Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T22:57:51.386Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Naked Truths: Bodies, Knowledge, and the Erotics of Colonial Power

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2013

Philippa Levine
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

If clothing can be said to have political and cultural meaning, then the same must surely be true of its absence. In the British Empire, where the calibration of difference was paramount, nakedness acquired hierarchical significance. The sensibilities of the Victorians clashed with those of their colonial subjects on this topic over and over again, and nakedness came to define savagery and subjecthood. Through the optics of scientific literature, popular photography, and art, this essay examines the colonial politics of nakedness, its gendered dynamics, and the tensions between the erotic and the scientific.

Keywords

Nakednessnuditysavageryanthropologyartscienceaestheticsphotographyclothing
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , January 2013 , pp. 5 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Letters to the editor, The Times, 20 May 1885.

2 Letters to the editor, The Times, 23 May 1885.

3 Smith, Alison, The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality, and Art (Manchester, 1996), 227–29Google Scholar.

4 A copy may be found online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Firstchristmascard.jpg (accessed 10 September 2012).

5 Robert Browning, Parleying with Certain People of Importance in their Day (London, 1887), II; III.

6 O'Neill, Patricia, “The Painting of Nudes and Evolutionary Theory: Parleyings on Victorian Constructions of Woman,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 34, no. 4, (Winter 1992):541–67Google Scholar.

7 A copy may be found online at http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/poynter-andromeda-l01770 (accessed 13 October 2011).

8 A copy may be found online at http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/poynter-paul-and-apollos-n03320 (accessed 13 October 2011).

9 A copy may be found online at http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/tadema/paintings/12.html (accessed 13 October 2011).

10 Smith, Alison, Exposed: The Victorian Nude (New York, 2002)Google Scholar.

11 Smith, John A. and Jenks, Chris, “Manet's Olympia,” Visual Studies 21, no. 2 (October 2006): 161CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 The Times, 28 May 1885.

13 For a discussion of the line drawn between decadent continental (meaning French) and wholesome British art, see Flint, Kate, “Moral Judgement and the Language of English Art Criticism, 1870–1910,” Oxford Art Journal 6, no. 2 (1983): esp. 62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 A copy may be found online at http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/millais-the-knight-errant-n01508 (accessed 13 October 2011).

15 Both the painting and the addition may be viewed online at http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/online/exhibitions/faith/martyrofsolway.asp (accessed 10 September 2012).

16 Thomas Huxley to Earl Granville, 12 August 1869, The National Archives (TNA): Colonial Office Circular Despatches, CO854/4.

17 Maxwell, Anne, Picture Imperfect: Photography and Eugenics, 1870–1940 (Brighton, 2008)Google Scholar.

18 Pultz, John, The Body and the Lens: Photography 1839 to the Present (New York, 1995), 26Google Scholar; Green, David, “Veins of Resemblance: Photography and Eugenics,” Oxford Art Journal 7, no. 2 (1985): 3Google Scholar; Edwards, Elizabeth, “Photography and Anthropological Intention in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Revista de Dialectologia y Tradiciones Populares 53, no. 2 (1998): 27Google Scholar.

19 Edwards, “Photography and Anthropological Intention,” 28–29.

20 Levine, Philippa, “States of Undress: Nakedness and the Colonial Imagination,” Victorian Studies 50, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 189CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

21 Smith, Alison, “Morality and the Nude in Victorian Art,” in The Nude: Ideal and Reality: From the Invention of Photography to Today, ed. Weiermair, Peter (Florence, 2004), 266Google Scholar.

22 Hayes, Patricia, “Introduction: Visual Genders,” Gender & History 17, no. 3 (November 2005): 521CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 im Thurn, E. F., “Anthropological Uses of the Camera,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 22 (January 1893): 188CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Lamprey, J. H., “On a Method of Measuring the Human Form, for the Use of Students in Ethnology,” Journal of the Ethnological Society of London 1 (April 1869): 85Google Scholar.

25 Coombes, Annie reads this emphasis on physical characteristics as a means of associating subject peoples with animals rather than humans in her Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture, and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (New Haven, 1994), 93–94Google Scholar. See, too, Webb, Virginia-Lee, “Fact and Fiction: Nineteenth-Century Photographs of the Zulu,” African Arts 25, no. 1 (January 1992): 58–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Klopper, Sandra, “George French Angas' (Re)presentation of the Zulu in The Kafirs Illustrated,” South African Journal of Cultural and Art History 3, no. 1 (January 1989): 69Google Scholar.

27 “A Manual of Photographic Chemistry,” Quarterly Review 116, no. 232 (October 1864): 498Google Scholar.

28 Hamilton, Peter and Hargreaves, Roger, The Beautiful and the Damned: The Creation of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Photography (Aldershot, 2001), 109Google Scholar.

