Colonial Gaze Research Articles

Naming beyond the white settler colonial gaze in educational research

In this article, I describe the ways educational research often calls us out our names, meaning that educational researchers often name communities not as they are but as the academy needs them to be along damaging logics of erasure and deficiency. I use Morrison’s concept of the White gaze, Tuck’s concepts of damage-centered and desire-based research, and other contemporary scholarship on settler colonialism, White supremacy, and education to offer ways of naming in educational research beyond the White settler gaze. Finally, I look to hashtag naming in current social movements (e.g. #BlackLivesMatter, #DearNativeYouth #NotYourModelMinority) to imagine educational research that understands the naming of the communities of our work as informed by movement speech, the sort of naming that can save lives and show us and others who we are and desire to be.

Aboriginal art and oral history in the colonial narrative

Eurocentric conceptions of Indigenous history have long dominated the conversation around what constitutes ‘legitimate’ Aboriginality. This essay examines the hyper-scrutiny Aboriginal art and oral history forms are subject to, as well as the continual omission and manipulation of Aboriginal history as a reflection of the ongoing colonial process. Keywordsoral history; Indigenous art; the colonial gaze

Neocolonialism: the true intention behind the Northern Territory intervention

While colonialism in Australia has ‘officially’ ended, it is evident that its impact on Indigenous people has been enduring. This essay argues that, beyond simply being ‘legacies’ of colonialism, latter-day interventions by Australian governments such as the Northern Territory Emergency Response Act are an insidious form of neo-colonialism. KeywordsNT intervention; neocolonialism; white paternalism; the colonial gaze

White Australia, Black Bodies: the use of Aboriginal bodies and artefacts in Australian public discourses

Indigenous bodies, artefacts and material cultures have largely been represented in the public sphere in ways that reflect and reinforce colonialist understandings of Aboriginality. This essay examines how discourses which position European whiteness in a place of primacy in direct contrast with an Indigenous ‘other’ continue to prevail in the contexts of museums, the art world and the tourism industry. Keywordsthe colonial gaze; othering; politics of representation

Rediscovering other geographical traditions

AbstractIn the last few years, a vibrant interdisciplinary and international literature is rediscovering those sectors of the geographical tradition whose exponents did not match the classical stereotype of the Western academic geographer directly or indirectly contributing to colonialism, warfare, and social conservatism. Ongoing research on primary sources has shown that early progressive, dissident, and unorthodox tendencies in the history of the discipline were more pervasive and influential than what has been believed. In this paper, I define this movement as the rediscovery of “Other Geographical Traditions” (OGTs) arguing that this notion can enlarge our understanding of geography as a plural and contested field. While a great deal of this literature is constituted by studies on early anarchist and critical geographies, I argue that this concept should be extended to scholarly production from the Global South in languages other than English, which is likewise providing important contributions to the discovery of different geographical traditions, politically and culturally. For that, I address the case of recent Latin American scholarship, in Spanish and Portuguese, on the history and philosophy of critical geographies. Moreover, the fact that these “Southern” scholars are rereading and translating classical figures of “Northern” geographers constitutes a reversal of the former colonial gaze from the North–South to the South–North direction. This suggests that the study of OGTs should also consider different cultural and linguistic traditions, challenging monolingualism in both literature reviews and sources' selection.

Listening as critique: Towards a methodology of absent presences in research on coloniality

Only recently I started a PhD at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in Theatre and Performance Studies. In this PhD I am investigating the history of the magic lantern, one of the first devices to project images for a broad audience. The magic lantern was frequently used for colonial propaganda by missionaries and social reformers, constituting an image of the Other that still lives on today. This article will not be an introduction into the subject of the magic lantern propaganda. Instead, it is attended to be a first methodological reflection of this research. It serves as an attempt to consider how to engage with the archival material I encounter without reproducing the colonial gaze living on in these photographs. Central to this article will therefore be the question on how to relate to the Other in the image from within a privileged (academic) position. As Theatre and Performance Studies cannot rescind from the discussions on decolonization coming from the African Diaspora in Belgium, I think about a methodology to cope with the recurring gaps in our research field as a precondition to do research on images of the other. I do not seek to map out a fixed methodological plan. I rather try to take some first steps to listen as critique to an alternative history that is always already, absent in its presence. 

