Jessica B. Harris writes about her collection of historic postcards and the unique slice-of-life perspective offered by the 19th century postcard form. Harris has cultivated her postcard collection for decades with a focus on “depicting Africans in their homeland and in the diaspora with food: fishing, farming, vending, serving, and consuming.” This essay appears in the Spring 2015 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review.
Postcards were developed in the 1860s and became wildly popular by the early twentieth century; their images, even more than the messages they carry, bear witness to how entire cultures have changed. In the United States, they document postbellum agricultural pursuits and the growth of cities after the Civil War. In Africa and the Caribbean, they provide a visual record of the apogee and decline of colonialism. The small rectangular pasteboard souvenirs house memory; they are photographic witnesses of a world that was and is no more.
