Travel and Representation 9781785336034

Citation preview

Travel and Representation

Travel and Representation

Edited by Garth Lean, Russell Staiff and Emma Waterton

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2017 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2017 Garth Lean, Russell Staiff and Emma Waterton All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed on acid-free paper ISBN 978-1-78533-602-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-78533-603-4 (ebook)

Contents

T Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction Travel and Representation: Past, Present, Future  Russell Staiff, Emma Waterton and Garth Lean Chapter 1 Repeating Visions: Hitchcock’s Vertigo and San Francisco Gemma Blackwood Chapter 2 Curious Images from Northwest China: Ethics and Poetics in Carolyn Drake’s Travel Photography Darren Byler Chapter 3 Astronauts and Avatars: Travels between the Physical, the Virtual and the Imagined Denise Doyle

vii x 1

23

43

66

Chapter 4 Finitude before Finitude: The Case of RousseauBougainville-Diderot83 Benoît Dillet Chapter 5 Bernhard Smith and Imagining the Pacific: The Art/Poetics of ‘Discovery’ and the Art/Poetics of Writing about Early European Travellers in the South Pacific Russell Staiff Chapter 6

Searching for the Spirit of Bluegrass Cynthia J. Miller

102 118

Chapter 7 The Transient Gaze: Perambulist Somnambulist (Sensual, Sonic and Aural Photographic Narratives)135 Peter Day

vi • Contents

Chapter 8 Snapshot Photography and a Gendered Poetics of the Beach, 1900s–1920s Nicolá Goc

158

Chapter 9 Mediating Mythic Origins and Lived Localities: Connecting and Distancing on Roots/Homeland Tours187 Jillian L. Powers Chapter 10 Road Trip through the Heartland: Television Advertisements and the Australian Domestic Traveller211 Christopher Drew Index229

Figures

T Figures 2.1  Top: Uyghur residents dismantle their homes as part of the urban renewal project to transform Kashgar into a Special Economic Zone for transnational trade. Bottom: in a transformed section of the city, a Han settler looks through a pair of binoculars.

46

2.2  Top: a young Uyghur woman has drawn in a flower and a pigeon over her resting body. Commenting on the weight of toil while she rests at her job away from home, she said: ‘It was our noon break when there were no customers, and we were tired since we worked from morning to night. I wasn’t optimistic about the future of that place. That job wouldn’t provide security for a whole life so my parents advised me to come back.’ Bottom: flies have been drawn on a window pane by a Uyghur inhabitant of the city and in the accompanying text he or she has lamented the changes that have come with urban upheaval: ‘Twenty years ago it was very nice, there were a lot of springs, clean water, grasses, and a lot of trees. I was always going swimming. It was a very beautiful place. But now it’s all buildings, and not much green. There are so many people living here now, it’s like flies.’

54

2.3  Top: a Uyghur man with a ‘five-mile stare’ framed by the rubble and dust of Chinese development: another 1,500 years of built environmental history erased. Bottom: what do we think when we see three generations of Uyghur butchers known by Uyghurs ‘for using every part of a sheep’, confronting us next to a stripped spine?

56

2.4 Drake is asking us to recognize the prayer hat, the kite string, the ceremonial gift cloth (top), the dust and broken plaster (bottom) as catalysts of a different time and space, which, when resituated, allow the viewer, the viewed and

viii • Figures

the photographer to present something that exceeds the sum of the parts under observation. 2.5 In texts paired with the above images by Drake, Uyghur viewers said (top): ‘Good dreams, you tell your good friends. If you do, maybe the dream will come true. If someone says “I was in a forest, I faced a tiger, and the tiger attacked me”, some people will say, “don’t speak about it”. If someone speaks bad words, they will come true.’ Bottom: ‘What dreams you have depends on your mind. I think kings dream about prime ministers, foreign ministers, and other presidents in their dreams. Beggars dream about biscuits.’

58

59

3.1 An interaction in Telematic Dreaming.72 3.2 Salt March to Dandi; the artist on the treadmill at the Eyebeam Gallery.

73

3.3  Wanderingfictions Story as part of the Meta-Dreamer project at the Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast.

76

4.1 World map by Jean Baptiste Bourguidnon d’Anville (1771) from Bougainville’s diary Bougainville et ses compagnons autour du monde, vol. 1, ed. E. Taillemite (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1978).

90

6.1 The life of Bill Monroe, inscribed on the landscape.

120

6.2 The Monroe family homestead.

122

6.3 One stop on the Mandolin Trail.

129

7.1 28 March 2013 – 10:23 am.

145

7.2 28 March 2013 – 10:39 am.

146

7.3 16 June 2013 – 11:54 am.

148

7.4 16 June 2013 – 12:00 pm.

149

8.1 Anonymous snapshot, sepia gloss Velox photographic paper, Australia, c. 1920s.

159

8.2 Anonymous snapshot, Velox photographic paper, America, c. late 1920s to early 1930s.

168

8.3 Anonymous snapshot, Velox photographic paper, America, c. late 1920s to early 1930s.

175

Figures • ix

8.4 Anonymous black-and-white gloss snapshot, Velox photographic paper, England, 1911.

177

8.5 Anonymous sepia snapshot, unknown photographic paper, America, c. 1920s.

179

8.6 Anonymous sepia snapshot Velox photographic paper, Australia, c. 1920s.

180

T Acknowledgements This volume forms the third book in a loosely formed ‘series’ edited by the three of us, with the first two volumes examining imagination (Travel and Imagination, Ashgate, 2014) and transformation (Travel and Transformation, Ashgate, 2014), respectively. For all three, we were generously supported by the School of Social Sciences and Psychology and Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, where our colleagues have continued to endure our distracted states during the preparation of this book. Our thinking on the relationship between tourism and representation has been greatly improved by conversations with a number of colleagues, and we would like to thank and acknowledge them here: Robyn Bushell, Annie Clarke and Steve Watson. We are also indebted to those who have contributed chapters to the volume; we are particularly grateful for their tolerance during what may have seemed like endless requests and delays as we tweaked the book. Finally, we would like to thank the commissioning editors at Berghahn Books for their enthusiastic response to our initial proposal; we also thank them for sharing so freely their professional knowledge, expertise and experience. We are particularly grateful for their patience, as this volume has been a long time coming. Omissions, errors and shortcomings we claim entirely for ourselves.

Introduction. Travel and Representation: Past, Present and Future

T Introduction Travel and Representation Past, Present, Future Russell Staiff, Emma Waterton and Garth Lean

. . . the magical, the soulful power that derives from replication. —Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses

Exhibit 1: Representation Alone In 2006, a very different kind of book was published. It was Shaun Tan’s award-winning The Arrival. What is extremely unusual about this book is that there are no words at all. The story is told entirely with pictures. The graphic story begins in the past, but when and where exactly is unspecified (the early 1900s? The 1920s?). As one turns the pages, it is like watching a movie without a soundtrack. The story is about the experience of migration. A man, heart-wrenchingly, departs from his wife and little daughter. The town he leaves seems run down, poor and with some foreboding spectre hanging over it. He travels in a steam train and a huge ocean liner across a vast ocean, seeking, we presume, a better life in a foreign country. But the city he eventually encounters is at best bewildering. Everything is peculiar, bizarre, queer and vexing, and in this foreign land indecipherable languages are spoken and written, and strange creatures abound. But the man must survive in the city to which he has journeyed; he must have a place to live, food to eat and a way of making money. Along the way, as time passes, the immigrant meets other people, usually strangers, who help him. But these people too have past experiences of struggle, of surviving, of dreadful events that have happened to them. Hope, however, endures. Finally, the man receives a letter from his hometown and, at the end of the story, he is

2 • Introduction. Travel and Representation: Past, Present and Future

reunited with his wife and daughter, who arrive to be with him in the baffling ‘new’ land. The picture story is deeply affecting, poignant and full of wonder. What a marvel an imagined world can be, but one we nevertheless recognize. In this representation, we the readers travel too; in the reading we experience a not easily forgotten marvellous and touching encounter. Epitomized by the writings of Nigel Thrift (2008), there has in recent decades been a decisive shift in social and cultural theory towards an analysis of social life not ‘captured’ in representation. What Thrift termed ‘non-representation’, Hayden Lorimer (2005) has called ‘morethan-representation’ (for an overview, see Waterton and Watson 2014) so as to imply a continuing interest in language, metaphor, discourse and so forth. Others, still, have adopted other sets of terms, such as ‘new materialism’, but collectively we can point to a swell of academic interest that has turned away from the ‘linguistic’ or ‘textual’ turn towards what Patricia Clough and Jean Halley (2007) have labelled the ‘affective turn’, which extends an interest in the body and emotion, and gives focus to that area of social life that is ‘other than conscious knowing’ (Seigworth and Gregg 2010: 1, emphasis in original). For many, what was at stake was the downplaying of the sensory and the material in favour of texts, discourses or systems (Liljeström and Paasonen 2010). As Seigworth and Gregg (2010) point out, this interest can in fact be traced to two earlier essays published by Sedgwick and Frank (1995) and Massumi (1995), which jointly brought to the fore ‘affect’s displacement of debates over the centrality of cognition with affect theory’s own displacement of debates over the centrality of structuralism and poststructuralism’ (Seigworth and Gregg 2010: 5). Therefore, for some time now, there has been concerted effort by those working in the fields of social and cultural analysis to grapple with what we will call here more-than-representational theory and apply it in our work (the field is quite vast, but we point to the work of David Crouch (2010, 2012) as an exemplar and to our own work: Lean 2016; Staiff 2012, 2014; Waterton and Dittmer 2014; Waterton and Watson 2014). But this begs the obvious question: why a book about representation at this point in time when we are toiling with/thinking about post-representation analytics? The opening epigraph by Michael Taussig, Exhibit 1 and Exhibit 2 (see below) provide a clue. By referring to the magic of mimesis and the ‘magic of the signifier’, Taussig, in his 1993 study Mimesis and Alterity, proposed that representational theory was a preamble and not a conclusion, and, more importantly, that mimetic productions had a life of their own. Mimesis and Alterity was/is a very different critical analysis of representation to that offered by the cultural geographers who came

Russell Staiff, Emma Waterton and Garth Lean • 3

later. Taussig was not concerned about what parts of ‘reality’ escaped representation, but what representations do or can do. He was interested in the way in which representations became ‘things’ in the phenomenological world we inhabit, as much entities in their own right as any other type of matter. Part of the way in which this process occurred was to do with the ‘Othering’ at the heart of representation; that a representation is a type of ‘Other’ to that being represented. It was not just about similitude, about representing the ‘real’, but the dynamic way ‘things’ took on the representations of themselves, that representations became part of the physical object they represented, and this had a profound effect on how the object was perceived and the emotional impact of that perception. This line of thinking about representation has to do with the power of mimesis and the potential for deep sensorial and emotional responses to the replication/representation when it is absorbed back into that being represented or when a representation stands alone (whether text, image, graph, model, sculpture, formula, etc,), but is nonetheless powerful as itself. Travel offers a multitude of examples that align with this style of thinking. Imagine you are on a trekking expedition in Northeast Thailand, the region known as Issan. You are walking near the village of Suhatsakhan and you come across some unusual rock formations that you stop to observe and photograph. Your guide tells you that these are dinosaur fossils from the Jurassic period. In that instance, the rocks stop being ‘just rocks’ and are transformed into something else entirely. The representations of dinosaurs and the Jurassic period attach themselves to the object with great emotional power and, once told this information, the physical entity can no longer be ‘just a rock’; the fossilized rock has become something fuelled by its own representations. In a similar way, Shaun Tan’s picture story is a representation that exists unto itself; it is a ‘thing’ in a world of things; it has its own reality. But in the reading it becomes enmeshed with other stories, with other images, with prior knowledge and with an array of emotional states. The power of representation continues to be manifested in the magic stuff it performs. Cinema, fiction, sacred texts, photographs, art works (etc.) and Shaun Tan’s The Arrival tell us so.

Exhibit 2: My Only Enemy is Time Every year, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney mounts an exhibition called ArtExpress that displays the outstanding art works of final-year high school students drawn from across the state

4 • Introduction. Travel and Representation: Past, Present and Future

of New South Wales. In the 2015 exhibition, Elly Caratinos presented the award-winning digital media film called My Only Enemy is Time. The film traces her grandfather’s visit to a hospital for tests related to his failing eyesight and his blurred vision. He now increasingly relies on his memories. Photographs of past travels to Greece when Elly’s grandfather returned to the island of his birth are mixed with photographs from his childhood and of him as a young, virile and handsome man. As macro-degeneration takes its toll, even the photographs will lose their efficacy and he will have to rely entirely on memory. This is juxtaposed with memories of his life in Australia, fishing with friends (as we tour the old boathouse, which is no longer used), visiting a cemetery and remembering, so fondly, departed Greek friends who had accompanied him as migrants to Sydney. So the corporeal journeys of migration, of travelling back to the village in Greece, trips to the old fishing hut, to the cemetery, to the hospital are merged with the journey into old age. Lovingly, the camera studies, in a very abstract way, the grandfather’s aging body, slow caressing close-ups of aged skin, lips and limbs; symbolic shapes and patterns are formed, textures and surfaces become poetic, and the aged body is revealed as an object of great beauty. The young filmmaker uses abstraction and sounds to evoke, touchingly, both the corporeal aspects of aging and the strong ­emotions  – felt acutely by the viewer – attached to decline, decay, a fading life and the inevitability of death. But in the granddaughter’s actions of making the film, the hope of the future, the continuity of life is revealed. In this short film we have an eloquent and compelling representation of travel, of the ambiguities in the migrant’s story of the home and away binary; of time, of the past, of the present, of the future, of belonging and of familial love. For the viewer, the film’s seduction/ invitation is complete, the filmic world a palpable presence. Despite the interest, then, in post- or more-than-representational thinking, representation continues to absorb our attention, and for very good reason. But we are conscious that developments around representational thought have been left rather hanging in the air, awaiting some resolution about its future use and relationship with what we have termed more-than-representational approaches. This is nowhere more important (or apparent) than in the analyses of semiotics and discourse, both of which have been mobilized in theorizations in the field of tourism over the last few decades. We therefore feel it is timely to revisit representation and travel. Indeed, we have been doing so in various guises across what are now three collections of essays: Travel and Imagination (2014), Travel and Transformation (2014) and this volume, Travel and Representation. In each, we point to a semiotic landscape of tourism in

Russell Staiff, Emma Waterton and Garth Lean • 5

which signs are traded for experiences, which sees representational theories reach their limitation as notions of experience, affect and practice disrupt the gaze that encapsulates the representational. Our intention, however, was not to preclude the importance of representations, texts and the visual, but rather to view these things as implicated in the construction of experience. However, as Waterton and Watson (2014: 119) have argued, ‘we are [so] concerned with encounters and engagements, moments of subjective and emergent meaning making, [that] we are faced with a choice about whether to abandon the representational for the new dimensions offered by more-than-­representational ­theories’. Thus, with our third volume in what can loosely be called a trilogy that examines ‘Travel and. . .’, we return to the heart of the matter and square our attention back on the representational. There are, of course, other reasons why the coupling of representation and travel needs to be freshly examined. First, there is the obvious observation that in recent theorization, the terminology continues to privilege representation – whether ‘post’- or ‘non’- or ‘more than-’, representation is the key referent in theoretical speculations, and this is an acknowledgement of the centrality of representation in the social world and in social and cultural analysis. Second, issues relating to the deep problematic(s) between the ‘real’ and its representations (see Levine 1993) have not disappeared, and in some cases have opened up new frontiers of contention. The arguments about climate change modelling come to mind, but so too do controversies about statistical representations, disputations about media representations and disagreements about cross-cultural communications (or ­ miscommunications), to name but four. The mode of representation, the mimetic capacity of representation (and so forth) generates the ongoing debates about the relationship between representation and the represented. Third, the social and cultural worlds we inhabit continue to produce and consume representations at ever-dizzying rates. It is now almost impossible to imagine our lives as anything other than ones mediated by representations. Representations have their own identity and, on many levels, come close to producing the reality we occupy; we exist, as Baudrillard (1983) instructed polemically, within the simulacra we have created. And representations often appear more ‘real’ than reality itself (Staiff 2014) or, at the very least, are so mired in the real that, as semioticians have long known, the real and the represented are fused (although that fusion is arbitrary, provisional and unstable) (Hall 1997). And so the analytical work of representation is not done. New ways of thinking have emerged around a number of loci. One such locus has

6 • Introduction. Travel and Representation: Past, Present and Future

been the interactions between Western and non-Western representational practices, especially in cultural productions. Is the modernism of China, Thailand and Brazil the same as that of Europe; is the historical chronology of modernity/modernism the same (Clark 2010; Moxey 2013)? Another locus has been in the field of translation, especially cross-cultural translation (Allen and Bernofsky 2013; Bellos 2011). In cultural studies, media studies and cinema studies, thinking around representation continues to produce startlingly imaginative work (for example, see Driscoll and Morris 2014). An obvious locus is in the field of art history and theory. Keith Moxey’s recent book Visual Time: The Image in History (2013) is a notable interrogation of representation in the art world. His analysis serves as a very illuminating exegesis of the current state of play in representation scholarship and, in conclusion to this part of the introductory chapter, we turn our attention to Moxey’s ruminations about images, time and aesthetic experience. While his subject is art history, his observations, we deem, are highly pertinent to a reconsideration of travel and representation. Moxey charts the state of representation studies and, in particular, the studies of the image away from semiotic decoding and back towards aesthetics where works of art are more appropriately regarded as an ‘encounter’ rather than something to be ‘interpreted’. The reasons for the shift are those we outlined at the beginning of this chapter: representations have the ‘power to . . . create fresh experiential worlds of their own’ (Moxey 2013: 4), that things and representations have agency, that they have what Moxey calls ‘presence’ and that they have the capacity to produce both effects and affects. Travel itself, for example, vectors representations reciprocally with feelings of intensity and expressions of emotion. Sometimes these are captured in representations in order to stimulate feeling and spread it, and the intensity, being fluid, will move between people and objects: this is a contagion that defines experience, place and engagement; it is also a contagion that creates and reproduces meanings and affect, including those that are patterned into the representational practices that produce, for example, the national past, the landscape, the familiar, the exotic and the toured. This is the realm of both the ‘more than’ representation thinking of Thrift et al. and that of Taussig’s sensorial enchantment. Representations of travel are not just acts of mimesis, but are ‘objects’ in their own right, simultaneously dislodged from that which they represent and yet tied to that which they represent. In this way, as Moxey demonstrates, there is an ontological collapse between the represented and the ‘real’; representations are not distinct from the social environments within which we live. In providing a type of conceptual bridge between Thrift (and his

Russell Staiff, Emma Waterton and Garth Lean • 7

f­ ollowers) and Taussig, the term ‘post-representation’ is perhaps only useful as a transitional term that denotes a shift away from representation as conceived in the Derridean sense of there being nothing beyond language to ‘paying heed to that which cannot be read, to that which exceeds the possibilities of semiotic interpretation, to that which defies understanding on the basis of convention’ (Moxey 2013: 54). Consequently, a new volume on representation and travel is not already an anachronism at the time of its publication. The subtitle of this chapter, ‘Past, Present, Future’, refers to two elements: first, the ­volume’s chapters variously interrogate/investigate the travel/­ representation integer through scenarios from the past, the present and, in one case, by imagining the future; and, second, representation and travel itself has a history of scholarship that is undergoing a transformation along the lines we have discussed. It is therefore hoped that this compilation, taken as a whole, will suggest multiple ways forward.

Travel and Representation: The Themes Much attention has been placed on the politics of tourism or tourism as a form of expertise with its own constitutive and constituting patterns of power (see, for example, Morgan and Pritchard 1998). Guide books, brochures, postcards and so forth have thus been variously explored as key sources of that power, marking out the conduct of visitors and laying out the ‘right’ modes of perception (see, for example, Selwyn 1996; Waterton 2009; Watson and Waterton 2010). Our purpose with this volume is not to duplicate this rich itinerary of work that has interrogated the ways in which travel is framed, produced and rendered thinkable. Instead, this volume draws together ten chapters that imply an orientation towards representation within the field of tourism/travel. Here, we have been deliberate in our selection of the word ‘imply’, as the individual chapters contained within at times are only momentarily explicit about their engagement with ‘representation’, though its presence is there nonetheless. In the section that follows, readers will be quick to note that we have made no attempt, structurally, to link our contributions beyond the spine offered by representation; indeed, we make no mention of parts or sections that could be used to delineate the volume against subthemes. But there are certainly commonalities that can be established in and between the volume’s chapters. For example, several of our contributors take as their focus linguistic formality, where others have foregrounded the visual rhetoric of travel, though neither do so in ways that would imply a primacy of language. Instead, they

8 • Introduction. Travel and Representation: Past, Present and Future

pick up an interest in simile, metaphor and so forth, evoking a poetics that has seldom been the focus of tourism scholarship. Others provide an orientation towards action and practice, or the performative, sensuous aspects of tourism and travel that belie a core relationship between texts and their readers. This notion of performative is doubly located in our volume: first, as that linked with the body (movement, emotion, action); and, second, in a Butlerian sense, in the performativity of producing that which is named. The latter has a constituting effect on the former, with the ‘ordering of the subject’, to borrow from Werry (2008: 405), largely done through representational means. But while we have not used themes to order the volume in any way – for there is much too much overlap to make such an approach fruitful – we do acknowledge that there are different approaches to representation visible across the book. We see these differing approaches as being connected to six overarching themes: the visual, the poetic, imagination, the postrepresentational, travel and self/world making. The Visual It is a truism in tourism studies that the visual is privileged over and above the other senses; indeed, the very notion of sightseeing encapsulates this foundational activity. Since its first appearance in 1990, John Urry’s formidably influential The Tourist Gaze (now in its third edition with Jonas Larsen (2011)) has given theoretical weight to this privileging of the visual. Equally significant was the publication of Crouch and Lübbren’s Visual Culture and Tourism (2003), which illustrated so powerfully the meshing of tourism in visual culture(s) more broadly and brought to bear upon tourism thinking the substantial work of recent decades on visual cultures (see, for example, Mirzoeff 2002). In all these studies there has been a marked and highly important bifurcation between ‘vision’ and ‘visuality’. The former relates to the physical and embodied processes of seeing (and processes that are not just neurological imperatives for survival, but are ones that are culturally inscribed, and deeply so). This domain of thinking includes the complex relationship between seeing and images and the intriguing proposition that we ‘see’ in pictures, that seeing is ‘pictured’ (Gibson 1979; Burnett 2005). It is also the domain of the gaze, seeing linked to power, knowledge and subjectivity. The latter, visuality, refers to the total visual environment: all visual media, the techniques of vision and the techniques of observation, and the way we learn to visually respond to the worlds we inhabit (aesthetics as a way of seeing, landscape as a way of seeing, cartography as a way of seeing and so forth). Visuality

Russell Staiff, Emma Waterton and Garth Lean • 9

also pertains to the visual environment as a field of ­knowledge – ­signifying processes, the relationship between image and text, scopic regimes and the production, circulation and consumption of visual material (see Staiff 2014: 73–78). The entangled relationships between travel, seeing, vision and visuality continue to fuel thinking about travel and representation for the very obvious reason that picture making and image communication/ transmission has always been central to both journeys of the imagination and corporeal travel – perhaps never more so than today, with the ubiquitous digital mediation of travel with phones and cameras. And while we may lament the focus on vision at the expense of the other senses, we cannot deny the power of vision and image making in the quest to understand and in the quest to augment and extend the travel experience. The chapters in this collection provide ample testimony to the enduring significance of visual representations in theory and practice. Poetics In 1980 Julia Kristeva, the celebrated literary and cultural theorist, at the time when postmodernism was being forcefully articulated, described ‘writing-as-experience-of-limits’. She was pointing to the limits of language and subjectivity (Kristeva 1980). Today, there is a widespread acceptance/acknowledgement of these ‘limits’ of representation/­ experience, but, at the same time, ever-renewed efforts to ‘return’ to the powerful possibilities of language, cinema, photography and performance. In other words, representation has not run its course, but has been re-energized by the very countenance of it limitations. We are still enthralled. In relation to travel, the entanglement of the corporeal with representation, of the ‘real’ and the ‘imagined’, of the empirical with the fictive has never been more acute in contemporary thinking. This is strangely ironic given that Western travel writing, forged in the shadow of (and under the spell of) Romanticism, preceded the ­‘industrialization’ of travel and was greatly concerned with aesthetics and the deep (and often dark) yearnings of the self, the emotional marriage between classical history/literature/archaeology and visiting sites of antiquity, with writing and painting in places of ‘scenic beauty’, with the health benefits of travel and so on (see De Botton 2002). In recent times there has been a creative wrestle between representations and the corporeal that gestures both to travel as an embodied, remembered experience and the imagined/fictive travel of the mind. These ‘wrestles’ produce

10 • Introduction. Travel and Representation: Past, Present and Future

not only attempts at mimetic description but also various, and often ­different, ways to think, feel, appreciate and desire. These ‘various ways’ of representation constitute a ‘poetics of travel’: the way in which writers employ rhetoric, metaphor, aesthetics, form, narrative and description; the way in which borders and genres are crossed and melded; the way in which surfaces and depths are thought and felt in the act of writing/analysis; the way in which the subject is liberated, interrogated, positioned and disturbed; the way in which travel refuses to be conventionalized, to be coherent, rational, ordered, refuses totality and emerges as disparate, contradictory, multivalent and discursive. In some of the chapters the conventions of representation are consciously part of the analytic, in others, poetics is inherent in what is being probed, while in others, we can see how poetics lays subliminally within the investigation. No writer can avoid the conventions of language that constitute the tools of writing/communication and so, unsurprisingly, and as Kristeva reminded us, ‘travel in representation’ and ‘travel and representation’ is a relationship that is both enlarged and limited by the rules and codes of representational systems. Imagination The travel/imagination dyad is a familiar one to us because it formed the basis of the first of our edited volumes dealing with ‘Travel and. . .’, Travel and Imagination (Lean et al. 2014). Borrowing from that earlier volume, here we position imagination as something that is central to our consciousness and perception, operating almost imperceptibly, whether we are awake or asleep. Beyond this, we also see imagination as something that takes up an endlessly complex form because it is linked to a constellation of other phenomenon: dreams, fantasy, perception, memory and remembering, storytelling – in all its many forms – and so forth. It is a shape-changing phenomenon that is utterly central to the human experience. Given this, we see it as a concept that is key to both our everyday lives and the idea of tourism, producing both ‘imaginative tourism’ and the ‘tourism imagination’. As we argued in the introduction to Travel and Imagination, bringing the two concepts – travel and imagination – together immediately renders possible a more fulsome and dynamic understanding of travel itself. Indeed, the dyad seems to open up a way of thinking about travel that highlights its ‘embodied implications, the “inner world” and “outer world” connotations (even when such binaries are over-ridden in the analysis) and the a priori assumption that one cannot conceive of the one without the other’

Russell Staiff, Emma Waterton and Garth Lean • 11

(Lean et al. 2014: 13). Central here, and as alluded to in our discussions of the visual above, is the idea of the image, or the mental visualization of something, someplace, someone, somewhere, all of which are captured by a good number of the chapters in this volume (see below). Post-representational Whilst the literature around the representational qualities of travel is an established part of the academic canon, we – and many of our authors – are keen to respond to more recent developments in theory that focus on action and engagement rather than conventional accounts of symbolic representation. For the purposes of nailing down a theme, we have labelled these recent theoretical forays ‘post-representational’ and highlight in particular those approaches that agitate for a greater appreciation of nonhuman actors and their affordances. This sort of emergent theory, which focuses upon performance, embodiment and experience, poses a challenge to the ways in which semiotics and visuality have been seen to work in the formation of meaning, from both an empirical and a theoretical standpoint. What lies at the crux of the theme of ‘post-representation’, then, is a concept of agency that revolves around a questioning of how bodies, capacities, intensities, forces, nonhuman agents and their human counterparts matter or figure in our lives. This work of agency is something that is envisaged as being distributed across the social and the material, the human and the nonhuman, albeit with elements of ambiguity and uncertainty (Spinoza 1996: 51). As our contributors point out in various ways, this requires us to acknowledge that travel brings us into contact – physically and/or imaginatively – with sites and spaces that are figured through the affective registers of pain, loss, joy, nostalgia and anger, to name just a few, in addition to myriad representational forms. How we begin to discover and describe such experiences, when they are shaped and expressed in moments and spaces that can be at the same time intensely personal, intimately shared and ultimately social, is a central focus for many authors in this volume. Such contributions bring a richer understanding of travel to the fore, one that takes account of more recent thinking in both visuality and performativity, notions that have emerged in an attempt to grasp the sensual, emotive and embodied aspects of the travel experience. In each case, our authors toy with the implications of this theoretical repositioning by exploring and examining new understandings of travel in situ, as a practice and as a system of significations that are derived from both practice and dominant cultural narratives that are shared and constitutive of intersubjective meanings.

