18 Colonialism and Culture

Christopher Pinney

It is ...too simple and reductive to argue that to control large parts of the world. These dif- everything in European or American culture ferent projects were driven at different times therefore prepares for or consolidates the grand by radically different motives: the Lockean idea of empire. It is also, however, historically inaccurate to ignore those tendencies – whether in natural law justification for the British expro- narrative, political theory, or pictorial technique – priation of American land, the ‘civilizing that enabled, encouraged, and otherwise assured mission’, and ‘whites bring death from afar’.2 the West’s readiness to assume and enjoy the These are some of the modalities, some of the experience of empire. (Said, 1994: pp. 95–96) European progenitors, some of the ideologies that are so deceptively concealed by the As colonialism has come to be seen as some- word ‘colonialism’. And to this we must thing other than just a question of economics add the stages on which all this complex and politics, its ‘cultural’ dimensions have drama was played out: the Americas, Asia, come to the fore. These include not only Australasia,Africa. To add further complexity, the obvious and central issue of the cultural colonialism refuses historiographic compart- dimensions of colonialism as a practice, mentalization: it rapidly unfolds into the but the fact that different colonialisms have history of the modern world: modernity and had their own cultures, the manner in globalization are intimately entangled with which colonialism has come to inform the colonialism. Beyond this we can consider, as metropolitan cultures of Europe, and the ways a coda, non-European empires. It is perhaps in which the colonial experience has itself one of the ironies of colonialism’s tenacity helped constitute the very notion of culture. that Euro-American scholars are reluctant to Colonialism’s variables are complex. We concede visibility to the colonies created by might consider the differences between trade, non-Europeans. conquest and settlement. The list of European In a moment, then, culture. But first, blood aspirants to empire is long: Spain, Portugal, and destruction. Any consideration of the the Netherlands, Britain, France, Germany, cultural technologies of colonial rule needs Belgium, Italy – even Sweden and Denmark.1 first to inscribe the more brutal technologies Some succeeded and others desired, but failed, on which certain colonial projects were built.

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Sven Lindquist provides an unforgettably is important not to repeat the forgetting powerful meditation on the technologies of which has characterized Leopold’s legacy, extermination perfected in colonial Africa, when we consider the cultural dimensions prior to their use in twentieth-century of colonialism: Lindqvist and Hochschild’s Europe.3 He recalls reading Conrad in the accounts must remain as moral spectres over 1940s, the ‘black shadows of disease and star- the rest of this discussion vation’ appearing as prophecy of twentieth- The new prominence given in various century death camps, and a refutation of the accounts to colonialism’s cultural dimensions claim for the ‘phenomenological uniqueness’ has also been attendant on the formal decay of the Holocaust. His point resonates with of colonialism as a world historical force: the passionate declaration by the poet of the more distant it has become the more Négritude Aimé Césaire: ‘cultural’ it is seen to have been. Colonialism conceived of as brute economic and political What the very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth oppression has ceded much ground to a vision century cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against humanity, not the of colonialism as a concatenation of ideas, humiliation of humanity itself, but the crime against categories, texts, images and exhibitions: the white man ...; it is the crime of having applied to instead of colonialism as the epiphenomenon Europe the colonialist actions as were borne till now of greed and the desire for conquest, dif- by the Arabs, the coolies of India, and the negroes ferent colonizing projects are increasingly of Africa. (cited by Ferro, 1997: p. x) approached through their complex cultural Adam Hochschild asks how it is that entanglements. the museums of Nazi Germany have been The plausibility of a singular Colonialism destroyed, Moscow’s Museum of the Rev- is now a thing of mere shreds and tatters, olution been utterly transformed and yet although its afterlife in notions of ‘colonial the Royal Museum of Africa at Tervuren worldview’, and ‘colonial discourse’ displays in Belgium remains packed with colonial a huge tenacity. Perhaps this should not sur- forgetting and lies. The museum celebrates prise us for, as Nicholas Thomas observes, we campaigns against ‘Arab’ slavers, shows need to theorize colonialism ‘but discussion black and white films of Pende masked may be obstructed if we assume that the dances, preserves spears and fish traps in glass word relates to any meaningful category or cases. But in this whole museum, swarming totality’ (Thomas, 1994: p. ix). The binary of with numerous visitors, there is not the Master and Slave has been displaced by the ‘slightest hint that millions of Congolese met complexities of the different European cul- unnatural deaths’ (Hochschild, 1999: p. 293). tural matrices that informed national empires When Leopold II was forced to officially cede and a growing awareness of the manner in his private killing fields in the Congo basin – which the transactions and ‘translations’in the the Congo Free State – to Belgium in 1908, the encounters between colonizers and colonized furnaces burnt for eight days incinerating the can hardly be reduced to a pure domain of records of his holocaust. Leopold, through power or economics. his private army in the Congo, the Force Although this enormous empirical diversity Publique, was responsible for the death of, at a makes it difficult to generalize about colonial- conservative estimate, ten million Congolese. ism itself, it remains possible to sketch certain The new historiography of colonialism has trajectories of thinking about colonialism. rightly reacted against what is sometimes In the next section I will consider differ- referred to as the ‘fatal impact’ thesis (the ent approaches to the cultural technologies reference here is to Moorhead’s popular 1966 associated with colonialism which vary in book of the same name), and has sought to the degree of efficacy that they grant to stress the ambivalence and incompleteness cultural practices in creating and sustaining of colonial projects, and the resilience of asymmetrical relations in colonial situations. those who were colonized.4 However, it Following this, the rest of this chapter will

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focus on vision, incarnated in a Foucauldian ‘became an object to be used in the political, fusion of visibility and power. This will be cultural and religious battles at the heart of explored as a theme in academic analysis, and [Indian] politics’ (Cohn, 1990: p. 250). Most then in the concluding part of the Chapter as importantly, Cohn demonstrated the precise an ongoing concern in visual arts practices mechanics through which objectifications predominantly by ‘fourth world’ artists. passed from ‘hand to hand’ and transformed worldviews. Hierarchy also appeared in the British appropriation of the ritual idioms of CULTURAL TECHNOLOGIES darbars, which they turned into spectacles OF COLONIALISM of submission and obedience. Following the Government of India Act of 1858 (which We might start by considering what we might ‘de-sacralized’ the Mughal Empire), British think of as ‘strong’ theories of the cultural rule faced the problem of ‘internalizing’ technologies of colonial rule (Dirks, 1996: itself within the Indian polity. Seeking to p. ix). These are predicated on the efficacy anchor their authority in the security of the of colonial ideology and practice.5 Initially past, Mughal court rituals of display and articulated as an alternative to ‘punishment’ incorporation became the model for a British paradigms of colonialism, which stressed neo-traditional idiom of power. Complex and military and economic dimensions, some of contradictory though this neo-feudal idiom these ‘disciplinary’6 approaches have para- was, it established a trope, to be affirmed or doxically come to mirror an earlier Imperial negated in the future: early Indian National History in the power they grant to the Congress meetings replicated its basic form; colonizer. Gandhi’s later political semiology directly The Nietzschean power/knowledge formu- repudiated it. lation quickly passed via Foucault into the Cohn’s concerns with the impact of British ‘cultural’ study of colonialism. The Saidean ‘systematizations’ of Indian cultural practice variant of this (that is, following the insights is taken up by Dirks, in his detailed ethno- of Edward W. Said) is undoubtedly the most history of a small south Indian polity and his celebrated and derided, but other important subsequent study of colonial understandings versions of this paradigm have also had of caste. Cohn, and subsequently Inden (1990) a great impact. Many years before Said and Bandyopadhyay (1990), had shown the published Orientalism, the anthropologist- Orientalizing effect of British valorizations turned-historian of India Bernard Cohn was of caste as ‘religious’ rather than aspects of producing powerfully detailed studies of the a political and economic aspiration. Dirks cultural technologies of rule in SouthAsia. His consolidates this, exploring in detail how the remarkable studies on the impact of the census ‘spectre’ of caste emerged out of a colonial on Indian social organization, the hierarchical modernity, how the manner in which ‘caste modalities of imperial assemblages (darbars), has been constituted as the principal modality the role that indigenous texts played in colo- of Indian society draws as much from the nial understandings of Indian society and the role of British Orientalists, administrators and socio-linguistic aspects of ‘command’ would missionaries as it does from Indian reformers, effectively inaugurate a ‘Cohnian’ school.7 social thinkers and political actors’ (Dirks, Among his former students are Ronald Inden, 2001: p. 8). Similar arguments are advanced Nicholas Dirks and Arjun Appadurai, who by Fox (1985) in his study of British concep- have all elaborated and extended Cohn’s tions of ‘martial races’ on Punjabi Sikhs, and interest in the cultural dimensions of colonial Mahmood Mamdani’s (1996, 2001) study of relations.8 the legacy in Africa of colonial constructions Cohn had suggested that the Census, with of political identity. Here we see colonizers’ its hierarchized and objectified categoriza- categories partially constituting the social tions, formalized identity in new ways, and formations they purported to describe.

