: Europe and its Colonial Ruins