12 • Introduction. Travel and Representation: Past, Present and Future

Travel As is to be expected, travel is a central theme throughout the book. As with our earlier volumes, we resist the urge to develop a rigid definition, choosing instead to showcase the complex and multifarious forms that travel can take. The chapters throughout depict a variety of journeys with travellers taking the guise of pleasure, film, music and diasporic tourists; leisure seekers; pilgrims; migrants; museumgoers; music and film enthusiasts; explorers; artists, poets, writers and photographers; car drivers; neighbourhood strollers and those travelling through nonphysical and more-than-physical means (e.g. cinema, music, photographs, memory, the virtual or the imagination). These travels take place in a plethora of physical, imagined and virtual spaces, places and landscapes – Australian beaches and rural landscapes, northwestern and rural China, northern England, Ghana, the United States (San Francisco and Kentucky), the South Pacific, voyages across the globe and in virtual and imagined worlds. Reflecting the book’s subtitle, the explorations/representations of travel take historical, contemporary and futuristic dimensions. One of the most striking revelations to come from observing this temporal range is the impact of technological advancement. This has not only facilitated a dramatic increase in the number of journeys being taken, it has also transformed the ways in which we travel, the diversity and complexity of these journeys and, with particular relevance to this volume, the ways in which travel is re/presented. New technologies have greatly enhanced the ability of travellers to capture, present and distribute representations of their journeys. In addition, travellers have unprecedented access to representations of performances of physical travel, along with the peoples, places, cultures, objects, etc. they may encounter on any given journey. Beyond this circulation of representations, the spaces, places and landscapes in which we reside, and through which we travel, are increasingly mobile/fluid (see Bauman 2000; Urry 2007), with flows of peoples, symbols, cultures, objects, sensory experiences, etc.. This fluidity has important implications for the ways in which travel is conceptualized, experienced and performed. While travel continues to be seen as a process through which travellers can encounter difference, these circulations/flows have led to spaces, places and landscapes which are increasingly full of familiarities and opportunities to stay connected (particularly through digital means) with elements that travellers have physically departed. Interestingly, this does not appear to have substituted the need for physical journeying; indeed, it seems to have merely whet an appetite for individuals

Russell Staiff, Emma Waterton and Garth Lean • 13

to experience the sensual, emotive, embodied experiences of travel for themselves. These flows/circulations have also not dampened an insatiable human desire to capture, express and communicate travel experiences evident across a long history of journeying. While travellers remain focused upon capturing, and representing encounters with, the ‘unfamiliar’, what constitutes the unfamiliar increasingly entails reinterpretations of the ‘familiar’ or a meeting of the ‘familiar/unfamiliar’, courtesy of an ever-increasingly mobile world. And this only serves to increase the challenge of representing travel as lived experience – a difficulty that may indeed be one of the central catalysts for the viewer/ reader to engage in their own journeying. Self/World Making Our final theme concerns the ways in which representations of travel are used to make worlds and represent travel as a world-making experience. For instance, travel is often represented as a process through which individuals make and/or reinterpret their ‘world’ – perhaps through the guise of knowledge acquisition, identity formation, transformation or self-discovery. In relation to representation, travel is frequently framed as an opportunity to look beyond/behind/through the ­representations/ discourses/narratives of others and to see, engage, interpret, understand issues, peoples, places, cultures, etc. for oneself. This is not only a process of world-making, but also world-­deconstructing. However, as explored throughout the book, there is also a paradox at play as we can never fully escape particular ways of understanding/seeing/­representing the world into which we have been socialized. The representations generated through travel over the course of human history have also played an important role in constructing ­understandings/knowledge of the world – European journeys of exploration are a good example of this. But this raises questions about who is doing the representing and what knowledge structures, biases, subjectivities, etc. may be informing them – which genders, sexualities, cultures, ethnicities and so forth. The chapters in this volume explore these issues, but also show how travel representations make worlds not on their own, but through becoming entwined in broader social and cultural process and phenomenon.

Chapter Synopses The volume commences with Gemma Blackwood’s (Chapter 1) analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo, which unfolds in relation to an

14 • Introduction. Travel and Representation: Past, Present and Future

interrogation of both the practices of film tourism and the touristic imagination, or those desires to see, first-hand, locations previously viewed on screen. Her analysis, in other words, is doubly located, but each time is concerned with the structures and devices used to produce affect/effect. Or, as Blackwood puts it, the chapter presents a point of ‘connect between a literary or cinematic poetics within the framework of the film, as well as a “real life” poetics of space in the process of tourism and travel itself’. The chapter touches easily upon many of the themes of the volume, such as the visual, travel, the imagination and the poetic. In terms of Vertigo, this is illustrated through Hitchcock’s manipulations of cinematic techniques; within contemporary tourism, we see this in the practices of tourists themselves, who employ choreographed ‘real time’ movements to create or replicate those affects in places associated with the film (such as the Golden Gate Bridge, native redwood forests and so forth). This sort of work is by no means restricted to Vertigo and San Francisco, as Blackwood is at pains to point out, but is rehearsed in numerous locations throughout the world. Another obvious example would be that of Paradise, New Zealand, which is the iconic location used in films such as Lord of the Rings, X-Men Origins: Wolvervine and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. In her analysis, Blackwood alludes to the power and use of tourist structures in film to produce affects; she also points out that these structures do not produce predetermined effects, but set up imaginative environments that yield myriad (and often undetermined) experiences. In the case of Vertigo, tourist sites become metaphors for a character’s attempt to connect to the past, with loss, with mystery, with self-destructive tendencies, and with the poetics of memory and place, which, for Blackwood, emerge as interlinked, entwined and twinned. Blackwood’s chapter is followed by an undertaking that focuses upon the American photographer Carolyn Drake and her images of Northwest China, authored by Darren Byler (Chapter 2). Byler’s theoretically adventurous approach is divided into three rough parts: a detailed account of Drake’s project in Xinjiang, inclusive of a suggestion of the competing discourses at play; a formal analysis of Drake’s work itself; and a consideration of the implications of such a project, particularly in terms of the question of an ethical dialogue and what Byler terms a ‘political space of encounter’. Like Blackwood, Byler points to a toying with rhetorical structure and devices in order to see, understand and experience the world, but here it emerges as a form of resistance. Indeed, Byler is pointing to a practice of using metaphor, colour, formal presentation and composition to punctuate stereotypes and document, comment upon and reveal change, continuity, complexity, embodiment,

Russell Staiff, Emma Waterton and Garth Lean • 15

self-actualization and multiplicity in a manner that utilizes aesthetics to enhance, underscore, enliven and animate. Photography is used to produce ambiguity and to question the inadequacies of representations in ways that push us, as tourists, to feel rather than think. Though he is implicit in his approach, Byler is pressing us towards a post-­ representational position by drawing attention to the visceral forces that drive us towards thought, action, movement and expression. Chapter 3 by Denise Doyle, entitled ‘Astronauts and Avatars’, engages with the ‘opportunities for new forms of “travel” being offered by new technologies’, which, as the title of the chapter suggests, can be found in physical space and in virtual space, both of which form core components of the chapter’s analysis and are accessed through the ‘bodies that act as interpreters of space’. Here we find deep engagement with the very notion of travel, as well as that of the imagination. Doyle commences her chapter with a detailed overview of the relationships between art, technology and travel, including an articulation of their histories, before moving on to examine her own avenues of exploration in virtual space. Her reflections open up a number of modes of analysis that relate to structures of perception that unfold in concert with lived realities, as the ‘real’, the ‘imagined’ and the virtual. The manipulation of technologies of representation, via immersive and virtual environments such as the reinterpretation of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities or the creation of Kriti Island in Second Life, brings the subject back, to a degree, to pure representation. However, Doyle raises the crucial question of whether these virtual/immersive spaces are more than just representations of some prior reality; she proposes that they have, indeed, a life of their own, an existence that is not so mimetic in nature in any ‘pure’ sense, but has its own independent existence that is then ­experienced as real – that is, the embodied experience of the virtual. Benoît Dillet (Chapter 4) is every bit as erudite as Doyle in his chapter on imaginative travel in the eighteenth century, understood, theorized and re/presented by three prominent figures of the Enlightenment: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Louis-Antoine Bougainville and Denis Diderot. Dillet begins his chapter with a simple yet compelling proposition regarding the convergence of the opening up of the new world, anthropology and the imaginary of travel, in which he argues that the ­‘discovery’ of America was not that which was newly ‘opened’; rather, ‘what was new was the space America started to take in Europe’s image of space’. In his chapter, Dillet deals primarily with words, concepts and ideas, but through this opening up of language, he points to the concomitant production of new conceptual spaces and new aesthetic, literary and artistic affects. Indeed, he evocatively

16 • Introduction. Travel and Representation: Past, Present and Future

inhabits not only the world of representing travel, but that too of representing the ideas and concepts drawn upon to understand and produce those travels. In Chapter 5 Russell Staiff observes Bernard Smith’s examination of ‘explorer artists’ aboard European expeditions to the South Pacific in  the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Smith’s work depicts the challenge explorer artists faced in depicting the new visions that the South Pacific presented within the constraints of European artistic conventions. While the prevailing Neoclassical style of the time emphasized the perfection of nature, Staiff explains how explorer artists believed the South Pacific demanded ‘something far more expressive, something more descriptive, something more deeply felt, something more emotionally infused, something that communicated affect more than the severe rationality of Neoclassical “geometry”’. He explores the ways in which artists grappled to communicate these aesthetics and sensualities, but how they ultimately could never completely evade the constraints of artistic conventions, along with cultural perceptions/ expectations and anticipated audience reactions. For him, this phenomenon constitutes a ‘poetics of history’, demonstrated not only by artists’ experiences, but also in Bernard Smith’s own travels through analysing the work of the explorer artists. The volume moves from the ‘new world’ in the eighteenth century to the East South Central United States and the state of Kentucky in the twenty-first century, affectionately nicknamed the Bluegrass State, in a chapter authored by Cynthia J. Miller (Chapter 6). While this chapter returns us to the notion of pilgrimage and processes of memorialization evident in the work of Blackwood (Chapter 1), Miller’s work commences with a quieter introduction to a succession of journeys to the boyhood home of the Father of Bluegrass, Bill Monroe, who is used in the chapter to explore journeys made time and again, congealed and yet always individualistic and always anew, refreshing and refashioning the memories and associations of a specific place. Here we find an established ‘structure’ in the form of a path, a route and a journey to the town of Rosine and the homestead on Jerusalem Ridge, but it is always improvised and in a process of remaking, of melding past and present in ways that cling to romantic analogies. This is an engagement with poetics seldom found in the tourism literature, though it is, of course, nearly always ‘there’, somewhere. Indeed, alongside the chapters offered by Byler and Doyle, in Miller’s work we find something crucial about a poetics of travel, as though it’s an emergent attribute; that is, our analytical foci have been elsewhere and, at the same time, always skirting around poetics without ever actually naming it as a way that

Russell Staiff, Emma Waterton and Garth Lean • 17

concentrates our attention on a particular aspect of travelling. Miller’s chapter reminds us, implicitly, that we have been mired in an admixture – an exquisite admixture – of sense making, meaning making, experience, representation, desire, structures, genres, embodiment, technologies, effects, affects, spaces, places, emotions, the somatic and so forth, such that poetics is everywhere except consciously in our analysis. In Chapter 7 Peter Day reflects upon his project Perambulist Somnambulist, which is based upon a series of walks taken near his home in northern England. The project uses photographs and poetry to represent both the walks themselves and the author’s own inner narrative while conducting them. In the conceptual way Day writes about walking, we glimpse constantly something we refer to in this volume as the ‘poetics of travel’. He argues that the images not only express what is ‘there’, but simultaneously illustrate the photographer’s feeling of ‘being there’. The chapter goes on to explore important questions regarding why certain journeys/geographies are recorded, are given significance, become catalysts for reflection and are marked as different, while others are not, being framed instead as ‘automatic’ and devoid of significance. Day defines the former as ‘embodied journeys’ and the latter as ‘disembodied journeys’, and in this distinction draws attention to an often-raised issue: in any attempt to represent travel, we are always confronted by the limits of language and, in turn, what can be represented and what escapes representation. Similarly drawing upon photographic representations, though this time from a historical perspective, Nicolá Goc (Chapter 8) explores how the emergence of snapshot photography in the early twentieth century became a key catalyst for reconstituting a gendered poetics of the beach, and the female self more broadly. Through analysing six photographs taken in Australia, America and England, drawn from advertisements and newspaper articles circulating from 1900 to 1920, Goc illustrates how snapshot photography facilitated performances that challenged traditional representations of femininity. These images and performances, distributed globally, established a representation of the beach as exotic, sensual and sexual. Goc shows how this poetic became entwined in other media representations of the beach, influencing travel/tourism imaginaries, desires and motivations in general. Implicitly, the chapter hints at the poetics of travel, especially those that play out in the form of resistance to key notions of how bodies ought to behave within the spaces of the beach, at times punctuated with a gentler politics of play. In Chapter 9, Jillian L. Powers observes the experiences of what she calls ‘diasporic tourists’, or those individuals who travel to engage with their cultural roots/homelands with guides and/or tours due to

18 • Introduction. Travel and Representation: Past, Present and Future

having no social connections of their own. Drawing upon the findings of empirical research conducted with American descendants of African slaves travelling to Ghana, and American citizens adopted from China returning to China, Powers argues that both groups use the experiences ‘to redefine essentialist and foundational frameworks of belonging in order to reconcile domestic experiences of exclusion and feelings of outsiderness’. While these groups may be outcast as ‘Other’ at home, Powers’ research suggests that, while travelling, individuals draw upon a dominant ‘Western gaze’ into which they have been socialized in the United States, and this serves to reinforce ‘global narratives of inequality and power’. In the final chapter (Chapter 10), and making links with those chapters by Blackwood (Chapter 1) and Day (Chapter 7), Christopher Drew returns us to the troubling question of representation by introducing what he terms ‘representational poetics’. Here he explores the representation of Australian identity in television advertisements that depict road trips. He argues that while these representations might be drawn upon to appeal to consumers in Australia and to reinforce the attributes of the brands in question, they also produce ‘a discursive, recognizable and idealized national identity trope within domestic travel discourse’. These representations present a rural and romanticized vision of Australia that reinforces a particularly colonial perspective and denies representations of an increasingly urbanized and socially/culturally diverse Australian identity. As with our earlier volumes, it is not our intention for this book to be the ‘be all and end all’ for travel and representation. Given the theme, the book might best be thought of as a representation of travel and representation. It is a representation, however, that we believe will provide a catalyst for further interdisciplinary scholarship on the theme and the related topics discussed throughout. Russell Staiff is an adjunct fellow in the critical heritage and tourism program at Western Sydney University and an adjunct professorial fellow in the architectural heritage and tourism program at Silpakorn University, Bangkok. His research interests are twofold: the various intersections between cultural heritage, communities and tourism with a particular emphasis on Southeast Asia, and heritage as a sociocultural phenomenon. He has recently co-edited a volume, Heritage and Tourism (with Robyn Bushell and Steve Watson, Routledge, 2013) and is the author of Re-imagining Heritage Interpretation: Enchanting the Past/Future (Ashgate, 2014).

Russell Staiff, Emma Waterton and Garth Lean • 19

Emma Waterton  is an associate professor based at Western Sydney University in the Institute for Culture and Society. Her research explores the interface between heritage, identity, memory and affect. Her most recent project, ‘Photos of the Past’, is a three-year examination of all four concepts at a range of Australian heritage tourism sites, including Uluru Kata-Tjuta National Park, Sovereign Hill, the Blue Mountains National Park and Kakadu National Park. She is author of Politics, Policy and the Discourses of Heritage in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and co-author of Heritage, Communities and Archaeology (with Laurajane Smith, Duckworth, 2009) and The Semiotics of Heritage Tourism (with Steve Watson, Channel View Publications, 2014). She co-edits the book series Critical Studies in Heritage, Emotion and Affect (Routledge). Garth Lean is Lecturer in Geography and Urban Studies in the School of Social Sciences and Psychology at Western Sydney University. His research and writing primarily investigates experiences of physical travel in a modern, mobile world. He is the lead researcher of the Transformative Travel Research Project (www.transformativetravel. com) and co-lead of the TinDA (Travel in the Digital Age) Project (www. tindaproject.com). He has published a variety of papers on travel, tourism and mobilities, along with the monograph Transformative Travel in a Mobile World (CABI Books, 2016), and the edited volumes Travel and Imagination (Ashgate, 2014) and Travel and Transformation (Ashgate, 2014). He is Vice President of the Geographical Society of New South Wales and a member of the Geographies of Leisure and Tourism Research Group with the Royal Geographical Society.

References Allen, E., and Bernofsky, S. (eds.) 2013. In Translation. New York: Columbia University Press. Baudrillard, J. 1983. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e). Bauman, Z. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bellos, D. 2011. Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything. London: Particular Books/Penguin. Burnett, R. 2005. How Images Think. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Clark, J. 2010. Asian Modernities. Sydney: Power Publications. Clough, P.T., and Halley, J. (eds) 2007. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Crouch, D. 2010. Flirting with Space. Farnham: Ashgate.

20 • Introduction. Travel and Representation: Past, Present and Future

———. 2012. ‘Meaning, Encounter and Performativity: Threads and Moments of Spacetimes in Doing Tourism’, in L. Smith, E. Waterton and S. Watson (eds), The Cultural Moment in Tourism. London: Routledge, pp. 19–37. Crouch, D., and Lübbren, N. (eds). 2003. Visual Culture and Tourism. Oxford: Berg. De Botton, A. The Art of Travel. London: Hamish Hamilton/Penguin. Driscoll, C., and Morris, M. (eds.). 2014. Gender, Media and Modernity in the AsiaPacific. London: Routledge. Gibson, J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton & Mifflin. Hall, S. (ed.). 1997. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage. Kristeva, J. 1980. ‘Postmodernism?’, in H. Gurvin (ed.), Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism. London: Associated University Press, pp. 136–41. Lean, G. 2016. Transformative Travel in a Mobile World. Wallingford: CABI Books. Lean, G., Staiff, R. and Waterton, E. (eds). 2014. Travel and Imagination. Farnham: Ashgate. ———. (eds). 2014. Travel and Transformation. Farnham: Ashgate. Levine, G. (ed.). 1993. Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature and Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Liljeström, M. and Paasonen, S. 2010. ‘Introduction: Feeling Differences – Affect and Feminist Reading’, in M. Liljeström and S. Paasonen, (eds), Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 1–7. Lorimer, H. 2005. ‘Cultural Geography: The Busyness of Being “More Than Representational”’, Progress in Human Geography 29: 83–94. Massumi, B. 1995. ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, Cultural Critique 31: 83–109. Mirzoeff, N. 2002. The Visual Culture Reader, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Morgan, N. and Pritchard, A. 1998. Tourism Promotion and Power: Creating Image, Creating Identities. Chichester: Wiley. Moxey, K. 2013. Visual Time: The Image in History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sedgwick, E.K., and Frank, A. 1995. ‘Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins’, in E.K. Sedgewick and A. Frank (eds), Shame and its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–28. Seigworth, G.J., and Gregg, M. 2010. ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, in M. Gregg and G.J. Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–25. Selwyn, T. (ed.). 1996. The Tourist Image. Chichester: Wiley. Spinoza, B. 1996. Ethics, trans. E. Curley. London: Penguin. Staiff, R. 2012. ‘The Somatic and the Aesthetic: Embodied Tourism Heritage Experiences in Luang Prabang, Laos’, in L. Smith, E. Waterton and S. Watson (eds), The Cultural Moment in Tourism. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 38–55. ———. 2014. Re-imagining Heritage Interpretation: Enchanting the Past-Future. Farnham: Ashgate.

Russell Staiff, Emma Waterton and Garth Lean • 21

Tan, S. 2006. The Arrival. Sydney: Lothian Books. Taussig, M. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. London: Routledge. Thrift, N. 2008. Non-representation Theory: Space/Politics/Affect. London: Routledge. Urry, J. 1990. The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage. ——— 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press. Urry, J., and Larsen, J. 2011. The Tourist Gaze 3.0. London: Sage. Waterton, E., and Dittmer, J. 2014. ‘The Museum as Assemblage: Bringing Forth Affect at the Australian War Memorial’, Museum Management and Curatorship 29(2): 122–39. Waterton, E., and Watson, S. (eds.). 2010. Culture, Heritage and Representation: Perspectives on Visuality and the Past. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. 2014. The Semiotics of Heritage Tourism. Bristol: Channel View Publications. Werry, M. 2008. ‘Tourism, Race and the State of Nature’, Cultural Studies 22 (3–4): 391–411.

T1 Repeating Visions Hitchcock’s Vertigo and San Francisco Gemma Blackwood

Why do humans want to see things again? Three motivations are certain: the pleasure of repeating an experience of pleasure. A desire to obtain a fuller perception of what has already been seen. A change of opinion. Another catalyst – realising that one has failed to see or was noticing the wrong things the first time – may sometimes appear after a further viewing has taken place for spectators endowed with the faculty of introspection. —P.C. Usai, The Death of Cinema

Cinema, as Paolo Cherchi Usai observes in his polemic text The Death of Cinema, allows humans the illusion of seeing things again. The same can be said for film tourism, which operates through the propagation of visual desires disseminated through media fantasies (Urry 1990: 3). Film tourism is governed by the spectator’s repetition and rediscovery of a film text through the joint acts of cinema viewing and visitation. Unravelling the metaphor of ‘vertigo’, here I will examine what I consider to be a poetics of film tourism and more broadly one of travel: this is the poetics of repeating visions, both within a particular Hollywood film text – Alfred Hitchcock’s celebrated 1958 film Vertigo about displaced romantic desire and loss – and the real-life practice of film tourism as a nostalgia for seeing again a location first viewed on the movie screen (Riley and Van Doren 1992: 267–74). Therefore, I am writing about an interesting connection between a literary or cinematic poetics within the framework of the film, as well as a ‘real-life’ poetics of space in the process of tourism and travel itself: Gaston Bachelard in his influential text The Poetics of Space (1994) has memorably made this

24 • Repeating Visions: Hitchcock’s Vertigo and San Francisco

connection between space and ‘reality’ existing phenomenologically as a kind of poetics of the imagination. The choice of Vertigo for an examination into such issues is twofold: it is one of the most famous Hollywood ‘San Francisco’ film tourism sites and is frequently cited by Hitchcock scholars and tourism researchers as an important cultural artefact for San Francisco. It is also a film that is now designated a Hollywood ‘classic’, which, as Stephen Roesch acknowledges, has ‘the potential to draw visitors to screened locations long after their premiere’ (2009: 95). As a director, Hitchcock was famous for his meticulous planning of every scene in his films. Far from being accidental or convenient, the geography of his films was carefully chosen to match the complex drama of the narrative. Writing on Vertigo, the film critic Charles Barr notes the following in his monograph on the movie: No other film has inspired such a flow of pilgrims to its locations. Spoto’s book records perhaps the first such systematic pilgrimage; writing for the San Francisco Magazine in 1982, Lynda Myles and Michael Goodwin anatomised and recommended the ‘Vertigo tour’, and countless fans have followed that tour since, as I did myself back in 1997 (how else could I have presumed to write this book?) (Barr 2002: 12)

By asking the question ‘how else?’, Barr signals the importance of actually visiting the film’s locations not just for fan homage, but for academic criticism. More importantly in the context of this chapter, Barr highlights the connection that the film’s location-tourists seemingly must hold with the central characters: namely, an obsessive longing for the past (or time travel) that is sublimated into the urge to travel. Therefore, I have selected this film because the narrative of the film itself poses issues that are central to philosophical understandings of the romance of tourism and the gaze of the film tourist, and hence speaks to a poetics of space and travel. Hitchock’s films were often set in glamorous international cities, such as Paris for Rich and Strange (1931), Vienna for Waltzes from Vienna (1934), Monte Carlo for To Catch a Thief (1955) and later Copenhagen for Topaz (1969). In these films, he used well-known tourist attractions economically to establish geographical location, which proved ‘convenient shorthand for the entire cities that encompass them’ (Jacobs 2007: 46). At the same time, he was able to alter the ordinariness of these monuments into something more strange and reflective of the psychological state of his characters. Although these issues appear clearly articulated in Vertigo, the level of film criticism has been limited to a fetishistic repetition of such logics via the nostalgic Hitchcock tour. This suggests that an analysis of the

Gemma Blackwood • 25

representation of space contained both in the film narrative and the real-life site together warrants a closer investigation.

A Synopsis of Vertigo First published in 1954, Vertigo started life as a novel written by Pierre Boulieu and Thomas Narcejace called D’Entre Morts (1997).1 Prior to the Hitchcock adaptation, the novel’s title had been translated into English as From Among the Dead and The Living and The Dead. Hitchcock chose the word ‘vertigo’ instead of the original title to emphasize the main protagonist’s condition. But it is perhaps telling that the word ‘vertigo’ also has a connection to travel and movement: etymologically, ‘vertigo’ is Latin for a ‘whirling or spinning movement’, derived from the verb vertere (‘to turn’). In its modern context, ‘vertigo’ refers to a pathological condition, yet this relation to whirling and turning in some ways better describes the nature of the business of tourism itself.2 The film Vertigo tells the story of a police detective – John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson – who has acquired the eponymous condition after his own near-death experience and the death of a colleague. Retiring from the police force, he is hired by an old friend, Elster, to follow the trail of his wife Madeleine. Madeleine seems possessed by the spirit of her dead grandmother, Carlotta Valdes. As Scottie follows her through the urban centre of San Francisco, he finally makes contact after saving her from drowning in the bay underneath the Golden Gate Bridge. His help and subsequent feelings for Madeleine seem to be of no avail after she leaps from the bell tower at San Juan Bautista – and because of his vertigo, he is unable to stop her or witness her actual death. After being acquitted at the inquiry into her death, Scottie suffers a nervous breakdown and ‘falls’ into a catatonic state for a number of months, during which time he is looked after by his doting female friend Midge. Once recovered, Scottie encounters Judy Barton, a woman who looks uncannily similar to Madeleine, but who claims she is a working-class brunette from Kansas. Scottie remains obsessed with the memory of Madeleine and induces Judy to resemble her as closely as possible. Although temporarily satisfied by her transformation, when Scottie sees that Judy is wearing Carlotta’s necklace, he believes that Judy actually is the same person – and that she had helped Elster murder his real wife by exploiting Scottie’s fear of heights. Despite Judy’s new-found love for him, Scottie makes her reclimb the steps at the tower at San Juan Bautista and confess her guilt. He seems finally cured of his vertigo at the same time that Judy is frightened by a ghost-like apparition,

26 • Repeating Visions: Hitchcock’s Vertigo and San Francisco

a nun, and falls to her death from the same location, at which point the film ends.