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The strong account of colonialism’s term ‘Saidean’, so often invoked, sketches a cultural technologies that Said mapped volatile position in a broader debate where in Orientalism (1978) was considerably other analysts have brought more penetration, complexified in his later work Culture and subtlety and consistency. More negatively, Imperialism (1993). The earlier work had an some scholars, deterred from investigating the impact which is hard to overestimate, and intellectual life of ‘outlying regions of the famously established what has almost become world’because of eagerness to avoid repeating an academic sub-discipline – the study Orientalism’s tenacious ideology, conjure a of colonially generated cultural knowledge mirror-image phantom of the discourse they and its relation to power. In Orientalism’s wish to attack. Anxious about the possibility original formulation this centred on the of ever engaging a world that has not inscription of two phantasmatic identities – already been ‘Orientalized’ they perversely Occident and Orient generated and sustained echo Imperial History’s own delusions of by an ‘enormously systematic’ European grandeur. Said, it is true, did state in Culture knowledge practice. Although Said gestures and Imperialism, that ‘No vision ... has to the complex desires that underlay this total hegemony over its domain’ (Said, 1994: practice (‘a battery of desires, repressions, p. 225) but Saidean analyses rarely stress an investments and projections’ [Said, 1985: incomplete hegemony.9 p. 8]) the bulk of his analysis advances a More recent work on empire and literature confident systematicity – a world of ‘racial, has many more points of contact with ideological and imperialist stereotypes’(Said, Said’s much more nuanced assessment of 1985: p. 328) – apparently devoid of self- Raymond Schwab’s encyclopaedic Oriental doubt and contradiction. Renaissance, a work first published in 1950 Culture and Imperialism shares Oriental- and which provides a sympathetic portrait ism’s curious mixture of declamation and of European literary tropes of alterity. For qualification and ultimate ontological inde- Schwab, the East was Europe’s ‘invisible terminacy. EuroAmerican cultural production interlocutor’, providing a ‘disruptive invigo- is charged with a blanket assumption that ration’(before succumbing to ‘condescending ‘outlying regions of the world have no life, veneration’) and the complex, fluid, cultural history of culture to speak of, no independence alignments and realignments he presents force or integrity worth representing without the the conclusion (which Said here affirms) West’(Said, 1994: p. xxi) and some of the most that ‘the library, the museum and the lab- reductive formulations of the relationship oratory underwent internal modifications of between literature and ideology are praised. In paramount importance’ (Said, 1984: p. xvii). one see-saw movement we are offered a vulgar This is a position very different from the reprimand. But the see-saw swings back when suggestion in Orientalism that from Homer to Said wisely observes that ‘A novel is neither Cromer10 European paradigms changed very a frigate nor a bank draft. A novel exists first little. as a novelist’s effort and second as object read Ros Ballaster, in her recent discussion of the by an audience’ (Said, 1994: p. 87). Just as in role of fictions and fables of the East from the Orientalism the Orient’s ontological status is late seventeenth to eighteenth century, affirms never really made clear (‘almost a European the Saidean supposition that ‘these tales are invention’, it was ‘manage[d] – and even part of a wider cultural project which creates produce[d]’), so in Culture and Imperialism the object it feigns identifying’ (Ballaster, the reader is offered a menu of incompatible 2005: p. 2), but rejects the idea that they options strangely juxtaposed like rocks on a are in any sense ‘cultural technologies of scree bed. rule’. Fables of the East are more than simple Said has acquired a deserved iconicity, in ideological reflections of colonial interests: part because of his political courage and an they are, Ballaster argues, ‘a form of subaltern attractively archaic humanism. However, the discourse, a means of seizing verbal authority’

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(Ballaster, 2005: p. 4). Works such as with power over a phantasmatic Orient, but Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy (1687–1694)11 are almost exclusively debates internal to are forms of what Ballaster terms ‘reverse Europe which happen to take the ‘Orient’ as ethnography’ in which an ‘oriental voice is their ‘alibi’. In this respect there is a certain deployed to provide an enlightened rationalist resonance with John MacKenzie’s ongoing critique of European political and social critique of Said on the grounds that Oriental- mores’ (Ballaster, 2005: p. 10). This reverse ism is expressive of desires that predate and ethnography conjures a complex space of exceed the instrumental knowledge/power shifting identities and locales. Certainly they dynamic on which Said focuses.15 remain European fictions, impersonations The second point concerns the inadequacy of an imagined subaltern who provides an of any analysis which differentiates simply alibi for the ‘subversive intent’ of other between different forms or national practices Europeans (Ballaster, 2005: p. 5) but there of colonialism and ignores the complex is no denying their complexly alienated historicity and variability of those individual relationship to emergent imperial formations. lineaments. This is to take the process of These fables of the East and other later analytical fragmentation much further than ‘reverse ethnographies’ such as Diderot’s simply Spanish versus British and British Supplement to the Voyage of M. Bougainville versus French. It insists that we attend to have been discussed by Sankar Muthu as the radical historical transformations and instances of Enlightenment Against Empire understand that colonial projects were not (2003). This is a radically post-Foucauldian the epiphenomenal reflection of unchang- vision of Enlightenment (in part because it is ing European national interests, but highly read ‘globally’rather than ‘domestically’) and conflicted and contested endeavours that foregrounds a sense of ‘shared history, and incarnated themselves in radically different sameness of self and culture’(Ballaster, 2005: ways often within the space of one or two p. 4), a moment of radicality greatly different decades. from nineteenth-century consolidations of These cautions may appear the perfect difference through race.12 justification for the abandonment of any Two important points arise from this. attempt to theorize continuities and reso- The first concerns the intra-European nature nances in colonial practices. The retreat to of many discourses around empire. Just empirical particularism can be very com- as Stephen Greenblatt (1991),13 Anthony forting. However, it is possible to respect Grafton (1992) and many other scholars have the singularity of colonialism’s multiple and argued that early European depictions of New diverse iterations, and at the same time draw Spain (the Spanish Empire in the Americas) out certain themes and idioms which appear reflects internecine European sectarian strug- as recurrent leitmotifs cutting across this gles (Protestantism versus Catholicism), so bewildering terrain. One such motif concerns Ballaster draws attention to the centrality of the relationship between visibility, knowledge debates around absolutism and democracy in and power. these early fables. The ‘Black Legend’14 is really a critique of Spanish Catholicism by European non-Catholics, and the critique of COLONIALISM AND VISIBILITIES the Ottomans becomes a proxy critique of an incipient European absolutism. In both Cohn’s and Said’s work there is a Ballaster agrees with Said that ‘Orientalism key visual trope: the certainty of knowledge has more to do with the Occident than is predicated on visibility. Cohn writes of an with the Orient’ (Ballaster, 2005: p. 2), but imperial gaze (‘The British appear ...to have the argument then implicitly diverges from felt most comfortable surveying India from Said’s inasmuch as the fables (and the ‘Black above and at a distance’ [Cohn, 1996: p. 10]), Legend’) are shown not to be concerned while Said repeatedly presents the colonial

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archive as a material and visual structure grip you; it pinches you; and the more you (‘there emerged a complex Orient suitable concentrate on it the less you grasp the whole. for study in the academy, for display in the Then gradually all this becomes harmonious museum, for reconstruction in the colonial and the pieces fall into place of themselves, office, for theoretical illustration ...in theses in accordance with the laws of perspective’ about mankind and the universe’([Said, 1985: (cited by Mitchell, 1988: p. 21). p. 7]). Tony Bennett’s (1995) theorization of Colonial perspectivalism becomes the a metropolitan ‘exhibitionary complex’ as a quest for a privileged ‘point of view’, mode of moral education and control was abstracted from the dangers of nearness exported to Indian contexts by Gyan Prakash and physical contact, and seeking surety in (1999), discussed in the broader context of the distance and framing. As with the panopticon British Empire as a whole by Peter Hoffenberg it was ‘a position from which ...one could see (2001) and has been reformulated as a and not be seen. The photographer, invisible ‘colonial exhibitionary complex’ by Daniel beneath his black cloak as he eyed the world Rycroft (2006). Colonial content was central through his camera’s gaze, in this respect to many of the exhibitions and museums typified the kind of presence desired by the that Bennett describes: Rycroft describes European in the Middle East’(Mitchell, 1988: how new illustrated popular journals such p. 24; see also Alloula [1986] and Pratt on as the Illustrated London News extended the the ‘seeing man’ [Pratt, 1992: p. 7]). And yet exhibitionary complex through an infinite Europeans also sought immersion within the prosthesis. Through the wood engravings object-world of the colony, a contradiction that made possible new forms of illustrated resolved for some writers such as Edward history, an endless stream of images of the Lane and Richard Burton through the use of British Empire became available in ways that disguise. These are positions very different they had previously not. from earlier ‘dialogical’ impersonations of In Timothy Mitchell’s (1988) justly influen- the sort addressed by Ballaster in the literary tial Colonizing Egypt the ‘world as exhibition’ field and popularized among a wide public by is fused with a Heideggerean sense of the William Dalrymple.17 world as picture. The general disposition that Monitorial schooling, urban planning and has been termed ‘Cartesian perspectivalism’ new modes of writing and communication (Jay, 1988) is given an especially intense were all aspects of a strategy, Mitchell colonial incarnation: ‘the age of the exhibition argues, of making Egypt colonizable through was necessarily the colonial age’ remarks visibility: ‘the colonial process would try and Mitchell in one of his most Heideggerean re-order Egypt to appear as a world enframed. moments. The exploitative framing of the Egypt was to be ordered up as something world (which movements such as Arne object-like ...it was to be made picture-like Naess’s ‘deep ecology’ attempt to undo16) and legible, rendered available to political and achieves its fullest and most destructive form economic calculation’(Mitchell, 1988: p. 33). in colonialism – a structured regime of Mitchell’s work exemplifies an approach – spectatorial distantiation. Indeed one could derived from Heidegger and Foucault – in almost substitute the word ‘technology’ with which a colonizing modernity is incarnated ‘colonialism’ in Heidegger’s writing and through the disembodied modality of vision. produce a text very close to Mitchell’s. This was a theme theorized with remarkable Echoing Cohn’s (1996: p. 10) comments about explicitness by Léopold Senghor in his essay the fear of Britons in India of ‘the narrow De La Négritude (1962), which opposes confines of a city street’ (as opposed to the a European deathly objectification with a certainty of distance and elevation), Mitchell desirableAfrican immersion in the materiality cites Gustave Flaubert’s 1850 letter from of thought. Whereas ‘the European’ ‘freezes’ Cairo. ‘As yet I am scarcely over the initial an object ‘out of time ...fixes it, kills it’ and bedazzlement ...each detail reaches out to ‘makes a means of it’, ‘the African turns it

