Scapeland: Writing the Landscape from Diderot’s Salons to the Postmodern Museum by Gillian B. Pierce

Abstract

Reviews 221 Amour and Warner-Vieyra’s Juletane to examine the primal encounter in disability studies—the stare—and the protagonists’ recuperation of their narratives through surreptitious observation; Condé’s Heremakhonon and Bugul’s Le baobab fou to study the quest for a cure and the failed promise of integrative healing as emblems of uneasy testimony and attempts at postcolonial reconciliation; Diagne Sène’s Le chant des ténèbres and Bugul’s La folie et la mort to consider how marked bodies are cast as impediments to the smooth circulation of capital in the era of globalization; and finally, Bessora’s 53 cm and Fatou Diome’s Le ventre de l’Atlantique to explore the lives of African immigrant women living in France, whose bodies contaminate urban spaces and trouble phantasmatic notions of nation and belonging. Calling for‘contact,’these analyses engage a methodology that intentionally juxtaposes disparate texts and allies lenses of analysis. They overturn traditional readings of the sick and disabled female body as an easy metaphor for postcolonial alienation in favor of nuanced readings of lived and shifting subjectivities. They negotiate rifts within disability studies between the ‘social model’ of disablement and the subjective, embodied experience of impairment , trauma and pain while at the same time revealing spaces for rewriting and self-determination. Postcolonial and disability studies have come of age together and yet seem to have met fairly recently.With few notable exceptions, the field of disability studies has yet to engage with literatures in languages other than English. Nack Ngue points out how foundational Michel Foucault and Henri-Jacques Stiker have been to disability studies to wonder why this encounter is so long in coming. The methodology and structure of Critical Conditions reckon with deeply ingrained hierarchies and patterns of exclusion—historical, linguistic, and theoretical—in order to imagine solidarity between apparently disparate subjects and to reach for a transnational feminist disability politics. University of Minnesota, Morris Tammy Berberi Pierce, Gillian B. Scapeland: Writing the Landscape from Diderot’s Salons to the Postmodern Museum.Amsterdam: Rodopi,2012.ISBN 978-90-420-3594-2.Pp.240. $70. Pierce analyzes French art criticism penned by creative authors, starting with Diderot’s Salons followed by Baudelaire, Breton, and Lyotard (spending the major part of her analysis on Diderot’s 1767 Salon and Lyotard’s 1995 Beaubourg exhibition, Les immatériaux). What ties these four writers together is their insistence on a purely subjectivist approach, on viewing art as an experience resulting in an inner moment and space of personal creativity and an outwardly aesthetic attitude toward existence. The term Scapeland is taken from Lyotard who uses it to describe the veritable ‘estrangement’ or displacement of the beholder and object viewed, transporting both viewer and subject matter into another-worldly or imaginative landscape of the beholder’s imagination. Unlike the scholarly gaze of the art historian whose interests are primarily attached to technique,materials,and subject matter—all for the purposes of describing and explaining the work of art—that of the subjectivist art critic sees the work of art as a point of departure for his own private creation; art (viewing) becomes a collaboration producing another work of art, be it a story, poem or even a self-engineered exhibit or event. For Lyotard, Diderot’s famous “Promenade Vernet” (Salon de 1767—the philosopher’s imaginative stroll through the sites visited in the paintings) expertly exemplifies this strange collaboration which Pierce also identifies as art’s ‘immateriality’; the physical canvas disappears into the beholder’s newly imagined ‘scape.’ In Baudelaire, this experience is taken to another level resulting not only in a prose poem but also in transforming the aesthetic experience of the flâneur into that of creator of (verbal) cityscapes. For Breton, the surrealist gaze is that “receptiveness or openness to the marvelous” (149): apprehending what lies beyond mere representation. Landscape paintings in particular serve as rich highways “to journey beyond the limits of mere representation into a world of dream and imagination inside its frame” (157). The subjective gaze of the author/critic reveals the essential immateriality of art, leading to an increasingly decentered attitude toward the work itself or what Lyotard identifies...