The Tourist Gaze in Vertigo In Vertigo, Hitchcock’s use of location as a kind of armchair tourism is interwoven into his creation of mystery. He sets up the viewer to be both attracted to and puzzled by the locations presented. His aim in Vertigo appears to be to emphasize both the beauty and mystery of his locations, but also, and perhaps most importantly, their danger(s). He quite deliberately seems to associate the typically ‘safe’ tourist location with the lure of dangerous adventure to create a situation in which the eponymous ‘vertigo’ can emerge. In the poetics of this film, as Hitchcock presents the tourist site as a metaphor for the character’s attempts at reconnecting with the past, the very identification these characters ­project becomes entangled with loss and a self-destructive mystery. Borrowing a term from Alain Silver, Steven Jacobs in The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock describes how the repetitive scenes of Scottie’s driving through San Francisco in Vertigo have a ‘landmarking effect’ on the viewer (Jacobs 2007: 45). Jacobs argues that Scottie (as though in anticipation of the location-tourist) travels like a flâneur through a dead city under the spell of a haunted past in a vehicle that is commonly used for sightseeing. He adds that: this form of sightseeing brings us to another striking urban icon playing an important part in Hitchcock films: the tourist site. The British Museum, the Royal Albert Hall, the Statue of Liberty, the Jefferson Memorial, the Golden Gate Bridge, the United Nations Headquarters and Mount Rushmore are eternally connected to films such as Blackmail, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Saboteur, Strangers on a Train, Vertigo, and North By Northwest respectively. (Jacobs 2007: 45–46)

As Jacobs suggests, the tourist site is not just applicable to Vertigo, but is a persistent theme in the Hitchcock oeuvre, a key locus in the director’s poetics of space. His urban imagery is so closely connected to familiar tourist sites that Jacobs says that: ‘Undoubtedly, famous buildings and places attracted more tourist attention because of their prominent role in Hitchcock’s films. Hitchcock, consequently, both tailed and stimulated tourism’ (2007: 46). Hitchcock added to these familiar tourist locations another level of meaning by employing what Jacobs calls an ‘Eisenstein montage of attractions’, which produced ‘a kind of look that transforms the city into a series of static postcard images’ (2007: 47).

Gemma Blackwood • 27

Touristic fantasies and their subsequent memorialization operate in a way similar to montage sequences in films, effectively constructing a ‘sacralization of specific places’. As Jacobs observantly states, Hitchcock ‘does not only rely on the tourist gaze, he also comments on it’. Some critics, however, have argued that Hitchcock is actually contemptuous of tourism (or, more specifically, cinema as tourism). But as Jacobs continues, it is not so much contempt as the fact that Hitchcock ‘transcends and undermines the tourist gaze. He made a habit of wielding postcard views in his films to lull his audiences into false security’ (2007: 50). In a film such as Vertigo, John Urry’s concept of the tourist gaze finds a valid case study. Despite the novel D’Entre Morts being set in France, the choice of San Francisco was part of Hitchcock’s vision. According to his daughter, Patricia, Hitchcock thought San Francisco was an ‘American Paris’ ripe for cinematic representation (Obsessed with Vertigo 1997). Before filming, Hitchcock had sent Production Designer Henry Bumstead to San Francisco on several trips to scout for locations (Kapsis 1990: 51). The final scriptwriter for the film – Samuel A. Taylor – was recommended to Hitchcock because of his deep knowledge of San Francisco (Aulier 1999: 30).3 In particular, Hitchcock was interested in specific monuments within the city such as San Juan Bautista and the Mission Dolores Cemetery for their picturesque and symbolic qualities, signifying a kind of filmic postcard (McGilligan 2003: 541). In particular, San Juan Bautista is represented as a museum and monument to San Francisco’s past. Scottie and Madeleine dramatically kiss in the stables where there is a fake plastic horse set up next to a cart for visitors to imagine themselves time travelling back to the nineteenth century. In The Tourist Gaze, one of John Urry’s fundamental claims is that tourism is a ‘leisure activity which presupposes its opposite, namely regulated and organised work’ (1990: 2). In Vertigo, while Scottie has left his conventional job as a police officer in order to freelance as a private detective, by trailing Madeleine, the viewer is reminded that he is actually on the job. The irony is that while Madeleine appears to be a woman touring the city at her leisure – a flâneuse – the real Judy is also undertaking paid work to deceive Scottie, albeit by a criminal in Elster. Therefore, while this film appears to employ conventional touristic features, there is of course something very different going on. Even though Scottie and Madeleine appear to be at leisure, they are also bound into the conventional duties of paid work, and therefore the study of the touristic aspects of the narrative have to take account of the underlying economic context of their activities. Urry writes that another presupposition of the tourist gaze is that it is ‘directed to features of landscape and townscape which separate

28 • Repeating Visions: Hitchcock’s Vertigo and San Francisco

them off from everyday experience. . . the viewing of such tourist sights often involves different forms of social patterning, with a much greater sensitivity to visual elements of landscape or townscape than [is] normally found in everyday life’ (1990: 3). Again, the tourist gaze is supposed to result in a kind of heightened awareness of the surrounding world, yet for Scottie precisely the opposite of this occurs – he becomes deceived by the gaze into believing the false reality it has opened up. Or, perhaps more specifically, Scottie’s obsession with the beautiful architectural spaces that frame and seemingly almost clothe the female body (at the beginning, Midge’s brassiere, designed on the principles of a cantilever bridge, makes this direct correlation between engineered urban space and femininity), work to distract him from the truth. Many of the characters in Vertigo are transfixed by memories of the past, which is another vital aspect of the film’s tourist gaze, which requires a prior screening and therefore a memory of the past film (Urry 1990: 94). Scottie and Madeleine-Judy are frequently shown in the act of remembrance, whether it is for lost love or for a lost and glorious past. And while the two characters look back, they also look around: a large part of the film is in essence a celluloid travelogue of the streets and landmarks of San Francisco and the surrounding region. The main protagonists continually draw attention to their contemporary space as a memory aid. When the couple visit the redwood forest, they examine calibrated tree stumps that emphasize history and time travel. Later, when Scottie embraces his vision of Judy as Madeleine, he is brought back in time through their kiss to his last kiss with Madeleine by the false horse in the stable at San Bautista. The carousel-like nature of the camera at this moment suggests that this embrace is another manifestation of his whirling, skewed vision and ‘vertigo’. In the narrative, there then appears to be a strong connection between an involuntary Proustian-like remembrance of things past and particular places.4 The poetics between memory and place become so interlinked throughout the film that they reach a point where they cannot be divorced, as represented by Scottie revisiting the sites that Madeleine had visited before she ‘died’. Similarly, Gavin Elster is also caught up by a very specific vision of old San Francisco, as he tells Scottie: ‘San Francisco’s changed. Things that spell San Francisco to me are disappearing fast.’ His knowledge of the history of the city is one of the first clues to the murder – his knowledge also made it easy to make up the story about the ‘MacGuffin’ of Carlotta Valdes.5 Yet, when describing Madeleine, he says that ‘a cloud comes into her eyes and they go blank. She’s somewhere else, away from me, someone I don’t know’. Drawing upon a romantic image of a possessed woman, innocently pulled into the past, Elster makes the

Gemma Blackwood • 29

comment ‘and she wanders. God knows where she wanders’. Already, the film has engaged with two characters under a spell or condition of a longing for the past, and who also describe themselves as ‘wanderers’; although ‘only one is a wanderer, two together are always going somewhere’, says Madeleine at one point to Scottie. Elster’s other description of Madeleine to Scottie proves equally significant. He mentions that she regularly visits and stares at the ‘Portals of the Past’ situated at Lloyd Lake in Golden Gate Park. Like Scottie, Madeleine seems deeply caught up by the past glories of San Francisco. Elster claims that Madeleine’s obsession with this place is due to a connection with the colonial past of Carlotta Valdes’ San Francisco. He emphasizes that she often stares at the ‘pillars’ on Nob Hill past Lady Lake, which represents the only remnant of the A.N. Towne mansion after the catastrophic 1906 earthquake. Once again, it is in sighting the historical structures and architectural momuments of the city that allows the characters to simultaneously locate and lose themselves within the shape of the city. In his famous analysis of urban views, Michel de Certeau contrasted the experience of surveying the urban space of New York City from the top of the World Trade Center with the lived experience of mapping out the city on foot (1988: 91–110). The bird’s-eye view of New York is one of supposed mastery and comprehension (clear-sightedness), but the chaotic lived experience of the flâneur provides the participant with strategies for moving against monumental structures and hence reappropriating space. De Certeau’s points are relevant to Vertigo in the scene in which Scottie has been stripped of the institutional mastery that he retained as a policeman of the city. For Scottie, a bird’s-eye view of San Francisco in the original police chase results in near-death and it is as if by acquiring vertigo, Scottie fears re-experiencing the controlling and monumentalizing (or the institutionalized) gaze. Scottie is directed by highly recognizable and iconic tourist locations in his surveillance of Madeleine, ‘passing’ as a tourist or conventional San Francisco resident. When she is looking for Scottie’s apartment, Madeleine likewise uses Coit Tower as a landmark to find her way.6 In some ways, this pretence at tourism enacts one of the paradoxes of tourism itself: that many deny the identity of ‘tourist’, instead wanting to achieve a more authentic and highly individualistic appellation such as ‘traveller’ or ‘pilgrim’ (Week 2012). Scottie has turned to this surreptitious form of policing because the trauma of the man’s death at the beginning of the film means that he cannot perform the police tasks that involve chasing and hold-ups. For him, driving around in a car provides a grounded experience of San Francisco’s streets, as do his shorter walking expeditions at Claude Lane and the entrance to the

30 • Repeating Visions: Hitchcock’s Vertigo and San Francisco

florist at Union Square. Such wanderings reinforce the point made by Jacobs mentioned earlier of Scottie as a flâneur. Yet when Scottie finally understands the truth and is ‘cured’ of his vertigo, this is the same moment when he returns to the monumentalizing gaze rather than Madeleine’s labyrinthine traps.

The Spectator’s Role: Film Tourism and Vertigo Vertigo makes spectacular diegetic use of a number of iconic locations in and around San Francisco in the late 1950s, such as the Golden Gate Bridge and Park, giant native redwood forests and historical missions, and has consequently inspired hordes of Hitchcock cinephiles to ­(re)­visit its precise film locations out of both curiosity and homage. Indeed, Kraft and Lowenthal have noted that: Vertigo seems like a travelogue of San Francisco and the surrounding area’s famous historical sites, monuments, architecture and luxurious businesses from the 1950s. Hitchcock had a remarkable ability to capture the subtleties of time, place and spirit in his films . . . While Vertigo is a notable suspense masterpiece, it is also a remarkable testament to Hitchcock’s passion for the San Francisco Bay Area. (Kraft and Leventhal 2002: 74)

Interestingly, Hitchcock had used familiar locations, assumedly already popular with tourists. The experiences of visitors to these locations (whether as film tourists or not) after its release were refiltered by Hitchcock’s lens and narrative, and thus the film effectively haunted these locations, creating a poetics of real life travel for the American city. Currently, in the era of contemporary film tourism, there is a large variety of real-life tours, textual and audiovisual responses that focus on Hitchcock and Vertigo settings in the San Francisco region. There are numerous web pages that feature virtual tours of the Vertigo film locations. Indeed, Vertigo can be considered a quite complex film tourism site, alongside the new popular film tourism site of The Lord of the Rings in New Zealand, because of the large number of sites that are publicly accessible to view, the range of tour operators that use the sites, and the distance between the sites. Some Californian tour operators offer trips that range in terms of expense, time and textual detail to see a few or many of these Vertigo sites. For example, ‘A Friend in Town Tours’ offers a Vertigo tour hosted by a local historian and accompanied throughout by the original Bernard Hermann

Gemma Blackwood • 31

soundtrack (‘Locales from Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (The Movie) Tour’ 2013). It also appears that individual sites have become more profitable enterprises when linked to the film. The Empire Hotel, so crucial within the film’s narrative, has been renamed and rebranded ‘Hotel Vertigo’ since 2008, and all rooms have a TV channel screening the Hitchcock film on a continuous loop. The hotel’s current website puns on the film, suggesting that ‘the hotel’s baroque-modern sensibility represents a head-spinning union of old and new’ (Hotel Vertigo 2013). These individualized tours appeal to the more cinephilic tourist or pilgrim, who in the former can spend up to ten hours personally experiencing each of the locations without being part of a group of tourists en masse. Therefore, it is quite noticeable how the tourism industry has fed on the success of Vertigo. Interestingly, despite the assumed differences between film experience in a cinema and the tourist experience of location, the two have converged in the case of Vertigo, where the film’s representation has reflexively reshaped the imaginary of the geographical space itself. Hence, the commercialization and commodification of the emerging film tourism industry must be taken into account in the creation of a poetics of Vertigo’s San Francisco, alongside the film’s narrative. Film tourism is often depicted as the ultimate form of film fandom; this is because frequently enough, great amounts of time, money and effort are required to physically visit film production locations. For example, the San Francisco Movie Tour describes its operation as an act of ‘bringing movies to life’ – an ultimate form of film appreciation that will somehow bring about a happy ending to this ongoing pathology of obsessive and excessive film spectatorship. On one tour’s website, a visitor has praised the tour for exceeding expectations: ‘It was nice to get the unexpected “extras” of the Avenue of Tall Trees, the sanatoriumhospital, and the Portals of the Past’ (‘Locales from Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (The Movie) Tour’ 2013). Visiting film locations allows the spectator to integrate personal life with film narratives. Similarly, such a visitation can also result in the creation of a surplus of meaningful and ‘mastered’ memories, and one internet advertisement for the film tour suggests quite knowingly the following to the potential tourist: ‘Sometimes we bring our enchanted day to a climax with a breath-­taking ride in the St. Francis’ glass elevator – to test your vertigo’ (‘Locales from Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (The Movie) Tour’ 2013). The fact that many parts of the original sets have been lost has not dissuaded those wishing to visit the sites. Jeff Kraft and Aaron Levethal in Footsteps in the Fog: Alfred Hitchcock’s San Francisco noted that the number of visitors to Mission Dolores Cemetery increased after the

32 • Repeating Visions: Hitchcock’s Vertigo and San Francisco

film (2002: 201). As an ironic result, the headstone of the fictional Carlotta Valdes in the cemetery, which was designed by the props team, remained on site after filming and was quite popular amongst the tourists. The prop was later removed after complaints that it was sacrilegious and not ‘authentic’ (Jacobs 2007: 46). However, the lost headstone of Carlotta Valdes in the cemetery and the non-existent bell tower at San Batista, which are arguably integral to the film can still remain part of the narrative of the film sites despite their material absence, as the sites have already been represented as places of loss. The experience of the film tourist parallels Scottie’s journey in the second half of Vertigo, which is the most direct representation of Scottie as tourist. Marilyn Fabe suggests that those who desire to return to the places where Vertigo was shot ‘replicate or perform the actions of its hero through much of the second half of the film . . . both experience the wish to recover an impossible object, something devoutly desired that was fictional and hence never existed in the first place’ (2009: 345–46). The visitor to these sites can be fully aware of this ‘impossible object’ prior to their visit, yet still be inspired. The character of Scottie anticipates this fascination in the film in his search of Madeleine despite the knowledge of her death. He continually revisits the same places depicted in the first half of the film: Brocklebank Apartments, the Mission Dolores Cemetery and the Palace of Fine Arts. After being released from the Sanatorium, he visits Brocklebank once again and sees the same green car driven by Madeleine. During the second half of the film, he becomes increasingly aware that something is missing. His fantasy of the past has no material support in the real. Even when he hangs out with Judy, attracted by her likeness to Madeleine, he nevertheless still seems to be unhappy. Yet he attempts to re-create the fantasy, rather desperately, by objectifying Judy in order to fit the appearance of Madeleine, ‘the parameters of his fantasy ideal’ (Fabe 2009: 359), despite her resistance. The film presents Scottie’s touristic obsession as a process that has a culmination or endpoint, just like the curl in Carlotta’s hair, for Scottie becomes ‘cured’ of his vertigo ­(idealization) via his awareness that Judy was ‘a copy of a copy’. But does the film tourist who re-enacts a lost past become ‘cured’? The paradox and aim of the tourist is to not lose the obsession that consumed Scottie. While Scottie overcomes the paradox at the expense of the whole material support of the fantasy dying, the tourist endeavours to maintain both the real and imaginary effects. Any disappointment felt by the film tourist is then not the fault of the guide or the tourist industry, but of the spectator herself, for she is connecting the real and imaginary through personally visiting these sites. The same logic

Gemma Blackwood • 33

applies to seeing a film itself, for the viewer cannot critique a film based on its lack of pure realism.

‘It’s Not Just Sightseeing’: Critical Obsession with Vertigo Visiting the San Francisco film locations of Vertigo has something of a cult following as well as mass tourist appeal. In his text on film tourism, Stefan Roesch suggests that ‘arguably, fans of a cult movie might be more easily stimulated to visit a film location than the average spectator, because such a film is more meaningful to them’ (2009: 96). This seems to be the case for the critics who have written on the poetics of Vertigo. In a subsection of Chris Marker’s documentary montage Sans Soleil (1983), the narrator recounts the strange experience of travelling through film locations in San Francisco as part of searching for Hitchcock’s ‘secret’ about time. An interesting result of written criticism on Vertigo is the tendency to meditate on the meanings of the places within the film. In his article ‘Caveh Takes the Vertigo Tour’, filmmaker Caveh Zahedi describes both the strangeness and seductiveness of taking the Vertigo tour (2008). He communicates both the cynicism and fascination of the modern and knowing tourist, who wants to refuse the label (and film tourism industry), yet is seduced by playing out the fantasy. He takes the ‘personalized’ tour given by Jesse Warr, and apparently Vertigo fans from overseas will contact Warr to schedule their own tour and make their travel plans based on its availability. Furthermore, they pay up to $500 for a ten-hour tour: ‘Some people are very into this movie. It’s almost a spiritual journey. It’s not just sightseeing’ (Zahedi 2008). According to Warr, many of the visitors on the Vertigo tour like to be left alone at the location sites in order to commune with the place in silence, a silence reminiscent of the quiet that accompanies meditation and prayer (Zahedi 2008). Taking the Vertigo tour, Zahedi says, is like visiting the Stations of the Cross in the Holy Land.7 But how one experiences it is entirely a function of the faith and enthusiasm of the ­tourist – or how much of a ‘buff’ you are. Zahedi notes whilst ­experiencing his own tour: It was then that the irony of the situation struck me: here we were, two strangers trying our best to recapture a moment from the past and act the part of someone else, which is precisely what Vertigo is about. In that sense, the Vertigo tour perfectly mimics the central conceit of the movie. It allows fans of the film to inhabit the implicit contradiction of the film, the always impossible but all too human attempt to make our illusions real. (Zahedi 2008)8

34 • Repeating Visions: Hitchcock’s Vertigo and San Francisco

Writing on the cult appeal that the sites of Vertigo have for visitors, Douglas Cunningham argues that the film goes beyond summoning mere touristic pleasures, but speaks personally to its fans and their own memories, inducing what he calls the ‘cinephilic ­pilgrimage’. His article is a part theoretical and part personal account of his many pilgrimages to the sites of Vertigo. He says: ‘Like Scottie and Madeleine, these pilgrims search for personal, subjective spaces within an ephemeral, metaphysical narrative . . . Whether searching alone or in pairs, these pilgrims can never, as Madeleine asserts, reach a specific, final destination, for the true cinephilic pilgrimage is always a “wandering”‘(Cunningham 2008: 123). For him, Vertigo is the film that best defines what is meant by ‘cinephilic pilgrimage’. Although he does not use the term ‘film ­tourism’, his own term can be assimilated into the same field of inquiry, as he admits pilgrimage and tourism cross paths. However, he suggests that the ‘specific motivations’ for pilgrimage and tourism differ (2008: 135). The aspects he draws the most out of are the spiritual meaning contained within the act of cinephilic pilgrimage, the phenomenological level of the individual’s own lived experience and personal memory. The problem within any pilgrimage is that the object remains forever intangible. The film tourist may perceive their own pilgrimages to sites of Vertigo as a spiritual kind of journey, yet such a perception only mystifies further what it is that is inspiring the travel. But where Vertigo succeeds as a suitable film tourist case study is in the way that Hitchcock can reflexively portray all tourist journeys as ‘wanderings’ and re-imaginings of the past. Louis Althusser’s well-known idea of ‘interpellation’ argued that ideological state apparatuses have a material existence and function through particular practices and rituals (1971: 156–59). The practice of visiting the sites of Vertigo itself commits one to the ideological space between physical reality and fantasy (the ‘psychophysical space’) – where one has to re-imagine the film through the poetics and narrative structures of real travel and space. Vertigo does not promise the reunification with a (singular) lost object or ‘imaginary signifier’ (the past), but the opportunity to experience the search for that object, that is, of having to project that object and re-create Scottie’s obsessed ‘wandering’. As Cunningham elaborates, Vertigo demands the cinephilic pilgrim to exercise ‘creative agency’. The actual icons such as Mission Dolores ‘serve merely as springboards for a potentially much larger phenomenological – and even spiritual experience. For this reason, cinephilic pilgrimages stand apart from the casual ogling of curious film buffs’ (2008: 124). Therefore, Vertigo is a clearly unique case study of cinephilic desire, which goes beyond novelty or curiosity. Involved in this phenomenon is a serious love and

Gemma Blackwood • 35

commitment to the film. For Cunningham, cinephilic pilgrimage has a certain kind of healing power, while apparently the tourist experience is a fragmented one. Upon revisiting, Cunningham says, deriving from his personal experience: ‘My physical desire to occupy this moment, in a space and time under my control . . . has eclipsed the real romantic angst, that inspired re-viewing of the film in the first place’ (2008: 127). For him, the repetition involved in revisiting the sites leads to ‘healing’ the divide between the real and the imaginary. But what he neglects are the conditions from which this kind of ‘authentic’ pilgrimage (and ‘healing’) is possible these days. He discounts the possibility that his pilgrimage could be another case of film tourism. How can cinephilic pilgrims really dissociate their experience and identity from the film tourist (or self-aware tourist) or, for that matter, the tourist gaze, especially when there is no ‘authentic’ object (or experience) to be embodied or possessed in the first place? For both the pilgrim and the tourist, Vertigo involves really the same thing: the search for the lost object that was never possessed, nor ever could be. The way in which Cunningham describes his own experiences as a pilgrim (e.g. ‘I did try to capture Scottie’s feelings’) does suggest that the pilgrim may actually suffer the effects more than most visitors and that the psychophysical (imaginary) space between film representation and reality commands fusion if one is to be a true obsessive. Although attracting personal commitment (assumedly a cinephilic quality), the lure of film locations can speak to any kind of traveller or tourist as it only requires a temporary suspension of disbelief. It may be that a key difference concerns a film location visitor’s response to ‘interpellation’. Žižek describes Scottie’s response to Midge’s own copy of the portrait of Carlotta with herself as the subject instead as ‘terrifying’. Midge had sought to impose/include herself on Scottie’s fantasy (Žižek 1989: 134). It may be that the cinephilic pilgrim like Scottie would resist/disavow a similar intrusion/substitution by commercial tour guide or a site alteration (reconstruction), for example, while the ‘tourist’ would see no significant difference, given that there is no authentic object to begin with.

Nostalgia, Disappointment and Restoration Frederic Jameson briefly alluded to the noir-ish poetics of Hitchcock’s filmic geography when he wrote that: ‘The hallucinatory San Francisco of Vertigo is undateable, out of time; its very foregrounding of the mesmeration by the image and voyeurism in some sense subverting and precluding the practice of nostalgia film and image culture’ (1992: 59).

36 • Repeating Visions: Hitchcock’s Vertigo and San Francisco

This idea of ‘nostalgia film and image culture’ is part and parcel of touristic fantasies or the tourist gaze. However, the question that arises with Vertigo is how much does Hitchcock subvert or ‘transcend’ this nostalgia or ‘tourist gaze’? If nostalgia is a psychical coping mechanism for loss of the past, a cultural form of nostalgia such as tourism also extends itself as a kind of time travel experience in representing a known past. David Lowenthal writes in The Past is a Foreign Country an explicit analogy between travel and the past, that ‘long uprooted and newly unsure of the future, Americans en masse find comfort in looking back’ (1985: xv, emphasis in original). Methods of ‘looking back’ manifest in various ways within cinema cultures – re-releases, remakes or adaptations of older stories, postmodern set designs evoking ye olde worlde qualities, new films set in earlier decades – and therefore the act of ‘looking back’ at the settings of a classic film such as Vertigo and visiting its real locations offers yet another method of achieving such comfort and pleasure for Hitchcock fans. Time and history are emphasized in the film – hence the title of the novel’s original reference: the ‘living and the dead’. Lowenthal suggests that ‘memory transforms the experienced past into what we think it should have been, eliminating undesired scenes and making favoured ones suitable’ (1985: 206). Thus, the motive behind film tourism in the case of Vertigo could be this kind of act of ‘looking back’, but importantly one that can be controlled. The Hitchcock subversion within the narrative of the film is that an ‘impossible object’ (the MacGuffin) determines nostalgia, yet, as previously discussed, even this ‘truth’ of nostalgia can still wield power. But we must discuss how, despite the motives and even paradoxical joys of film tourism that emerge from the case study of Vertigo, this phenomenon is still underpinned by a deeper socioeconomic legacy. As a niche tourism attraction, Vertigo locations present the opportunity to add an idiosyncratic element to what has arguably been theorized as a homogenizing urban landscape. Michael Hough’s analysis of the relationship between market forces and place argues that ­‘technologization as agents that homogenize the landscapes of places that were otherwise unique’ will hence deprive them of their ‘special character’ (1990: 6). In this sense, film tourism might be considered a way of hiding the reality of the city. In order for tourism marketers to craft a niche consumer base, such as the ‘cinephilic pilgrim’, the use of a fictional Hitchcock stage-set onto San Francisco’s urban space adds a unique identity that might gloss over the way that some San Francisco tourist markers – such as Fisherman’s Wharf – are now themed environments and identical to other themed zones throughout the United States. Not only is

Gemma Blackwood • 37

the representation of space similar to other themed environments, but the sheer quantity of tourists present in such spaces means that a niche industry such as film tourism offers tourists some creative agency to distinguish themselves from the mainstream tourist and to hence cross from tourist to ‘unique traveller’ or even ‘pilgrim’ category. The end of Vertigo embodies the sense of disappointment the film has intimated throughout. As soon as the mystery is unravelled (just like Madeleine’s spiral curl), Madeleine as the object of desire becomes revealed for what she was – a fantasy. But the last scene also reveals the extent to which Scottie had identified with that fantasy. Through a repetitive act of confronting his vertigo, he becomes actually cured from it through his discovery of the secret of Madeleine. Žižek makes an important point when he says that ‘Scottie’s fury at the end is an authentic Platonic fury: he is furious at discovering that he was imitating the imitation’ (2002: 16, emphasis in original). It is important for his acknowledgement that this fury is ‘Platonic’ – that is, metaphysical. Or, as Jacobs puts it more plainly: ‘In the end, Madeleine turns out to be an artificial construction as the painted portrait of Carlotta Valdes’ (Jacobs 2007: 61). The touristic sacralizing of space and its dissolution of the gap between physical reality and cinematic image is finally revealed as one between the living and dead, and this is an impossible identification that narratives of cinema can only attempt to conceal. In tourism, the poetics of travel drawn out in Vertigo find their formalistic correlate: the disappointment caused by the object not matching a preconceived notion or imagined (‘Platonic’) ideal of a space. The cinematic representation of space cannot match the real-life voyage to the locations that are available: in this sense, the Vertigo tour is unrepeatable and impossible to achieve. It is in relation to this problem that John Frow has written that ‘the structure of the tourist experience involves a paradoxical relation at once to the cultural and ontological Other . . . It is tourism itself that destroys (in the very process it constructs) the authenticity of the touristic object’ (1991: 146). When Scottie enters a catatonic state after the trial dealing with Madeleine’s death, the doctor diagnoses him as suffering from ‘acute melancholia’. For Fabe (2009), this diagnosis is quite significant. It actually explains the reason behind Scottie’s obsession with a non-possessable lost object. Fabe argues that the reference by local historian Pop Leibel to Carlotta Valdez’s daughter actually reflects something about Scottie’s own condition. The daughter created an ‘ideal mother’ in place of her real mother, who always ‘wandered’ and finally abandoned her. Fabe calls this condition that is indirectly implied by the film ‘an insecure attachment’. According to her, Scottie falls in love with Madeleine

38 • Repeating Visions: Hitchcock’s Vertigo and San Francisco

(the impossible object) because she is fictional and thus ‘safe’, while Midge is not (2009: 345–46). Midge is not just a sideline character, but she plays an important and symbolic role in the story. She is a sign of Scottie’s failure to commit to a relationship and of his indifference to ‘domestic [material] relationships’. So is the film tourist likewise suffering from a form of ‘acute melancholia’? Does the tourist turn into a deluded subject just like Scottie, pursuing ‘safe fictions’ (or ideals about the film tourist space) rather than choosing the suffering that would come from an admission that the film sites are impossible to locate, that they are material ‘lost objects’? Returning to the film, Judy’s death at the end could represent Scottie’s insecurity once again. Far from being ‘cured’, Scottie is rather more distanced from facing his vertigo and falling in love with a real person (Judy), so instead he blames her for shattering the fictional edifice he had created. Vertigo demonstrates the inherent disappointment in attempts to acquire an object of desire. Likewise, disappointment has been theorized to be a typical aspect of tourism. A psychoanalytic reading of tourism would suggest that the fantasy space of the Other cannot be achieved in material reality. Only at the moment of consummation, or the point at the end of the spiral, does Scottie realize that his ideal never existed in the first place. Perhaps this is the lesson: that there can be no pleasure in the repeating of pleasure, especially once the fuller perception and introspection has been achieved. Usai’s (2001) book on the death of cinema emphasized the impossibility of a completely restored (or resurrected) past. Likewise, Lowenthal, writing about the preservation and reconstitution of the past, indicates that restored or rebuilt structures are not only dead but also they are impossible to realize despite the fanatical attention to architectural authenticity (1985: 278). While the text of Vertigo is a product of a reproducible medium, to an extent this holds true within the film’s narrative too. Famously, the original film was restored in 1996 by Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz. Likewise in the film, Judy becomes a ‘site’ for Scottie to be renovated or restored back into the ideal Madeleine, in an attempt for Scottie to be able to repeat his experience forever. Scottie’s sublime moment when Madeleine’s image reappears at the hotel represents a movement toward infinity – a moment that leads inevitably to selfdestruction. The Orphean strains of this scene and its connections to the tourism industry are all too apparent: through travel, the tourist must ‘look back’ and destroy the object of desire. In this sense, the film narrative enacts the central disabling paradox of tourism itself. Yet the whole lesson of this paradox does not enact a ‘cure’– the repetition continues, either out of a deep insecurity or a will to believe.

