La Violencia del Pasado Colonial: Un Análisis Visual de Libros de Historia/Violence of the Colonial Past: A Visual Analysis of History Textbooks

Despite their potential to foster critical thinking, history textbooks have traditionally reinforced national narratives. This tension has led to debate about how these textbooks represent the colonial past in increasingly multicultural classrooms and societies. Recent studies based on narrative analysis point to a predominantly Eurocentric approach, in which the violence exercised by colonizing countries, as well as the voices and agency of colonized peoples, tend to be minimized. However, the role of images has received little attention. From a perspective that integrates sociocultural psychology and postcolonial studies, this article examines images of violence, whether explicit or implicit, in three secondary school history textbooks used in Spain. The analysis shows that when images function merely as illustrations, they tend to reinforce narratives of encounter or civilization that attenuate colonial violence. In other cases, violence is represented but disconnected from its structural dimensions. Only when images are contextualized and critically examined do they open up possibilities for problematizing violence, making Indigenous agency visible, and connecting the past with its present-day legacies. The study thus extends the analysis of narratives of violence to the visual domain and highlights the pedagogical potential of the critical analysis of images for the development of historical thinking.