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over and over in his supple hands, he fingers The desire to use the visual as an emblem of it, he feels it’ (Senghor, 1965: pp. 29–30). other historical forces always encounters the Mitchell’s approach has been subject to wider issue which Carlo Ginzburg, following measured and useful critique by Charles E.H. Gombrich, termed the ‘physiognomic Hirschkind. He has suggested that Mitchell problem’. Here the issue is whether images entangles two quite different modalities of or texts (or other aspect of cultural produc- power – what Foucault would term ‘micro- tion) genuinely inform analyses as originary physical techniques’ and those that depend on evidence, or whether they must always be what Hirschkind terms a ‘theological effect’. relegated to the role of illustration of a thesis This criss-crossing between quite different which has already been determined. Ginzburg forms has the consequence that ‘power seems (1989) put it this way: to reside outside of the realm of material forces, and hence to lay claim to a certain The mishaps that can result from such a ‘phys- iognomic’ reading of artistic documents are clear suprahuman authority’ (Hirschkind, 1991: enough. The historian reads into them what he p. 284). has already learned by other means, or what he This critique alerts us to an aporia at the believes he knows, and wants to ‘demonstrate’. heart of many assertions about culture and (Ginzburg, 1989: pp. 34–35) colonialism: the difficulty of demonstrating Ginzburg is concerned with this as a the mechanisms of consumption and iteration fundamental methodological issue for all that link ideological artefacts to the material visual-historical enquiry. However, much of arenas of colonial policy. Arguments, such as the debate around ‘Orientalism’ has engaged that advanced by Linda Nochlin (1983), who the image in such a cavalier fashion that this reads Orientalist paintings much in the same has become a peculiarly acute issue. way that Said reads texts, frequently depend on a generalized colonial zeitgeist in order to convince us of an epistemic colonialism which produces colonially inclined artists DIVERGENCES AND CONVERGENCES who produce images which appear self- evidently to propagate the same colonial It is a curious, and generally overlooked, fact episteme. MacKenzie draws attention to the that scholars who dwell on the polarization volatile identifications of signs which Said of their viewpoints increasingly agree on and Nochlin gloss negatively: images of the fundamental modalities of colonialism. boys studying in Koranic schools, which for Superficially one could easily present an Saideans may signify languor, can also be read account of the historiography of colonialism as ‘showing respect for learning and literacy’, that pitted ‘postcolonial’ scholars against craft production may signify ‘backwardness’ those who exhibit a tolerance of, and nostalgia but might also be understood as positive for, empire. So the work of Edward W. Said is valorizations of pre-industrial production by in certain obvious respects wholly opposed to artists who were in some cases closely the widely disseminated ‘notorious’ (Porter, allied with William Morris’s arts and crafts 2006: p. xvii) views of Niall Fergusson. movement. ‘The east’ MacKenzie argues For Said, a Christian Palestinian product of ‘offered inspiration for a radical movement the nakba, (British) colonialism ‘required to refresh itself anew at the deep wells an abiding ... subordination of the native of colour and light, pattern and design’ and colony to the English, individually (Mackenzie, 1995: p. 67). Subsequent work and collectively’ (Said, 2003: p. 5). For by Roger Benjamin (1997, 2003) nuanced Fergusson – Oxford historian turned Bush- this considerably, allowing us to understand regime confidant – British colonialism was the changing historical moments in which rendered as a beneficent and foresighted particular configurations of artists, images, ‘Anglobalization’. Underlying this apparent exhibitions and ideological iteration occurred. incommensurability are a shared set of

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assumptions that colonialism was something May 1817 – assumes such importance, for he far more subtle, complex and tenacious than intends us to understand that all relations are gunboats and the Maxim gun. Beneath differ- subject to empirical articulation.19 It is in the ences in political evaluations of colonialism’s enunciation of power – its iteration – that we legacy –frequently expressed with an extreme see slippage as the condition of manifestation: combativeness – there is a growing agreement ‘the presence of the book’ triggers a ‘process about the cultural dimensions of its modality. of displacement’in which it is ‘repeated, trans- To illustrate this, consider Homi Bhabha’s lated, misread ...’ (Bhabha, 1994: p. 102). exemplary reading of the material dimen- Bhabha’s text describes the perplexity of sions of colonialism as translational slippage a native catechist who had encountered a in his essay ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’, small crowd of Indians under the eponymous C.A. Bayly’s Empire and Information, and tree. The catechist is initially delighted by David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism. Whereas what appears to be a group of bible-clutching Bhabha is frequently cited as an empathetic Christians, Indians who have assimilated critic of Said the latter two authors are themselves in a utopian conversion to ‘the commonly taken to exemplify (respectively) religion of the European sahibs’. But all is the dying embers of the ‘Cambridge School’ not as it seems. The Indians’ books cannot be of South Asian historiography, and of ‘High the same as the Europeans’because Europeans Toryism’. Said has described Bayly’s work eat flesh, and besides the Indians were given (here filtered via Dirk’s characterizations) as it directly by God. Here ‘through an act ‘assigning a good deal of blame to Indian of repetition ... the colonial text emerges “agents and accomplices” ’ and Cannadine’s uncertainly’ (Bhabha, 1994: p. 107). The approach as turning ‘the whole business into catechist attempts to merge this ‘re-iterated’ a peripheral episode in the history of the book in the possession of the group of Indians eccentricities of the British upper classes’ with the ur-text of the bible as the codification (Said, 2003: p. 3). of the ‘religion of the European sahibs’ but What alignments and resonances can we fails. detect beneath this surface animosity? Where This incident exemplifies a more general Said conjures a world of binaries, the proposition for Bhabha, that ‘colonial pres- one holding sway over the other, Bhabha ence is always ambivalent, split between its imagines an asymmetric world character- appearance as original and authoritative and ized by ambivalence, anxiety and dialogue. its articulation as repetition and difference’ ‘There is always, in Said, the suggestion (Bhabha, 1994: p. 107). It also conjures a that colonial power is possessed entirely tangible and material space of transaction, by the colonizer, which is a historical and encounter and iteration.20 It is material theoretical simplification’ (Bhabha cited in both in terms of its specificity and in the Young, 1990: p. 142). In ‘Signs Taken for appearance of the ‘English book’ not as a Wonders’, Bhabha scrutinizes a colonial logic disembodied text or ideology, but as incar- as the ‘partialization’ of the ‘English book’. nations that have complex histories, surfaces Diagnosing colonial power’s own claims as and appearances: ‘it is its appearance that rhetorical anxiety, Bhabha focuses, almost regulates the ambivalence between origin and ‘ethnographically’, on a precise moment displacement, discipline and desire, mimesis of encounter, transaction and translation.18 and repetition’ (Bhabha, 1994: p. 110). Colonial power may appear incarnated in its A close reading of Bhabha’s ‘case studies’ own terms at the beginning of this account helps dispel the oft-cited claim that he is but is quickly revealed in its fragility once it only interested in a placeless, de-historicized becomes subject to negotiation in a particular and de-materialized phantasmatic ‘colonial location at a particular time. It is here that discourse’. From the placedness of the shade Bhabha’s subtitle – Questions of ambivalence of a tree outside Delhi, we find Bhabha and authority under a tree outside Delhi, inhabiting a space which is epistemologically