29 Cited in Ryan, James R., Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (Chicago, 1997), 148Google Scholar.

30 Webb, “Fact and Fiction,” 50.

31 Web, Virginia-Lee, “Missionary Photographers in the Pacific Islands: Divine Light,” History of Photography 21, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 17Google Scholar.

32 Edwards, “The Image as Anthropological Document, Photographic ‘Types’: The Pursuit of Method,” Visual Anthropology 3, nos. 2–3 (1990): 238Google Scholar.

33 Elkins, James, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (New York, 1996), 87Google Scholar.

34 Edwards, “The Image as Anthropological Document,” 247; Pultz, The Body and the Lens, 25.

35 Man, Edward Horace, Ellis, Alexander John, and Temple, Richard Carnac, On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands (London, 1932), 109Google Scholar.

36 Man, Edward Horace, The Nicobar Islands and Their People (Guildford, 1932), 58Google Scholar.

37 Man et al., On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, 26.

38 Man, The Nicobar Islands and Their People, 59; Man et al., On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, 109.

39 Im Thurn, “Anthropological Uses of the Camera,” 184.

40 Needham, George, “Manet, Olympia, and Pornographic Photography,” in Woman as Sex Object: Studies in Erotic Art, 1730–1970, ed. Hess, Thomas B. and Nochlin, Linda (New York, 1972), 81–89Google Scholar.

41 See, for example, Balce, Nerissa S., “The Filipina's Breast: Savagery, Docility, and the Erotics of the American Empire,” Social Text 24, no. 2 (June 2006): 89–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morgan, Jennifer L., “‘Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder’: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500–1770,” William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1, 3rd ser. (January 1997): 167–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Elizabeth Elbourne argues that Saartje Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus, on display in London in the early 1800s, was marketed as the antithesis of the domestic. One might perhaps see her as a grotesque for whom desire would reveal considerable—and primitive—perversity. See Elbourne, “Domesticity and Dispossession: The Ideologies of Domesticity and ‘Home’ and the British Construction of the Primitive from the Eighteenth to the Early Nineteenth Centuries,” in Deep Histories: Gender and Colonialism in Southern Africa, ed. Woodward, Wendy, Hayes, Patricia, and Minkley, Gary (Amsterdam, 2002), 43Google Scholar.

43 One might consider the speculations of Parent-Duchatelet on French prostitute women and in an earlier era the anxious interest of Parisian naturalists in the genitalia of Saartje Baartman.

44 Ellis, Havelock, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 4, Sexual Selection in Man, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia, 1927), 151–52Google Scholar.

45 Alfred Duggan-Cronin was a self-taught photographer who rose to eminence in South Africa for his depictions of local people. Today, a gallery in Kimberley bears his name and displays examples of his work alongside tribal artifacts such as pottery, tools, and carvings, http://www.openafrica.org/participant/Duggan-Cronin-Gallery. For a helpful interpretation of Duggan-Cronin's Bantu series, see Godby, Michael, “Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin's Photographs for The Bantu Tribes of South Africa (1928–1954): The Construction of an Ambiguous Idyll,” Kronos 36, no. 1 (November 2010): 54–83Google Scholar.

46 A very good example is “Te Po, in War Costume,” National Library of Australia, Rev. John Williams Collections, http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an13770364 (accessed 27 September 2011). The same image is used as the frontispiece in Stewart, C. S.,  A Visit to the South Seas in the United States' Ship Vincennes, during the Years 1829 and 1830 Including Scenes in Brazil, Peru, Manila, the Cape of Good Hope, and St. Helena (London, 1832)Google Scholar.

47 A point driven home by Sandra Klopper, in “George French Angas' (Re)presentation of the Zulu in The Kafirs Illustrated.”

48 With thanks to David Smith of the University of Hong Kong for introducing me to this illustration.

49 The classic statement of the policy is to be found in Neville, A. O., Australia's Coloured Minority: Its Place in the Community (Sydney, 1947)Google Scholar. Neville did not originate the policy, but he was an enthusiastic advocate and practitioner of its advantages. Secondary works on this strategy include Jacobs, Margaret D., White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (Lincoln, 2009)Google Scholar; Haebich, Anna, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families, 1800–2000 (Fremantle, WA, 2000)Google Scholar; Moses, A. Dirk, ed., Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York, 2004)Google Scholar.

50 Kerin, Rani, “‘Natives Allowed to Remain Naked’: An Unorthodox Approach to Medical Work at Ernabella Mission,” Health & History: Journal of the Australian & New Zealand Society for the History of Medicine 8, no. 1 (2006): 27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brock, Peggy, “Nakedness and Clothing in Early Encounters Between Aboriginal People of Central Australia, Missionaries and Anthropologists,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 8, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 Brock, “Nakedness and Clothing,” 39, et. seq.

52 Ibid., 33, 44.

53 Ibid., 35.

54 Vickery, Amanda, “An Englishman's Home Is His Castle? Thresholds, Boundaries and Privacies in the Eighteenth-Century London House,” Past and Present 199 (May 2008): 152CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 173.