Gemma Blackwood • 39

It appears that we do not stop being tourists once we work out the structure of our desires. While some who visit the sites leave unaffected or disappointed, there are always some who are transformed.9 Scottie can be read as representative of the tourist who submits fully to a fictional obsession at the cost of the material world (in this case, two people’s lives) in order to be cured. Hitchcock emerges as a critic of nostalgia-inflected tourism in that he reveals how any obsession can unfold in dangerous and fatal ways. But the conclusion of the film is ambiguous – whether Scottie is really cured after Judy’s death is unanswered. Despite the cure, he has lost everything, and his perverse characterization in the final part of the film distances him from audience identification. Fabe suggests that those who ‘seek vestiges of Vertigo continue Scottie’s doomed quest to make a fantasy real . . . to seek an illusory means by which to overcome loss’. For her, Hitchcock makes us all ‘melancholics’, in that the problem presented to us, which we subsequently obsess over, is the ‘doomed’ attempt at overcoming loss (2009: 365). The implication is that there is a profound connection between film tourism and narratives of loss and nostalgia in the poetics of Vertigo. Gemma Blackwood is Coordinator of Communication Studies at the School of Creative Arts and Humanities at Charles Darwin University, Australia. She researches in the areas of film studies,  cultural studies and visual cultural analysis. With Andrew McGregor, she recently ­co-edited the book Motion Pictures: Travel Ideals in Film. Her Ph.D. thesis examined film tourism sites and their ideological impacts.

Notes 1 The French release of the film was translated as Sueurs Froids (literally ‘Cold Sweat’). 2 The common tourist industry expression ‘a whirlwind tour’ suggests the sensation of vertigo as well as the superficiality and perhaps also the heady euphoria of a fast-moving, transitory journey across a foreign landscape. 3 Chris Marker wrote that ‘Taylor was in love with his city (Alex Coppel, the first writer, was “a transplanted Englishman”) and put all his love into the script; and perhaps even more than that, if I am to believe a rather cryptic phrase at the end of his letter: “I rewrote the script at the same time that I explored San Francisco and recaptured my past . . . ‘Words which could apply as much to the characters as to the authors’”‘(1995: 128). 4 Although the Proust connection is rather indirect, it is interesting to note the strange parallel of the involuntary memory effect that Scottie experiences

40 • Repeating Visions: Hitchcock’s Vertigo and San Francisco

5

6 7 8

9

via the character of Madeleine in Vertigo and the ‘episode of madeleine’ in Remembrance of Things Past: Volume One, Swann’s Way, where a strong vivid memory is experienced by the protagonist after tasting a madeleine cake. Robert E. Goodkin (1991: 89–104) has discussed Vertigo and Proust comparatively. A ‘MacGuffin’ is a plot device used to attract the audience’s attention and precipitate the action of the film. In an interview with Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock made this explanation of what a ‘MacGuffin’ was: ‘It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says: “What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?”, and the other answers “Oh that’s a MacGuffin”. The first one asks “What’s a MacGuffin?”. “Well”, the other man says, “It’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands”. The first man says “But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands”, and the other one answers “Well, then that’s no MacGuffin!”. So you see, a MacGuffin is nothing at all’ (Truffaut 1968: 138). Interestingly, Žižek considers the MacGuffin in Hitchcock’s films as the Lacanian objet petit a, ‘a gap in the centre of the symbolic order – the lack, the void of the Real setting in motion the symbolic movement of ­interpretation, a pure semblance of mystery to be explained, interpreted’ (1992: 8). When Madeleine mentions that she was only able to locate Scottie’s house because of the phallic Coit Tower close by, Scottie suggests ‘that’s the first time I’ve been grateful for Coit Tower’. In the documentary Obsessed with Vertigo (1997), the two restorers refer to Vertigo sites of San Francisco as ‘hallowed ground’. Zahedi has a documentary maker take photos of him re-enacting scenes from the film, an impossible task, as he notes (2008). In his documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006), Žižek does exactly the same thing whilst describing the meaning of such scenes. For example, Douglas Cunningham can be thought of as one of these ­‘transformed’ visitors.

References Althusser, L. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. London: New Left Books. Aulier, D. 1999. Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic. London: Titan Books. Bachelard, G. 1994. The Poetics of Space, trans. M. Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press. Barr, C. 2002. Vertigo. London: British Film Institute. Boulieau, P., and T. Narcejac 1997. Vertigo. London: Bloomsbury. Cunningham, D. 2008. ‘“It’s All There, it’s No Dream”: Vertigo and the Redemptive Pleasures of Cinephilic Pilgrimage’, Screen 49(2): 123–41. De Certeau, M. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Fabe, M. 2009. ‘Mourning Vertigo’, America Imago 66(3): 345–46. Frow, J. 1991. ‘Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia’, October 57: 123–51. Goodkin, R.E. 1991. Around Proust. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Gemma Blackwood • 41

Hough, M. 1990. Out of Place: Restoring Identity to the Regional Landscapes. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hotel Vertigo. Retrieved 1 December 2016 from http://www.haiyi-hotels.com/ hotelvertigosf. Jacobs, S. 2007. The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers. Jameson, F. 1992. ‘Spatial Systems in North by Northwest’, in S. Žižek (ed.), Everything You Wanted to Know about Lacan (But were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). London: Verso, pp. 47–72. Kapsis, R.E. 1990. Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kraft, J., and A. Leventhal. 2002. Footsteps in the Fog: Alfred Hitchcock’s San Francisco. Los Angeles: Santa Monica Press. ‘Locales from Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ (The Movie) Tour’. A Friend in Town: The Premier Personalized Tour Service for the San Francisco Bay Area. Retrieved 1 December 2016 from http://www.toursanfranciscobay.com/tours/hitchcocks-​ vertigo.html. Lowenthal, D. 1985. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marker, C. 1995. ‘A Free Replay (Notes on Vertigo)’, in J. Boorman and W. Donahue (eds), Projections 4 and a Half: Filmmakers on Filmmaking. London: Faber & Faber, pp. 123–30. McGilligan, P. 2003. Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light. New York: HarperCollins. Riley, R.W., and C.S. van Doren. 1992. ‘Movies as Tourism Promotion: A “Pull” Factor in a “Push” Location’, Tourism Management 13(3): 267–74. Roesch, S. 2009. The Experiences of Film Location Tourists. Bristol: Channel View Publications. Silver, A. 1999. ‘Fragments of the Mirror: Hitchcock’s Noir Landscape’, in A. Silver and J. Ursini (eds), Film Noir: A Reader 2. New York: Limelight, pp. 106–27. Spoto, D. 1983. The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock. Boston: Brown and Little. Truffaut, F. 1968. Hitchcock. London: Martin Seeger and Warburg. Urry, J. 1990. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage. Usai, P.C. 2001. The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Dark Digital Age. London: British Film Institute. Week, L. 2012. ‘I am Not a Tourist: Aims and Implications of “Traveling”’, Tourist Studies, 12(2): 186–203. Zahedi, C. 2008. ‘Caveh Takes the Vertigo Tour’, Films in Focus. Retrieved 1 December 2016 from http://www.filminfocus.com/article/caveh_takes_the_ vertigo_tour. Žižek, S. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. ———1992. ‘Alfred Hitchcock, or, the Form and its Historical Mediation’, in S. Žižek (ed.), Everything You Wanted to Know about Lacan (But were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). London: Verso, pp. 1–12.

42 • Repeating Visions: Hitchcock’s Vertigo and San Francisco

———2002. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 2nd edn. London: Verso.

Films Obsessed with Vertigo: New Life for Hitchcock’s Masterpiece. 1997. Documentary. Directed by H. Engle. American Movie Classics. The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. 2006. Documentary. Directed by S. Fiennes. Amoeba Film. Sans Soleil. 1983. Motion Picture. Directed by Chris Marker. Argos Films. Vertigo. 1959. Motion Picture. Directed by A. Hitchcock. Paramount Pictures.

T2 Curious Images from Northwest China Ethics and Poetics in Carolyn Drake’s Travel Photography Darren Byler

I spoke of this piece of work we were doing as ‘curious’. I had better amplify this. —James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

The images I imagine when I encounter the work of photographer Carolyn Drake1 are based on my own perceptions and memories of travel over the past few years in the deserts and oases of Chinese Central Asia or, as it is known in Chinese, Xinjiang. When I look at her ‘Uyghur’ project,2 stubborn Oriental fantasies replete with Silk Road desert caravans, Sufi shrines and dusty bazaars mix with her framing of the rubble of capitalist development, poisonous coal-soot fogs, chthonic identities watered by blood, and create a ‘fictocritical’ imaginary (Taussig 2009). There is an immediate affective atmosphere in her images; a melding of ethics to poetics, critical theory to storytelling. Drake is routing her poetry of substance, her aesthetics, through the cumulative effect of everyday violence towards an ethics of encounter, of being-with (Al-Mohammad 2012), which is shared by the viewer, the viewed and the photographer. When I watch the play of her images, I feel the estrangement of state surveillance and environmental alienation all over again: peculiar grey skies punctuated by clay houses of complex asymmetry rising from the same earth from which they were made; people made of sweat, bone and steely thoughts populating the streets that for historical reasons remain slightly off the map, quietly existing. Northwest China is an exceptional space made out of ten million Uyghur lives that have been set apart by the blindness of the law that operates on an alien linguistic

44 • Curious Images from Northwest China

and epistemic register.3 Yet despite the harshness of the desert world, the arbitrariness of the social one, the mundane grind of life goes on. In fact, even though forces of biopower ­management attempt to exclude unproductive ‘foreign’ bodies – in this case the Turkic-Muslims whose home ecosystem is here demarcated as Chinese Central Asia – local worlds still survive and thrive in quiet ways. In the following chapter, I first situate Drake’s images from Northwest China against the photographic imagination manufactured by the assemblage of ‘Silk Road’ lore and burgeoning enthusiasm for ‘ethnic photography’ among nouveau riche domestic tourists. Drawing on a series of interviews conducted with Drake, I then turn to her conceptual vision by asking her to explain how she came to Xinjiang and how she shaped her project around local lifeworlds. By discussing her images of Uyghur subjects, material culture and value systems, we construct a dialogue around her attempts to frame the ‘nodes of the Uyghur network: the truck stops, livestock markets, secondary schools, and county offices where Uyghurs connect with each other, sometimes furtively’ (Drake and Greenberg, in Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) 2008: n.p.). Moving further into her project, we then discuss the way in which Uyghur subjects responded to her images and the ethical implications of this aesthetics of dialogue. Turning from discourse to form, in the second section of the chapter, I then follow the lines of flight that puncture the palate of her images and spark a feeling in unfamiliar viewers of ‘the surreal’ realized in the taste of the dust, the grit, in the high whining call of young women, in the last bellow of the cow before the fountain of blood returns to dust, and in the sense that through every door, across every space, from every corner we are confronted with the leaden gaze of men staring deep into the blank distance. I ruminate on what we, travelling outsiders, might be imagining when we are confronted with a stilled cultural topography populated by desperados, mystics, tinkers, peddlers, farmer-butchers, barber-storytellers, work-weary waitresses, sad-slow dancers and mourning brides – regular people who are building their own futures despite outside efforts to corral and train their lives. In the final section of the chapter, I address the implications of Drake’s poetic provocation. What makes her pictures so uncanny? It is not only the oddness of the light, the curious juxtaposition of forms in the compositions, not even the beautiful depth of the reds and blues against the beige of the dust. Is it that these images do all those things simultaneously and still recognize the sensibilities of these metamorphic characters in the midst of their dislocating lives? If art is a magnificent organizer of language, as Mikhail Bakhtin argued (1981), what

Darren Byler • 45

is the visual language of subjects and objects, perceptions and affects conveyed by these images and the imagination they catalyse in the viewer? By making abject life a subject of curiosity, do these poetic images transform our imagination of life in the Chinese desert into a critical weapon? Is it possible that these photographs are an act of many – the viewer, the photographer, the photographed – and that the irreducibility of the art object as an aesthetic agent creates a space of human relations, of politics, visually exposed in public?

Three Visions of a Topography: Tourists, Carolyn Drake and Inhabitants Driven by an unslaking thirst for more oil, more gas, more coal, more energy and more money, coils of steel and rivers of asphalt are quickly rendering the deserts and steppes of Northwest China legible to the industrial eye. This landscape revision is part of an infrastructural moment – an interstate collapse of space through the acceleration of travel-speed – that China has suddenly entered everywhere. Following the ‘Open up the West’ campaign initiated in 1999 with the objectives of reducing socioeconomic disparities and ensuring social and political stability in the frontier areas, Northwest China became no exception to the march of global capitalist networks. Using a set of development priorities that combines a ‘Learn from California’ model and a ‘Learn from Shenzhen’ model of resource and export development, cities on the borders of Pakistan and Kazakhstan are being restructured as Special Economic Zones on a ‘New Silk Road’ (Figure 2.1). Old places that bring forward transhistorical scenes of experience and memory are being replaced by new cities. Community graveyards and tombs of Sufi saints are becoming tourist monuments; whole enclaves of narrow streets and asymmetrical adobe houses where families trace their roots across a millennium are being razed. This sort of upheaval affects the material poetics that tourists, a documentary photographer and minority inhabitants invest in space. Dominant Tourist Visions In popular media, the dominant vision of travel in Xinjiang is that of the many middle-class Han tourist photographers who come armed with cameras. Like many Western adventurers, the primary target of this army of Chinese photographers is allegory-imbued natural landscapes, exotic and erotic minorities, and introspective images of the self. As a writer on a popular Shanghai photography blog put it

46 • Curious Images from Northwest China

Figure 2.1 Top: Uyghur residents dismantle their homes as part of the urban renewal project to transform Kashgar into a Special Economic Zone for transnational trade. Bottom: in a transformed section of the city, a Han settler looks through a pair of binoculars. Images by Carolyn Drake.

Darren Byler • 47

recently: ‘In Xinjiang, so many tourists had complicated set-ups (and enormously long telephoto lenses), you’d think they were shooting for National Geographic. The prevalent styles are still nature-oriented, ­ethnic-minorities interested, and individualistic (edgy, introspective and ultimately, young)’ (Tay 2010: n.p.). For China’s new legion of tourist-photographers, Northwest China is a target of choice. Many romantic artists and worldly citizens have made a trip to Xinjiang to take pictures of the desert and mountain landscapes made famous by Tang Dynasty-era Buddhist lore, ride a camel and capture shots of ‘happy minorities’ (Gladney 1994; Schein 1997) at the many song and dance shows that populate the scenic spots.4 These ‘arrested representations of a changing reality’ (Trinh 1999: 216) or stereotypes are not untrue as much as they are power-laden misrecognitions of the dynamic landscape and its inhabitants. Xinjiang is of course home to a fabulous wealth of human and material culture. Yet for many Han tourists, while renowned for fruits and incomparable jades throughout the Chinese world,5 it is little more than a premium location for ‘primeval’ exotica as it is described by state-owned media (see Wang 2011). Based on the findings of a recent survey of 650 Han tourists, only eleven per cent of visitors to Xinjiang expressed interest in understanding minority culture and local ways of life (Yang et al. 2013); most signed up for tours with the intention of seeing timeless landscapes, ancient cities and precious commodities. Since Han academics and popular writers often lack a critical consciousness of their position in relations of domination, those who do attempt to understand local ways of life often reproduce the essentialization of Chinese multiculturalism (see Hu 2011). Like everything in China, Xinjiang exotica is historically freighted. As early as the late eighteenth century, Chinese scholar-officials who were sent to Xinjiang began charting the unfamiliar with Chinese cultural markers etching a ‘New Dominion’ over the alien landscape. As the migration of Chinese to Xinjiang became a necessary prerequisite for the security and sustainability of Qing Dynasty suzerainty in the mid nineteenth century, Chinese scholar-officials began to characterize the region not as a barren wilderness and logistical nightmare, but as a land spotted with ‘divine areas of exquisite beauty’ – the perfect place for a writer’s retreat (Newby 1999: 464). Indeed, even today, after the post-1949 migration of eight million Han settlers, the landscape of Chinese Central Asia remains a frequent backdrop in many epic Chinese historical blockbuster films – see, for example, Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) or Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers (2004) – and Western visions of a humanism that is so universal that it need not name the space it utilizes – see, for example,

48 • Curious Images from Northwest China

Marc Forster’s The Kite Runner (2007) or Werner Herzog’s My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? (2009). All of these films use Xinjiang’s landscape to project a sense of timelessness, of human figures pitched against an unforgiving desert backdrop. Given the ubiquity of this mode of representation, it is perhaps not surprising that a resistant mode of mediation is beginning to emerge. Rather than re-activating antique tropes of the Chinese classic Journey to the West or the visions of Marco Polo, critically aware documentary photographers like Carolyn Drake show us with ironic precision how power is being imbricated in the landscapes of Chinese Central Asia.6 This nascent counterdiscourse re-activates the landscape by pushing back at dominant stereotypes with a new lyricism. As Trinh Minh Ha tells us through her parenthetical reworking of Roland Barthes’ semiotics: ‘the real antonym of the “poetic” is not the prosaic, but the stereotyped’ (Trinh 1999: 216). Carefully watching the processes and relationships of people moving through their worlds is thus a way of seeing the social poetics of everyday life. Carolyn Drake’s Vision Carolyn Drake first encountered Uyghurs armed only with an ethics of travel and a tourist’s guidebook. Writing in a series of interviews I conducted with her in 2012, Drake noted: ‘Before crossing into China, I read about Xinjiang in a guidebook. There was a section about Uyghurs, and it suggested that Uyghur culture had already nearly vanished. So I was surprised when I arrived in Kashgar. I hadn’t anticipated finding such a vivid culture spilling onto the streets.’ Trying to make sense out of what she experienced, Drake began documenting the imminence of social change as Uyghur cityscapes are transformed under the state rubric of ‘development’. Speaking about her travels over the past few years through Xinjiang, she senses that ‘the landscape is looking more modern, more Chinese. There are more Chinese-speaking migrants, more Chinese teachers in the schools, more Uyghurs speaking Chinese and more Uyghurs speaking English’. This perception of the malleability of identity has caused her to consider ‘Uyghur as a concept in flux. It is a political construct, but currently a real one’. One of the reasons why Uyghur identity matters is because it continues to shape the lifeworlds and life chances of those identified by it. Although Drake understands that ‘the category Uyghur is a modern construct and that there are dangers in reinforcing nationalistic or ethnic divisions, Uyghur seemed like a category that is, or is about to, undergo drastic change. So to me it made sense to try to visualize it now’. Drake found that Uyghur subjectivities often pivot around three distinct nodes of intensity: language, religion and family. Drawn by an

Darren Byler • 49

intuition of the precariousness of these social institutions and the intensity of desires for a durable existence in those she encountered, she has focused her work on ‘discretely Uyghur’ ways of being in the world. Yet rather than freeze Uyghur spaces as futureless moments in time, she has sought to explode the category ‘Uyghur’ by getting closer to it, by ‘working with fragments of many different voices that don’t all match up neatly’. By amplifying ‘strands of continuity and strands of contrast’, she is drawing our attention to the complexity of performing one’s social position and, more importantly, the way indigenous knowledge can be organized, embodied and experienced by self-actualizing subjects. To Drake’s thinking, Uyghur language and culture is still very ‘concentrated and contained’, yet also dynamic and vital. ‘One of the surprising aspects of the Uyghur images’, she notes, ‘is that they are from this time. They are not fossils.’ In the West, we often assume that chthonic lifeways where children are educated in narrow pathways and food is eaten in the same space in which it was grown are long gone. Drake writes: ‘That [Uyghur life] has actually existed parallel our modern and post-modern lives is hard to grasp. My intention is not as much to long for a lost object of desire as it is to draw attention to something which is not lost yet, something which is vivid and alive with myriad voices and imagery.’ Of course, she says that ‘photography and melancholy are happy partners’, but for her, this nostalgia is trained towards a future yet to come; it is a melancholy that imagines a future loss. Responding to Roland Barthes’ description of the way in which images can trigger intense feelings by wounding the viewer through the inclusion of personally touching details, she writes: ‘I would like the viewer to be an active reader rather than a passive observer of the horror of definite loss. As I piece the story together, I try to ask myself if this image or quotation or combination of them opens the story up or closes it down. Does it expand meaning or reduce and simplify it?’ In their successful proposal for the Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor Prize from the CDS at Duke University, Drake and her writing partner Ilan Greenberg wrote that they intended ‘to create a composition that reads and looks like a sort of Uyghur cultural topography of the moment’ (CDS 2008: n.p.). While their project was ‘not cinematic in approach, the director Robert Altman’s technique of folding unrelated yet connecting storylines into each other’ (CDS 2008: n.p.) provided them with inspiration. Writing about Robert Altman, the film critic Pauline Kael (1971) wrote that Altman’s gift for ‘creating an atmosphere of living interrelationships and doing it so obliquely that the viewer can’t quite believe it (cited in Polito 2012: 82), introduced a narrative approach that tells

50 • Curious Images from Northwest China

stories indirectly, in a way that could be read ‘as a fleeting, almost diaphanous vision’ (cited in Polito 2012: 82). Rather than look for decisive moments of the singular ‘proper expression’ of an event, Drake tries to present her own particular angle of entering moments in time. She says: ‘I think of the world as being multifarious. Its truths are many, and they are often contradictory. I try to engage with this idea.’ One way in which she gets at these ‘powerful partial truths’ (to borrow a phrase from James Clifford 1986) is to create ‘plot holes’ in the narrative of Uyghur stories. As Kael noted, Altman’s method creates ‘slight losses’ or ‘temporary inconveniences’ – ‘holes that don’t get filled and loose ends that we’re used to having tied up’ (cited in Polito 2012: 82). Like Altman, Drake tries to open up possible vistas through a montage of disjunctive yet rhyming texts and images. To the careful viewer, this synchronal narrative is indicative of something deeper. What they are doing is presenting us with pictures of ‘how Uyghurs conspire to pass on their constrained cultural identity’ (Drake and Greenberg, in CDS 2008: n.p.), bringing forward embodied nodes of intense feeling – Uyghur epistemology, indigenous spirituality, intimate sociality – into worlds yet to come. The Vision of Inhabitants One of the most interesting aspects of Drake’s approach is the way in which she recognizes the subjects of her photographs as collaborators. By staying close to the material and the desires of her subjects, she opens up a space of encounter where multiple voices emerge in shades of resonance and dissonance. Her project is one that seeks to portray the impossible, yet truthful, story of living in-between regimes of truth: Uyghurs as actors who create, Uyghurs as objects of suffering and Uyghurs as inhabitants in an ecological and atmospheric space that is at once profoundly simple, in the way it affects everyone in basic ways and complex, as it is dependent on them to transform it into a liveable space. By amplifying Uyghur voices and recognizing their creations as coexistent with her own voice and creations, she has found a way to preserve a sense of wonder – a wonder that never acts as though it has fully possessed the other. For Drake, ‘resisting stereotype, cliché, paternalism, and other absolutist tendencies, is an inner battle. I don’t necessarily think that giving voices to subjects automatically eliminates paternalism. Nor do I think that without voices, paternalism is inevitable’. Writing about the way in which the photographed responded to her images when she returned to the scenes in which they were captured, she writes:

Darren Byler • 51

People were generally intrigued by the photos and enjoyed looking at them and identifying familiar objects and people. There was smiling and laughing. Maybe some anxiety, but not shame or disdain. I found people were generally more interested in the ones of places and people familiar to them, but I got different responses from different people. The well-travelled artist looked at them differently from village farmers who looked at them differently from university students who looked at them differently from devoted students of Islam. My images want different things from different people. I can’t say for sure what that is. For a Uyghur in Xinjiang, the images could be a reflection of self and family, or a misconstrual of it. For a Uyghur in Turkey, they may trigger memories of home. The Chinese official may react to them with repulsion, humor, disregard, familiarity, curiosity. They may trigger surprise, affirmation of difference, or empathy from the Mongolian in China who has heard that Uyghurs are dangerous. To viewers who have never or rarely heard of Xinjiang, they might appear seductive, or they might be considered in relation to the flow of events closer to home, or as a challenge (hopefully) to recent political tropes about terrorism and Islam.

As Drake interacted with the photographed and asked them to write and draw the thoughts and desires that sprang to mind on top of her images she found that photography was in fact an act of many that opened up a multidirectional space of encounter. She produced a genre of travel photography that anticipates the political in the aesthetic by recognizing that the photographed are more than inanimate material and that images are more than just objects. In the drawings and inscriptions that the viewed inserted into Drake’s images, we see assertions of values, symbolism and ethics. Food, language and family emerge as sustaining themes within an everyday affect of structural, symbolic and intimate violence. In Drake’s images the vision of inhabitants asserts itself as a stubborn element; it comes from the semiotics of a local past and the experience of the everyday present, and projects a future lifeworld for Uyghurs in the midst of rapid social change.