Darwinian Feminism and Early Science Fiction: Angels, Amazons and Women by Patrick B. Sharp

433 BOOKS IN REVIEW which audiences are shown “in graphic detail … the very real impact of inappropriate and reckless consumption” (83). She incorporates helpful film analysis into her readings and does so with verve, as in her elaboration of a scene in which clinical laboratory footage is juxtaposed with traditional film footage: “While [the doctor] watches the ‘clinical version,’ the version the audience sees is a more emotional version, a version shot on handheld camera, a version that bobs and weaves, as if filmed by a person in the crowded casino rather than by a security camera fixed to a wall” (82). The book would benefit from more sustained readings of this nature, during which Schweitzer’s style, at once approachable and insightful, comes through. Overall, Schweitzer’s monograph would work well as a reader for lowerdivision courses in film studies with a focus on disaster films or in intro-level medical humanities courses. Its tendency to gloss over critical scholarship while presenting big (if sometimes trite) ideas, while niggling to readers well versed in the topic, would make for a good primer for students just getting used to the idea that there is something more to zombies and apocalyptic plague movies than meets the eye.—Kari Nixon, Whitworth University The Descent of Woman. Patrick B. Sharp. Darwinian Feminism and Early Science Fiction: Angels, Amazons and Women. Cardiff: U of Wales P, NEW DIMENSIONS IN SCIENCE FICTION, 2018. ii+193pp. £60 hc, ebk. This well-researched and very readable study of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminist responses to Darwinian evolutionary theory examines the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and colonialism in a wide range of early speculative fiction by women. For Sharp, “Darwinian feminism” was “a formative moment in the long history of women’s SF” (173) and he sets out to trace the outlines of this moment. He opens by situating Margaret Cavendish’s A Blazing World (1666) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) as influential precursor texts that provide model critiques of masculinist science, but his emphasis is on later work, from nineteenthcentury feminist utopias to feminist sf published during the heyday of the pulp magazines. Sharp argues that for Darwinian feminists, “Darwin’s account of sexual selection provided the template for diagnosing the violence of patriarchal institutions that enslaved women” and “also provided an account of the possible mechanisms for their emancipation” (2). He situates Darwin’s work in the context “not only of a colonial grammar of race, but also a Victorian grammar of gender and sexuality” (7), and it is through this complex nexus that he reads women writers’ challenges to “violent Darwinian masculinity” (7), even as they worked within the plot structures and narrative strategies favored by male writers. Sharp outlines five “storytelling tactics” (9) particularly popular in early women’s sf: 1) a revisionary take on sexual selection that gives women the upper hand; 2) a privileging of the domestic sphere to which women have traditionally been confined; 3) a reorganization of the colonial gaze in order to challenge masculine aggression and hierarchy; 4) echoing Mary Shelley, a critique of the dangers of masculinist science; and 5) the representation of women through figures of the Amazon and the angel 434 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) “as the apex of Darwinian feminist evolution” (9-11). Sharp convincingly makes the case that science fiction is “a Darwinian genre” (1) and that evolutionary theory is a key element of sf’s scientific megatext. As part of his analytical framework, Sharp notes how systems of genres become available to writers at specific historical and cultural moments. His first two chapters, “Scientific Masculinity and its Discontents” and “Charles Darwin, Gender and the Colonial Imagination,” provide both a detailed overview of the kinds of scientific “plots” that feminist writers struggled with/against and a very useful outline of Darwin’s work, including its developments and transformations in the socio-philosophical works of Herbert Spencer and others. These opening chapters tracing the rise of the masculinist science project provide an excellent background to Sharp’s study. He pays careful attention to the scientific theories and stories that directly impacted the writing of science fiction in the late...

