Geographies of vision

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Seeing Across Cultures in the Early Modern World

Edited by Dana Leiboshn and Jeanette Favrot Peterson

The latest entry from Ashgate in one of the most innovative and stimulating new art history publication series, 'Transculturisms 1400–1700,' this collection of essays takes up the complex issue of what some scholars are calling 'visuality,' a conception of vision itself in a given culture.  The volume is edited by two specialists in early colonial Mexico: Leibsohn, a professor at Smith College and Favrot Peterson,  professor at California-Santa Barbara. 

Leibsohn's introduction, 'Geographies of Sight,' lays out the leading questions to be addressed, how to create knowledge, especially of the unknown, through vision during a period of expansion, exploration, and discovery.  The same broader topic is revisited in a more historiographical and methodological approach in a thoughtful essay by Claire Farago, who pioneered books of this kind with her own anthology, Reframing the Renaissance (1995).  She fully underscores the politics (not only intellectual politics) inherent in such a charged field of scholarship, even in its definition of objects of study.

The clustering of larger themes borders on the arbitrary, with separate sections bearing the following titles: Perspective and Mimesis ('the persuasiveness of Catholic imagery'), Blindness and Memory ('intersections between haptic and optic experiences'), and Colonial Visualities ('competing notions of colonial history').  They encompass essays ranging widely in geography, with Mexico the core (along with a rare study of the French in Florida; Todd Olson), but additional essays take on regions as diverse as Akbar's Mogul India (Saleema Waraich), Napoleon's Egypt (Liz Oliver), west Africa (Mark Hinchman), and Japan (Yoriko Kobayashi-Sato and Mia Mochizuki). One additional essay – curious in this context, if brilliant – on blindness in Italian art (Bronwen Wilson) further threatens to dilute the thematic concentration and post-colonial insights of this ambitious volume.  In contrast to the stated time limits of the series, several essays even engage with the early 19th century in west Africa, Egypt, as well as India under the Raj (Natasha Eaton).  Leibsohn acknowledges this 'capacious view' of the early modern period but argues that photography and intensified colonialism represent a watershed in visuality concerning the foreign. 

 Perhaps this volume could be taken as a snapshot of current thinking on intercultural contact, beginning with, but not limited to, 'first encounters,' and often seen, but not always, from the indigenous perspective of unconventional objects rather than just the imagery by Europeans experiencing the rest of the globe.  As Leibsohn notes, the essays were gathered to avoid partisanship, neither for European power and privilege nor to 'valorize indigenous otherness'. 

Interested students will find the best extant literature in the individual essays, although there is no collective bibliography (which would surely provide a more useful gathering than the index) across such disparate works.  Another small cavil: while most major western European countries are addressed here with resolute heterogeneity, these essays fully omit the one country – Holland – that most frequently reported to the continent about the new regions in the form of prints, maps, and illustrated travel reports (alluded to briefly in Olson's essay); of course, in Japan, west Africa, and elsewhere, the Dutch were themselves objects of representation. 

Limited space precludes detailed response to individual essays. Ultimately, this remains a fascinating collection, but it runs the risk – like any collection of essays – of adding up merely to the sum of its parts, only some of which are likely to be consulted by most readers.  As Leibsohn herself concludes:

'One lesson that we learn from the work presented here is that iconography, color, and media were so culturally encoded that any broad sense of early modern visuality must, at least for now, be constructed piece by piece . . .'

Seeing Across Cultures in the Early Modern World,  edited by Dana Leiboshn and Jeanette Favrot Peterson is published by Ashgate 2012. 302 pp., 18 colour, 64 mono illus, $104.95. ISBN 978-1-4094-1189-5