From A View On The World To A Point Of View In It

Rethinking Sight, Space and the Colonial Subject

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4546094
AutoresJessica Dubow (0000-0003-0429-0175, autor de correspondencia)
Año2000
Volumen2
Número1
Páginas87-102
Fecha de publicación2000-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaInterventions (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1369-801X • E-ISSN: 1469-929X
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/136980100360814
OpenAlexW2077846241
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas14
Referencias citadas8

This essay seeks to revise the claims of recent postcolonial critique by replacing analyses of a power-charged colonial gaze with an approach that emphasizes the lived and affective aspects of visual experience under colonial conditions. The key argument here is how the creation of a field of vision represents the colonial subject's anxious desire for reciprocal engagement in a foreign space. Attendant on this is the suggestion that that strand of postcolonial critique which lays stress on the discursive determinations of the colonizing subject and on the formal structures of a colonial scopic regime betrays a dependence on a reductively spectatorial notion of theory. Against this reduction I suggest that a phenomenologically grounded account of colonial vision contains the potential for appreciating the lived and embodied desires of the colonizing subject and offers an alternative to the strictures of ideological critique that still largely regulate our attention. In looking towards a more dialogic conception of colonial sight and space, I offer the thematic hook of the colonial picturesque. It is, I argue, an aesthetic which does not merely mimetically duplicate a colonial view on the level of representational content. Rather, its internal and formal dynamics offer a stratagem for forging a relation between subject and object, self and space, and so enables the colony to be brought into phenomenal being

Aesthetics · Colonialism · Epistemology · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Subjectivity · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Computer Science · Law · Philosophy · Travel Writing and Literature · Visual Culture and Art Theory