“Corpus Christi, Corpus Delicti”: A New Narrative Contract: Władysław Pasikowski’s “Aftermath” (2012) and the Invalidation of the Category of the Polish Witness to the Holocaust

Władysław Pasikowski’s 2012 feature film Aftermath recapitulates and works through the existing resources in documentary cinema that deals with the Polish context of the Holocaust (Claude Lanzmann, Paweł Łoziński, Marian Marzyński, Agnieszka Arnold). It is also founded on the knowledge amassed in the wake of the countrywide debate about the 1941 Jedwabne massacre (2000–1). As such, it rejects the majority narrative of the Holocaust, one told under the banners of the Righteous Among the Nations (the paradigm of innocence), the Polish witness to the Holocaust (triggering an unjustified identification of the Jaspersian paradigm of unimputable, metaphysical guilt with unwarranted guilt), and the alleged collective Polish trauma of the Holocaust. Aftermath is analyzed as a treatise on antisemitism which problematizes and narrativizes phantasms that are central to this socio-cultural pathology, visualizing the mechanism whereby the phantasm of the Jew is constructed and imposed on actual individuals. It also touches upon the Christian roots and identitarian dimension of antisemitism, alongside its central figure: the Crucifixion. Antisemitism is a matter of religion as a doctrine but also religion as an institution. By displaying a plexus of discourses and practices, attitudes and behaviors, Pasikowski defends the great quantifier as a legitimate category to describe the Polish context of the Holocaust. He debunks the essential differentiation between pre-modern and modern antisemitism (including notions about the secondary nature of Polish antisemitism in relation to the German Nazi exterminatory projects targeted at the Jews). The film convincingly portrays antisemitism as dominating the experience and its representation to such an extent that antisemitic culture loses the ability to reflect on the human condition. Where a non-antisemite sees the irreducible strangeness that is inherent to individual existence, the antisemite sees a Jew, etc. The long duration of violence and exclusion has turned the phantasmic and alternative reality of antisemitism into reality tout court, as it produces a materiality of its own, up to and including the materiality of the atrocity (stolen property, looted corpses, etc.). The text offers an extensive discussion of the essential conflict between Aftermath and the system of Polish culture. The aesthetic is political. The juxtaposition of two genre films (the thriller and the Western) and a plebeian protagonist with a domain that is perceived as proper to the intelligentsia provoked widespread shock and rejection. Accusations of kitsch, exaggeration, improbability, and a colonial gaze enabled critics to sidestep, if not invalidate, the director’s argument. A study of the reception of Aftermath is a study of class distinction in action. Pasikowski’s film portrays antisemitism as a problem of an antisemitic culture and an antisemitic society. This entails a radical invalidation of the notion of antisemitism as an inter-group conflict, thus exposing the fiction and falsehood of such constructs as “dialogue” and “reconciliation.” Despite its pessimistic diagnosis, Aftermath raises the possibility of change and the emancipatory potential of self-empowerment. By considering the cultural and social implications of our knowledge about antisemitism and the Polish context of the Holocaust, the film reveala systemic challenge posed by the imperative to revise culture and reject its toxic models. From this perspective, a new narrative becomes possible as a critique of narratives.

Frederick Alexcee's Entangled Gazes

Abstract This article discusses how Tsimshian artist Frederick Alexcee (1853–1939) represented his community of Lax Kw'alaams (Fort/Port Simpson) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Created for sale to non-Indigenous people, Alexcee's works in various media reveal a distinctly Tsimshian—and perhaps personal—perspective, which, it is argued, reversed the colonial gaze. Alexcee's artistic perspectives, and the choices he made in determining the content and style of his work present in the ethnographic record, speak to the ways he represented Tsimshian history and identity. Although his work was ostensibly directed at Euro-Canadian settler audiences, the various ways that he decentered, or chose not to represent, European presences in Lax Kw'alaams raise the question of who his works were really for.

Art as a Weapon: The Inverted Gaze in Julius Lips The Savage Hits Back

Abstract This article investigates the history of the book, The Savage Hits Back or the White Man Through Native Eyes (Yale University Press, 1937), which opened up a kaleidoscopic view of global representations of Europeans, thus inverting the colonial gaze on the “Other.” The author, the German anthropologist and museum director Julius Lips, published his book in the heyday of race theory in Germany. Driven into exile by the Nazis, he read Indigenous representations of Westerners as a tool of empowerment against the hegemony of colonial power and merged a critique of colonialism and fascism. By analyzing the scholarly reception of The Savage Hits Back, the author revisits Lips's crucial assumptions. Honing in on Lips's ambiguous and strategic use of Indigenous North American objects against the background of his exile in the United States, this article illuminates the mutual imbrication of Lips's biography and his scholarly work in politically volatile times.