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(if not politically) curiously resonant with which, by the device of never bothering to the spaces conjured by Bayly and Cannadine. read the works of those authors to whom When Cannadine repeatedly asks what colo- they imagine themselves to be opposed, ends nialism ‘really looked like’(Cannadine, 2002: up unwittingly mirroring certain elements p. xvii), he is – unexpectedly – engaging the of them. It is striking that the central same issue as Bhabha in his preoccupation point made by many of his critics is that with ‘surfaces’ and ‘appearances’. Similarly, what he says is not ‘new’: postcolonial Bayly’s project – to explore the ways in which historiography of the kind he professes to colonial knowledge depended on ‘native’ disparage has been exploring these issues for mediation of that knowledge – produces several decades. Thus do phantoms battle a space very similar to that described by phantoms. Another idiom through which Bhabha’s catechist. In a parallel manner in we can trace a curious symmetry between his remarkable book Empire and Information, ‘postcolonial’ and High Tory approaches can Bayly is keen to document the emergence be found in the area of biographical reflexivity. of what he terms ‘an Indian ecumene’ – What Said (1985: p. 25) described as the a terrain of shared knowledge negotiated necessity of a Gramscian ‘inventory’ has between Indians and colonizing Britons – become de rigeur for historians of different which is also characterized by contestation hues: Bayly (1998: pp. 307–322). Hall (2002 and failure. passim), Cannadine (2002: pp. 181–199) and In Bayly’s account, the power/knowledge Porter (2006: pp. x–xi) have all recently relationship, which for Foucauldians such as offered their own reflexive inventories. Cohn and Said entails intimacy and potency, Different approaches have also reflected has a Bhabha-esque anxiety and ambivalence. different audiences. A postcolonial scholar- In the first place it is not colonial sui generis; ship, engaged with the tenacity of colonial rather it is the co-option by colonizers of ideologies, has consolidated a position within ‘sophisticated systems of internal espionage the academy through its recondite profession- and political reporting which had long been alized language. A contrasting populism – deployed by the kingdoms of the Indian largely based in the academy but looking to sub-continent’ (Bayly, 1999: p. 365). In the broader publics – has advanced politically second place, we should not understand this conservative positions in an everyday lan- to have been a ruthlessly efficient system guage. Part of a wider public desire for the for it ‘rested on shaky foundations’ (Bayly, return to neo-Macauly-an history as narrative, 1999: p. 365). Colonial knowledge was ‘never works by authors such as Colley, Cannadine, absolute’ and was the result of a ‘dialogic Fergusson and Dalrymple (some tied also to process’ in the manner that Irschick uses this a television series) have fed into a public Bakhtinian idiom (Bayly, 1999: p. 370).21 If desire for absolution from the burdens of the one wishes one can roll up these ‘anxious’ postcolonial. characterizations as part of a paradigm which desires to portray ‘colonizer[s] as victim[s]’ (as Said claims Linda Colley – wife of PROVINCIALIZING EUROPE Cannadine – does in her book Captives [2002]). Alternatively, and I think more I have suggested that the starkness of Said’s productively, one can search beneath the vision has been fruitfully complicated by superficial political oppositions (whose reality Homi Bhabha’s suggestion that ‘Orientalism’ I do not deny) and explore resonances between was never as straightforwardly successful very different approaches which attempt to as Said imagined it to be for it was itself apprehend different forms of colonialism in internally flawed – ‘forked’ or ‘split’ – by their complexity. the entanglement of horror and desire that So as a further example, David Cannadine’s constituted it. Bhabha’s re-elaboration of the Ornamentalism exemplifies a High Toryism complex urges driving colonialism has also

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illuminated the ways in which those who (1997: p. 1) This is a trajectory that could be had been ‘orientalized’ might work within the given a vast temporal dimension. Wolfgang contradictions of ‘orientalism’ as a practice Schivelbusch has argued – in a wonderful to partially overthrow it. Whereas Said’s provocation – that early modern Europe’s model is suggestive of a mimesis in which class system emerged through the control of colonialism is granted the power of the spices, prestige substances from the east that master copy, Bhabha’s is more suggestive of brought with them the ‘taste of paradise’. Pandora’s Box – the act of colonial enuncia- Spices were ‘emissaries from a fabled world’ tion immediately sets free a surplus of possible (Schivelbusch, 1992: p. 6) and would give enactments ensuring unpredictable outcomes. an undifferentiated European palate its first The potential of Bhabha’s insight is ‘decisive refinement’. Schivelbusch draws a demonstrated by Stephen Eisenman’s study parallel between today’s Age of Oil and an of the painter Paul Gauguin’s residence in earlier Age of Spices in which the Occident Tahiti. Previous approaches to Gauguin had borrowed its vestments from the east: ‘More stressed his complicity in various systems of and more people desired sumptuous, exotic domination: he was variously condemned for clothes and sharply seasoned dishes, and ‘colonial racism and misogyny’ (Eisenman, this change in taste signalled the end of the 2000: p. 120). In a world of colonial Middle Ages and the dawn of the modern binaries he seemed to be unequivocally age’ (Schivelbusch, 1992: p. 10). Sidney placed on the side of the French colonizers. W. Mintz (1985) makes a parallel argument Eisenman, however, presupposes a world about the manner in which the European of more fluid identities and hypothesizes love of sugar (initially an elite sumptuary a congruence between Gauguin’s bohemian classed as a ‘spice’) was transformed through refusal of European sexual dimorphism and the economics of slave labour into a mass- Tahitian categorizations of the Tata-vahine, or produced source of calories that reduced the Mahu – terms that are sometimes translated as cost of reproducing an industrial workforce. the ‘third-sex’. Remaining alert to Gauguin’s From spice to sweetener, sugar became a colonial investments and the complexity of necessity demanded by the masses. his position, Eisenman nevertheless opens Bernard Porter asks ‘in what ways [was up the possibility of seeing how Gauguin’s Britain] an imperial society, as well as an liminality permitted him an almost ethno- imperial nation?’ (2006: p. vii). His answer graphic intimacy with Tahitians, and provided is that most of the time it wasn’t, at least in the base for aesthetic projects which can- any obvious self-conscious way. Attempting not be reduced to a ‘colonial gaze’. This to systematically survey British cultural life privileged liminality is compressed in his for colonial/imperial ‘content’ (as opposed illuminating title: Gauguin’s Skirt. Echoing to opportunistically ‘pok[ing] about for the Bhabha, Eisenman concludes that ‘Rather occasional imperial shard’ [2006: p. 224]) than buttressing repressive regimes, colonial he finds surprisingly little. Surveying public arts and literatures may actually undermine statutary erected in London he finds that a their ideological legitimacy, or at least offer mere five out of eighty erected before 1880 potential paths for future cultural and political (and still standing) were of ‘imperialists’. resistance’ (Eisenman, 2000: p. 19). Glasgow’s statuary, however, betrays a far Gauguin’s Tahitian and Marquesan experi- greater material residue of empire (Porter, ences fed back into metropolitan European art, 2006: p. 147). Porter concludes that empire just as Picasso’s ‘epiphany’ in the Trocadero played a small role in the constitution of opened European Modernism to African and domestic British society, at least until the Oceanic aesthetics. ‘Europe was made by late nineteenth century, when there were its imperial projects, as much as colonial more concerted attempts to generate imperial encounters were shaped by conflicts within patriotism and affect. Their lack of success Europe itself’ as Cooper and Stoler note explains, he suggests, the lack of popular

