The restitution of dignity: Photography, resistance and her-stories in Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King

The question of how to deal with photographs from the colonial period and photographic archives is one of the most pertinent in the fields of art history, critical museology and critical heritage studies today. This article approaches these issues by focusing on the role of photography in a novel. It discusses Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (2019), highlighting intersections between photography, literature, history and memory; interrelations between histories of photography, violence and war; histories of Italian colonialism and the military occupation of Ethiopia. And it pays particular attention to the role of women in these regards. While much emphasis has rightly been given to questions of the restitution of cultural belongings and ancestral remains, this article approaches the issue of photographs and photographic archives, as well as Mengiste’s written photographs, through the lens of the ‘restitution of dignity’, a concept discussed by the Savvy Contemporary collective in 2022.