“Alexander von Humboldt and the Reinvention of America” by Mary Louise Pratt

by Jean Marie Carey | 30 Apr 2007 | Art History

“Alexander von Humboldt and the Reinvention of America” by Mary Louise Pratt reprinted in Visual Culture: The Reader edited by Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, (Sage Publications, London, 2006).

In “Alexander von Humboldt and the Reinvention of America” linguistics professor Mary Louise Pratt describes how verbose explorer and compulsive documentarian Alexander von Humboldt came through his writings to define the European and American perception of South America from the beginning of the 1800s until, to some extent, the present day.

Pratt begins by describing the itinerary of Humboldt and his colleague Aimé Bonpland. Over a period of five years beginning in 1799, the two men and a contingent of assistants and porters, having landed in Venezuela, navigated the waterways of the Orinoco and Amazon, scaled Andean peaks, and crossed Peru, Argentina, Mexico, and Ecuador. Pratt notes that the men were not precisely explorers in the context of charting unknown geographies as “Humboldt and Bonpland never once stepped beyond the boundaries of the Spanish colonial infrastructure.”

Humboldt’s innovation was rather to reinvent the idea of South America as refracted through a Germanic strain of Romanticism. Humboldt affiliates himself and his dramatic writing with a rather anti-scientific linking of South America, as a singular entity despite its varied microenvironments, with the concept of nature as an irrational and enormous force, “a spectacle capable of overwhelming human knowledge and understanding.” Pratt reports that Humboldt also had something of a unique mode of writing, one which eschewed conventional travel “journalism” and narrative voices and structures in favor or essays filled with emotional descriptions of various tableaux and impassioned, occult-flavored analyses of virtually every aspect of the five-year journey

New World, Asian, and African Primates

A page from a 1792 edition of An Encyclopedia of Animals shows apes from Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America. Personal images.

Pratt imagines Humboldt’s creation of a sensation of what would come to be identified as “otherness.” He achieves this effect first be describing the South American continent as an isolating, barren expanse and then populating it with an exhaustive catalogue of weather systems, botanical wonders (such as curare), ecologies of the extreme – high mountains and windblown pampas – and exotics in the persons of Spanish colonials and missionaries and indigenous peoples. Humboldt was apparently a man of no small ego, and, Pratt asserts, though he purported to be channeling Nature with a capital “N” as the main character and presumptive narrator of his more than 30 volumes on the South American escapade, these capacious journals are actually Humboldt, and by extension the Nineteenth Century European holding forth.

This personality was a familiar one, Pratt says, even given Humboldt’s extraordinary blowhardness; Europeans had experience with this sort of projection from the earlier experience of colonizing North America.
Pratt notes that the enduring impressions of Humboldt’s oeuvre – most especially Views of Nature, a volume revised twice in the author’s life to the exclusion of his own autobiography – can be attributed in great part not just to a societal interest in South America and the ease of acceptance of Humboldt’s worldview, but to the man’s singular gift of relentless self-promotion. While Bonpland returned to (and remained in) South America following the initial five-year exploration, Humboldt devoted his energy to becoming and remaining a continental public intellectual. Pratt describes how other notable Romantic scholars of the day – particularly Frederich Schiller, whom Humboldt fawningly quotes in Views of Nature – did not return Humboldt’s admiration. Yet Pratt concludes by suggesting Humboldt achieved his philosophical Romantic ambition of pointing out the emerging relationships and differences between Europe and not just the Americas but also the rest of the world.

“White” by Richard Dyer

by Jean Marie Carey | 12 Apr 2007 | Art History

“White” by Richard Dyer reprinted in Visual Culture: The Reader edited by Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, 2006.

British film historian and academic is today best known for his book-length analysis of the David Fincher movie Se7en and was recently quoted extensively in the media on the work of Nino Rota when the composer – the original focus of Dyer’s scholastic inquiries – died. But one of Dyer’s earlier fields of interest concerned the representation of binary oppositions in the cinema. “White” originally appeared as an essay in a 1988 issue of Screen magazine (that version excerpted by Evans and Hall) but eventually became a book unto itself.

Dyer’s main points are that caucasians as a group are not consciously represented as such in cinema, and that awareness of subcultures in film, even when sensitively represented in non-mainstream movies, has in fact contributed the continued perceptions of separation, marginalization, and alienation amid “non-dominant groups.”

Dyer is also concerned simply with the word “white” and its historical connotations. He discusses commonly accepted tenets of the physiological aspects of human vision and the conventions of the color wheel, in which “black is the absence of all colour” and “white is no colour because it is all colours.” Dyer extrapolates that the accepted definition of white as a convention of synthesis allows the more figurative notion of whiteness to occupy the cognitive spectrum of what is considered normal. This unanalyzed fact of whiteness has the cumulative cultural effect of preventing nominative media critics from seeing and therefore openly addressing and maintaining a dialogue about white identity.

Dyer purports to explore issues around whiteness denied through a study of three films: Jezebel, a 1938 movie featuring a rebellious, defiant Bette Davis character; Simba, an early (1955) attempt at an “issues” feature set in Kenya; and Night of the Living Dead, the 1969 horror film that has transcended the genre to become generally regarded as something of a groundbreaking classic. Unfortunately the remarks included in this excerpt are confined to what is probably the most tedious film to view though the one most neatly underscoring Dyer’s points, Simba.

Dyer doesn’t compare Simba to a similar film from the same era, Zulu, though clearly it is that type of movie: The main (white) character, played by Dirk Bogarde, goes to Kenya to deal with the death of a family member and while there encounters a violent uprising by an indigenous (black) tribe, the Mau-Mau. Dyer points out that the racist conventions one would expect in such a film are present, including scenes filmed in high contrast lighting which place the black characters interacting nonverbally and gesticulating in shadow or at night, while the white characters are seen speaking proper English in well-lighted daylight settings. Dyer continues, though, to address the subtext of Simba. Explicit colonial binarism is imparted through the film’s assumed values, as rational and thus implicitly more civilized black Kenyans are offered the hopeful eventual outcome of one day being as well-behaved as their British visitors.

“Simba is, then, an endorsement of the moral superiority of white values of reason, order and boundedness,” Dyer concludes, though he allows that in some way the white characters in this period film are incapacitated by their own lameness despite their self-control.

“White” by Richard Dyer, reprinted in Visual Culture: The Reader edited by Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall. (Sage Publications, London, 2006)

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