Structured around a series of photographic returns and mis-registrations, this paper brings a “disobedient gaze” to colonial images of British Malaya both before, and after, the so-called Malayan Emergency struggle for independence (1948-60), arguing that viewers and artists play vital roles in activating the sovereignty of historical subjects found in the colonial archive.

The first return is an intellectual one. I circle back to an unwritten chapter of a book I completed in 2019 (Projecting Citizenship: Photography and Belonging in the British Empire, Penn State University Press) which examines the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee (COVIC)’s lantern slide lectures: an ambitious scheme of geography lectures, illustrated by more than 3,000 photographic images, that circulated in classrooms around the British Empire between 1902 and 1945. Organized geographically into seven sets of lectures and slides that surveyed the United Kingdom, India, Canada, Australasia, the West Indies, South Africa and the “Sea Road to the East,” the lectures combined photography, imperial propaganda, and the still-nascent notion of “imperial citizenship” to teach schoolchildren about the land and peoples of the British Empire.

The Sea Road to the East: Gibraltar to Wei-hai-wei (1912), the second to last in the series, was authored by economist and political scientist A.J. Sargent, and invited viewers to follow an imaginary steam ship journey departing from England and traveling through Malta, Gibraltar, Cyprus, Ceylon, Singapore, and Hong Kong. The textbooks, read aloud by teachers, were accompanied by more than 360 lantern slides, produced from photographs made by Alfred Hugh Fisher, the artist commissioned by COVIC who toured the Empire aboard its mail ships between 1907 and 1910. By attending closely to the photographs of Singapore and the “Chinese Stations,” I examine the ways the lectures tried to balance depictions of a multi-ethnic and authoritatively managed network of colonial outposts along the “sea road,” while never forgetting to remind the viewer of the persistent need for such colonial rule due to the seditious nature of its inhabitants. 

The paper concludes by a second return, undertaken in the photographic, performance and installation work of Berlin-based artist Sim Chi Yin, who has been reworking images from the COVIC lantern slides in her multidisciplinary practice, bringing what I describe as a “disobedient gaze” to these imperialist images. Comprising 40 photographic glass plates displayed in wood stands, Sim’s manipulated images seek to uncover the slippages between the fantasies of the colonial state, the grounded reality of anti-colonial resistance, and the ongoing return of the imperial past in the present in the form of trans-generational inheritance. The Suitcase is a Little Bit Rotten (2023), emerges from the artist’s ten-year-long investigation into the visualization and memorialization of the anti-colonial war in Malaya, a period of armed resistance against British rule that coincided with her grandfather’s disappearance and death. By enlarging found photographs depicting the British colony of Malaya from the 1800s and early 1900s—including 27 of the glass slides included in the COVIC lectures—and slyly inserting images of her grandfather and her young son into the scenes, Sim creates a “reconstructed archive of an imaginary Southeast Asian landscape” that refuses to forget her familiar ancestry.[1]

[1] Sim Chi Yin, “The (trans-)generational camera,” Transit (exhibition catalogue), Zilberman Gallery, 2023.