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political angst in Britain during the disinte- embodied world is also taken up by Can- gration of empire. nadine and E.M. Collingham. Cannadine’s Catherine Hall’s Civilising Subjects (2002) Ornamentalism was essentially concerned to argued that empire had fundamentally inscribe imperialism as a question of class, constituted a Britain which had been able of rank and status, rather than race, an to imagine itself civilized through continual echo of Joseph Schumpeter’s argument. In counterpoint with colonized others. Focusing exploring the question of ‘imperialism as in the latter part of her study on mid-Victorian ornamentalism’ (Cannadine, 2002: p. 122), Birmingham she traces the slippage from Cannadine dwelt on a material dimension paternalistic Abolitionist discourse into a of colonialism – which he summarized inter harsher vocabulary increasingly configured alia as ‘processions and ceremony, plumed by notions of race as biological difference.22 hats and ermine robes’ (Cannadine, 2002: Porter in response complains that in support p. 126). This was part, he argues of imperial- of a Birmingham structured by empire she ism’s anti-capitalist nostalgia for an idealized ‘can come up with nothing apart from Uncle hierarchy evident in ‘Gothic cathedrals in Tom’s Cabin’ and a popular entertainment the Dominions; ruling princes and Indo- about Australia. The former does not count Saracenic architecture in South Asia; native as ‘imperial’ in Porter’s scheme and the chiefs and traditional tribes in Africa and the latter ‘should probably not count as serious Middle east; imperial chivalry, royal images theatre’. ‘The silence’, Porter concludes ‘is and icons...’ (Cannadine, 2002: p. 128). deafening’ (Porter, 2006: p. 140). Imperialism permitted a magnification of a In his staging of doughty panoramic fantasy no longer plausible within Britain: historical empiricism against a flighty and ‘blooming with brighter colours, greater radi- unreliable postcolonial scholarship,23 Porter ance and stronger perfume’(Cannadine, 2002: privileges only the visible and the countable p. 128).24 Collingham examines the body as as evidence. The subliminal, the repressed, a locus for the construction and contestation the allusive (and even the sweet) have of authority in colonial India. The manner in no place in his enumeration. The Saidean which Gandhi would use his body as a somatic conclusion – on a reading of Mansfield signifier, a visible sign of bio-moral substance, Park and Great Expectations – that English has been extensively analysed (Alter, 2000; literature demonstrates the ‘hegemony of ... Bean, 1989). Collingham focuses on colonial imperial ideology’ is, Porter argues, possible somatics, showing how dialogical ‘nabobism’ only if one is prepared to ‘put more weight is displaced by an anxious ‘sahibism’. Trans- on very incidental aspects of their plots than formations in British power were complexly they can bear’ (Porter, 2006: p. 141). Here mirrored and prefigured in transformations in we encounter an impasse between different bodily norms. Collingham’s book cloaks a methodologies: Porter’s vulgar enumeration celebratory account of the British in India in a (illuminating in many ways) finds itself thin carapace of Foucault and Elias; however, passing a sophisticated ‘new imperial history’ she draws our attention to the need to study the (proposing that British history simply cannot material articulations of colonizers’ cultural be understood without an understanding of practice.25 empire) which looks to a radically different order of signs as evidence. We can think about different kinds of signs SOMATICIZING EMPIRE in a different idiom. Stephen Eisenman’s argument, briefly touched on above, proceeds The corporeal anxiety that Collingham from a material moment, rather like Bhabha’s describes and Gandhi’s ‘implosion’ of colo- scene under a tree, outside Delhi: the nially constituted somatics alert us to the moment when a long-haired Gauguin alights volatility of difference in colonial contexts. at Papete in 1891. This concern with an Cooper and Stoler note that ‘the otherness

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of colonized persons was neither inherent influenced by ‘climatalogical’factors. Herder, nor stable’ (Cooper and Stoler, 1997: p. 7). for instance, is interested in ‘nation’ as ‘a In India, the Dutch East Indies, French state of mind or a sense of distinctiveness’ Indo-China and diverse parts of Africa, (Muthu, 2003: p. 246)26: race has almost colonizers invested much energy in managing no role to play in this. From the mid- race as a crucial idiom of colonial logic. nineteenth century onwards, partly under the The colonial ‘construction’ of caste has weight of misreadings of Darwin, and in the already been alluded to in the discussion of face of increasing anti-colonial resistance, a Cohn and Dirks, but we might note here biologistic race assumed a new tenacity in that the dominant colonial anthropological many official colonial projects and in the theorization of caste at the end of the popular European imagination (Rich, 1986). nineteenth century and early twentieth century Here, as Stoler (1995; see also Young, 1995) constituted it as ‘race’ on the basis of has argued, a ‘racially erotic counterpoint’ the ‘nasal index’ (Risley, 1891: p. xxxiv). of black and white bodies was a key vector Associated with Herbert Hope Risley, Census through which colony and metropole inter- Commissioner in 1901 and President of the acted. The strength of these identifications Royal Anthropological Institute in 1911 (see was most powerfully expressed in the anxiety Pinney, 1990, 1992), this conceptualization of that surrounded métissage, which Stoler reads caste as race was very explicitly mobilized as a ‘metonym for the biopolitics of empire at as part of a divide-and-rule anti-nationalist large’ (Stoler, 1997: p. 199) ideology. Since caste ‘perpetuate[s] such I will shortly turn to the ways in which con- differences between classes of men as we temporary visual artists have explored what readily recognize between different breeds Sarat Maharaj terms a ‘xeno-epistemology’, of horses or cattle’ (Anderson, 1913: p. 5), which may help us understand some of the Indian nationalism could never succeed, it questions which have so far, in this essay, only was claimed. Risley characterized European been addressed through the idiom of academic nations as built on ‘national types’ made dispute. Prior to that we must consider two possible by genetic interchange. In India by central conceptual paradigms – negritude contrast ‘the process of fusion was long ago and neo-Gandhism – which have articulated arrested ...There is consequently no national influential paradigms of post-coloniality. type, and no nation in the ordinary sense of Négritude can be seen (like Ubuntu and the word’ (Risley, 1909: p. 288). Gyanendra Thabo Mbeki’s ‘African Renaissance’) as a Pandey (1990) has traced a parallel process in tactical inversion of ideologies implicated the sphere of ‘communalized’ constructions in colonialism. Originating in 1930s Paris of Hindu and Muslim identities in colonial under the influence of the Harlem Renaissance northern India. (a further exemplification of what Paul Gilroy But race was more commonly configured terms the Black Atlantic), figures such as as the difference between colonizer and Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire invoked colonized. The differential role it played in a striking set of essentializations about Black diverse colonialisms with diverse histories Africa. Senghor’s 1962 text De La Négritude makes it impossible to produce a generalized starts with a starkly drawn characterization of history of its trajectory. Eighteenth-century a colonial ‘Cartesian Perspectivalism’ which Mexican casta paintings were profoundly kills its object in order better to understand it. typologizing minute fractions of mestizo Black Africans, by contrast, are presented as difference (see Katzew, 2004) at the very immersed affectively in a world from which moment that in some parts of Europe they are not yet divorced. Enlightenment anti-imperialism was rejecting Senghor’s disparagement of colonial objec- naturalized difference in favour of a quasi- tification finds echoes in an Indian tradition relativistic form of ‘culture’ (Muthu, 2003: of anti-colonial opposition. Rabindranath p. 184), albeit one which was heavily Tagore – a major influence on Ashis Nandy

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and Partha Chatterjee (India’s two leading be seen as its own essentialization of the public intellectuals) – produced powerful ‘non-modern’ and pre-colonial. poetic descriptions of what Partha Chatterjee In all these textual arguments, the material has termed the ‘prisonhouse of colonial and visual have figured prominently. The reason’ (Chatterjee, 1995: p. 55). In 1893 appearance and non-appearance of imperial in a letter written at Shelidah, Tagore wrote themes in public statuary, imperial plumes, that ‘Curiously enough, my greatest fear is styles of architecture and complexly somati- that I should be reborn in Europe! For there cized bodies have all served as currency one cannot recline like this with one’s whole within linguistic discourses. Working within being laid open to the infinite above ....Like the humanities and social sciences it is the roads there, one’s mind has to be stone- difficult to escape a self-reflexive language as metalled for heavy traffic – geometrically laid the primary mode of investigative analysis. out, and kept clear and regulated’ (Tagore, However, the experience of colonialism has 1921: p. 106). A year later he would write also preoccupied numerous visual artists, and of his repugnance with Calcutta, which ‘is as this concluding section considers the nature of ponderously proper as a Government Office. the particular insights they offer. Each of its days comes forth like a coin from a mint, clear cut and glittering, Ah! Those dreary, deadly days, so preciously equal in ART-ETHICAL PROCESSING AND weight’ (Tagore, 1921: p. 121). THE LEGACY OF COLONIALISM Ashis Nandy draws on Tagore and Mohandas K. Gandhi as resources for recov- The legacy of the colonial within the post- ering possibilities generated by Indian epis- colonial has been of central concern to a temologies which have survived colonialism, number of important visual artists and critical albeit in fragmentary forms. His early work commentators on visual cultural production. The Intimate Enemy (1983), informed by Okwui Enwezor, perhaps the most consis- Fanon and Césaire, engaged the deep insertion tently exciting international curator, made this of colonial alienation in the Indian psyche a central issue in the conceptualization of (‘that is why the cry of the victims of Documenta 11 in 2002, noting that today’s colonization was ultimately the cry to be heard avant-garde is ‘so thoroughly disciplined and in another language ...’[Nandy, 1983: p. 73]). domesticated within the scheme of Empire Later work has looked to Tagore for insights that a whole different set of regulatory and on alternative modalities for national self- resistance models has to be found to coun- imagination, and popular commercial film as terbalance Empire’s attempt at totalization’. a bearer of ‘vestigial elements in a dialect Sarat Maharaj (2002) wrote very thoughtfully which everyone had half-forgotten’ (Nandy, at the time of that show about ‘xeno- 1995: p. 21). In a memorable account of a epistemics’ and the potential of visual art series of 1980s hijackings of Air India aircraft for knowledge production that might provide by Sikh extremists he records the emergence such a counterbalance. Noting the different of a repressed sense of community – triggered modalities of the visual arts and ‘high- in extremis – and articulated by a common speed’knowledge systems such as science and language of the songs and sentiments of social theory, Maharaj conceptualized art as Hindi film. Nandy writes of the ‘deep but ‘ “xeno-equipment” rigged out for attracting, increasingly cornered elements of Indian conducting, taking on difference ...’ and culture’ – by which he means non-modern harbouring the possibility of ‘art-ethical and pre-colonial which still find a place in processing plants churning out options and mass-cultural forms such as Hindi film. Ably potentials ... for action and involvement in championed by Lal (2000) and subsequently the world’ (Maharaj, 2002). Young (2001), Nandy’s position has been Art’s potential to theorize options and subject to searching attack for what might potentials has a long history. A new history