Regrounding Chinese Central Asia: Sketches, Encounters, Forsaken Objects and Dreams In the previous section I traced a few of the competing discursive forces that entwine Drake, her Uyghur interlocutors and the viewing public in her travel photography project. I would like to turn now to a formal analysis of the work itself. Instead of arranging the images in a temporal or spatial narrative, in an early presentation of her work Drake drew viewers into meditations on the following themes: Sketches, Encounters,

52 • Curious Images from Northwest China

Forsaken Objects and Dreams. Each of these categories indexes a particular imaginary and discrete formal presentation. With the exception of the ‘Encounters’ images – most of which were featured in Drake’s 2009 National Geographic project – these photo essays deviate from conventional documentary photography format. As Drake (2013) writes in the introduction to the series: Feeling the limits of what could be expressed with my camera, I eventually began to look for meaning in other ways. I learned about the significance of dreams in Islam and asked people to describe their own remembered dreams. I collected and photographed objects left in the dust of demolition. I carried a journal which I asked people to leave messages in. And I made prints of my photos, asking people to draw their own pictures on top of them, and recording interviews with those who were willing to take the risk. The project has become a narrative collage of these disparate elements.

Since what I am presenting here are only excerpts from Drake’s visual essays, I have centred my analysis around the themes I found most striking. Due to space considerations, I was able to use only two images from each section of her overall project. I chose the images I did based on responses I received from Uyghur interlocutors and my own interest in particular themes. The text that appears under the images are stories told by Uyghurs in response to the images to which they are matched. Sketches In the first section, ‘Sketches’, Drake has created a montage of images overlaid by Uyghur drawings and punctuated by texts that the photographic encounter inspired in the photographed. The most striking of these image-drawing-text assemblages draw out senses of place; they bring forward living mythologies tied to the sentient land and cityscape. Coloured in by Uyghur artists, pigeons, known for their life-giving force in Uyghur medicine, take on a different vitality in Sufi metamorphic narratives. Old Uyghur neighbourhoods, known in Uyghur as mehelle, made up of interlocking courtyards of mud brick and exquisitely carved wooden doors are named by the photographed as the living ecosystem of Uyghurs who identify themselves as ‘of the earth’. Sketched on top of an Ürümchi skyline, the capital of the province, cloaked in smog is a swarm of flies – a vivid description of the temperature of the city that attracts docile subjects to industry like a warm house in winter. These are images in which spirits thrive; the outside traveller is given a

Darren Byler • 53

glimpse of what the photographed are seeing. This is far more than an intrigue with exotica or a dyspeptic vision of a regime-made disaster; what we see in front of us are vivid worlds where local futures and histories are being generated from the margins. We are not told what to think, but instead are compelled to feel. We do not know what we are seeing, but instead intuit that there is a deep, visceral presence, a bending of a living sociality at work in these visual spaces. We are seeing people who have an obligation, a responsibility towards their way of life and its regeneration. It is here that we are watching a fractured emergence of the soul, as the clinamen of bodies, into a collectivity: these are people who are saying ‘we are our relations’. What Drake is doing is showing us the political space, the relations of the human (as well as the other-than-human), which happen in a work of art, in the space of an image. In the two images extracted from Drake’s visual essay (Figure 2.2), a young Uyghur woman has drawn in a pigeon and commented on the weight of toil while she rests at her job away from home; in the second image, flies have been drawn on a window pane by a Uyghur inhabitant of the city and in the accompanying text, he or she has lamented the changes that have come with urban upheaval. By allowing the viewed to draw themselves into the picture, Drake is collapsing the contemplative aesthetic gaze into an actional atmosphere of encounter. Like the photo critic Ariella Azoulay (2012), she is telling us that there are no images that exist outside the aesthetic plane and, likewise, there is no aesthetics outside of the political. These images are ethical tactics aimed at making conflict personal. They compel us to look closely, to get intimate with what we see. This is Drake’s poetics of travel; her ethics of encounter. Encounters Relative to the other photo essays, Drake’s rumination on the theme of ‘encounter’ is less explicit in its ethics. These uncaptioned images are frames of startling heaviness. Francine Prose (2012) has suggested that images of unfamiliar strangeness can be seductive and alluring; Drake’s images do this very well. To Drake’s thinking, though, ‘the pictures that appear uncanny and strange to the Western viewer may feel familiar to a Uyghur or someone who has spent time in Xinjiang. My hope is that the images resonate beyond the initial familiarity or strangeness that draws you in. I hope seduction isn’t their end point’. Since ‘language, religion, rural traditions, the mandate to modernize’ are social themes and ethical imperatives that carry across the developing world, ‘the

54 • Curious Images from Northwest China

Figure 2.2 Top: a young Uyghur woman has drawn in a flower and a pigeon over her resting body. Commenting on the weight of toil while she rests at her job away from home, she said: ‘It was our noon break when there were no customers, and we were tired since we worked from morning to night. I wasn’t optimistic about the future of that place. That job wouldn’t provide security for a whole life so my parents advised me to come back.’ Bottom: flies have been drawn on a window pane by a Uyghur inhabitant of the city and in the accompanying text, he or she has lamented the changes that have come with urban upheaval: ‘Twenty years ago it was very nice, there were a lot of springs, clean water, grasses, and a lot of trees. I was always going swimming. It was a very beautiful place. But now it’s all buildings, and not much green. There are so many people living here now, it’s like flies.’ Images by Carolyn Drake.

Darren Byler • 55

Uyghur “story” is not limited to Turkic people. Despite their unusual, particular colors and landscape and content, they speak of patterns that have taken place everywhere, repetitively, vividly, nebulously’. Inasmuch as encounter is ubiquitous in this global historical moment, Drake’s work is an exploration of the ethics and poetics of this problematic. She is pointing us towards encounters between the viewed, the viewer and photographer, but, since these images have circulated in the New York Times, National Geographic and elsewhere, they have also generated encounters in the economy of real estate development, ethnic discrimination and the lived experience of carrying on one’s existence. How do we feel when we see a Uyghur man with a ‘five-mile stare’ framed by the rubble and dust of Chinese development: another 1,500 years of built environmental history erased? Do we see another local culture defined by its absence? How do we locate the future of the way of life under erasure? Or, in the second image, what do we think when we see three generations of Uyghur butchers (Uy: qassap), known by Uyghurs for their skill in ‘using every part of a sheep’, confronting us next to a stripped spine (Figure 2.3)? Do we see steely resolve or living craftsmen? Do we see a closeness to an ecosystem or consumer ­poverty? Do we smell the freshness of blood and flesh or sense an economy that privileges intimacy over industrial sanitation? Forsaken Objects A third section of Drake’s Uyghur series addresses the way in which objects travel and come to signify affective atmospheres. Like Susan Meiselas’ archives for Kurdistan (2008), Drake has begun to create an archive for a community that lacks the legitimization that comes through outside recognition. By taking abandoned objects from the rubble of Kashgar’s centuries-old Uyghur enclave (a target for ‘urban renewal’ under China’s urban development plan), representing those images in a photography studio in Istanbul and displaying them as museum artefacts, Drake is giving viewers a talisman, an imaginary, against the future erasure of Uyghur memories – memories for both the outsider and insider of the existence from which they are drawn. Although this archive is partial and estranged from local ways of knowing, Drake is nevertheless pushing the viewer towards a ­(however partial) recognition of what is at stake in the forced ‘desettlement’ of Uyghur collectivities.7 As we see images of tile fragments, torn pages of the Koran framed for a gallery wall, Drake seems to be asking us to ‘get with’ our Oriental fetish and to think about what it can do. She is asking us to recognize

56 • Curious Images from Northwest China

Figure 2.3 Top: a Uyghur man with a ‘five-mile stare’ framed by the rubble and dust of Chinese development: another 1,500 years of built environmental history erased. Bottom: what do we think when we see three generations of Uyghur butchers known by Uyghurs ‘for using every part of a sheep’, confronting us next to a stripped spine? Images by Carolyn Drake.

Darren Byler • 57

the prayer hat (Uy: doppa), the kite string, the ceremonial gift cloth, the dust, and broken plaster (Figure 2.4). These are souvenirs that function in the true sense of the word as a catalyst of a different time and space, which, when resituated, allows the viewer, the viewed and the photographer to present something that exceeds the sum of the parts under observation. If a fetish is, as James Clifford (1985) suggests, that which accords ‘things the power to fixate, rather than simply the capacity to edify or inform’, then what Drake is activating is an assemblage of things that ‘gather a world sensibly around us’ as a collection without an album (Clifford 1985: 244). Dreams Drake’s final category, ‘Dreams’, draws the viewer, the viewed and the photographer into a conversation regarding the terrifying, obscene, curious messages that emanate from Uyghur dreamworlds. More than that, Drake is watching the shape and pattern of Uyghur efforts to articulate their existence – its past and future. The colours that emerge from Uyghur dreams are what is seen when consciousness is shifted from the imagined to the perceived. This slippage from the desired to the imagined to the actual reveals the cruel radiances of life in flux. In this case, Drake says, ‘my use of color wasn’t really an intellectual decision, it just happened. I find color rich, tangible, in one sense realistic, in another surreal. And I see it as uplifting and alive’. ‘Photographs are always the same temperature of the planet’, Edmundo Desnoes writes (1985: 310). The worlds Drake pictures are filled with tigers, beggars and soldiers (Figure 2.5). As the dreams written by Uyghur participants tell us, death comes with certainty even while biscuits come with uncertainty. What is unsaid and unseen matters. The future is not as dependable as earth, friends, family, faith and food. This is what Uyghur dreams tell us.

A Poetic Provocation In her curious images from Northwest China, Drake addresses the ethics of travel photography by both implicitly and explicitly recognizing the agency, the desires, of the photographed the visions that pierce the viewer with the blankness of their gaze; the drawings and stories of the photographed that activate feelings of intimacy. This attention to the voices and gestures of the subaltern resonates with recent developments in visual anthropology. The provocative Israeli photo critic

58 • Curious Images from Northwest China

Figure 2.4 Drake is asking us to recognize the prayer hat, the kite string, the ceremonial gift cloth (top), the dust and broken plaster (bottom) as catalysts of a different time and space, which, when resituated, allow the viewer, the viewed and the photographer to present something that exceeds the sum of the parts under observation. Images by Carolyn Drake.

Darren Byler • 59

Figure 2.5 In texts paired with the above images by Drake, Uyghur viewers said (top): ‘Good dreams, you tell your good friends. If you do, maybe the dream will come true. If someone says “I was in a forest, I faced a tiger, and the tiger attacked me”, some people will say, “don’t speak about it”. If someone speaks bad words, they will come true.’ Bottom: ‘What dreams you have depends on your mind. I think kings dream about prime ministers, foreign ministers, and other presidents in their dreams. Beggars dream about biscuits.’ Images by Carolyn Drake.

60 • Curious Images from Northwest China

Ariella Azoulay has recently called for a reconsideration of the politics of photography: The photograph bears the seal of the photographic event, and reconstructing this event requires more than just identifying what is shown in the photograph. One needs to stop looking at the photograph and instead start watching it. The verb ‘to watch’ is usually used for regarding phenomena or moving pictures. It entails dimensions of time and movement that need to be reinscribed in the interpretation of the still photographic image. (Azoulay 2008: 14)

Commenting on Azoulay’s theorization of photography, the visual anthropologist Zeynep Devrim Gürsel (2012) has noted that ‘watching photographs for Azoulay moves debates about photography beyond the dualistic relationship between the viewer and the photograph (as she claims is the case in the work of Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag) to a space of social relations between the photographer, the viewer and the photographed’ (Gürsel 2012: n.p.). As such, Azoulay insists that the photographed is not merely a visible presence that can be reduced to the status of an object, but is an active participant who returns the gaze of the photographer and challenges the gaze of the viewer. ‘Watching’ Drake’s photographs lead us to think beyond the usual critique of fixing subjects to particular racial categories, which photo critics have attributed to photos of colonial subjects since Edward Said’s (1978) influential work on Orientalism. Instead, Drake asks us to consider the ways in which photography can simultaneously sediment and fracture the emotional and political density of ‘ethnicity’, of ‘the oppressed’ and of ‘the Oriental Exotic’ as visual and conceptual categories that operate in the regime-made disaster of Northwest China. While Drake did feel constrained by the editorial feature format when her work was picked up in 2009 by National Geographic as part of a story on Uyghur cultural history, she nevertheless felt that these limits and conventions were also a part of making Uyghur stories ‘engaging and informative to a broad audience’. She prefers her ‘own narrative to be more open-ended than what you find in a magazine. I’d like to give the reader more responsibility to piece things together, to let them embrace a lack of closure, to leave some of the story to the imagination, to share my curiosity and questions with the reader and let them have their own’. Perhaps it was this invitation that drew me to contemplate Drake’s work and consider how it resonates with my own ethics and poetics as an anthropologist. Drake’s work is a rich illustration of the future programmatic that visual anthropologists Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins (1993) offered

Darren Byler • 61

readers in their landmark postcolonial critique of National Geographic. As Lutz and Collins noted, the photography featured in the historical archive of the magazine is bound by a strict adherence to humanist accuracy (1993: 270). However, this focus often had the unfortunate effect of ‘erasing’ conflict (1993: 271). Rather than the skewed sensationalism of news photography, these images point to the mundane and the everyday that persist alongside events as prototypical examples of humanist survival. Up until the early 1990s, they argue, ‘the cameras of the Geographic are trained on the vibrant, ebullient, sometimes longsuffering, but always noble human spirit’ (1993: 271). Yet in this historical moment, after the stinging critique that emerged from postcolonial theory, Drake’s work points us towards a different sort of aesthetic politics. Utilizing an affective register of suspicion, Drake acts as an agent of discursive multiplicity: projecting National Geographic against Chinese governmentality, and what emerges from that encounter against ethnic political identity, and again against humanist universalism and the exoticism being reproduced by Chinese tourism. Rather than presenting us only with the way in which beauty persists through tragedy, she is routing the aesthetic through the cumulative effect of the everyday towards a shared affective atmosphere experienced and presented by both the viewed and the photographer. If we ‘watch’ these photographs as Azoulay prescribes, we can see the emergence of a political space of encounter. As Lutz and Collins (1993) point out, ‘political’ photography in the West usually follows two general trajectories of direct and indirect action. One, typified they say by the work of Dorothea Lange (1982) and Sebastião Salgado (1997), seeks to educate and motivate desires for change by presenting poignant and, at times, overwhelming realist images of suffering and hardship in precarious situations at the margins of our political economies. Another approach, typified by ‘critical rather than tutorial functions’, attempts to disrupt the gaze of the viewer by confronting them with uncanny and surreal images (1993: 280). Rather than evoking empathy or pity, these images are meant to force the viewer to ‘question the power we have had to control the lives of others and to leave our own unexamined’ (1993: 280). They evoke a mood rather than a message. They use formal presentations to evoke a response that resonates with traditions of seeing, yet pushes back at those same sources of knowledge and power. Bakhtin (1981) would call them ‘heteroglossic’, Fanon (1994) would call them ‘actional’ and Deleuze (1986) would call them a ‘minor genre’ of resistance. I will call them, and Drake’s work in particular, a poetic provocation.

62 • Curious Images from Northwest China

I began this chapter with a line from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee and Evans [1939] 1988) – one of the first works of English-language travel literature and photography to act as a poetic provocation. The dialogue of text and images in the book hails the reader with its strange beauty and anguished thick description of quotidian life to the extent that stories of poverty and racism rise to the surface and shock the viewer with their poignancy. Like James Agee and Walker Evans’ collaborative work on tenant farmers in the Depression-era rural American South, it is not unreasonable to think of Drake’s project as a ‘portent and fragment, experiment, dissonant prologue . . . a swindle, an insult, and a corrective’ (Agee and Evans [1939] 1988: xlvii). Like them, she is trying to deal with an ‘unimagined existence’ in the ‘normal predicaments of human divinity’ not as ‘journalists, sociologists, politicians, entertainers, humanitarians, priests, or artists, but seriously’ (Agee and Evans [1939] 1988: xlvi–xlvii). As Drake puts it: ‘I would certainly rather be placed on the side of poetic truth than conventional ways of knowing. I prefer to avoid defining what is in my pictures, cataloguing facts that they contain, the knowledge they accumulate.’ To paraphrase Stephen Tyler (cited in Marcus 2012: 441), Drake’s project is poetic not in its textual form, but in its return to the original context and function of poetry, which by means of its performative break with everyday ways of seeing evokes memories of the ethos of human collectivities and thereby provokes watchers to act ethically. A further implication of this form of ‘social poetics’ (Herzfeld 1997) is that what we see playing out in Drake’s images are the links between the everyday poetics of dreams, encounters, imaginings and desires as they are shaped by the largerscale politics of development, tourism and rapid social change. The interplay of the lived experience of Uyghur worlds are brought into sharp focus, breaking down illusions of scale and absolute difference. In this chapter I have argued that poetic images of travel that provoke an ethical dialogue between the photographer, the viewed and the viewer can destabilize the imposed power relations of dominant forms of representation. In advocating this form of ethical travel and representation, Drake and myself are taking a position similar to that of Kim Fortun (2012: 453). We are proposing that an ethical traveller must know in advance that established visual idioms for representing the other are often inadequate, and that this understanding requires us to reach beyond the unknown with humility and reflexivity towards provocation, towards an openness to the otherwise. By showing us the way in which Uyghurs interact with images of themselves, Drake puts travellers such as us in touch with other ways of seeing the world and being seen. Her dialogic images invite us to tune into the future of

Darren Byler • 63

Uyghur lifeworlds. She is showing us not how to stand as passive witnesses to each other’s pain, but that being-with (Al-Mohammad 2010) each other is how we live ethically. Darren Byler is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington, Seattle. His work focuses on emerging forms of art and politics among Uyghur migrants and Han settlers in urban Northwest China. He has published essays on Transnational Chinese Cinema (Bridge 21 Press, 2014) and on Literature, Writing and Anthropology (with Shannon Dugan Iverson, Cultural Anthropology website 2012). His co-translations of Uyghur fiction and poetry have appeared in Guernica, Pathlight and Banango Street. He is also program coordinator for the Cultural Anthropology Contributing Editor Program.

Notes 1 Carolyn Drake is an award-winning American documentary photographer. Many of the images included here have appeared in a narrative book entitled Wild Pigeon (2014), and in publications such as Time Magazine, the New York Times, National Geographic, the New Yorker and Guernica, as well as gallery and museum exhibitions. She has given the author express written permission to be identified and quoted in this chapter. 2 Parts of the project can be viewed here: http://carolyndrake.com/WildPigeon-2007-13. 3 For a detailed account of Uyghur dispossession under the sovereignty of the Chinese state, see Gardner Bovingdon’s 2010 monograph. 4 According to official statistics, annual domestic tourists to the region number in the millions; while many local Uyghurs do benefit from trading in cultural tourism, it often comes at the cost of the museumification of their way of life. Much of the profits go to Han and governmental tourism agencies that have leased the infrastructure of old Uyghur towns – turning villages, mosques and shrines into theme parks. 5 Hami Gua (Hami melons), Tulufan putaogan (Turpan raisins) and Hetian yu (Hotan jade) are famous throughout the Sinophone world. 6 It is important to note that Han documentary photographers such as Tian Lin and Chen Zhifeng who self-identify as Xinjiang ‘locals’ (Ch: bendi ren) often have a very different sense of indigenous Uyghur and Han pioneer struggles for survival on the margins of the state. Since this chapter is focused on the representations of people who engage with Xinjiang on a temporary basis – during the span of weeks – rather than months and years, I will not be able to dwell on these alternate visions. 7 As the anthropologist Jay Dautcher (2009) has argued, the Uyghurs are a ‘chthonic’ people whose society is organized around the urban

64 • Curious Images from Northwest China

neighbourhood (Uy: mehelle). By undermining this place-based intersubjectivity via a systematic erasure of Uyghur topographies, the state has generated a rhetoric and environment of epistemic ‘desettlement’.

References Agamben, G. 1998. Homo Sacer. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agee, J., and Evans, W. [1939] 1988. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. New York: Mariner Books. Al-Mohammad, H. 2010. ‘Towards an Ethics of Being-with: Intertwinements of Life in Post-invasion Basra’, Ethnos 75(4): 425–46. Azoulay, A. 2008. The Civil Contract of Photography. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. ———. 2012. Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography. New York: Verso. Bakhtin, M.M. 1981.  The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, vol. 1. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barthes, R. 1982. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill & Wang Press. Bovingdon, G. 2010. The Uyghurs: Strangers in Their Own Land. New York: Columbia University Press. Center for Documentary Studies (CDS). 2008. ‘2008 Winners: Ilan Greenberg and Carolyn Drake’, Duke University. Retrieved 20 February 2016 from http://documentarystudies.duke.edu/awards/lange-taylor/prizewinners/​ 2008. Clifford, J. 1985. ‘Objects and Selves: An Afterword’, in G.W. Stocking (ed.), Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, vol. 3. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 236–46. ——— 1986. ‘Introduction: Partial Truths’, in J. Clifford and G. Marcus (eds), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. San Francisco: University of California Press, pp. 1–26. Dautcher, J. 2009.  Down a Narrow Road: Identity and Masculinity in a Uyghur Community in Xinjiang China. Boston: Harvard University Asia Center. Deleuze, G. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Desnoes, E. 1985. ‘Cuba Made Me So’, in M. Blonsky (ed.), On Signs. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 384–403. Drake, C. 2009. ‘The Other Tibet’, National Geographic, December 2009. Retrieved 5 December 2016 from http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/12/uygurs/ drake-photography. ———. 2013. ‘Wild Pigeon 2008–2013’, CarolynDrake.com. Retrieved 20February 2016 from http://carolyndrake.com/Wild-Pigeon-2007-13 ———. 2014. Wild Pigeon. Amsterdam: SYB. Fanon, F. 1994. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press. Fortun, K. 2012. ‘Ethnography in Late Industrialism’,  Cultural Anthropology 27(3): 446–64.

Darren Byler • 65

Gladney, D.C. 1994. Representing Nationality in China: Refiguring Majority/ Minority Identities. Journal of Asian Studies 53(1): 92–123. Gürsel, Z.D. 2012. ‘Photographic Figure Studies as a Mode of Ethnography?’, Cultural Anthropology. Retrieved 5 December 2016 from http://production. culanth.org/photo_essays/1-corpus-mining-the-border. Herzfeld, M. 1997. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New York: Routledge. Hu, D.A.I. 2011. ‘On Noble Spirit and Folk Consciousness of Uighur Dance’, Journal of Kashgar Teachers College 13(3): 38–41. Kael, P. 1971. ‘McCabe & Mrs. Miller: Pipe Dream’, New Yorker, 3 July. Lange, D. 1982. Photographs of a Lifetime. Millerton, NY: Aperture. Lutz, C.A., and Collins, J.L. 1993. Reading National Geographic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marcus, G.E. 2012. ‘The Legacies of Writing Culture and the Near Future of the Ethnographic Form: A Sketch’, Cultural Anthropology 27(3): 427–45. Meiselas, S. 2008. Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History. New York: Random House. Newby, L. 1999. ‘The Chinese Literary Conquest of Xinjiang’, Modern China 25(4): 451–74. Polito, R. 2012. ‘Finger in the Fuse: Becoming Pauline Kael’, Harper’s Magazine, September, pp. 80–86. Prose, F. 2012. ‘George Georgiou’s Tour of the Unfamiliar’, Aperture 208(3): 37–38. Said, E.W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon. Salgado, S. 1997. Terra: Struggle of the Landless. New York: Phaidon. Schein, L. 1997. ‘Gender and Internal Orientalism in China’, Modern China 23(1): 69–98. Taussig, M. 2009. What Color is the Sacred? Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tay, S. 2010. ‘On Street Photography in China’, Shanghai Street Stories, 8 November. Retrieved 5 December 2016 from http://shanghaistreetstories. com/?p=1914. Toops, S. 1999. ‘Tourism and Turpan: The Power of Place in Inner Asia/Outer China’, Central Asian Survey 18(3): 303–18. Trinh, T.M.H. 1999. Cinema Interval. New York: Routledge. Wang, Y. 2011. ‘Primeval Xinjiang’, China Daily, 13 June. Retrieved 8 April 2017 from http://europe.chinadaily.com.cn/travel/2011-06/13/content_12694435. htm. Yang, J., Ryan, C. and Zhang, L. 2013. ‘Ethnic Minority Tourism in China – Han Perspectives of Tuva Figures in a Landscape’,  Tourism Management 36(2): 45–56.

Films Forester, M. 2007. The Kite Runner. Universal City, CA: DreamWorks Pictures. Herzog, W. 2009. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? New York: IFC Films. Lee, A. 2000. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. New York: Sony Pictures Classics. Zhang, Y. 2004. House of Flying Daggers. New York: Sony Pictures Classics.

T3 Astronauts and Avatars Travels between the Physical, the Virtual and the Imagined Denise Doyle

That’s where we make the connections, crossing the borders, the boundaries. It is in the process of travelling itself, of journeying that we dream. You ask me what ‘moving’ or ‘travelling’ means to me: it is about transformation ‘through’ dreaming, through imagining. I am freer to dream when I am moving. And one has to journey to dream. —Wanderingfictions Story Truth in her dress finds facts too tight. In fiction she moves with ease. —R. Tagore, Stray Birds

Introduction Having spent the late 1990s reading women’s travel writing, flirting with the adventures of those historical travellers, having already nurtured a sense of excitement towards the freedom of the road,1 I understood then that there is always a certain ‘discovery’ of the self when moving through different cultures. When you loosen your grip on your everyday humdrum realities, it is curious how quickly you move more freely, think more freely. There is often a poetics surrounding the experience of travel suggesting a change, a transformation, through the experience of moving through space itself. Yet, as the Tagore quote above suggests, an even greater freedom comes when we can imagine the truth through another kind of fiction, a fiction that expands our view of reality (as will be seen in Judith Schalansky’s writing on remote islands). Since embracing the digital realm in the mid 1990s, many of my own digital arts projects of that

Denise Doyle • 67

time used travel as a starting point for the exploration of space, whether real, virtual or imagined, and particularly with a focus on the sense of the unknown.2 Contemporary astronomy enables us to contemplate the wonders of the universe with its evocation of the endless frontiers of outer space; another cosmology of space and time suggests a difficulty in determining where the border of the real and imagined lies. From dreams of early space travel to the echoes of longing in journeys as chance encounters through space and time, artists have long explored the theme of the unknown. Conceivably even the cultural myths of astronauts and avatars are one and the same – that of bodies travelling in unknown spaces and time. The 1950s and 1960s can be seen as a time when, with new tools and technologies, the exploration of the extreme limits of outer space developed new imaginaries of space itself. In a contemporary context, online virtual space and, more particularly, the 3D virtual worlds available for exploration are providing similar outer or extreme limits of worlds – yet it is the nature of the space that is created and experienced that is more significant in a contemporary context. Bachelard, writing in Air and Dreams ([1943] 1988: 27), suggests that when we dream of flight, wings are already a rationalization. How do we make sense of these opportunities for new forms of ‘travel’ being offered by new technologies? Rather than a geographically distant far-awayness that is imagined (and sometimes experienced), it is the ‘nature’ of the space along with a new type of traveller that is being created that is of interest here. Two strands of travel will be explored in this chapter: that of travelling in physical space that can be encountered as extreme and unknown, where the experiences of the physical body become distorted or challenged; and through the imagined and virtual spaces that are not physical, yet are encountered as real. The chapter explores the common thread: it is bodies that act as interpreters of space – both in the body of the astronaut (and those who have experienced their bodies in zero gravity) and in the virtual body of the avatar (or the virtuanaut). Using examples from a range of art projects, the chapter explores how technology can aid the exploration of new forms and methods of ­‘travelling in and through’ space. In particular, there are opportunities to further explore the poetics of the transforming act of virtual and imagined travel through an exploration of the experience of time, space and place. My interest in the notion of Wanderingfictions Story (my virtual avatar counterpart) as a form of virtual traveller, moving between the physical and the virtual, and travelling between the virtual and the imagined, became the basis of a range of projects that will be discussed later in the chapter.