Buddhist Meditation and the British Colonial Gaze in Nineteenth Century Sri Lanka

ABSTRACT This paper argues that the multiple orientalist expressions that flowed from British pens in nineteenth century Sri Lanka are of use to the scholar of Buddhism, in that they can not only shed light on the growth of Buddhist modernism and the use of the term ‘meditation’ within it, but also on Sri Lankan Buddhist practice on the ground. It first surveys the preconceptions of the British about the concept of ‘meditation’. It then examines the writings of a representative selection of scholar civil servants and Christian missionaries who were resident in Sri Lanka within the century. This data reveal that a vibrant culture of Buddhist devotion and preaching existed throughout the century, together, among the laity, with the practice of ‘meditation’ on objects related to insight into reality. Additionally, it suggests that the jhānas, although hard for westerners to understand, were an important part of Buddhist self-understanding. The paper, therefore, argues that the priority given to vipassanā as the essence of meditation within Buddhist Modernism is a reduction of the diversity within traditional practice and a distortion of the traditionally recognised interrelationship between the jhānas and other forms of mental culture.

The New Missionaries: Spiritual Striving and Political Engagement in India

In its search for a meaningful disciplinary enterprise, anthropology focuses on those ‘others’ who live at the edge of civilisational chaos, the marginalised, underprivileged, those cast aside or abandoned, as well as the middle classes and the elite, as they construct their social worlds. In Asia, or at least in India, our anthropological gaze is not focused on those Westerners (in the twentieth century) who aspire to fulfil their goals through an imagining of a social and ‘spiritual’ landscape in India. In this article, I argue that Western imaginings of spiritual India rest not merely on their efforts to embed themselves in a local spiritual enterprise. More importantly, it rests on their understanding of their active role, as they envisage it, in the context of a changing India. I refer to these Western, single women protagonists as the ‘new missionaries’ who seek responsibility, and simultaneously fulfilment, through their participation in spiritual living. In this manner, the colonial gaze and the ensuing privilege are reproduced and enable them to act in particular ways. No doubt, gender, sexuality, rejection, and fulfilment and the inevitable place of charismatic others are all part of this significant process of becoming in India.

Materialities of the Non-human Animal and the Species Matrix of Postcolonial Remains in Selected Contemporary Writing

Postcolonialism, much like Graham Harman’s well-wrought hammer, does not exist because it can be used, it can be used because it exists. The well-wrought hammer of postcolonialism is worked upon on selected contemporaneous but disparate narratives, Vicki Constantine Croke’s Elephant Company (2014) and Tania James’ The Tusk that did the Damage (2015), to crack them open for an assessment of the extent to which as-yet invisible but already-present traces of former imperialism remain embedded in the texts. Though Croke’s androcentric account is more obviously revelatory in its projection of the colonial war hero, even James’ emphatically anti-correlationist standpoint does not appear entirely free of the colonial gaze. Additionally, materialities of the non-human animal assert themselves despite their discrepant local manifestations in the two texts: Croke’s elephant is the loyal servant in a mystic relation with an apparently loving master, whereas James’ is the enraged subaltern in rebellion against an abusive one. Yet, in both accounts, the physicality of the elephant as well as its behavioural singularities generate an interruptive encounter with the non-human animal, foregrounding its capacity for autonomous living, substantive human interaction, and an equal relationship when the human imposes itself on the non-human. Neither the non-human animal nor the human beings in the narratives are a monolithic block. An elephant may be a worker, a source of ivory, or an object of sympathy for activists; the human cast is a diverse collection of poachers, smugglers, forest officials, corporate managers, and an American film crew. Each group, whether animal or human, establishes a distinct relationality with the others. When the entire ensemble is gridded in Cary Wolfe’s species matrix, latent, implicit, power relations become visible which in turn reveal the postcolonial remains of violence and subjugation in selected twenty-first-century writings.