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of art as xeno-epistemology would have to argument about the colonization of Egypt) a include such substantial and extraordinary specific tool in the picturing and control of bodies of work as Mexican subversions of territories and peoples. Mulvey has suggested colonial codices commissioned in the wake that Durham’s ICA show might be understood of the Spanish conquest of 1519 (Gruzinski, as a prolonged destabilization of such a 1992) and the extensive commentary and visual/political regime founded on a process critique of the colonial settlement of Australia of binary confrontation between a valued provided by nineteenth-century Aboriginal self and disavowed other. If a system of artists such as Tommy McRae and Mickey perspective provides the stable point from of Ulladulla (Sayers, 1997). There are ample which one’s own culture can (following Said) and sufficient survivor’s of non-Western visu- oppositionally view nature, civilization view alizations of the history of colonial trade and savagery, and so on, Durham tried to corrupt conquest on which to construct indigenous the alignments that make such identifications visual histories of colonialism. possible. Ropes hung from the ceiling bisected the space of the gallery and set up a rival spatial regime that conflicted with a series of FOURTH-WORLD XENO-EPISTEMICS opposed signifiers (presented in the style of road signs) that invoke colonial binaries. Among key contemporary contributors to The critique of colonialism as – literally and a project of ‘xeno-epistemology’ we might figuratively – a way of seeing forms a central include Jimmy Durham, an artist of Cherokee part of the Brisbane-based Aboriginal artist descent. His earliest works were a series of Gordon Bennett’s work. Bennett, more than Indian ‘artefacts from the future’. One of any other living practitioner, has taken as his them, Bedia’s Muffler (1985), is a car exhaust object of analysis the visual regimes that made decorated with cowries and shamanic designs colonialism possible and subjected these and suspended from a leather strap. This post- to complex transformations and reordering. industrial artefact simultaneously mocked the ‘By recontextualizing images subtracted from expectations of an ‘authentic’ timeless Native this grid of Euro-Australian “self” represen- American art and conjured a future in which a tation [he attempts] to show the constructed skilled relationship to the land again becomes nature of history and of identification as necessary for survival (illustrated in Durham, arbitrary’ (cited in Bennett, 2000: p. 16). n.d.: p. 18). Pocahantas’ Underwear (1985), Bennett’s Aboriginal mother was raised on a pair of red feathered knickers in which a reserve and prohibited knowledge of her frayed elastic coexists with archaic pendula own people’s belief and customs. Bennett’s of beads, conjures a similar collapse of own upbringing, which he has written about Empires. with searing insight and poignancy, involved But Durham’s works constitute a more a complete invisibility of his Aboriginality. ambitious and conceptually complex cri- Bennett’s triptych of 1989, Requiem, Of tique of what we have previously consid- Grandeur, Empire, demonstrates his concern ered under the rubric of ‘colonial/Cartesian with cultural technologies of rule and colonial perspectivalism’. In a superb reading of technologies of representation. Aboriginal Durham’s 1994 ICA (London) show Original figures (based on early photographic images Re-Runs, Laura Mulvey situates Durham’s by Charles Woolley and J.W. Lindt from the concerns within the literary theorist and 1860s and 1870s) are positioned at the van- historian Tzvetan Todorov’s conjoining of ishing point of perspectively depicted cubes. the introduction of linear perspective and the Labelled A, B and C, these conflate colonial discovery and conquest of America (Mulvey, literacy and the abbreviated racist calum- n.d.: p. 45) This technology of representation nies (which Bennett references explicitly in serves not simply as metaphor, but rather many other works) as dual technologies of (as we have seen in Timothy Mitchell’s domination. Linear perspective and European

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technologies of writing, together with civiliza- the re-cloaking of the everyday with a tional rhetorics (two of the triptychs reference provocative postcolonial surface that makes European classical archways), are diagnosed history ‘strange’ (Kasfir, 1999: pp. 211–212). as central devices in the construction of Bennett’s exceptional work might be seen Aboriginal identities by a colonial ‘world as an actualization of Homi Bhabha’s demand picture’. that in the reading of colonial discourse ‘the But, as Bennett himself has said, his is not point of intervention should shift from the a nihilistic investigation, despite the enormity identification of images as positive or nega- of the genocidal history he of necessity tive, to an understanding of the processes of engages with. Rather, he is interested in the subjectification made possible (and plausible) arbitrary nature of identifications and the ways through [...] sterotypic discourse’ (Bhabha, in which technologies which claim a natural 1994: p. x). Bennett’s diagnosis of the intimate status might be overturned by radically dif- efficacy of this discourse provides us not ferent world views. Empire endows Emperor simply with a moral/political position but an Augustus at the summit of the archway with enormously sophisticated and precise analysis an Aboriginal ‘halo’ referenced through the of its mechanics, demonstrated especially well ‘dot’style which became such a characteristic in his 1988 series titled Notes on Perception feature of Western Desert acrylic paintings (Bennett, 1999). His wider oeuvre constitutes from the 1970s onwards. Empires disrupt a penetrating intellectual disquisition on the Empires. ways in which we perceive other histories The manner in which representational through the experience of colonization and the technologies ‘made’ a colonial history is grain of visualization. more explicitly developed in a series of Bennett’s work is also powerfully con- paintings in which Bennett reworks familiar cerned with the relationship between centre images of Captain Cook. Possession Island, and periphery, and their mutual dependency for instance, reconstructs an eighteenth- and fictionality. Ian McLean has observed century history painting, overlayering and ‘Perspective does not expel the periphery to interweaving both Aboriginal dot style with a the ends of the world, as it might seem, but Jackson Pollock-style dribble that references brings these ends into the centre of both the his Blue Poles, famously purchased by the picture’s space and the subjectivity of the Whitlam Government in 1972 for a then viewer’(McLean, 1998: p. 138). Through this record sum and which for many symbolized manoeuvre, Bennett (like Durham) sought to the Australian state’s desire to find an place under erasure the relationship between authenticating history and narrative outside centre and periphery, and subject and object, itself. Abstract Expressionism as cultural which discourses like that of linear perspec- imperialism is a connection made explicitly by tive propose. But there is a broader concern Bennett: ‘The overpainted Modernist trace of here with cartography – the making of maps, a Pollock skein [is] a metaphor for the scar as territories and borders which Paul Carter trace and memory of the colonial lash’ (cited (1987) has diagnosed as ‘spatial history’. The by Smith, 2000: p. 16). Bennett’s concern with illegitimacy of colonially imposed borders the ways in which ‘style’ embodies culture has also been the object of a direct, explicit and history resonates with Yinka Shonibare’s and literal attack in the Namibian artist John deployment of kitenge printed cotton as a Ndevasia Muafangejo’s linocuts. In Angola trace of history and identity. For Shonibare, and South West Africa (1976), for instance, he a London-born artist of Yoruba heritage, traces the legacy of King Mandume (a figure these trans-national textiles (originating in a of great political resonance for Kwanyama Dutch East Indies batiks factory, printed in people) and the artist’s own experience Manchester for the colonial African market) of trans-national migration. The pictorial articulate the contingent, but enormously space occupied by Angola and (apartheid powerful, conditioning of style and permit South African-occupied) South West Africa,

