About Global South Postcards

Postcards from the Global South, a gallery of picture postcard images, documents colonial visual discourses on Mexico during the regime of Porfirio Díaz, and Korea during the first two decades of the Japanese Occupation. The gallery is meant as a comparative resource from two widely separated countries that nevertheless experienced the colonizing gaze of postcard makers and consumers in similar ways. Both countries were situated as incipiently modern, promising in their cultural riches and histories, yet othered and exoticized, as it were, by colonizing processes. These images show how consistent the colonizing visual discourse on countries in the global south was, regardless of their specific histories and conditions.

Several developments combined to create the first postcard boom shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. On the technological front, photography and photomechanical reproduction had developed to the point where it was economically feasible to print high quality photographs on card stock, and sell them cheaply. On the diplomatic front, the signing of an international agreement known as the Universal Postal Union let postcards be mailed across international borders, and beginning in 1900 (in Korea and Mexico), postcards with printed images were allowed to circulate (contrasting with the relatively boring cards made prior to that by national postal services, which had only a printed stamp). These changes resulted in an immediate globalized media phenomenon, with collectors feverishly exchanging postcards from all parts of the globe, and small and large photography and printing companies producing millions of cards. The postcard was, in some ways, the Instagram of its era.

The popularity of postcards coincided with another phenomenon: Europe’s colonization of Africa. The European (and more broadly Western) gaze turned toward North Africa, the Levant, and East Asia, depicting these regions through a series of othering tropes: the harem, the Bedouin, the geisha—tropes that collectively go under the title of “Orientalism” theorized by literary scholar Edward Said. Postcard images from this era form a kind of immense gallery of Orientalized depictions of non-Europe, or the others of Europe. Mexico and Egypt were two countries that, because they host monumental stone ruins from bygone civilizations, attracted a parade of European photographers from the mid-nineteenth century onward, establishing visual discourses on these countries that were fully Orientalized.

Meantime, the European move into Africa was mirrored in Asia by Japan’s imperial expansion into Korea and China. Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese war (1905) marked the ascension of Japan as a colonial power. In 1910, it formally annexed Korea, and maintained a brutal campaign of repression against Korean independence fighters until its defeat in World War II established Korea once again as an independent state.

In the Korean context, Japanese photographers and card producers exoticized Korean folk customs, painting the country as a kind of pre-modern, authentic (i.e. Orientalized) cultural essence in a childlike state, in need of Japan’s modernizing and paternalistic direction. Korea was, in a sense, Japan’s ‘demonstration country’, meant to show off the image of technological and bureaucratic prowess that Japan wanted to project to the rest of the world. It undertook massive development projects and instant industrialization in the country. Many of the postcards show these aspects of Japanese Occupied Korea.

Mexico represented a very different legacy of colonialism. Following the conquest of Cuba and nearby islands, it was the first major landmass to be colonized by Europeans (1519). New Spain, as the colony came to be known, lasted as a bureaucratic and territorial entity until the wars of independence established Mexico as an independent country in 1821. But Europe still did not stop meddling in the country’s affairs. In 1863, soon after Mexico lost half its national territory in 1848 war with the United States (on which we in California now reside), Napoleon III of France installed a European nobleman, Maximillian of Hapsburg, as the Mexican emperor. It was an ill-fated power grab that lasted only three years. Two politicians were key in this period: Mexico’s great nineteenth century statesman Benito Juárez, president before and after the French occupation, and Porfirio Díaz, a young general who fought for Juárez. After Juárez’s death in 1872 Díaz became the dominant figure in national politics, serving as president 1876-80 and again 1884-1910. Like Juárez, he was a modernizer, fighting to establish modern Mexico against entrenched forces such as the Catholic Church. However, in his rush to modernize he sold Mexico out, with many key development projects controlled by foreigners, wealth accumulating in the hands of a few people, and the peasant and working classes deprived of freedoms and economic opportunities. He became, in short, a dictator who made policies and ruled the country for the benefit of the wealthy at home and abroad. This was another kind of colonialism, widely separated from the direct colonial rule suffered in Korea, but with results that were not widely different (in fact quite similar) for common people. In 1910 Díaz was deposed violently in the first gusts of the Mexican Revolution.

Project Leads

Kent Dickson is Professor in the English and Modern Languages Department at Cal Poly Pomona.

Hyeryung Hwang is Assistant Professor in the Interdisciplinary General Education Program in the Department of Liberal Studies at Cal Poly Pomona.

Acknowledgements

This project was made possible by a SPICE grant from Cal Poly Pomona, and by the amazing team at the University Library–particularly Ariel Hahn, Alfredo Lafarga, and Ryan Rush. Many thanks for their invaluable assistance.

Additional Collection Timeline

Interactively engage with the timeline of our Global South Postcard Collection.