68 • Astronauts and Avatars

Art, Space and Technology There has been a relationship between Western art and virtual space at least since the Renaissance, with the invention of linear perspective. More recently, in the field of art and technology, the relationship between art and virtual space appears implicit in its scope and engagement (Ettlinger 2009; Grau 2003; Lindstrand 2007). However, Or Ettlinger describes the ‘fog of multiple meanings around the term the virtual’ (2009: 6) and suggests that, in fact, contemporary and digital art has lost its interest in the art of illusion, and is only now marginally concerned with the pictorial. The relationship between art and the virtual has been explored in the last few decades through early experiments in virtual environments (Davies 1995, 1998; Gromala and Sharir 1994; Laurel and Strickland 1993; Sermon 1992), the networked environments of the early twenty-first century (Zapp 2002, 2005) and the networked virtual spaces found in online virtual worlds such as Second Life. There is an argument that as soon as linear perspective was invented, painting became another kind of virtual space and, in fact, Lindstrand suggests that ‘once the tools to depict three-dimensional space on a two dimensional surface were developed, architecture and the understanding of space leaped into a new era’ (2007: 354). For him, the possibility for the viewer to imagine herself walking around inside a painting opened up a whole new chapter in art as well as causing a fundamental shift in the experience of space. Ettlinger would most certainly agree with this perception of space. In developing ‘The Virtual Space Theory’, he states that at its heart lies ‘the interpretation of virtual space as the overall space which we see through pictorial images, and of “virtual” as describing any visible object which is located inside of that space’ (Ettlinger 2009: 6). The notion that the concept of space can be seen as Cartesian and definable is at odds with the concept of space as lived and experienced. In The Production of Space (1991), Henri Lefebvre attempts to define the experience of space from both a metaphysical and an ideological perspective. Initially he outlines two terms in relation to space: that of the illusion of transparency and the illusion of opacity (or the realistic i­ llusion). Of the illusion of transparency, he writes that the emphasis of the written word is to the detriment of what he terms ‘social practice’. In what he describes as the grasping of the object by the act of writing, he suggests that this is supposed to bring the ‘non-communicated into the realm of the communicated . . . such are the assumptions of an ideology which, in positing the transparency of space, identifies knowledge, information and communication . . . The illusion of transparency turns

Denise Doyle • 69

out . . . to be a transcendental illusion: a trap, operating on the basis of its own quasi-magical power’ (Lefebvre 1991: 28–29). In turn, the illusion of opacity, of substantiality is philosophically closer to naturalistic materialism. However, and most interestingly, Lefebvre continues to say that the two illusions are not necessarily in opposition to each other and do not ‘seek to destroy each other’; rather, he argues that ‘each illusion embodies and nourishes the other. The shifting back and forth between the two, and the flickering or oscillatory effect that it produces, are thus just as important as either of the illusions considered in ­isolation’ (Lefebvre 1991: 29). This flickering, from opaque to transparent to opaque again, suggest a complex system of relationships between a space and the objects found in that space. Yet, Lefebvre (1991: 29) writes that it is the texture of space that allows us to create space through social practice as sequences of acts that become a signifying practice in itself. Ettlinger’s and Lefebvre’s understandings of space appear to be at odds with each other. An article by Axel Stockburger, ‘Playing the Third Place’ (2007), extends Lefebvre’s ideas to the work of Soja and his definition of what he terms the Thirdspace. As Stockburger notes, beyond the dualism of subject and object, Lefebvre suggests that spaces can be understood within the triad of the perceived, the conceived and the lived. According to Stockburger, Soja ‘identifies perceived space (Firstspace) with the real, and conceived space (Secondspace) with the imaginary, leading to lived space (Thirdspace), as a field of both, imagined and real’ (Stockburger 2007: 232). Stockburger continues with his interpretation in the context of game space and describes the hybrid mix between real and imagined spaces created through digital game universes as resonating strongly with the concept of Thirdspace. He notes that ‘this insight is crucial because it defies the idea of computer games as merely “virtual” or purely imaginary spaces. It is precisely the interaction between real and imagined spatiality that makes this medium so compelling and unique’ (Stockburger 2007: 232). A concept of space that suggests a mixed experience of both real and imagined spatiality proves to be useful when considering online and networked spaces, whether they are games-based or not.

Technology and Travel From early writings on virtual reality (such as Damer 1998; Heim 1993; Heudin 1999; Rheingold 1991; Schroeder 2002) through to Jones

70 • Astronauts and Avatars

(2006:  4), who suggests that ‘virtual reality is the contemporary and future articulation of the philosophical and psychological question of how we define (and create) reality’, the issues, definitions and experiences of reality find rich and challenging ground in virtual environments. The early use of virtual environments for artistic practice were explored in a series of projects undertaken at the Banff Centre, Canada in the early 1990s and subsequently documented in Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments (Moser 1996). In the preface to that book, Douglas Macleod, the Project Director, likens this ‘moment of virtual reality’ to a similar moment in time when Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera was released in 1929, cataloguing the potential of the film medium (Macleod, cited in Moser 1996: ix). Of particular note were works such as Brenda Laurel and Rachel Strickland’s Placeholder (1993), the Archaeology of the Mother Tongue (1993) by Toni Dove and Michael Mackenzie, and the virtual reality performance Dancing with the Virtual Dervish: Virtual Bodies (1994) by Diane Gromala and Yacov Sharir. These projects were particularly innovative in their exploration of virtual r­ eality environments in an art context. Artists such as Char Davies moved from painting to exploring virtual space in virtual environments in the early 1990s, resulting in the works Osmose (1995) and Ephémère (1998). In Osmose, the participant, or ‘immersant’, must concentrate on her breath as a device to navigate vertically through the spaces represented. In Landscape, Earth, Body, Being, Space, and Time in the Immersive Virtual Environments Osmose and Ephémère, Davies (2003: 1) says that ‘within this spatiality, there is no split between the observer and the observed’. She argues that this is not tied to a Cartesian paradigm, but rather allows ‘another way of sensing to come forward, one in which the body feels the space very much like that of a body immersed in the sea’ (2003: 1). In this private virtual space, by ‘leaving the space of one’s usual sensibilities, one enters into communication with a space that is psychically innovating . . . For we do not change place, we change our nature’ (Bachelard cited in Davies 1997: 3).

On Travelling in Outer Space It seems that another way of sensing also comes forward when physically leaving the space of our usual sensibilities, when travelling in outer space or when experiencing zero gravity (created through parabolic flight conditions). When we lose the pressure of what holds us to the earth’s surface on our bodies (what enables us to travel in the

Denise Doyle • 71

way we understand travelling) and experience the lack of gravity as a condition of the experience, new sensibilities emerge. The UK based Science-Art agency, the Arts Catalyst, has been supporting artists’ and scientists’ exploration of zero-gravity conditions since the early 2000s. As Nicola Triscott explains, ‘to defy gravity is to defy the accepted, the unquestioned and the status quo. It is to embrace the unknown and to map a new territory, personal, artistic and political’ (Triscott, cited in Triscott and La Frenais 2005: 6). An example of a rather playful project supported by the Arts Catalyst is that of Ansuman Biswas and Jem Finer’s Zero Genie (2001), where feats performed by ‘genies and flying carpets of ancient myth’ (Triscott and La Frenais 2005: 56) are re-created in zero-gravity conditions. According to Triscott and La Frenais, the project questions whether the realities of shamanistic technologies are any less real than those of astronauts and cosmonauts, and suggests that any ‘judgements of fantasy and reality are conditioned by ­relationships of power’ (Triscott and La Frenais 2005: 56). Kitsou Dubois is a choreographer who has been exploring the experience of zero-gravity movement for a number of years. Through this work, she cites a number of key references in zero-gravity movement such as the subjective vertical, continuous motion and the consciousness of the ‘space between’ as states associated with parabolic flight. She suggests that in the space of weightlessness, ‘there is no need for a sense of balance . . . extremities of the body feel less defined and there is a sense of merging with the empty space around’ (Triscott and La Frenais 2005: 46). Parallels of the experience can be seen in the descriptions given by Char Davies of the experience of travelling through the virtual space of Osmose (1995). There is an uncertainty of the body in extremes of space that is also reflected in the changing relationships we have to the embodied aspects of our day-to-day experience in the virtual space of new technologies.

On Travelling without Leaving The work that defines the early exploration of telepresence in telematic spaces by artists engaged with technology is that of UK-based artist, Paul Sermon and his work Telematic Dreaming (1992). Dixon (2007: 220) describes this work as a ‘wonderful, exquisitely simple and groundbreaking installation [that] creates a type of magic, a sort of lucid dream’. Over the last two decades, Sermon has built upon the very simple concept of two geographically remote spaces being connected in time. In Telematic Dreaming (Figure 3.1), images of two beds, one

72 • Astronauts and Avatars

Figure 3.1 An interaction in Telematic Dreaming © Paul Sermon, 1992 (courtesy of the artist)

in Finland and the other in England, are projected onto each other, enabling a real-time interaction with the performer in one space and the visitor in the other (Sermon 1992). This new form of telematic experience enabled the participant to ‘travel’ or, rather, to be ‘present’ in another space through the use of technology. Susan Kozel has written an interesting account of her experience of being the performer in this piece (seen in Figure 3.1 in the projected image) in ‘Spacemaking: Experiences of a Virtual Body’ (1994). She notes that ‘telepresence has been called an out-of-body experience, yet what intrigues me is the return to the body which is implied by any voyage beyond it’ (Kozel 1994: n.p.). She goes on to discuss the claim by artists such as Myron Krueger that virtual technology changes what it means to be human and alters human perception, but suggests that it does not ‘simply refer to the voyage out, but the inevitable return and the lasting effect that the outward motion leaves on the reunited body’ (Kozel 1994: n.p.). A more recent project by performance artist and activist Joseph DeLappe was realized in the virtual world of Second Life. Inspired by a comment, or rather a criticism, by a player in America’s Army who suggested that DeLappe was suffering from a ‘Gandhi Complex’, he began researching the history of protest and Mahatma Gandhi’s forms of protest. The result was the re-enactment of Gandhi’s 1930 ‘Salt March to Dandi’, from 12 March to 6 April in 2008, in a durational performance in Second Life. Using a customized treadmill (Figure 3.2) that controlled the Gandhi avatar MGandhi Chakrabarti, DeLappe walked for twentysix days to cover the 240 miles march, but this time in virtual space.

Denise Doyle • 73

Figure 3.2 Salt March to Dandi; the artist on the treadmill at the Eyebeam Gallery © Joseph DeLappe, 2008 (courtesy of the artist). Photograph © Christine A. Butler

A whole series of works were created as a result of the performance and the subsequent residency at the Eyebeam Gallery, New York (DeLappe 2008a, 2008b). However, acknowledging that the circumstances of the works came from the residency, and the opportunity to experiment with the rapid prototyping facilities there, DeLappe recognized that it was the time spent re-enacting in Second Life that gave him the opportunity for other ideas to emerge. When interviewing him,3 he commented that: ‘What’s fascinating about these performance projects, this walking, gives you, number one time, this physical movement, and contemplating this reality as it is presenting in front of you’ (DeLappe, cited in Doyle 2010: 244). As to how the land would be traversed in Second Life and how this connected to Gandhi’s actual march to Dandi in 1930, DeLappe

74 • Astronauts and Avatars

comments that he was initially considering this as a geographical connection or interpretation. In the end, due to the nature of Second Life space being spatially discontinuous (with a number of mainlands and then a series of disconnected islands), he acknowledged in the interview that ‘it was impossible to make the route do that’ (DeLappe, cited in Doyle 2010: 252). After beginning on the largest mainland (and traversing the land in a circular route), DeLappe teleported4 to everdecreasing masses of land. Sometimes he teleported to smaller plots of land, or islands, with random security systems, creating what he terms ‘a kind of involuntary navigation’ that he did not expect. The navigation came through the recognition of presence on the grid. He explains that in the end he decided to follow this form of navigation and responded by thinking: let’s see where I am and let’s keep walking. That was definitely something I thought about, but I’m really glad I didn’t do that perfect tracing of the map. Because, what I landed up doing, the primary navigation was, I would go from one group of green5 to the other, so I could interact with the residents and invite people to walk. That became a primary way of navigating after a while. (DeLappe, cited in Doyle 2010: 252).

Working within the realm of art and technology (and as an artist who engages with narrative as method), my own exploration of virtual space over the last decade has often been based on the retelling of narratives in a new context. An early practice-based project was to re-interpret Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1997) through an interactive artefact. The story was of Marco Polo’s adventures to imagined cities, with Calvino providing the descriptions of the fantastic, symbolic and often conceptually based places. How do we travel without a map? Of note were my closing remarks where I suggested that the creation of a figure in the virtual space, that of Eleni, was worthy of further study ‘to produce Wandering Fictions for the web remained essential for the concept. The impact on the process, above technical constraints, of constructing a character to exist within this space was continually evident. The net space if it has borders and boundaries are not yet visible. A very different potential space could still emerge’ (Doyle 2000: 24). Following my introduction to Second Life in 2007, it was a relatively short time before I created Wanderingfictions Story. The origin of the maiden name was based on media archaeologist Siegfried Zielinksi’s early writings on the internet, in which he notes that: In the motion of crossing a border, heterology encircles the impossible place, that is unlocatable, that is actually empty, that in practice is created in the motion of crossing the border . . . this is what taking action at the

Denise Doyle • 75

border, that which I call subjective, targets in relation to the Net: strong, dynamic, nervous, definitely process-orientated aesthetic constructions, that are introduced into the Net as Wandering Fictions. (Zielinski 1996: 285)

Having already developed a number of artist projects utilizing and investigating Second Life as a space for artistic experimentation, in 2009 my interest in the notion of Wanderingfictions Story as a manifestation of, and from, virtual space became the basis of a new project, Meta-Dreamer (2009). After reflecting on DeLappe’s MGandhi series,6 I began working with digital materialization expert Turlif Vilbrandt7 to create a series of digitally materialized objects of Wanderingfictions Story. By experimenting with digital processes that extracted data from Second Life and investigating different types of materials, attempts were made to represent clouded glass and jade, amongst other textures. The end result can be seen in Figure 3.3, the qualities of the figure are cloud-like and ethereal as though Wanderingfictions Story, the meta-dreamer, is ‘almost there’. The digital object was presented in the Golden Thread Gallery space (as part of the ISEA20098 exhibition) alongside DeLappe’s figure of MGandhi 1 (2008). The visitor could also experience the virtual installation on Kriti Island9 that included the presentation of Wanderingfictions Story, the meta-dreamer, through captured images and her meta-dream writing.

On Not Travelling at All Ah, so you are a map maker! I wonder what remarks you make of the landscapes that you travel through? Do you have a system of classification at all? Of patterning? Is it to ‘capture’ what it is to be here or to be there? I’m uncertain of my own geography. I don’t even know where I live. Conceptually, that is. If we looked on the map I would not be able to point to it and say ‘there, that is where I live, that is my home’. Perhaps this is something that happens with a virtual geography. — D. Doyle and T. Kim, ‘Embodied Narrative’

Moving through space (and time) is our basic level of experiential knowledge, as we exist in the physical world. Geographer Doreen Massey, in an essay responding to the work of artist Olafur Eliasson, attempts to illustrate a set of relationships between time and space by using a narrative account of a journey between Manchester and Liverpool in the United Kingdom. In the process of travelling, she suggests that ‘if movement is reality itself then what we think of as space is a cut through all those trajectories; a simultaneity of unfinished stories’

76 • Astronauts and Avatars

Figure 3.3 Wanderingfictions Story as part of the Meta-Dreamer project at the Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast © Denise Doyle, 2009. Digital Object

(Massey 2003: 111). Further, ‘space has its times. To open up space to this kind of imagination means thinking about time and space together. You can’t hold places and things still. What you can do is meet up with them . . . “Here”, in that sense is not a place on a map. It is that intersection of trajectories’ (Massey 2003: 111, emphasis in original). Two interesting points emerge from this argument. First, if each space has a particular time, as Massey implies, then it could be that virtual world spaces also have a particular time (or times) attached to them. Not only, then, could there be different sets of time-spaces that may be located in the Second Life, the space could enable a particular reflection upon different time-spaces as phenomenal experience. Second, if ‘place’ can be considered to be an intersection of trajectories of unfinished stories, does this challenge our understanding and

Denise Doyle • 77

articulation of what place is? Does this also force us to rethink the notion of the traveller? Is ‘place’, in fact, physical at all? An artist residency in India10 revealed that distinct folk art practices have developed in very specific regions and can even be linked to individual villages in the state of West Bengal. These folk art practices are intrinsically connected to (and are born out of) place. Certain parallels already exist between the virtual space of Kriti Island and the real places in West Bengal. Wanderingfictions Story (my avatar and virtual counterpart) ‘wanders’ in her virtual place, just as the Bauls and Fakirs (minstrels) ‘wander’ through their place in the eastern region of the state (having already inspired many of the writings of the well-known Indian writer and poet Rabindranath Tagore). Edward Casey considers that ‘there is no knowing or sensing a place except by being in that place and to be in a place is not, then, subsequent to perception . . . but is an ingredient of perception itself. Such knowledge, genuinely local knowledge, is itself experiential’ (Casey 1997: 18). Yet Massey suggests that places should not be considered ‘as points or areas on map, but as integrations of space and time, as spatio-temporal events’ (Massey 2005: 130, emphasis in original). Perhaps an understanding of place should be multilayered and draw from a range of views in attempting to ­consider the ‘specificity of place’ itself (Massey 2005: 130). In her Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will, writer Judith Schalansky (2009: 10) suggests that ‘the lines on a map prove themselves to be artists of transformation: they crisscross in cool mathematical patterns . . . they ensure the earth retains its physicality’. Having never travelled to these real islands (and never intending to), Schalansky pieces together information and descriptions of these imagined, yet real places. Comparing the earth represented as a globe and through the atlas she writes: this Earth has no borders, no up or down, no beginning and no end [whereas] in an atlas, the Earth is as flat as it was before explorers pinned down the white spaces of enticingly undiscovered regions with contours and names, freeing the edges of the world from the sea monsters and other creatures that had long held sway there. (Schalansky 2009: 11)

Rapa Iti, Pingelap and Clipperton Atoll are but three of the fifty islands that are described by Schalansky (it is hard not to imagine Kriti Island to be the fifty-first of Schalansky’s Islands, full of stories yet to be told). Rapa Iti is forty square kilometres with 482 inhabitants and lies in the Pacific Ocean as part of French Polynesia. Marc Liblin, who lived near the foothills of the Vosges in France, dreamt that he speaks an unknown language. Eventually, he meets an old woman who speaks the old Rapa

78 • Astronauts and Avatars

of her homeland. Liblin, ‘who has never been outside Europe, marries the only woman who understands him, and in 1983 he leaves with her for the island where his language is spoken’ (Schalansky 2009: 72). Seventy-five of the 250 inhabitants of Pingelap in the Caroline Islands see no colour, ‘not the fiery crimson of the sunset, not the azure of the ocean . . . Silly talk about the gloriousness of colour makes them indignant’ (Schalansky 2009: 98). Clipperton Atoll, with barely two kilometres of land, is uninhabited. Schalansky suggests that the very construction of an island lends itself to narrative, or to stories in literature (everything becomes a stage), pointing out that: ‘The absurdity of reality is lost on the large land masses, but here on the islands, it is writ large. An island offers a stage: everything that happens on it is practically forced to turn into a story, into a chamber piece in the middle of nowhere, into the stuff of literature’ (Schalansky 2009: 19–20). If Kriti Island were to be described in similar ways (if her stories could be told), the space (or place) would not be unlike the islands described by Schalansky (2009). When Kriti Island was specifically placed almost adjacent to the virtual island of Symobia in 2007, there was barely another island nearby. By 2014, it is as though Kriti has become part of an archipelago of islands. Beyond its locality, it is hard to determine the situation of Kriti with any geographical certainty. But when I try and ‘imagine’ the differences and similarities between the real islands in Schalansky‘s atlas and Kriti, their differences seem to fade and their similarities strengthen – the island offering up a stage writ large.

Conclusion As we rethink the traveller at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we realize there are now many new forms of travel, and each form holds its own poetics (and politics). Travel can be embodied, remembered, imagined, even as fictive travels of the mind (in fact the traveller no longer necessarily even needs to leave her home). According to Bachelard, writing in The Poetics of Reverie, ‘the dreamer dreams at his own depth’ (1969: 197). Yet he uses the curious analogy of how in tranquil water ‘depth and surface are reconciled. The deeper the water the clearer the mirror . . . depth and surface belong to one another’ (1969: 197). New technologies explored by Paul Sermon (Telematic Dreaming, 1992), Char Davies (Osmose 1995 and Ephémère 1998) and more recently Joseph DeLappe (Salt March to Dandi, 2008) point to new relationships in virtual space, experienced as real and sometimes offering entirely new spatial experiences; perhaps

Denise Doyle • 79

‘depth and surface’ has a resonance here too. Equally, the explorations of artists (and scientists) and dancers, such as Kitsou Dubois, point to new relationships of the body, space and travel. As the real and imagined are no longer strangers (or opposites), it is also true that the physical and the virtual have become more firmly entangled. Whether travelled to physically or in the imagination, the experience of a place can be as a mathematical pattern on a map, or as a virtual island on a virtual grid, or even as a real place imagined. In the accounts of those who have experienced zero-gravity conditions and those who experienced their virtual bodies, the heterogeneity of the experiences points towards a complex interweaving of the virtual and the physical, and that of the body with space and place. The question of what is real and what is fiction has always been a tenuous one, and this premise is demonstrated in the stories and descriptions of the islands on Schalansky’s (2009) map. The narratives are written based on fact, and yet these embellished stories allow us to see the world slightly differently, revealing stories that allow us to make another sense of the world and to understand grasp a little more our passion to experience the extreme spaces of the unknown. Denise Doyle is Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at the University of Wolverhampton, Adjunct Professor of Virtual Worlds and Digital Practice at Ontario College of Art and Design University, Toronto, and Principal Editor of the Journal of Virtual Creativity (formally Metaverse Creativity), Intellect, UK. She has a background in fine art painting and digital media. She has contributed research in the fields of art and technology, phenomenology, performance, video games, art and consciousness, virtual worlds and digital arts practice through numerous book chapters and articles, and recently edited the artist-led book New Opportunities for Artistic Practice in Virtual Worlds (IGI Global, 2015). She sits on the editorial boards for the International Journal of Performance Art and Digital Media (Routledge) and the Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds (Intellect). Her research interests include: art–science dialogues, the phenomenology of digital space, interactive film, philosophies of the imagination, immersive technologies, practice-based research methods and digital narratives.

Notes  1 As a teenager of 18, I boarded a plane to Israel and ‘disappeared’ into the Middle East for six months, much to the dismay of my family. I was too

80 • Astronauts and Avatars

 2

 3  4  5  6

 7  8  9 10

busy having adventures of my own to consider the worry I created by not keeping in touch in a predigital age. However, my intense love of travelling has never diminished as both the experience of ‘travelling’ itself and the experience of ‘arriving’ at my destination. There was in particular an animation I created entitled The Dress (1999) that was inspired by a piece of travel writing by Mary Morris (1988): ‘it was my mother who made a traveller out of me, not so much because of the places where she went as because of her yearning to go. She used to buy globes and maps and plan dream journeys she’d never take’. Joseph DeLappe was interviewed by the author in March 2010 as part of a study on the use of virtual worlds for creative practice and the avatarmediated experience. It is possible for your avatar to walk, run and fly in Second Life, whilst ‘teleporting’ is a method of travelling from one geographical region or virtual space to another. A green dot indicates the presence of an avatar in Second Life. During an artist residency at the Eyebeam Gallery, New York in 2008, Joseph DeLappe experimented with a range of data materialization processes to produce MGandhi 1 (8” rapid prototyped 3D print), MGandhi 2 (15” rapid prototyped 3D print finished in genuine gold leaf) and MGandhi 3 (17’ tall monumental sculpture constructed from cardboard and hot glue). Turlif Vilbrandt is an expert in the field of digital materialization. He is currently completing his Ph.D. research at the SMARTlab Digital Media Research Institute, University College Dublin. The Inter Society for Electronic Arts organizes an annual symposium and related exhibitions. In 2009 it was held in Belfast on the Island of Ireland. Kriti Island was an art laboratory space in Second Life that I set up in 2007– 2014 to host artistic explorations of virtual space. This artist residency in the spring of 2011 brought together a group of six artists, musicians and dancers from the United States, the United Kingdom and Eire, and a group of West Bengal folk artists working with Banglanatak. com, Calcutta (organized through the India FOLKNEST Ethno-Magic Going Global (EGG) Project funded through the EU and UNESCO India).

References Bachelard, G. 1969. The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language and the Cosmos. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. [1943] 1988. Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, trans. E.R. Farrell and C.F. Farrell. Dallas: Dallas Institute Publications. Calvino, I. 1997. Invisible Cities. London: Vintage. Casey, E. 1997. ‘How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time’, in S. Feld and K. Basso (eds), Senses of Place. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, pp. 3–52. Damer, B. 1998. Avatars! Exploring and Building Virtual Worlds on the Internet. Berkeley, CA: Peachpit Press.

Denise Doyle • 81

Davies, C. 1997. ‘Changing Space: Virtual Reality as an Arena of Embodied Being’, in R. Packer and K. Jordan (eds), Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, pp. 137–153. ———. 2003. ‘Landscape, Earth, Body, Being, Space, and Time in the Immersive Virtual Environments Osmose and Ephemere’, in J. Malloy (ed.), Women, Art and Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 322–337. Dixon, S. 2007. Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Doyle, D. 2000. ‘Wandering Fictions 2.0: Eleni’s Journey’, MA dissertation. Coventry: Coventry University. ———. 2010. ‘Art and the Emergent Imagination in Avatar-Mediated Online Space’, Ph.D. thesis. SMARTlab Digital Media Institute, London: University of East London. Doyle, D., and T. Kim. 2007. ‘Embodied Narrative: The Virtual Nomad and the Meta Dreamer’, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 3(2/3): 209–22. Ettlinger, O. 2009. The Architecture of Virtual Space. Ljubljana: University of Ljubljana Press. Grau, O. 2003. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Heim, M. 1993. The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. New York: Oxford University Press. Heudin, J.C. (ed.). 1999. Virtual Worlds: Synthetic Universes, Digital Life and Complexity. Reading, MA: Perseus Books. Jones, D.E. 2006. ‘I, Avatar: Constructions of Self and Place in Second Life and the Technological Imagination’. Gnovis, Journal of Communication, Culture and Technology. Retrieved 5 December 2016 from http://www.gnovisjournal.org/ files/Donald-E-Jones-I-Avatar.pdf. Kozel, S. 1994. ‘Spacemaking: Experiences of a Virtual Body’. Retrieved 5 December 2016 from http://art.net/~dtz/kozel.html. Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Lindstrand, T. 2007. ‘Viva Pinata: Architecture of the Everyday’, in V.F. Borries, M. Bottger and S.P. Walz (eds), Space Time Play: Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism – The Next Level. Basel: Birkhauser Verlag AG, pp. 354–357. Massey, D. 2003. ‘Some Times of Space’, in S. May (ed.), Olafur Eliasson: The Weather Report. London: Tate Publishing, pp.107–118. ———. 2005. For Space. London: Sage. Morris, M. 1988. Nothing to Declare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Moser, M.A. (ed.). 1996. Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rheingold, H. 1991. Virtual Reality. New York: Summit Books. Schalansky, J. 2009. Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will. London: Particular Books. Schroeder, R. (ed.). 2002. The Social Life of Avatars: Presence and Interaction in Shared Virtual Environments. London: Springer. Soja, E.W. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

82 • Astronauts and Avatars

Stockburger, A. 2007. ‘Playing the Third Place: Spatial Modalities in Contemporary Game Environments’, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 3(2/3): 223–36. Tagore, R. [1916] 2011. Stray Birds. Knockeven, Ireland: Salmon Poetry. Triscott, N., and R. La Frenais (eds). 2005. ZeroGravity: A Cultural User’s Guide. London: Arts Catalyst. Zielinski, S. 1996. ‘Thinking the Border and the Boundary’, in T. Druckery (ed.), Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation. Vancouver: Aperture Foundation.

