Empire and the Ambiguities of Love

Abstract

Wandering through a maze of fake--foliage covered trellises, the viewer chances upon groups of lovers that seem at once strangely familiar and disquietingly foreign. Yinka Shonibare's installation, Jardin d'Amour, commissioned by, and first exhibited at, the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris in 2007, reinterprets Jean--Honoré Fragonard's 1770s' rococo scenes of aristocratic love, revealing the colonial wealth that made possible such idyllic romanticism. The opulence of Fragonard's paintings remains but the satins and silks of the original breeches, gowns and bustles have been replaced by vibrant, patterned 'African' wax--print fabrics, clothing life--size headless mannequins. Otherness flamboyantly intervenes into European conventions of seduction and courtship, entwining love with fear, banality with exoticism, familiarity with alterity.Referencing colonialism and foreshadowing the decapitations of the French Revolution that will soon follow these eighteenth--century scenes, Shonibare's work also disturbs the relation between love and colonialism. By inserting 'African' wax--print fabrics into European love scenes he at once evokes the VOLUME19 NUMBER2 SEP2013 194 colonialism that financed these games of pleasure and creates a hybrid image of love in which Africa is interleaved with Europe and/or Europe becomes Africanised. Shonibare's work raises questions of the relation between love and colonialism, asking: How has love been experienced and expressed in the colonial and postcolonial context? Has love been used as an instrument of empire or does it function as a mechanism for the overcoming of imperialism? And does the colonial experience of love enable a new perspective on the conventional formulations of love? This article reflects on these questions using Shonibare's work as a provocation to reconsider the forms, uses and depictions of love in colonial and postcolonial contexts. While the literature on love and colonialism is small, there is already a clearly demarcated division between two positions in relation to colonial love. The first depicts love as a tool of empire, as a mechanism of control and exploitation, which justified and partially disguised the abuses of empire while also facilitating alliances and occupations that enabled colonial ambitions to be attained. The second, more utopian perspective, sees love as the basis for a resistance to the objectives of colonialism. Love of humanity as a whole, or of the particular Other, is envisaged as the motivation for a refusal of the violence that is colonial conquest. To contest and dismantle this dichotomy, the article draws on the work of various theorists, including Matt Matsuda, Elizabeth Povinelli, Chela Sandoval, Leela Gandhi and Jean--Luc Nancy, from a range of disciplines such as history, anthropology, literary theory and philosophy. It creates a 'conversation' between these theorists and Shonibare's installation that allows the theories to be sketched and a 'response' inspired by Jardin d'Amour to be proposed. Shonibare's Jardin d'Amour challenge...

Identity Exhibition in Batik Motifs of Ebeg and Pataruman

“…Batik is Indonesia's traditional practice of dying a piece of cloth through wax resistance method. It is a work of art and an ethnological object known as traditional art (Aragon, 2012), having inspired the designs and techniques of African wax print fabric (Secomb, 2013). According to its history, batik was originally an art form of Javanese royalty.…”