[2차년도] Colonial Landscapes: The EmergencE/Y of Victorian Africa
- 영어영문학과
- 조회수613
- 2021-08-18
Presenter(s) / Title / Conference name / Date / Location
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Ji Eun Lee, "Colonial Landscapes: The EmergencE/Y of Victorian Africa," Paper Presented at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, July 26-August 6, 2021, Online. |
Colonial Landscapes: The EmergencE/Y of Victorian Africa
Abstract
In response to the recent transition in Victorian scholarship initiated by “Undisiplining Victorian Studies,” which has disrupted the assumed whiteness in readership and pedagogy, and by “The Wide Nineteenth Century,” which has extended the purview of criticism to include geography and species beyond Europe and humanity, I propose to imagine how environmental humanities can help teach Victorian travel narratives through a race-, species-conscious standpoint unsettling the primacy of the white male spectatorship implicated in colonial landscapes. “The very idea of landscape,” Raymond Williams writes, “implies separation and observation.” The distance that elevates the “seeing-man” to an aloof position, however, may be challenged by the “transculturation” of “contact zones” (Pratt) and the “communication between the Human and the non-Human” (Mitchell) implied in colonial landscapes. Reading images such as “Victoria Falls,” “The Ma-Robert on the Zambesi,”and “A Woman Attacked by a Crocodile Emerging from the Water, in Central Africa” based on scenes from David and Charles Livingstone’s Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and its Tributaries; and of the Discovery of the Lakes Shirwa and Nyassa, 1858-1864, I discuss how the materialization of indigenous nature and the abundance and centrality of animals complicate the colonial aestheticization of African nature and challenge imperialism. This unit plan (see undiscipliningvc.org) questions the nature/culture binary, which was used to support the imperial dehumanization of colonized natives and the capitalistic exploitation of indigenous labor and resources, rethinking (non)humanity implied in multi-species, entangled colonial environments of Victorian Africa.