Artwork References Davies, C. 1995. Osmose. Virtual Reality Environment. Retrieved 5 December 2016 from http://www.immersence.com/osmose/index.php. ———. 1998. Ephémère. Virtual Reality Environment. Retrieved 5 December 2016 from http://www.immersence.com. DeLappe, J. 2008a. Re-enactment: The Salt Satyagraha Online. Retrieved 5 December 2016 from http://saltmarchsecondlife.wordpress.com. ———. 2008b. Tourists and Travelers. New York, Eyebeam Gallery. Retrieved 20 April 2013 from http://eyebeam.org/archive/events/tourists-and-­travelers. Dove, T., and M. Mackenzie. 1993. Archaeology of the Mother Tongue. Virtual Reality Installation. Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta, Canada. Retrieved 5 December 2016 from http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/coproduction/ archives/a.asp. Gromala, D., and Y. Sharir. 1994. Dancing with the Virtual Dervish: Virtual Bodies. Virtual Reality Installation. Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta, Canada. Retrieved 5 December 2016 from http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/coproduc​ tion/archives/d.asp#dancing. Laurel, B., and R. Strickland. 1993. Placeholder. Virtual Reality Installation. Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta, Canada. Retrieved 5 December 2016 from http:// www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/coproduction/archives/p.asp#placeholder. Sermon, P. 1992. Telematic Dreaming. Performance Installation. Retrieved 5 December 2016 from http://creativetechnology.salford.ac.uk/paulsermon/ dream. Zapp, A. 2002. The Imaginary Hotel. Networked Installation. Retrieved 5 December 2016 from http://www.virtualart.at/database/general/work/theimaginary-hotel.html. ———. 2005. Human Avatars. Interactive Installation. Retrieved 20 April 2013 from http://spa.exeter.ac.uk/drama/presence/presence.stanford.edu_3455/ Collaboratory/283.html.

Finitude before Finitude: The Case of Rousseau-Bougainville-Diderot

T4 Finitude before Finitude The Case of Rousseau-Bougainville-Diderot Benoît Dillet

[The] song [of sirens], we must remember, was aimed at sailors, men who take risks and feel bold impulses, and it was also a means of navigation: it was a distance, and it revealed the possibility of traveling this distance, of making the song into the movement toward the song, and of making this movement the expression of the greatest desire. Strange navigation, but toward what end? —M. Blanchot, The Book to Come

The New World ‘Our world has just discovered another one’, wrote Montaigne (1991: 1029) after reading and condemning detailed accounts of the massacres orchestrated by the Spaniards in present-day Mexico, Florida and Brazil. It is from the notes and fragments of his Journal de Voyage (1580– 81; discovered in 1770 and published in 1774), written before the period of the Grand Tour, that Montaigne compiled and developed in his reflections in his Essais (1580–95). Gilbert Chinard studied Montaigne as one of the first French thinkers (with the philosopher of law, Jean Bodin) to recognize the good nature of Native Americans; their defence of these Indigenous people was a way to critique French society without being condemned (Chinard 1970: 212–17). In his well-known and controversial chapter ‘On the Cannibals’, Montaigne (1991: 228–41) neither advocated a return to nature nor a celebration of cannibalism, but he aimed at denouncing (much like many humanitarians today) the atrocities and the massacres in America. Perhaps independent of his will, he started a new tradition – what Chinard called ‘the exotic

84 • Finitude before Finitude: The Case of Rousseau-Bougainville-Diderot

dream’. It is precisely this rise of ‘exoticism’ that Chinard studies that interests us here: how the opening of a new world, America, has had tremendous effects on both anthropological thought and the imaginary of travel. Yet, the notion of exoticism is ambiguous and how it links to finitude. ‘Exo-’ in exoticism denotes both the possibility of an exteriority, but it is a known exteriority. It is, however, not an overstatement to claim, for instance, that Montaigne’s defence of the ‘primitives’ makes him a precursor to subaltern studies, since he aimed not only at writing about the human traits of the primitives, but also at launching the first critique of European humanist thought by joining the resistance of these peoples against colonialism and imperialism. For the literary critic Michel de Certeau (1986: 68), the ‘discovery’ of the ‘new world’ was only really significant because of the space that it opened in the text. Montaigne’s text produces the other inside the text; the discovery of a new place is then also replicated inside language to reveal the reworking of space inside the text. This reworking was not necessarily a positive one for the primitives, and Montaigne’s defence aimed precisely at participating in the rewriting and the reshaping of this space to lodge the resistance of the other. Following the same line, Anthony Pagden (1993) argues that the ‘new world’ is not America but Europe, since America in itself had always already been there when the Europeans ‘discovered’ it – what was new was the space America started to take in Europe’s image of space, but also the change in Europe’s understanding of time. In creating a new space, travellers participate in the task of poiesis, with the material supports of books, drawings and maps, but also artefacts and plants found in remote lands. One of the main themes underlying this chapter is how anthropology and ethnography were born overseas or, to be more precise, how anthropology was invented between the writing of overseas travels and their reading by some of the most prominent Enlightenment figures (Liebersohn 2008: 17–31).

Tahiti I believe that understanding travel as poetics today requires another voyage, a travel back to the eighteenth century when the travel writing genre (especially ‘sea-narratives’) was immensely popular. Hundreds of narratives were published, sometimes real accounts, sometimes unauthorized compilations of previous accounts, or simply pure fabulations. Although this new literary production had multiple effects, it served many different and sometimes conflicting roles. Overseas

Benoît Dillet • 85

travel writing had to respond to a compromise and tension between the ‘general public’ who made it profitable and gratifying, but it also had to provide as much scientific and technical observation as possible (Edwards 1994: 8). The competition between France and Great Britain for world domination was fierce and travel narratives did not escape this conflict. Apart from the essential legal and political control of the seas, narratives and testimonies also aimed at justifying the imperial conquest. The ‘discovery’ of Tahiti, first in 1767 by the expedition led by Samuel Wallis, then ten months later by Louis-Antoine Bougainville, did not escape this logic. Tahiti is synonymous with a long history of exoticism in French thought. Soon after the publication of Bougainville’s travel accounts, it quickly became, rightly or wrongly, the epitome of Rousseau’s description of the state of nature, and it also led to the development of anthropology before anthropology. At that time, overseas travellers were employed by the state to explore, study and most importantly colonize; for instance, Bougainville and Charles de La Condamine for France, and Thomas Cook for the British Empire. The infinitude of the world for European thought meant that there was a contiguity between knowledge and travel; a border between the known and the unknown could be drawn. The context of Bougainville’s voyage around the world (1766–69) is twofold. First, from the eighteenth century onwards, travels were organized by patronage, which shaped both their routes and their writings. ‘Many decades before the British, the French state took a direct role in organizing expeditions with scientific ends, method, expertise, and organization’ (Liebersohn 2006: 81). Given the well-defined aims of these voyages, the specific routes to follow and the explicit commitment to further colonial expansion for ever more political domination, intellectuals read travellers’ accounts with suspicion. Almost contemporary to Bougainville’s voyage, Raynal and Diderot wrote in L’histoire des deux Indes: ‘the contemplative man is sedentary, and the traveller is ignorant or a liar’ (Raynal 1794: 66).1 Second, the context was also that of Rousseauism and the noble savage. Atkinson argues that it is not a coincidence if the ‘noble savage’ was not found in Africa, but on the other side of the Cape of Good Hope, in Oceania and in the Pacific islands: ‘distance adds a lot to beauty’ (1924: 64–65). The search for an earthly paradise inherited from the Christian tradition motivated and guided the travellers (Eliade 1955).2 The mythical figure of the noble savage fascinated the sailors much like sirens. Atkinson also notes that to the mythical figure of the noble savage should be added the significant presence of the Utopian tradition from the sixteenth and

86 • Finitude before Finitude: The Case of Rousseau-Bougainville-Diderot

seventeenth centuries. This tradition was first renewed by Thomas More and Francis Bacon, but a ‘literary tradition of Utopias had become very French before the death of Louis XIV [in 1715], through Utopists who nowadays are much less known: Bergeron, Foigny, Vairasse, Gilbert, Lahontan and Tyssot de Patot’ (Atkinson 1924: 22). In the Utopian tradition, what is idealized is not the individual, but societies; it is the living together – the being-with (Mitsein) – that is emphasized. Therefore, the co-existence of the myth of the noble savage with Utopian thought meant that Bougainville and his men ‘were prepared, before travelling, to find “republics” in savage or semi-civilised countries’ (Atkinson 1924: 47).3 It is in this difference and spacing that Bougainville’s Voyage Around the World should be read.

Rousseau At the same time as his famous Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, Rousseau argued for the necessity of scientific travel. This is particularly well-developed in the section ‘On Travel’ at the end of Emile, or On Education, originally published in 1762, where he gives prescriptions on a good way of travelling: But once the utility of travel is recognized, does it follow that it is suitable for everyone? Far from it. On the contrary, it is suitable for only very few people . . . Everything that is done by reason ought to have its rules. Travel – taken as a part of education – ought to have its rules. To travel for the sake of traveling is to wander, to be a vagabond. To travel to inform oneself is still to have too vague an aim. (Rousseau 1979: 455)4

Ultimately, the purpose of travelling for Rousseau is to find a home, in order to ‘fix’ one’s life to a place. Travel functions as a way to return to home, since there is no return to the state of nature, but an appreciation of the origins of humans. Only by recognizing the goodness of humans, and by gathering the customs and practices of other societies, can travel be fruitful to the self and others. While a similar positive judgement on travel is found in Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopedia – in Louis de Jaucourt’s entry on ‘Voyage’5 – Rousseau (1979: 455) emphasized that ‘it is suitable for very few people to travel’. In his elitist picture of travel, he warns against vagabonds who travel for travel’s sake and affirms that, on the contrary, before leaving his home, the traveller has to know philosophy (if not become a philosopher) in order to know what he is searching for. While in the work of Rousseau there is a progression and a movement from his Discourse on Inequality, first published in 1755, to Emile, or

Benoît Dillet • 87

On Education, published in 1762, it is nonetheless important to remember that these two treatises were published before Bougainville left for his voyage around the world in 1766. Bougainville returned from his voyage in 1769 and published his accounts of the travel (which is a rewriting of his dairy) in 1771. Diderot first wrote an unpublished review of Bougainville’s Voyage (Diderot 1995) and finally published his Supplément to Bougainville’s Voyage in 1773, which will be discussed after Rousseau and Bougainville in this chapter. Therefore, when Rousseau, as is well-known, denigrated the status of travel writing in his Discourse on Inequality, he prepared the ground for his reflection on the educational benefits of travel in Emile: For the three or four hundred years since the inhabitants of Europe inundated the other parts of the world and continually published new collections of travels and stories, I am convinced that we know no other men but the Europeans alone . . . it seems that philosophy travels nowhere  . . . The reason for this is manifest, at least for distant countries. There are hardly more than four sorts of men who make long voyages: sailors, merchants, soldiers, and missionaries. Now we can hardly expect the first three classes to provide good observers; and as for those in the fourth . . . we must believe that they would not voluntarily commit themselves to investigations that would appear to be sheer curiosity. (Rousseau 1987: 99, emphasis added)

For Rousseau, the production of travel writing is problematic because ‘philosophy travels nowhere’, and only interested men travel and write travel accounts that compete with and overshadow the more noble philosophical treatises. However, this is why there is a compatibility between his argument in the Discourse and in Emile: he explains in the Discourse on Inequality that if a voyage were made by a philosopher or a man of letters, it would be ‘the most important voyage of all’, since ‘we ourselves would see a new world sally forth from their pen, and we would thus learn to know our own’ (Rousseau 1987: 100).6 Rousseau extensively used travel writing (Chinard 1911) to formulate his argument in the Discourse on Inequality, especially in order to formulate his idea of the natural goodness of man.7 His disdain for travel writings comes from his desire to see an established discipline of anthropology. At the time of the writing of the Discourse on Inequality, neither ethnology nor anthropology existed as such, and this is why he could only use the work of travel writers as well as naturalists (or natural historians). In fact, the other main source for the text, besides his debate with Hobbes and Locke, is Buffon’s Natural History (published between 1749 and 1788), especially the ‘natural history of man’ from the second book.8 In the absence of any form of anthropological thought,

88 • Finitude before Finitude: The Case of Rousseau-Bougainville-Diderot

Rousseau turns to natural history to find how a discourse on nature can inform the knowledge of man. As is well-known, this is the questioning of the relationship between nature and the human that led Claude LéviStrauss to consider Discourse on Inequality as ‘the first treatise of general ethnology’ (Lévi-Strauss 1996: 47).9 One of the ambiguities of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality is the place given to the natural man. At times, Rousseau refuted his concrete and historical existence (1987: 58), yet he notes that he later added attempted to provide empirical proof of the existence of a state of nature and of natural men in remote lands discovered by the travellers. The notes then complicate the text and give it a second layer. He could have easily refuted his argument about the solitary life of the natural man with the descriptions of the social life of ‘the savage men’, but he decided to keep the ambiguity by juxtaposing the fictional and timeless ideal state of nature together with the discussion of empirical descriptions from travellers’ accounts. According to Lévi-Strauss, only philosophers who come after Rousseau can do ‘a reversal of the relation between the self and the other’, while also asserting that ‘nature ­presents us incarnated in “sensible objects”’ (Lévi-Strauss 1996: 51). Thus, Rousseau opened the path to anthropology and ethnological studies, explicitly asking philosophers to travel in order to report back on the social and political organization of the ‘savage men’ encountered during the ‘discoveries’ made by these great travellers. It will therefore be tempting to a posteriori call Bougainville the philosopher-traveller that Rousseau desired, but while Bougainville was a mathematician and was a remarkably talented man of letters (he also studied under d’Alembert), the reality is rather different.

Bougainville What is remarkable about Bougainville’s travel is the voids of the map that it intends to reach and know. But it is also only through the text of the map and the text of his ‘relation of voyage’ that his and his men’s discoveries could be actualized. As de Certeau (1986) argues, it is the text that produces the first figure of the other, and differently from the surfaces of the book, the map also worked towards ordering the world, appropriating land and tracing lines of powers. Cartography codifies the names of continents, islands, rivers, hills, etc. given by travellers, and the map is turned into a technology of power that ‘frames’ the environment of everyone who visits these places (Waggaman 1992: 99–115).10 Cartography is more than simply a spatial representation of

Benoît Dillet • 89

the world, but is also a writing of space, a composition of both verbal as well as non-verbal signs. For navigators, especially in the eighteenth century, to use their predecessors’ map was like ‘travel[ling] in their predecessors’ language’ (de Certeau 1986: 145). Bougainville’s map of his company’s travel (Figure 4.1) clearly illustrates the infinite nature of the world in 1769: Australia has no contours, many of today’s islands are ‘missing’ and the earth is an unknown place. The fifth continent did not have a name until the French geographer and cartographer Conrad Malte-Brun named it ‘Oceania’ in his treatise Géographie de toutes les parties du monde, published in 1804. It is as if the voids of the maps were waiting to be filled, for these empty spaces are not merely representations of the sea, but of the unknown, outside the borders of European knowledge. This configuration is hard to imagine today, but the ‘voids’ of the world captured the imaginary of both travellers and the readers of travel accounts. The relations of travel change how the world is imagined, by contesting legal, moral, political and epistemic borders. In fact, the map and textual descriptions are the first way to ‘acquire a dominium’ (Pagden 2008: 427), to begin the appropriation of new spaces. The first objective of these scientific (or proto-scientific) explorations was the appropriation of land – which is denounced by Denis Diderot in his Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville – rather than a disinterested study and a disinterested admiration of these remote and unknown lands. Maps frame Europe’s relation to the world; reading the world can only be done through the dominium of the maps. The methods to acquire such knowledge of the ‘outside’, the ‘beyond’ or the ‘unknown’ are diverse, and the authenticity of these travel accounts was often questioned. There is no definite method that was in use for directing travel accounts besides the fact that they were destined for the royal courts or the other powers that had financed the travel. For instance, in the agreement describing the objectives of the voyage undertaken by Bougainville (1766–69), addressed to King Louis XV by Bougainville (though referring to himself in the third person), it first states that ‘it may be advantageous for France to know [these Pacific islands] and to acquire them’. Regarding the collection of ­‘ethnographic’ information, the guideline is rather vague: it is in these climates that we find rich metals and spices. Sir Bougainville will examine the soils, the trees and the principal productions; he will bring back samples and drawings of everything that he will judge of interest; he will observe, as much as possible, all the places to be used for anchorage for naval vessels and everything that can be of interest for navigation. (Bougainville 1966: 25)

Figure 4.1 World map by Jean Baptiste Bourguidnon d’Anville (1771) from Bougainville’s diary Bougainville et ses compagnons autour du monde, vol. 1, ed. E. Taillemite (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1978). By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France

Benoît Dillet • 91

The politics of naming then comes into play as a method of assigning meaning to the unknown parts of the world. A nominalist practice comes to substitute the lack of precise ethnographic methods, and it is in fact both a minimalist and powerful method: inscribing space to leave an indelible mark of the journey on the map. In describing travel as the process of writing space, de Certeau certainly captures well what it may have been like for some of the great travellers of the nineteenth century (Cook, Wallis, Bougainville, Humboldt and so forth): ‘What gradually fills the world’s voids with words, multiplies and details representations (geographical maps, historical enactments, etc.), and thus “conquers” space by marking it with meanings, is a component of and force within history’ (de Certeau 1986: 139, emphasis added). The writing of the world is then a process of history-making, and the authors of the text of the world become ‘the great men of history’, to be remembered and commemorated. Of course, the politics of naming is not independent of everyday occurrences and accidents. For example, Bougainville writes in his Voyage that he decided to name a small isle, île de la Pentecôte (Pentecoste Island), because that was the day when the ship perceived it. Another one was named île de l’Aurore (Daybreak Island) since the crew saw it in the early morning (Bougainville 1966: 242). The act of naming can also fall under certain prejudices about the people being named – for instance, Bougainville called another island île des Lépreux (Island of Lepers) due to the first judgements he made regarding the inhabitants. The choice of names for the ‘newly discovered island’ Tahiti is insightful in understanding the impressions of Bougainville and his company and the objectives of the mission. Wallis decided to name the island in 1767 ‘King George III Island’, but the first name given by the French to designate Tahiti was ‘Utopia’, revealing a desire to establish an exchange between philosophy and empirical observation. This name was given by the French naturalist and botanist Philibert de Commerson, who is not as well-known as Bougainville, but Liebersohn’s recent work reconsidered his influence, leading him to affirm that Commerson ‘came close to fulfilling Rousseau’s call for a scientific world traveler’ (Liebersohn 2006: 20). However, Bougainville’s expedition was far from being a scientific exploration. Jacques Proust notes that the expedition did not bring back many samples of plants, spices and animals, but remained famous for its description of Tahiti as a natural Utopia, illustrating the ‘trendy “rousseauism”, even though the myth of the “noble savage” had nothing to do with the thought of Rousseau’ (Proust 1982: 13). Proust is right to emphasize the difference between Rousseau’s thought and a form of ‘Rousseauism’ that was popular at the time, and Bougainville and his

92 • Finitude before Finitude: The Case of Rousseau-Bougainville-Diderot

company were certainly more influenced by this air du temps than by the philosopher’s theses. By explaining how Banks and Solander from Cook’s expedition spent three months in Tahiti, while the French spent only nine days, Proust can conclude: ‘The era of great scientific explorations had begun [with Cook], while the time of the adventure as rêverie [l’aventure rêveuse] ended with Bougainville’ (1982: 14). The fact that Commerson, the naturalist who was selected by Buffon for the expedition, named the island ‘Utopia’ in itself questions the accuracy of the ethnographic material that the company brought back. The second name given by the French to Tahiti was ‘la Nouvelle-Cythère’.11 Bougainville’s first impressions of the island seem to have been the only motives for this name: the Tahitian offered ‘their’ women to the sailors as soon as they arrived and Bougainville thought that the beauty of the women was goddess-like. While Bougainville and his team were still on the ship, the first Tahitian pirogues were welcoming the crew with noise and excitement, screaming ‘tayo’ (friend): the pirogues were crowded with women; who for agreeable features, are not inferior to most European women; and who in point of beauty of the body might, with much reason, vie with them all. Most of these nymphs were naked; for the men and the old women that accompanied them, had stripped them of the garments which they generally dress themselves in. The glances which they gave us from their pirogues, seemed to discover some degree of uneasiness, notwithstanding the innocent manner in which they were given; perhaps, because nature has everywhere embellished their sex with a natural timidity; or because even in those countries, where the ease of the golden age is still in use, women seem least to desire what they most wish for. The men, who were more plain, or rather more free, soon explained their meaning very clearly. They pressed us to choose a woman, and to come on shore with her; and their gestures, which were nothing less than equivocal, denoted in what manner we should form an acquaintance with her. It was very difficult, amidst such a spectacle, to keep at their work four hundred young French sailors, who had seen no women for six months. In spite of all our precautions, a young girl came on board . . . The girl carelessly let drop a cloth, which covered her, and appeared to the eyes of all beholders, such as Venus showed herself to the Phrygian shepherd, having, indeed, the celestial form of that goddess. (Bougainville 1772: 218–19)

From these lines, the myth of Tahiti as the land of eroticism, love and natural jouissance was created. Bougainville wanted all the more to communicate such feelings with the chosen name New Cytherea, before he learned that the Tahitian people called their island ‘Tahiti’. The ethnographic descriptions that Rousseau expected from the philosopher-traveller

Benoît Dillet • 93

that would confront the French society with its outside, in a process of distancing and mirroring, were not to be found in Bougainville’s Voyage around the World and Commerson’s short text. All that emerged was a mystified and idealized picture of the island as the land of plenty. From this first description, Bougainville’s entire discourse on Tahiti follows: ‘the houses are open . . . there seems to be in the island no civil war, no particular hate’ (Bougainville 1966: 212). It is ‘the best place in the universe’ because Tahitians have ‘the habit of living continuously in pleasure’ (Bougainville 1966: 220, 216). This generalized pleasure is also manifested by the lack of obligation: ‘It would seem that for the things absolutely necessary to life, there is no property and everything belongs to everyone’ (Bougainville 1966: 213), and there is neither the presence of venomous animal nor tropical insects. Tahiti embodies a dream of the perfect place, an Eden on earth, where there is an abundance of natural wealth (plants and fruits, as well as women), where ‘Venus is the goddess of hospitality, her worship does not admit of any mysteries, and every jouissance is a celebration for the whole nation’ (Bougainville 1772: 228, translation modified). Problematic and discriminatory as it stands, these overtly feminized and sexualized depictions by Bougainville of Tahiti certainly fuelled its myth, and the desire to travel overseas. This is exactly what was aimed at in choosing to name the island New Cytherea – to remind Europeans that there is a place where the inhabitants ‘know no other god than love’ (Commerson, cited in Bougainville 1966: 392).12 Yet, this picture depicted by Bougainville is an entirely ahistorical spectacle, idealized, and uprooted from its time (the Enlightenment). This has led Jacques Proust to ask about the political consequences of Bougainville’s travel accounts: ‘Does this rêverie bear a ­“philosophical” message? It certainly does, since dreaming of a golden age probably implies a condemnation of the century in which one lives. But this ­“philosophy” is entirely out of touch with the current ideas of Bougainville’s times’ (Proust 1982: 25). By ‘current ideas’, Proust refers to Diderot and the project of the Encyclopaedia, and while Bougainville disagreed with much of Rousseau’s theory of the origin of man, he decided to borrow its ideas to embellish his narrative in order to give an appeal to his travel accounts.13

Diderot The ambiguity of Bougainville’s text that Andrew Martin diagnosed is certainly challenged by Denis Diderot’s Supplément, as the philosopher’s

94 • Finitude before Finitude: The Case of Rousseau-Bougainville-Diderot

response to and interpretation of Bougainville’s ‘ethnographic’ materials. In spite of the contested quality of the account, the significance of Bougainville’s text is the ethnographic evidence it presents about the existence of many worlds and other social organizations (Waggaman 1992: 125). But this challenge is intensified in Diderot’s own Supplément, since it is a rewriting of his 1771 review of Bougainville’s text as a dialogue between characters A and B, allowing the movement of the dialectic to produce new meanings between the contradictions and before the synthesis (or sublation): A. . . . So what should we do – go back to the state of nature or obey the laws? B. We should speak out against foolish laws until they get reformed, and meanwhile we should obey them as they are. Anyone who takes it upon himself, on his private authority, to break a bad law, thereby authorizes everyone else to break the good ones. There is less harm to be suffered in being mad among madmen than in being sane all by oneself. (Diderot 2001: 227)

The sublation (Aufhebung) is not entirely clear in Diderot’s text, yet each element of the dialectic offers a multitude of arguments that do not simply oppose themselves. In fact, Diderot’s Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville is a polemical piece, and it is organized as a dialogue, comparable to the Socratic dialogues. Diderot attempted to write an accessible piece that was intended for a mass readership, and this certainly motivated his use of the dialogic form for this text. But here the dialogic form exceeds the objective of reaching a specific audience to ­‘supplement’ – that is, to transform and rewrite – Bougainville’s text with his own ideas. Although it starts off by praising Bougainville’s voyage and the possible scientific findings following from the French expedition, it soon turns into a harsh critique of French society and more broadly a critique of moralism.14 In a first movement, Diderot attempts to confirm the hypothesis of Rousseau concerning ‘natural man’ through the empirical and lyrical observations of Bougainville. But in a second movement, it is clear that he does not want to praise the state of nature that he reads in Bougainville’s account of Tahiti, but rather to present a criticism of France’s interference in Tahiti’s moral, political and social life: Do you want man to be happy and free? Then keep your nose out of his affairs – then he will be drawn toward enlightenment and depravity, depending on all sorts of unforeseeable circumstances . . . I call to witness all our political, civil and religious institutions – examine them thoroughly . . . Watch out for the fellow who talks about putting things in order! (Diderot 2001: 225)

Benoît Dillet • 95

Yet, Diderot refers at the beginning to a point that he also expressed in his early review – that before reading Bougainville’s Voyage, he thought that: ‘Up to now, I had always thought that a person was never so well off as when at home. Consequently I thought [before reading this book] that everyone in the world must feel the same’ (Diderot 2001: 185). In fact, the dialogic form of the Supplément is explained not simply by comparing it to Socratic dialogues, but by seeing that it introduces exoticism in philosophy, generating the dialogue between the self and the other, between Europe and its outside. In fact, Diderot continues Rousseau’s work in many respects, while presenting a different political programme. While Rousseau opts for the social contract that establishes a founding moment, through the transcendence of the state of nature, Diderot privileges a materialist and immanent construction of norms. However, I agree with Henri Joly when he writes that: ‘Rousseau largely contributed to educate [instruire] the anthropological gaze [regard] in teaching travellers to consider the “savage” not under the angle of “barbarity” but under that of “nature”’ (Joly 1987: 130, my translation). This confirms Lévi-Strauss’ emphasis on Rousseau’s role in founding anthropology and the distinction between nature and culture, but nevertheless this is also the result of the influence of other Enlightenment thinkers, such as Buffon, on Rousseau.15 Diderot takes Tahitian society very seriously and imagines what contemporary anthropologists have now observed: a complex system of contracts, an economic programme (through the economic exchange of women), a non-religious symbolic order and a regulation of social life, all radically different from French society. By using Bougainville’s ‘empirical’ observations, Diderot writes the ethnographic study – using, not unproblematically, many complex literary devices (for instance, a mise en abyme structure where the characters in dialogue refer to the Supplément in the text itself) and fictional characters – that Bougainville’s travel should have produced. Diderot rewrites Bougainville’s Voyage to contest French society, not by idealizing Tahiti, as Commerson and Bougainville all too easily did, but by writing an intricate philosophical dialogue, where polyphony is the general rule in imagining an alter-anthropos. This alter-anthropos is presented by taking the question of ‘natural utopia’ – the ideal society where only good morals rule – very seriously because of its fabulated character. It is through fiction that Diderot manages to raise Tahitian society to an intelligibility comparable to that of French society, while Bougainville, by using his supposedly empirical credentials, remained in idealism and the mythical world of the possibility of transcendence (an earthly paradise). By inverting European customs with Tahitian

96 • Finitude before Finitude: The Case of Rousseau-Bougainville-Diderot

ones, or mixing them around, Diderot is careful in ruling out any kind of simple dualism, but instead uses the argument of the paradox to show that Tahiti should be considered under a European term (the fictive Tahitian character Orou is a philosophe), so that a true comparison can be established. The problem of language and translation, for instance, is mentioned but quickly overcome by letting other customs speak (Diderot 2001: 186). Also, Tahiti should not merely be seen as a hypothetical idealized society, living in the state of nature, but, as Diderot notes, ‘it would be easier for savages to get rid of some of their rustic ways than for us to turn the clock back and reform our abuses’ (2001: 219). However, this sentence comes after claiming that Tahitian society is ‘backward’ and hence closer to a ‘good legislation’ than any ‘civilised nation’. For Diderot, the ethnographic experience does not mean conserving or admiring a perfect society, but learning that other societies are governed by other rules, and that every society can change its laws and reform its politics according to ideas of justice. In writing that he thought that every nation felt that no other place is like home, Diderot introduces two arguments: the first is that there are different gradients of morality and ethics, and in writing these short dialogues, his project was to write a treatise on morality;16 and the second is an explicitly political argument. Diderot formulates a revolutionary argument that claims the possibility of changing the arbitrary and authoritarian laws, and the ethnographic experience shows that this revolutionary movement can be successful. In sum, Diderot’s text is not a work of Utopian thought in the way that the fabulations of Commerson and Bougainville were (in the tradition of More), but it grounds an immanent critique of norms that anticipates Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Ernst Bloch, Karl Mannheim and the critical theory tradition. It is a dialogue aimed at finding the correspondence of moral ideas to physical actions, as the full title reads: Supplement to Bougainville’s ‘Voyage’, or, a dialogue between A and B on the undesirability of attaching moral values to certain physical acts which carry no such implications. The ‘discovery’ of Tahiti by Bougainville gives Diderot a reason to ground its practical immanent critique of modernity.