Choreographing “ChinAfrica” through Transnational Encounter

A dance film made by two Belgian directors collaborating with Guangdong Modern Dance Company, An African Walk in the Land of China (2015) attempts to explore the encounter of an African woman with Chinese workers in urban China in the age of “ChinAfrica.” In this work, the co-directors create a “duet” between an ensemble of Chinese dancers portrayed as blue-collar workers and a black female dancer depicted as a woman from an unspecified country in Africa. In my analysis, I juxtapose choreographic and cinematic representations of the African woman and Chinese workers with the complex social reality of their diverse experiences of encounters. Resisting any singular reading, the dance film provokes questions and stirs up reflections about the ever-intensifying interactions between Chinese and Africans at economic, political and cultural levels operating under global capitalism. This seemingly detached approach, while offering opportunities for multiple readings of the film, also glosses over the complexity of the very ideas of Africans and Chinese as well as their transnational encounters. The gap between the filmic representation and reality unveils the directors’ reductionistic approach to representing ethnic figures and their experiences of each other on screen, indicating a persistent but well-masked colonial gaze.

Modernity, World War I, and Appropriations of the Colonial Gaze in John Joseph Mathews’ Sundown

Approximately 12,000 American Indians served in the armed forces of the United States during World War I, yet very few of them turned their experiences into memoirs, fictions, or poetry. A notable exception is John Joseph Mathews, whose acclaimed 1934 novel, Sundown, provides rare glimpses into the multifaceted and conflicted Great War experiences of Native Americans in general and a young Osage aviator in particular. Written during the early 1930s, as the Bonus March briefly revived America’s cultural memory of the First World War, Sundown defies long-held stereotypes about Native Americans and explodes the myth of the ‘Vanishing Indian.’ Before the backdrop of the encroachment of white settlers and ruthless speculators on the oil-rich Osage reservation, Sundown depicts its protagonist’s attempts to navigate a modern world that is marked by radical technological developments and social shifts.

Until You See the Whites of Their Eyes: Brett Bailey's Exhibit B and the Consequences of Staging the Colonial Gaze

Until You See the Whites of Their Eyes: Brett Bailey's Exhibit B and the Consequences of Staging the Colonial Gaze

Book review- Primitive Selves: Koreana in Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910-1945- E. Taylor Atkins

In 2010, E. Taylor Atkins published his book Primitive Selves: Koreana in Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910-1945, seeking to make sense of the seemingly recent Japanese enthusiasm for Korean culture. As a historian of modern Japanese and Korean cultural history who focuses mainly on transnational popular culture, Atkins sought to prove that the twenty-first century South Korean, or hallyu, wave is not without historical precedent. This book positions itself within historical Japanese Imperial scholarship, focusing on cultural history rather than military or policy. Instead of concentrating on how the Japanese Imperial gaze of Korean culture shaped Korea through the imposition of Japanese culture onto the colonies, Atkins instead emphasises how the Japanese gaze on the Korean peninsula worked to shape the identity of the metropole, highlighting the importance of transnational flows on the creation of Self. The result is an interesting view into the complexities in the current and historical cultural connections between Japan and the Korean peninsula. Primitive Selves (2010), offers the reader a comprehensive and well researched look into the historical Japanese fascination with the Korean culture and traditions, something that continues to be relevant in an increasingly globalised world. In his very detailed introduction, Atkins explains [...]