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or Namibia, is bisected by a line marked picture’ – of a realm over which ‘man’ had ‘artificial boundary’ (Timm, 1998). power (structured through alien taxonomies and endlessly substitutable), perhaps King- Smith’s photocompositions should be seen CONTESTING THE COLONIAL WORLD as a reassertion of the power of that world PICTURE over a colonizing eye. The power relations are reversed: it is no longer the viewer The work of all these artists suggests what who structures the world in his/her own has already been hinted at: that beneath all its image, but the world which ‘impresses’ the infinite variety, what we understand as colo- viewer (Williamson, 1996: p. 46; King-Smith, nialism is the climax of a man-besotted view 1992). of reality, the fruition of a way of regarding Michel Foucault once characterized an the world as expendable, as something simply emergent form of European knowledge as there for human exploitation. European world ‘the absolute eye that cadaverizes’ (Foucault, conquest was precipitated by the desire to 1976: p. 166). He was concerned here with extract resources (spices, gold, slaves ...) the paradoxical manner in which certain and colonialism and imperialism emerged as forms of encompassing knowledge demand technologies of control and quantification. In the death of their subject in a way that the terms delineated by Heidegger, the world Senghor had prefigured. The black British became increasingly viewed as a ‘picture’ – photographer Dave Lewis has confronted as something set apart from man, rather than this continuing cadaverization in a series of that thing that encloses and moulds man works which introduced fluid, live bodies (Heidegger, 1977). The modern concept of into the regimented and ordered spaces of man indeed emerges as a product of the ability nineteenth-century anthropological archives to set oneself apart from the world. Many (Charity et al., 1995). The desire to analyse the colonial projects intensified this concern ‘absolute eye’and its tendency to ‘cadaverize’ with the world as a field of mathematically has also been a central concern in work by the quantifiable, spatial and temporal, certainty, white South African artist Penny Siopsis. In drawing out the differences between European a powerful series of photographs she engaged subjects and non-European objects. Colonial with the legacy of Sartje Bartmann, the so- pseudo-sciences and representational prac- called Hottentot Venus, who was exported to tices can be interpreted in this light as anxious Europe as an object of curiosity in the early attempts to guard against the collapse of this nineteenth century. separation. South Africa has also been the setting for a The world as something set apart, and significant recent debate about the rights to use as something ripe for colonization, consti- certain images. Okwui Enwezor, director of tutes one of the central concerns of Leah the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale, launched a King-Smith’s elegiac Patterns of Connection fierce critique of white South African artists’s series. These photo-compositions emerged use of ‘black bodies’in their attempts to nego- from King-Smith’s work in the archives tiate the new ‘rainbow nation’. He focused of the State Library of Victoria (Australia) particularly on Candice Breitz’s Rainbow in 1989 and 1990. The works overprint Series, which morphed pornographic and archival images of Aboriginal people with National Geographic images of white and King-Smith’s original fish-eye landscapes in black bodies in a manner that referenced large Cibachrome prints. The smallness and Dada and Surrealist notions of the ‘exquisite disposability of the original archival prints corpse’. Practitioners such as Breitz, Enwezor has been banished by these imposing prints, implied, appeal to a universal space of whose glossy surface confronts the viewer Modernist creativity and right to speak: with their own mirrored presence. If the they fail to recognize the ways in which archive prints were one sign of the ‘world as political histories in which they are complexly

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implicated have deprived them of that right to postcolonial art practice: the margin as centre. speak (Enwezor, 1999). This involves a repudiation of a temporalized Enwezor’s intervention problematically cartography which positions much of the entangles itself with essentializations of world in a relationship of ‘belated-ness’ (in Foucault’s term) enunciative modality, to colonial centres. Recall Said’s argument which has been wittily critiqued by Rasheed (much elaborated by Inden [1990], and Araeen under the rubric of ‘Our Bauhaus, independently theorized by Fabian [1983: Others’ Mudhouse’ (Araeen, 1989). Araeen, p. 25ff.]) that a key Orientalizing strategy the Pakistani-born London-based editor of involved (in Fabian’s term) the denial of Third Text, has recounted how after his arrival ‘co-evality’ (the denial of a singular tem- in London as a sculptor working in a post- porality uniting both centre and periphery: Caro tradition, he came increasingly ‘to feel the Occident had History and Agency; the that the context or history of Modernism was Orient did not). As Dipesh Chakrabarty has not available to me’ (Araeen, 1987: p. 10). discussed, it became the fate of the belated Instead, he was continually reminded of the zones to replicate a history that had already relationship of his work to that of ‘his own happened elsewhere: Europe andAmerica had Islamic tradition’. While Araeen dreamt of a histories of art (see Nelson, 1997), the belated universal ‘Bauhaus’, he was offered only a zones had traditional art practices which might ‘mudhouse’. one day cease to be traditional, but never Araeen sees this artworld vision of the with the possibility of becoming ‘original’. modernity of the self and the archaicism of Nineteenth-century evolutionist propositions the other as part of a structural dependency, which posited colonial metropoles in histor- for one cannot have the modern without ical advance of their peripheries are easy to its obverse, the archaic. Araeen’s diagnosis dismiss now, but they have a tenacious shadow of the artworld’s Orientalism provides a in the assumption that aesthetic history is useful frame through which to view the made in New York or Paris by practitioners important recent work of the Russian artist who, like Nietzsche’s madman in the market Haralampi G. Oraschakoff. Like Bennett, proclaiming that ‘God is Dead’, discover that Oraschakoff attempts to implode the basis they have arrived ‘too soon’ and that the of centre/periphery distinctions, proposing ignorant public are not ready for them. If instead something rather like the Möbius loop Nietzsche’s madman’s burden was to arrive in which the inside and outside transmute. ‘too soon’, the belated-zones’s burden was to His exhibition on the theme of Itinerants arrive too late. and Orientalists – which juxtaposed his Dipesh Chakrabarty – who has perhaps own images of cartographic marginalization theorized this question more perceptively with painted ‘copies’ of canonical Orien- than anyone – observed with regard to talist works by artists such as Delacroix the writing and thinking of history that and Gerome – explores the mutability of ‘ “Europe” remains the sovereign, theoretical different positions, noting that ‘For the subject of all histories, including the ones British artists, Russia represented eastern we call “Indian”, “Chinese”, “Kenyan” and exoticism, but the Russians identified them- so on ...’ (Chakrabarty, 2000: p. 27) The selves as Europeans, condemning Ivan the same could be said – perhaps with even Terrible’s bloody excesses ...’ (Borovsky, more justification – about much art history, 1999: p. 14). Echoing Dipesh Chakrabarty, which so fully presumes the ‘sovereignty’ of Oroschakoff takes as his central problem the the primary European model that all other belief that ‘time on the boundaries flows contending histories are merely footnoted, differently’. or even deleted. Some commentators would This struggle between centres and periph- claim that a similar ‘denial of co-evality’ lay eries, metropoles and interstices, gives rise at the heart of two exhibitions in the 1980s to one of the major framing tropes of which generated a huge critical industry.

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The Museum of Modern Art’s 1984 ‘Prim- A similar critique was developed by itivism’ in Twentieth Century Art: Affinity Rasheed Araeen with respect to Magiciens of the Tribal and the Modern exhibition de la Terre, which, like Primitivism, was was a milestone in the creation of a new ostensibly concerned with a universal cre- consciousness of the politics of representation ativity. Curated by Jean-Hubert Martin in and exclusion. Committed to exploring the 1989 in Paris, Magiciens deployed a ‘super- ‘affinity of the tribal and the modern’, the empiricism’aimed at destroying the ‘false dis- ostensible aim of the show was to demonstrate tinction between Western and other cultures’ the influence of ‘Primitive’ non-Western but, for many critics, its refusal to address the art (primarily African and Oceanic) upon institutional and cultural frameworks through European ‘Primitivists’. Building upon earlier which different art practices were mediated studies (von Sydow, 1921; Goldwater, 1938), vitiated this laudable project. The exhibition William Rubin, the curator of the MOMA mixed works produced by EuroAmerican exhibition, was honestly explicit about his named individual artists with those produced interest in the ‘modern’ half of the equation, by ‘anonymous’ collective ‘tribal’ practitioners, being concerned to ‘understand the Primitive reproducing for many a further neo-Hegelian sculptures in terms of the Western context sense of the West as the sole occupant of in which modern artists “discovered” them’ historical space (Araeen, 1989). In this sense (Rubin, 1984; p. 1). It was this privileging the history of non-Western aesthetics’colonial of EuroAmerican artist’s actions and the entanglement (e.g. Mitter, 1977) is merely almost complete silencing of the voices of repeated, not superseded and resolved. the creators of the ‘Primitive’ objects which Approaching colonialism’s cultural dimen- caused such outrage among a plethora of sion through the prism of contemporary critics who ranged against what came to be visual ‘xeno-epistemology’ presents a clear seen as Rubin’s ‘colonial’ strategy. sense of a recurrent concern with colonial The dominant narrative in the exhibition perspectivalism – a coercive rationalizing sustained a beneficent and self-possessed mode of hierarchical knowledge. However, EuroAmerican modernism granting African it provides little sense of the heterogeneity and Oceanic art mere walk-on parts as proofs of colonialisms which I was keen to stress of its generosity and open-ness to diverse at the beginning of this discussion. Perhaps influences. This entailed an inventory of this reflects the way in which a hypostasized (in the sense that Homi Bhabha charac- colonialism is presented in the art schools terizes it) cultural ‘diversity’, as opposed in which most of the artists I have dis- to a confrontation with cultural ‘difference’ cussed have been trained. The art I have as a conflictual and historically constituted discussed demonstrates in a powerful way struggle (Bhabha, 1994: p. 34). Thomas that, as Stoler notes, ‘“to colonize” is an McEvilley turned up the heat further in evocative and active verb accounting for a denunciatory exchange in Artforum. For a range of inequalities and exclusions – McEvilley, the MOMA show strove for a that may have little to do with colonialism ‘Western-imposed “commonality”’, but for at all. As a morality tale of the present all its pretensions had only served to further the metaphor of colonialism has enormous inscribe the ‘Hegel-based conviction that force but it can also eclipse how varied the one’s own culture is riding the crucial time- subjects are created by different colonialisms’ line of history’s self-realization’. Ultimately (Stoler, 1995: p. 199).Arts xeno-epistemology the Primitivism exhibition’s desire to believe appears exceptionally good at ‘Heideggerean’ in the ‘wholeness, integrity and indepen- evocation, not as successful in nuanced delin- dence’ of the Western tradition reinscribed eation. An analysis of subaltern visual xeno- the Hegelian assumption that Western art epistemology grounded in the study of Indian history alone embodied the self-realization of popular responses to colonialism (Pinney, Universal Spirit (1984). 2004), Zairean popular ‘history painting’

