Imperial Eyes

Landscape, politics and the historical geography of southern Africa

“…They argued that the European intellectual traditions and expansionist context that produced these ways of seeing created ideas that were intrinsically masculine and colonial, even as they had developed through the influence of African intermediaries who shaped visitors' understandings of imperial peripheries. 37 Writing on the colonial and apartheid eras has maintained this critical tenor. Historians have emphasized the role of preservationist thought and legislation as a centrally important component of colonial power and social control.…”

After the ‘king of beasts’: Samuel Baker and the embodied historical geographies of elephant hunting in mid-nineteenth-century Ceylon

“…Pratt links such visions to a masculinist desire to achieve 'the view from nowhere' -or at least the 'promontory view' so beloved of landscape painters. 17 This view removed the observer from the messy, transgressive and often dangerous materialities of the colonial encounter and reinforced the colonial illusion of supremacy over both local people and nature. More recent work in the historical geographies of landscape, exploration and natural history has challenged the rather narrow understanding of vision presented by Pratt and has sought to contextualise seeing to recognise its practical, material and embodied foundations.…”

Benevolent imperialism: George Catlin and the practice of Jeffersonian geography

“…10 A productive thread running through this scholarship draws on the notion of 'encounter' between the explorer and the explored, known and unknown, human and non-human, self and Other, and the resultant, often mutually felt influence exerted by such imperial geographies-a process Mary Louise Pratt calls 'transculturation'. 11 Indeed, Withers and Livingstone write of Enlightenment exploration that what 'travelers encountered were certainly new peoples, typified variously as 'savages' or 'primitives'. But, in important ways, geography in this sense provoked an encounter not just between travelers and 'others', but among travelers themselves.'…”

“…But, in important ways, geography in this sense provoked an encounter not just between travelers and 'others', but among travelers themselves.' 12 The social space of the 'contact zone,' described by Pratt as the 'space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations,' 13 was integral to the development of political and scientific institutions in imperial Europe and North America-not least of all the 'disciplined' science of geography. In early 19th century America the seeming limitless and then as yet uncharted and undocumented western territory was especially crucial as a stimulus to ensuing national geopolitical and scientific imperatives.…”