What's in a Face?: Sara Baartman, the (Post)Colonial Gaze and the Case ofVenus Noire(2010)

The story of Sara Baartman, who was brought to Europe in 1810 to be exhibited as the erotic-exotic freak ‘Hottentot Venus’, is arguably the most famous case study of the scientific validation of (gendered) racism. Her scientific examination and post-mortem dissection by Georges Cuvier, who looked for an alleged connection between the Khoisan and the orangutan, have been the object of famous critical works (Gilman, 1985; Haraway, 1989; Fausto-Sterling, 1995), but also exposed her to the unpalatable fate of becoming the ‘quintessential’ figure of intersecting gender and racial oppressions. This paper deals with Abdellatif Kechiche's film Venus Noire (2010), which interestingly rearticulates the (in)famous narrative in unexpected ways. Shot by a male director who is also a postcolonial subject, the film exposes the performativity not only of gender and racial identities, but also of science theorisation, while at the same time raising the issue of whether exposing a violent male colonial gaze on a heavily exhibited woman can contribute to a counter-knowledge of her experience or rather risks reiterating the historical violence. The startling dynamic between the portrayed abuse and Kechiche's peculiar filmic strategies is the crucial focus of this paper. While Sara's body is continually exposed and violated, Venus Noire relies on her face, shot in recurrent extreme close ups, as a haunting presence potentially exceeding violence. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's (1987 [1980]) account of the close up, I explore how Kechiche's take on Sara's face builds a strong connection with the spectator's extra-filmic dimension. As a case of what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘reflective face’, such close ups invest the viewer with the ethical responsibility of being complicit in the othering practices of (post)colonial times. Vénus Noire thus manages to engage the spectator's own corporeal awareness of violence, and calls attention to the persisting exploitation of sexual and racial colonial tropes in the contemporary world.

Paradise, Built in Hell: Decolonising Feminist Utopias in Top of the Lake (2013)

Jane Campion and Gerard Lee's miniseries Top of the Lake (2013) marked New Zealand-born but Australian resident Campion's return to New Zealand for the first time since The Piano (1993). The show's central subject of child sexual abuse by state officials echoes the different yet resonating political situations in twenty-first century Australia and New Zealand, a state of emergency that allows for the emergence of what Rebecca Solnit (2009) calls a ‘disaster community’. Implicitly addressing critiques of her colonialist gaze in the earlier film, the miniseries both decolonises the idea of the Utopian no-place and offers an alternate, emplaced vision of relational, anti-colonial provisional Utopia through the main, mirroring female characters, Detective Robin Griffin and her half-sister Tui Mitcham. In contrast to contemporaneous police procedurals focussed on lone female officers, Top of the Lake rejects the authority of the police state and offers a resolution aslant that critiques generic expectations of individual heroism and resolution within a legal framework. Looking specifically at how the show knows its place—Lake Wakatipu on South Island, New Zealand—the article offers a close reading of Top of the Lake's formal critique of the male colonial gaze and its adoption of a feminist soundscape in relation to Campion's oeuvre; and considers its politics through indigenous media theory, to argue that it marks an initial step towards a decolonisation of viewing practices in relation to feminist conceptions of Utopia.

팍스의 Venus에 나타난 공연의 정치학 : 구경거리에서 공연자로

This paper examines the ways in which Parks’s Venus critiques the dehumanizing colonial gaze that commodifies and fetishizes the black female body by representing The Venus Hottentot as a multivalent figure occupying multiple subject positions as spectacle, spectator, and performer. Shifting from an object of male specular desire to a desiring subject, The Venus subverts the male structure of the gaze founded on the male subject/female object binarism. The Venus thus reconstructs her relationship to the spectatorial gaze and in doing so reconstitutes her subjectivity as well. In the play-within-the-play, The Venus watches The Bride-To-Be masquerading “The Venus,” with her subjectivity split into spectator and spectacle. This in turn splits the audience’s gaze as well. In an ironic twist, she announces her own death in the overture and then proceeds to present her story in the following scenes. This suggests that “The Venus” is a theatrical construction, that what the spectator is about to see is a performative re-enactment of the history of Saartjie Baartman. Through this performance, the heroine is re-created. In a series of metatheatrical scenes, the contemporary spectators are implicated in the onstage voyeuristic objectification and racial oppression. In the mise-en-abyme of seeing, the theatergoers’ gaze is conflated with the onstage spectators’ gaze at freak shows and with the scientific gaze in the anatomical theatre. When addressing the spectators, The Venus as performer returns the spectators’ look and invites them to see that racial oppression is still going on and that something should be done about it. In this sense, Parks’s play stages a ritual remembering, not sexual objectification, of Baartman, calling for their ethical engagement. BR