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(Fabian, 1996) and other localized practices years is divided into a period pre-colonial, would almost certainly generate a vastly more colonial and post-colonial which centres less disparate set of perspectives, positions that than 60 years of British rule at the heart might be congruent with Stoler’s. of Hausa experience’ (1997: p. 408).28 The acknowledgement of non-European expan- sive forms would perhaps contribute a further CONCLUSION: WHOSE COLONIALISM? stage in what Dipesh Chakrabarty terms the ‘provincialization’ of Europe. The move Such an approach would also highlight the towards culturalized accounts of world history multiple non-European colonialisms which has been accompanied by an increased although having very low visibility in scepticism about the centre-periphery models mainstream academic discourses have never- which seemed to replicate colonialism’s theless structured the experience of significant own self-delusion. Emmanuel Wallerstein’s numbers of people. Haralampi Oraschakoff’s world systems theory has been increasingly work directs our attention to Russia’s incorpo- displaced by a ‘provincializing’ trajectory. ration of neighbouring lands into its empire, In this new historiography colonies emerge a process which has increasingly attracted not simply as a ‘belated’ periphery but as the attention of scholars, as has Japan’s motors of innovation. In Jorge Cañizares- regional expansion, where attention has been Esguerra’s account of Spanish histories of directed to culture as a tool of imperialism, Mexico, it is indigenous historiography which ‘a tool often so malleable, transportable, and plays a key role: early Spanish historians imperceptible that it masked its own profound ‘did not hesitate to consider the historical instrumentality’ (Weisenfeld, 2000: p. 595; information stored in quipus and codices see also Low, 2003). We might also note as trustworthy’ (Cañizares Esguerra, 2001: that one of the most significant, and earliest, p. 68). In Bernard Smith’s (1960) account of documents of ‘visual resistance’ to European European artists in the South Pacific in the late colonialism, Guaman Poma’s Nueva corónica eighteenth century it is the effect of Tahitian y buen gobierno of 1615, is also marked by light on the landscape painter William Hodges local struggles over empire. Guaman Poma which facilitates his aesthetic breakthrough sent his remarkable illustrated text to King 25 years before William Turner’s belated Philip III of Spain as a primer in ‘good metropolitan achievements. For Susan Buck- government’, a moral guide as to how the Morss (2000), Hegel’s writing on the master- Spanish should act if they were good Catholics slave dialectic can only be understood through (see Adorno, 2000, 2001). His own position the impact of the Haitian Revolution,29 was complex for though he was matrilineally and for Carlo Ginzburg, a key element descended from Inca nobility he articulated in the surveillance of colonial metropolitan a pro-Andean but anti-Incan stance on the populations – fingerprinting – has its origins in basis of his paternalYarovilcaAllauca Huanco rural colonial Bengal of the 1860s (1989). The lineage. From this perspective the Incas were belated acknowledgement that the ‘periphery’ ‘usurpers’: thus did two empires entwine was also capable of generating its own vast Guaman Poma. empires now needs to be added to the The list of empires which the discussion of inventory of this process of ‘provincializing colonialism generally has no space for might Europe’. be extended: we could add the Ching, Mughal, Ottoman, the Sultanate of Sokoto (Ferro, 27 1997). A focus on an exclusively European NOTES presence can produce curious results: Brian Larkin notes that Northern Nigeria was colonized by the British between 1903 and 1 At various times Sweden had a colonial presence 1960 and ‘a history of over a thousand in Delaware, Guadeloupe, parts of the Gold Coast

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and India. Denmark also had a presence in the Gold perceived as morally and physically clean ...the desert Coast, various Caribbean islands and Serampore in represented a great purifying force’ (MacKenzie, India. 1995: p. 59). 2 These are ideological permutations described, 16 See Zimmerman (1993). Naess’s philosophy can respectively, by Anthony Pagden (1995, 1998), Fisher- be read as generically anti-colonial, as much as it can Tine and Mann (2004) and Lindqvist (1997). Locke’s be read ‘ecologically’. sanction against American natives attempting to 17 Dalrymple’s White Mughals (2003), celebrates regain their lands (that they ‘be destroyed as a lion the eighteenth-century British Resident at Hyderabad, or tiger, one of those savage wild beasts’ [Pagden, James Kirkpatrick’s cross-cultural entanglements. 1995: p. 77]) was in practice similar to the modality 18 In this respect Thomas’s critique of Bhabha Lindqvist describes. (1994) is curious inasmuch as Thomas’s earlier work 3 See also Davis (2002). (1991) could be viewed as precisely concerned with 4 Nicholas Thomas observes that the extent to those questions of translational slippage which are so which fatal impact theories ‘require qualification is central to Bhabha himself. variable’ (Thomas, 1994: p. 15). 19 Conversely Bhabha in other writings does 5 ‘Colonialism was made possible, and then invoke a disembodied ‘colonialism’ and ‘colonial’ sustained and strengthened, as much by cultural discourse for a critique of which see Parry (2004), technologies of rule as it was by the more obvious Perloff (n.d.) and Thomas (1994). and brutal modes of conquest that first established 20 Important works which engage this problematic power on foreign shores’ (Dirks, 2001: p. 9). (though without recourse to Bhabha) include Greg 6 ‘Punishment’, following Foucault (1979), denot- Denning (1992, 1996) and Jonathan Lamb (2001). ing a modality of naked power, and ‘discipline’ Lamb paraphrasing Pagden notes ‘the damage caused denoting an internalized self-policing. to the self by its own mobility’ (2001: p. 114) and 7 Cohn taught for the whole of his career in cites John Trenchard’s 1725 warning against the ‘self- the Department of Anthropology in the University of extrusion’ provoked by voyaging: ‘People are like Chicago. See Guha’s foreword to Cohn (1987) and Wire: the more they are extended, the weaker they Vinay Lal’s helpful assessment at: http://www.sscnet. become’ (Lamb, 2001: p. 115). ucla.edu/southasia/Culture/Intellectuals/cohn.html. 21 Irschick describes how the ‘colonial’ under- 8 See Inden (1990), Dirks (2001) and Appadurai standing of the vellala caste in South India was not (1996). the ‘product of the British alone but formed a project 9 In this light, the repudiation of the sense in resulting from many voices, high and low, past and Orientalism that colonial ideologies were all-powerful, present’ (Irschick, 1994: p. 201). by the claim in Culture and Imperialism that ‘there 22 See an illuminating review by Edward Said was always some form of active resistance’ (Said, (2003). Hall’s argument could be fitted to Stepan’s 1994: p. xii) appears equally absurd. One would like suggestion that racism – almost indiscernible through to think there was ‘always’ resistance, but this is the middle ages – is a product of the slave trade surely a historical phenomenon to be documented in (Thomas, 1994: p. 78). Hall can then be seen to particular situations rather than humanistically posited describe an Abolitionist modulation, after which as a general reflex. earlier attitudes are reconsolidated. 10 Lord Cromer, Agent and Consul-General in 23 Although this is a distinction he seeks to Egypt, 1883–1907. undercut in the preface to the paperback edition of 11 Almost certainly the work of the Italian writer 2006. Giovanni Paolo Marana (Ballaster, 2005: p. 207ff.). 24 See Geoff Ely’s critique: ‘Ornamentalism’s 12 ‘Common understandings of “Enlightenment approach seems bizarrely disconnected: durbars and universalism” fail to come to terms with the ... plumed hats may have made empire into a spectacle, manner in which Diderot, Kant and Herder interweave but its mechanisms of rule depended far more on commitments to moral universalism and moral incom- the local contexts of legitimacy and contestation’ mensurability, to humanity and cultural difference’ (2002). (Muthu, 2003: p. 10). 25 See also Arnold (1994) and Cummings (2003). 13 ‘Europeans no longer appear as representations 26 For a contrary position see Young (1995: of a a single univocal tradition, but as figures p. 40). who were improvising sinuous paths through fiercely 27 And sub-regional strategies that have competing claims’ (Greenblatt, 1991: p. xx). sometimes been termed ‘internal colonialism’ 14 The portrayal of Spanish colonialism as moti- (Hechter, 1975). Beyond this we might also consider vated by gold and blood, and stressing greed and diverse ‘counterflows’ such as non-Europeans’ cruelty. travel accounts of their experiences of Europe 15 For instance MacKenzie suggests that Oriental- (Mukhopadhyay, 2002; Fisher, 2004). ist pre-occupations with the desert are expressive of 28 See also Cooper and Stoler (eds.): ‘We question industrialized nations’ citizens’ desire for cleanliness: the “colonial” as well as the “-ity”, the former ‘the central point about the desert was that it was because it homogenizes a power relationship whose

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