Spectacles of Empire: Colonialism, Gender, and Humanitarianism
Adrita Mitra (University of Oxford), Staging Salvation: Humanitarianism on Display in Belgium’s Colonial Project

This paper argues that humanitarianism in the État Indépendant du Congo (EIC) was inseparable from the spectacles that enacted and legitimised it. From the outset, King Leopold II relied on visual and performative displays to make his imperial project intelligible and attractive to metropolitan audiences. These spectacles operated within a tension between hope and horror: hope in the promise of European tutelage and Belgium’s enhanced prestige, and horror in the objectification, disciplining, and erasure of African bodies. Rather than a stable moral project, colonial humanitarianism emerged as a performative apparatus, reshaped to serve shiftingpolitical, cultural, and economic ends. The paper focuses on three episodes—the 1885 Congo Pavilion at the Antwerp exposition, the education of Congolese children in Belgium (1888–1897), and the ethnographic villages at the 1897 Tervueren exposition—reading them as a triptych that highlights spectacle as a central instrument in the circulation of Belgium’s imperial ambitions.

Mathilde Lyons (University of St Andrews), Examining Black Women’s Everyday Experiences under Italian Fascism

This paper explores the affective dimensions of Black life in Fascist Italy by foregrounding the lived experiences of East African women who moved between colony and metropole between 1922 and 1945. The paper draws on doctoral research that has led to the compilation of a corpus of approximately 6000 Black individuals who spent time in Italy during this period, the vast majority of whom were men. Within this overwhelmingly male archive, women’s stories appear more fleetingly. Yet these fragments speak to the ways in which racial hierarchies were compounded by gendered exploitation and how women’s lives were entangled in wider imperial processes. Through case studies, the paper examines the contradictions women navigated as colonial subjects in the metropole such as through the coerced sexual labour demanded in ‘living’ colonial exhibition spaces such as the Mostra Triennale d’Oltremare in Naples 1940 where women were forced into sex work by the regime. While others engaged in tactical evasions to avoid drawing the regime’s attention towards them. These examples highlight both the situational treatment of Black women and the individual strategies they employed to assert forms of agency within constraint. Rather than privileging a state-centred approach, the paper foregrounds the subjective and interpersonal registers preserved within ofttimes obscure archival traces. Methodologically, it combines everyday history with Black Studies to redress the layered invisibility of Black women in the archive and situates these women’s experiences within a broader transnational history of colonialism, gender and everyday life.
Date: 22 October 2025, 14:00
Venue: Merton College, Merton Street OX1 4JD
Venue Details: Sir Howard Stringer Room
Speakers: Adrita Mitra (Oxford), Mathilde Lyons (University of St Andrews)
Organising department: Faculty of History
Organisers: Asma Shakeel (Oxford), Asmita Sarkar (Oxford), Sana Shah (Oxford)
Organiser contact email address: admin@oxfordtghs.com
Part of: Transnational & Global History Seminar
Booking required?: Recommended
Booking url: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/t8yLzX90TO6PobukTOUXVQ
Audience: Public
Editors: Adrita Mitra, Suchintan Das, Asmita Sarkar