My dissertation studies gender and politics in printed imagetexts in colonial Bengal. It covers the period from the publication of the Bengali Punch Magazine, Basantak, in 1874 to the circulation of anti-imperial newspaper gags during WWII. At the core of this project are colonial illustrated periodicals—the quintessential mediums of colonial modernity and pedagogy, and the bearer of anticolonial imagetexts. The dissertation analyzes printed imagetexts like comics, cartoons, caricatures, newspaper gags, posters, and advertisements in periodicals and their effects on anti-imperial thought and the politicization of colonial popular culture. Imagetexts are synthetic mediums where ‘image’ and ‘text’ compositely create meaning. I argue that the printed imagetexts understood nationalist politics and gender through the stereotypes of English-educated babu, native politician, and the urban clerk. Imagetextual satire, for anticolonial and nationalist politics, framed these three stereotypes as both the oppressor and the oppressed in relationship to which other genders were conceived in colonial Bengal. These imagetextual stereotypes provided the bases for imagining the self and the other and a set of sensibilities, practices, and modes of sociability that defined late colonial South Asia. The circulation, co-existence, and deployment of these satirical discursive models for decolonial projects in English and vernacular illustrated periodicals stemmed from the nineteenth-century phenomenon of print erotophobia—the national and imperial fear of Indian erotic literature. I examine the imagetextual satire born in the wake of this print erotophobia at the intersections of class, gender, and nationalist politics. This cultural history of imagetexts also draws attention to the fictional properties of the colonial archival documents, which served as mediums of political exclusion and representation, history-recording, storytelling, and articulating nationalist sentiments.

The aim of my master’s thesis has been to examine the situation of the price lists in the National Library of Sweden, in Uppsala University Library and in the Nordiska Museet Library. The starting point was that the institutes have been operating within different institutional practices. These operational differences between the institutes have affected the collecting, the organizing and the accessibility to the information of the price lists. My master‘s thesis is based on Birger Hjørlands theories of domains and knowledge organization. The main sources of the information in the thesis are interviews conducted with informants within these three institutes. The findings of the study show that the main differences in how the institutes have been organizing the price lists, results from the different assignments the institutes have in collecting the material. Based upon the facts that have emerged in the interviews, some general and some specific problem areas have been highlighted. These problem areas have been discussed in the thesis and possible solutions in how to proceed have been presented.

The aim of this two years master’s thesis in Archive, Library and Museum studies is to investigate how the National Library of Sweden collects, arranges and provides access to its collection of printed ephemera. As a comparison, the thesis also looks at how Lund University Library is working with the same tasks. The main sources of information in this thesis comes from participant observations and interviews conducted with informants within the two libraries mentioned above. Document studies of the library’s internal documents and the Swedish Legal Deposit Law has also been used to get additional information. The findings in this thesis has been analyzed with a model based on a practice theory and a knowledge organization theory. The starting point in the investigation was to look at how these two libraries receives printed ephemera through legal deposits, if there are any problems connected to the legal deposits and if that possibly has an influence on the printed ephemera collections. The next part of the investigation focuses on how these collections has been organized with various classification systems over the years. In addition to this the survey wanted to find out if- and in what way these different systems have had an effect on the availability of this material and what tools the libraries uses to make it easier to find specific material within the collections and make it available for users. The results of the investigation show that National Library of Sweden and Lund University Library resave a wide range of material throw legal deposits but not nearly as much as they should get. One big problem is that many producers print their material outside of Sweden and are not aware that they are obligated to give copies of this to the Swedish Legal Deposit Library’s. The survey also reached the conclusion that the way the material is arranged and stored has a big impact on how accessible it is. However, by using cataloguing and digitalization the libraries can make this material more visible, and thus also more accessible.