Historiography
This project draws on a number of scholarly fields, as reflected by the fact that the footnotes leap dizzyingly between imperial history, children’s literature, visual culture, and environmental history. The unifying thread connecting these disparate fields is the idea of empire; or, failing that, the relationship between power and culture. This page will introduce each of these fields more fully as they relate to the exhibit.
Environment and empire
The environment has emerged as a site of significance to imperial history, and its incorporation into the historiography of empire has offered new insights about the nature of imperial power and the ways it has interacted with the natural world. As Karen Oslund noted in her introduction to Cultivating the Colonies, “the relationship between power and nature can tell us much about the nature of power.”[1] These studies have ranged from ecological histories like Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism, which documented invasive species in the conquest of the New World, to cultural and intellectual histories like Richard Grove’s Green Imperialism, which considered the imperial roots of environmentalist thought.[2]
Tropicality is a subfield of environmental history devoted to examining the cultural relationship between tropical landscapes and European empires. First labeled by David Arnold, the field has come to rely on an interdisciplinary theoretical background, including literary criticism, imperialism history, cultural geography, and art history.[3] As a field, tropicality has revealed a complex set of cultural ideologies that were constructed around tropical landscapes over the last four hundred years—the jungle “could be luxuriant and yet wanton, beautiful yet deadly, inviting yet bizarre.”[4] More than simply paradoxical, these ideas and imaginings about the tropics also served to support the imperial enterprise and define the colonial periphery as an inferior “other.” The constructed geography of the tropics has proven itself an enduring set of ideologies that still shapes the “production and consumption of knowledge” today.[5]
As a field, tropicality has relied on the study of Orientalism and colonial power, and the scholarship dealing with landscape as a cultural space. In his first essay defining the concept of tropicality, David Arnold consciously evoked the structure of Said’s Orientalism and his concept of “otherness.” Arnold claimed that “interpretations of otherness have tended to focus on representations of non-Western people and their cultures rather than the otherness of non-European environments.”[6] To remedy this oversight, he argued that the disparity between tropical and temperate environments has been the primary division in the Western construction of the natural world.
Studies of the cultural landscape have also been formative for the field of tropicality. Most significantly, these works have argued that there are symbolic representations of culture embedded in landscape, or even that the landscape itself is entirely a “work of the mind.”[7] Denis Cosgrove’s Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape was an early, transformative work along these lines, claiming that “landscape constitutes a discourse through which identifiable social groups historically have framed themselves and their relations with both the land and with other human groups, and that this discourse is closely related epistemically and technically to ways of seeing.”[8] Tropicality has relied on this basic thesis, and has been particularly focused on visualization of landscape as the dominant way that Europeans understood the tropics.[9]
Popular imperialism and children’s history
British popular imperialism, the other half of this project’s historiographical heritage, has been the subject of intense historical examination since the 1980s, partially fueled by more contemporary and political debates about American imperialism. A key question has been the degree to which the empire at large was recognized, celebrated, and culturally influential ‘at home’ in metropolitan British society. Responding to a long tradition of ignoring the existence empire in domestic British history, John MacKenzie argued in Propaganda and Empire that imperialism had permeated all layers of British culture, even past WWII.[10] Other cultural historians immediately contributed their own research on the presence of empire in domestic society, examining everything from music-hall entertainment to the Scouting movement to the display of colonial material culture.[11] While their findings certainly did not go uncontested, their work has yielded a few uncontested lessons about British history: that metropolitan history did not exist in a vacuum, and must be studied in the context of a global empire; that the reverberations from this empire are still visible in British culture; and that new kinds of sources and analyses are needed to truly contend with something so nebulous and mutable as popular culture.[12]
One of these new bodies of sources has been children’s literature. Long considered inappropriate for scholarly research, children’s literature has been reluctantly admitted to the ranks of other historical sources. Since the early 1990s, Victorian children’s literature has been reexamined through the lens of imperialism, with more specific attention to gender, adventure, moral character, and race.[13] Kathryn Castle’s Britannia’s Children was a fairly early contribution to the field which considered the racial stereotypes of Africans, Indians, and Chinese characters in children’s materials. Daphne Kutzer has looked at similar concerns from a literary perspective, analyzing the more general presence of empire in famous children’s works.[14] Borrowing heavily from the literary criticism surrounding children’s materials, this historiography has collectively argued that the popular British experience of empire can be clarified and distilled through an analysis of children’s materials. Moreover, “children’s books, always fundamentally involved in reflecting and transmitting culture” were consistently “the witting or unwitting agents of the empire-builders.”[15]
Visual culture and empire
Another more recent area of imperial analysis has been focused on the visual culture of the popular experience of empire. In analyses of advertising, map-making, early film, photography, portraiture, landscape painting, museum displays, and even botanical illustration, these scholars have argued that “the visual culture of colonialism had a significant role to play in explaining, defining, and justifying the colonial order.”[16] Such studies borrow from visual and postcolonial theories, and have explored both casual and formal visual sources to conclude that the visual experience of empire was pervasive and significant.[17]
Taking these historiographical assumptions—that the tropical environment was heavily constructed, that children’s books were a primary tool for the distribution of imperial ideology, and that visual sources are valuable ways to reexamine the colonial order—this exhibit demonstrates how imperial ideologies were communicated not only through gender, class, and race hierarchies, but also through ideas, images, and stories about the environment.[18]
Notes
[1] Drayton makes a similar, although much more complex, argument in Nature’s Government. He argues that knowledge of nature, and the supposed ability to improve nature, functioned as both instigation and justification for empire. Christina Folke Ax et al., Cultivating the Colonies: Colonial States and Their Environmental Legacies, 1st ed. (Ohio University Press, 2011), 2; Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World (Yale University Press, 2000).
[2] Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 1986); Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
[3] David Arnold, “Inventing Tropicality,” in The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion, 1st ed. (Wiley-Blackwell, 1996), 142.
[4] David N. Livingstone, “Tropical Hermeneutics and the Climatic Imagination,” Geographische Zeitschrift 90, no. 2 (January 1, 2002): 71.
[5] Felix Driver and Brenda S. A Yeoh, “Constructing the Tropics: Introduction,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 21, no. 1 (March 1, 2000): 1.
[6] Arnold, “Inventing Tropicality,” 141.
[7] Simon Schama, Landscape And Memory, First Thus. (Vintage, 1996), 7; See also: Dianne Harris, “The Postmodernization of Landscape: A Critical Historiography,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 58, no. 3 (1999): 436; Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860 (University of California Press, 1989); W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power, 2nd ed. (University Of Chicago Press, 1994).
[8] Denis E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), xiv.
[9] For example, Felix Driver and Luciana Martins, Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2005); Nancy Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).
[10] MacKenzie’s initial work generated a great deal of additional scholarship, which supported, refuted, or simply complicated his original argument (this includes the rest of the ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series edited by MacKenzie). Several of the most prominent and broad works include: John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880-1960 (Manchester University Press, 1988); Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford University Press, USA, 2005); Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back?: The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Longman, 2005); Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose, eds., At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
[11] John M. MacKenzie, ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester University Press, 1986); Jeffrey Richards, ed., Imperialism and Juvenile Literature (Manchester Univ Pr, 1989); Dr Annie E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (Yale University Press, 1997).
[12] Porter has been one of the most serious critics of popular imperial studies, and argues instead that empire was not an overly noticeable part of domestic British life. Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists.
[13] Several of these works most influential in this thesis are: Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (Unwin Hyman, 1991); Kathryn Castle, Britannia’s Children: Reading Colonialism Through Children’s Books and Magazines (Manchester Univ Pr, 1996); M. Daphne Kutzer, Empire’s Children: Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children’s Books (Psychology Press, 2000); Richards, Imperialism and Juvenile Literature; Rashna B. Singh, Goodly Is Our Heritage: Children’s Literature, Empire, and the Certitude of Character, 2004.
[14] Kutzer, Empire’s Children.
[15] Peter Hunt and Karen Sands, “The View from the Center: British Empire and Post-Empire Children’s Literature,” in Voices of the Other: Children’s Literature and the Postcolonial Context, ed. Roderick McGillis (Routledge, 1999), 40.
[16] Nicholas Mirzoeff, ed., The Visual Culture Reader, 1st ed. (Routledge, 1998), 474.
[17] For example, Qureshi has analyzed the popular and generally lower-class exhibits of colonial peoples in the metropole, while Hoffenberg considered the formally run imperial exhibitions of the later nineteenth century. Sadiah Qureshi, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (University Of Chicago Press, 2011); Peter H. Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War, 1st ed. (University of California Press, 2001).
[18] It should be noted that the field of children’s ecocriticism has certainly looked at children’s literature using the environment as the analytical lens. However, many of these works exclude historical interpretation and deal purely with contemporary understandings of environment and environmentalism. Two of these have still offered valuable insights: Mary Harris Veeder, “Children’s Books on Rain Forests: Beyond the Macaw Mystique,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 19, no. 4 (1994): 165–169; K. B. Kidd, Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism (Wayne State University Press, 2004).