Conclusion The limit of the Rousseau–Bougainville–Diderot case is the lack of rigorous ethnographic study. The reconstructed dialogue between these three authors demonstrates that they allowed for the development of anthropology and ethnology, but they lacked the empirical methods

Benoît Dillet • 97

to gather data. Other philosophers-travellers need to be referred to in order to complete the picture of travel in the age of Enlightenment. In fact, Nicole Hafid-Martin’s remarkable study examines the Comte de Volney (Constantin-François Chassebœuf, 1757–1820), Jan Potocki (1761–1815) and Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). She notes that the first two not only gathered detailed observations on fauna, geography and local customs, but also analysed social and political structures: so few Europeans before them were interested in political structures and their influence on social and cultural behaviours. Yet, how can we understand the mind [l’esprit] of a people without examining it through its institutions? From the provinces of the Turkish empire or in the United States, Volney remarks the adaptation of men to their environment, but against Montesquieu, he affirms that the climatic factors are less meaningful than the effect of the regime that governs them. In Morocco or in Caucasus, Potocki observes patiently regional particularisms and cleavages between ethnic groups. Travelling becomes the art of understanding people; travelling leads to a political commitment [voyager conduit à s’engager]. (Hafid-Martin 1995: 4)17

Contrary to these philosophers-travellers, who were more focused on empirical methods, Rousseau, Bougainville and Diderot reflected on the finitude of knowledge and the modes of existence, anticipating modern forms of anthropological problematization.18 Diderot used dialogue as a device to allow for the diversity and the multiplicity of voices to be heard; he imagines a Tahitian philosopher in order to warn against Europe’s abuses and slavery to-come. In presenting a materialist immanent critique of French society, he also demonstrates Enlightenment’s other side: for him, to study the nature of man did not mean to find an eternal substance, or even qualities, but that diversity is the only rule. Hence, when anthropology and finitude were born, they were born with respect to multiplicity. Benoît Dillet is a Marie Curie Fellow of the European Union at the Freiburg Institute for Advances Studies (FRIAS), University of Freiburg, Germany. He is the author of several articles in contemporary French thought and political theory, and his first monograph, The Political Space of Art (co-authored with Tara Puri), was published in 2016. He edited two books: The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) and Technologiques: La Pharmacie de Bernard Stiegler (Cécile Defaut, 2013). He is also the translator of Bernard Stiegler’s Philosophising by Accident: Interviews with Élie During (Edinburgh University Press, 2017).

98 • Finitude before Finitude: The Case of Rousseau-Bougainville-Diderot

Notes  1 Diderot is said to have rewritten most of The History of the Two Indias by Guillaume-Thomas Raynal; see Duchet (1978).  2 Mircea Eliade argues that far from being an invention of the eighteenth century, the myth of the noble savage is in fact the myth of origins. According to Atkinson (1924: 63), Chinard also drew a genealogy of the figure of the noble savage before the eighteenth century and found that ‘exotic books used the term the “noble savage” long before 1600’.  3 Atkinson (1924: 47) continues: ‘And there is more. The public, who was reading the travels, asked for novelties. The traveller who could witness [voyait] abroad only kings, magistrates, priests, inferior to those of Europe, was not an interesting author. The public only bought travels to learn new things [des nouveautés].’  4 See the section ‘On Travel’ (Rousseau 1979: 450–80), together with the excellent commentary by Georges Van Den Abbeele (1992: 85–108).  5 ‘Today . . . [travel makes up] the most important part of the education of youth and make a part of the experience of the elderly . . . Travels extend the mind [étendent l’esprit], raise it, enrich it in knowledges [conoissances] and cure it from the national prejudices’ (de Jaucourt, 2013).  6 ‘Let us suppose a Montesquieu, a Buffon, a Diderot, a Duclos, a d’Alembert, a Condillac, or men of that ilk traveling in order to inform their ­compatriots’ (Rousseau 1987: 100).  7 Rousseau writes in his Confessions: ‘I spent my entire life reading relations of voyage’ (Dunmore 1981: 163).  8 This argument is made by Jean Starobinski (1976: 388); see also Fellows (1960). The first sentence of Rousseau’s preface to the Discourse on Inequality explicitly states his debt to Buffon for formulating his anthropological question: ‘Of all the branches of human knowledge, the most useful and the least advanced seems to me to be that of man’ (Rousseau 1987: 33). This should be compared with Buffon’s first sentence of Natural History of Man: ‘Quelqu’intérest que nous ayions à nous connoître nous-mêmes, je ne sçais si nous ne connoissons pas mieux tout ce qui n’est pas nous’ [‘Whatever interest we have in knowing ourselves, I think that we know better what is not us’] (Buffon 1749: 429).  9 However, Lévi-Strauss’ commemoration of Rousseau is controversial for anthropologists even today, since Lévi-Strauss did not give fieldwork a central role in anthropology. This argument is formulated, for instance, by Alban Bensa (2010), who calls for a return to the real; nonetheless, anthropologists today have to establish their work in a positive or negative relation to Lévi-Strauss’ magistral work. 10 Béatrice Waggaman’s study is remarkable and many of the arguments in this chapter are influenced by this small book. See also the excellent anthology on the poetics of travel edited by Susan L. Roberson (2007). 11 New Cytherea in English; Cytherea is another name for Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of beauty, fertility and sexual love.

Benoît Dillet • 99

12 Andrew Martin (2008) presents an interesting argument regarding this disproportionate eroticization and the romanticization by Bougainville in a recent article. The first part of his argument is illuminating, while the second part seems exaggerated. Martin first argues that Bougainville has an internal dialogue where he draws a general and timeless picture of an earthly erotic paradise, which he contrasts with the struggles of actual life (while collecting empirical evidence); this dual position is always in tension in Bougainville and complicates any simplistic reading. Up to this point, I agree with Martin, and Bougainville explicitly enters a phase of self-criticism in the text regretting his first ‘optimistic judgements’ (Bougainville 1966: 227–29), but his second argument that in fact Tahitians adopted different behaviours as a way to protect themselves from massacres and ‘constructed New Cythera like a Hollywood filmset on the backdrop of Tahiti in accordance with French fantasy’ (Martin 2008: 212) seems rather far-fetched. To argue that the depiction of Tahiti as an erotic paradise (New Cytherea) is a dual process ‘almost an artistic collaboration’ (Martin 2008: 213) is unconvincing. 13 Bougainville’s diary was more factual, noting observations and first thoughts, whereas the rewriting of this text for his Voyage Round the World was decidedly idealizing and fabulating, referring to the Garden of Eden and the land of plenty. See Bougainville (2003). 14 See the excellent discussion of this theme in Sharon A. Stanley (2009). 15 In terms of the nature/culture divide, the relation between Diderot’s writings on nature and his critique of moralism needs to be interrogated, but this lies beyond the scope of my study. 16 Michèle Duchet describes the context to the Supplément: ‘At the time of the Supplément, the thought of Diderot is still in an experimental stage; the text of the History [of the Two Indias], on the contrary, gives the impression of a thought that is forged in its own certainties. Without taking the dimensions of a “treaty of morals” that Diderot dreamt of writing, he nonetheless offers its theoretical grounding, the “practical” aspects of a provisional morality that was introduced in parallel in conjectural writings [écrits de circonstances] such as the Observations, the Refutation of Helvétius or the Essay on the Reigns of Claude and de Néron’ (Duchet 1961: 181). 17 While the first two philosopher-travellers attentively wrote in a rational and objective manner, Humboldt also travelled, but he developed an empirical method so original that Hafid-Martin refers to him as ‘the father of ecology’ (Hafid-Martin 1995: 233). They repudiated all kinds of fabulation and embellishment in order to study societies and not just their ­‘feelings’ and experiences of the foreign. This erudite study is not of primarily concern to us here as it is too much of a specialist approach, but it needs to be taken into account when assessing discoveries and world travels. Our concern here is to examine how the quest for experimental knowledge was shaping and feeding rational thought. 18 I am thinking especially of Foucault’s own definition of anthropology as ‘this properly philosophical structure that conditions the problems of

100 • Finitude before Finitude: The Case of Rousseau-Bougainville-Diderot

philosophy and makes them inhabit [logés] this domain that we can call human finitude’ (Foucault 2001: 467).

References Atkinson, G. 1924. Les Relations de Voyages du XVIIIe Siècle et L’évolution des Idées. Paris: Champion. Bensa, A. 2010. Après Lévi-Strauss: Pour une anthropologie à taille humaine. Paris: Éditions Textuel. Blanchot, M. 2003. The Book to Come, trans. C. Mandell. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bougainville, L.-A. 1772. A Voyage Round the World, Performed by Order of His Most Christian Majesty in the Years 1766–1769, trans. J. Forster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1966. Voyage Autour du Monde par la Frégate la Boudeuse et la Flûte l’Etoile. Paris: 10/18. ———. 2003. The Pacific Journal of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville 1767–1768, ed. J. Dunmore. Aldershot: Ashgate. Buffon, Comte de (Georges-Louis Leclerc). 1749. ‘De la nature de l’homme’, in Histoire Naturelle, Générale et Particulière, avec la Description du Cabinet du Roy, Vol. 2. Retrieved 6 December 2016 from http:// www.buffon.cnrs.fr. Chinard, G. 1911. ‘Influence des récits de voyages sur la philosophie de J. J. Rousseau’, PMLA 26(3): 476–95. ———. 1970. L’Exotisme Américain dans la Littérature Française au XVIe siècle, d’après Rabelais, Ronsard, Montaigne, etc. Geneva: Statkine Reprints. de Certeau, M. 1986. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. de Jaucourt, L. 2013. ‘Voyage’, in D. Diderot and J. le Rond d’Alembert (eds), Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers, etc.  Retrieved 6 December 2016 from R. Morrissey (ed.), ARTFL Encyclopédie Project, University of Chicago, http://encyclopedie.uchicago. edu. Diderot, D. 1995. ‘Voyage Autour du Monde’, in Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, pp. 101–10. ———. 2001. ‘Supplement to Bougainville’s “Voyage”’, in D. Diderot (ed.), Rameau’s Nephew and Other Works, trans. J. Barzun and R.H. Bowen. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Duchet, M. 1961. ‘Le “Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville” et la Collaboration de Diderot à “L’Histoire des deux Indes”’, Cahiers de l’Association Internationale des études Française 13: 173–87. ———. 1978. Diderot et l’Histoire des Deux Indes ou, L’écriture Fragmentaire. Paris: Nizet. Dunmore, J. 1981. ‘L’imaginaire et le réel: le mythe du bon sauvage de Bougainville à Marion du Fresne’, in É. Taillemite (ed.), L’importance de l’exploration maritime au siècle des Lumières (À propos du voyage de Bougainville). Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

Benoît Dillet • 101

Edwards, P. 1994. The Story of the Voyage: Sea-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eliade, M. 1955. ‘Le Mythe du bon Sauvage ou les Prestiges de L’Origine’, Nouvelle Revue Française 32: 229–49. Fellows, O. 1960. ‘Buffon and Rousseau: Aspects of a Relationship’, PMLA 75(3): 184–96. Foucault, M. 2001. ‘Philosophie et Psychologie’, in Dits et écrits 1: 1954–1975, eds D. Defert, F. Ewald and J. Lagrange. Paris: Gallimard, pp. 466–75. Hafid-Martin, N. 1995. Voyage et Connaissance au Tournant des Lumières (1780– 1820). Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. Joly, H. 1987. ‘Du “Voyage” au “Supplément” ou de Bougainville à Diderot: Fragments pour une “Anthropologie” des Lumières’, Beiträge zur Romanischen Philologie 26: 125–43. Lévi-Strauss, C. 1996. ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Fondateur des Sciences de L’Homme’, in Anthropologie Structurale Deux. Paris: Plon, pp. 45–56. Liebersohn, H. 2006. The Travelers’ World: Europe to the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2008. ‘Anthropology before Anthropology’, in H. Kuklick (ed.), A New History of Anthropology. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 17–32. Martin, A. 2008. ‘The Enlightenment in Paradise: Bougainville, Tahiti, and the Duty of Desire’, Eighteenth Century Studies 41(2): 203–16. Montaigne, M. 1991. The Essays, ed. and trans. by Screench. London: Penguin. Pagden, A. 1993. European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 2008. ‘La découverte de l’Amérique: La Transformation du Temps et de L’Espace en Europe’, Revue de Synthèse 129(3): 421–36. Proust, J. 1982. ‘Préface’, in L.-A. Bougainville, Voyage Autour du Monde. Paris: Gallimard. Raynal, G.T. 1794. Histoire Philosophique et Politique des établissements et du Commerce des Européens dans les Deux Indes, Vol. 6. Paris: chez Berry. Roberson, S.L. (ed.). 2007. Defining Travel: Diverse Visions. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Rousseau, J.J. 1979. Emile, or On Education, trans. A. Bloom. New York: Basic Books. ———. 1987. ‘Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men’, in The Basic Political Writings, ed. and trans. D.A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett, pp. 111–222. Stanley, S.A. 2009. ‘Unravelling Natural Utopia: Diderot’s Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville’, Political Theory 27(2): 266–89. Starobinski, J. 1976. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La Transparence et L’Obstacle. Paris: Gallimard. Van Den Abbeele, G. 1992. Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Waggaman, B. 1992. Le Voyage Autour du Monde de Bougainville: Droit et Imaginaire. Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy.

T5 Bernard Smith and Imagining the Pacific The Art/Poetics of ‘Discovery’ and the Art/Poetics of Writing about Early European Travellers in the South Pacific Russell Staiff

Introduction: Bernard Smith’s Travel Landscape and Other Ruminations First published in 1960 by Oxford University Press, Bernard Smith’s magisterial study European Vision and the South Pacific has gone through several editions and remains in print. It is now considered a foundational work in late twentieth-century Western anthropology, cultural history and art history (Anderson, Marshall and Yip 2016). This chapter examines the way in which the poetics of travel is doubly signed in Smith’s brilliant exegesis: first, in his account and analysis of the ‘explorer artists’ who were aboard the European boats that ventured into the South Pacific in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century – and the ‘poetics of travel’ expressed through their writings and the art works they produced – and then, by way of a concluding observation, in his own account of these voyages where his writing and conjuring of his subject is also a kind of ‘poetics of travel’. What happens when one attempts to translate or convert a perception of the world into paint, music, film, words or numbers? This is not a new question and, in Western thought, the interest in representation stretches back to Greek antiquity. What is generally accepted today is that the conversion of perceptions of reality into systems of representation is subject to the governing structures that underpin the mode of mimesis, whether music, painting, written language, film or statistical measurement; in other words, the structuring of the way we represent (Gibson 1979; Staiff 2014). While these structures are the tools of the

Russell Staiff • 103

trade, they are also a set of limits to what is possible within any system of representation (Levine 1993). Of course, artists working in any genre can choose to play with, ignore or subvert the conventions associated with the governing structures, and this is, after all, a trait of Modernism as it evolved in the twentieth century (Levenson 2011). Significantly, it was also an attribute of Italian Mannerism in the sixteenth century and the rise of Byzantine art in reaction to late Roman Classicism in the sixth century (although in the case of Christian art, it was over a very long period of time and in many places). But a ‘rebellion’ against conventions is nevertheless, to quite a degree, curtailed by the unavoidable situation that culturally inscribed codes of communication require a shared ‘grammar’ if that communication is to be widely understood. The subversion of the conventional is less restrictive if hermeneutics is not the desired end point, but rather the artistic intention is pure affect/effect where the somatic, the sensorial and spiritual transcendence are considered more important than conceptual understanding. This is another hallmark of twentieth-century Modernism and especially Abstract Expressionism in the visual arts (Anfam 1990). Generally speaking, however, writers, painters, composers and filmmakers (and so on) are not only forced to translate a perception into their medium of choice, but to achieve this, they must wrestle with the structures inherent in their means of expression. Partly, this ‘wrestling’ is the domain of poetics: the exploitation of structures within systems of representation to produce an effect that satisfies an artist’s desire to represent a perception and/or an emotion. The term ‘wrestling’ is conscious. Bernard Smith, in his autobiography A Pavane for Another Time (2002), quotes one of his articles on the sculptor Henry Moore and writes of Moore’s ‘wrestling’ with material reality and infusing it with imaginative capacities to produce poetry/art. This is an idea crucial to Smith’s early work, although he returned to these ideas often, especially in his much later work Imagining the Pacific (1992): in the interstices between the material, imagination, perception and representation, artists must struggle with prevailing conventions governing their endeavour to represent experience. The tussle between embodied perception (with particular regard to ocular perception) and the conventions employed to communicate that perception is one of the subjects of European Vision and the South Pacific. Smith was interested in how the structures of Western painting, before Modernism, were moulded in an attempt by eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century European voyagers to record what they experienced/saw as they sailed the South Pacific. Central to Smith’s quest is

104 • Bernard Smith and Imagining the Pacific

the idea that what the voyagers saw could not just be reproduced as a ‘mere’ copy of an ocular event – that the travelling artists simply drew what they saw; rather, as Smith demonstrates, there was more to the record making than empirical ‘realism’, topographical accuracy and the scientific observation of plants, animals and peoples. Influenced by the work of Ernst Gombrich (1977), Smith was convinced that the ability to produce an ‘exact copy’ of nature was a cognitive process that all trained artists could perfect and this skill was all too evident in the outputs of the artist travellers, especially in their preliminary sketches and drawings (for an analysis of the influence of the Warburg Institute on Smith and the evolution of European Vision and the South Pacific, see Gaston (2016)). For argument’s sake, I here set aside the long Western discourse about mimesis and the idea that art could fool the eye, the trompe-l’oeil illusion of creating perfect reality effects, a discourse that stretches back to fifth-century BCE Greece (see Bryson (1986) for a critique of Gombrich and optical realism in painting). Smith considered that even the most empirical of drawings could not escape the conventions employed by artists because, in turn, artists could not (easily) escape from the prevailing discourses of style and aesthetics, both of which are historically situated and constituted. A historically grounded material culture was a crucial strand in what was fundamentally, in Smith’s work, a culturally inscribed hermeneutic project about Europeans making sense of their travels in the Pacific. More recently, this structured way of seeing has been called ‘pictured vision’, whereby the artist ‘sees what one draws’ rather than, as common sense suggests, ‘draws what one sees’ (Wartofsky 1979, 1980; Alpers 1984). In this calculation, vision is already tempered by representational conventions. Although this is not what Smith ever argued, his cultural materialism approach to his subject laid vital foundations for these later explanations. In the South Pacific, Smith argues, the European voyagers were baffled by the inability of European conventions of artistic representation to communicate the ‘atmospherics’ of the South Pacific islands because these ‘atmospherics’ were seemingly remote from European environments; the prevailing conventions of the time, particularly Neoclassicism, were thus regarded as inappropriate vehicles, or at the very least limiting for the travellers’ pictorial and written records. Therefore, the desire to translate the voyagers’ experiences for a European audience was not just about communicating difference, nor just an ideologically rendered colonialist project of ‘othering’ people and places (both highly important to Smith’s interest in material culture and imperialist control), but was also about aesthetics and stylistic categories.

Russell Staiff • 105

What was the relevance or otherwise of dominant aesthetic ideas about how to represent nature? Prevalent Neoclassical discourses, Smith argued, privileged nature’s ‘perfection’, an ideal that was both abstract (and redolent with the perfect forms of geometry) and manipulated (nature’s ‘blemishes’ removed). However, in the South Pacific, the artist travellers struggled with this aesthetic conception as a vehicle for rendering what they encountered. The South Pacific seemed to call for something far more expressive, something more descriptive, something more deeply felt, something more emotionally infused, something that communicated affect more than the severe rationality of Neoclassical ‘geometry’. Smith documents what he considered to be a recalibration of the devices of painting/representation to communicate something Neoclassicism was deemed unable to do. This recalibration, in part, pertained to poetics: the orchestrating of compositional devices to produce the desired effects/affect. And in a very precise way, as described by Smith, this was about the poetics of travels to the South Pacific by European voyagers in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century.

Journeying, Poetics and the Artistic Record: The Evolution of the ‘Typical Landscape’ Smith’s book is too vast in scope to consider all the ways in which Europeans envisioned the Pacific in their travels and, in turn, how these perceptions altered ideas back in the imperial capitals of Europe, and how European ideas and intrusions altered the societies and cultures of the South Pacific. European Vision and the South Pacific considers the scientific expeditions of James Cook, European colonization from 1788 onwards and then the arrival of Christian missionaries into Pacific island societies in the nineteenth century. However, this is an expansive and intricate history. In the context of travel and poetics, it is the first section on the voyages of Cook that offers an illuminating study of the way in which Smith argued that the structure of painting was refashioned by the traveller artists to produce a new kind of landscape art, what he called the ‘typical landscape’. The ‘typical landscape’ was a synthesis of, first, acute empirical documentation of the hitherto unknown (to Europeans) islands and landmasses, and, second, a new sensibility to atmospheric effects/affects. Nothing, of course, in a historicist approach is without a wider sociocultural milieu. Smith notes the advent of the Royal Academy in 1768 happening at the same time as the Royal Society’s attempts

106 • Bernard Smith and Imagining the Pacific

to launch Cook’s expedition (with Joseph Banks aboard), one institution devoted to the Neoclassical pursuit of perfect forms in art and the other institution advocating the use of drawing in the service of scientifically recording the natural world. Two modes of representing the landscape could therefore be identified as already occupying parallel universes. The ‘complicating’ factor, Smith claimed, was the employment of professional artists to record the scientific journeys of Captain Cook. He notes that while Neoclassical theory called for ‘unity of mood and expression’, the empirical observation required by late eighteenth-century scientists focused on individual details, a ‘world of disparate things’ (Smith 1989: 3), especially under the governing scientific descriptions of the time, the reign of classificatory systems (cf. Foucault 1973). However, Smith argued that in the Pacific, traveller artists began to increasingly see unity not in expressive moods underpinned by formulae for painting a landscape, but in the ecological diversity, in the details of individual rocks, plants, animals, climate and peoples. This was not the unity of perfect forms, but the forging of a new poetics of landscape art. William Hodges is Smith’s star exhibit in his analysis of Cook’s second voyage, and deservedly so, but before the voyage in the Resolution beginning in 1772 with Hodges aboard, there was the more famous first voyage in the Endeavour leaving England in 1768 to observe the transit of Venus. Cook’s so-called ‘secret instructions’ were to assess the resources of the Pacific (minerals, plants and people). The inclusion of Joseph Banks in the party was, as it turned out, crucial because of his interest in having the world he encountered visually recorded by a professional artist. This may seem peculiar from the perspective of the twenty-first century, but pictorial records of the natural world as a means of documenting and understanding it were something quite novel at the time of Cook’s expedition. Consequently, as Smith illustrates in abundance, the visual and verbal descriptions from the first voyage oscillate between Neoclassical reveries and empirical observation, and back in Britain, in their published form, changes were made to many of the voyage sketches in order to bring out, as it were, the classical and picturesque elements of Neoclassical landscape painting. Both people and places were adjusted according to prevailing aesthetic tastes and in the hands of some commentators and printmakers, the Pacific was transformed into a vision of Paradise before the Fall or into some Grecian Golden Age, idealism retaining its power over empiricism. But against this manipulation, and seeing what one wanted to see in the record of the first voyage, there were equally powerful representations that strained the Neoclassical conception – for example, the flora

Russell Staiff • 107

and fauna collections and scientific descriptions of Banks, the astronomical observations, the cartographic enterprise, the botanical drawings, the portraits and landscapes of Sydney Parkinson, the botanical artist employed on the voyage and the culturally loaded descriptions of Polynesian society (sexual ‘licentiousness’, prostitution, infanticide, human sacrifice and paganism). None of these could be so easily ‘airbrushed’ aside for devout Europeans of ‘taste’ (Smith 1989: 44). Cook’s second voyage in the Resolution again included the successful combination of natural scientists and artists, but unlike the first voyage, where Sydney Parkinson was under the direction of Banks, William Hodges was under Cook’s authority and thus the science of navigation (especially atmospheric conditions) was an added element of the pictorial record. Indeed, the second voyage was more scientific and included a meteorologist, William Wales. For Smith, Hodges responded to the onboard interest in meteorological phenomenon and his paintings revealed an intense curiosity about the properties of light, about atmospheric effects and the way in which light and the atmosphere could be represented in landscape paintings. Smith compared two paintings Hodges produced on his return to England: Oaitepeha Bay, Tahiti (1776) and A View of Cape Stephens (New Zealand) with Waterspouts (1776) (both now in the National Maritime Museum, London). In the first, the Neoclassical structure is still given some credence with a group of Tahitian women bathing in the bottom-right-hand corner, their bodies in a grouping reminiscent of a classical Arcadian composition (although the tattoos adorning their bodies makes it quite clear that this is not some Grecian myth about ­shepherdesses). But, as Smith observes, the Claudian formula for an Italianate Neoclassical landscape, while legible, gives way to a ‘rendering of tropical atmosphere charged with luminous vapour which imposes a visual unity on the composition’ (Smith 1989: 64) and, in so doing, makes the physical environment the main subject of the painting. Hodges had changed the structure of landscape composition so that he could communicate powerful atmospheric effects that were unlike anything his European audience would have been familiar with. Here we witness a change in the poetics of representation induced by the direct experience Hodges had witnessed on the voyage. As Smith wrote, this painting ‘is at heart quite unclassical’ (1989: 65) because it gives such prominence not to an ideal landscape of an educated and cultivated mind, but to one informed by scientific observation. The poetic shift is even more acute in Hodges’s New Zealandinspired painting of the storm at Cape Stephens. Again the references to the Neoclassical landscape still have a degree of traction in the

108 • Bernard Smith and Imagining the Pacific

c­ omposition – and Smith finds allusions to a work by Hodges’ teacher, Richard Wilson – but Hodges is also faithful to the meteorological description of the waterspouts given by George Foster, another member of Cook’s second voyage. The painting communicates the sheer power of nature, the boat at the centre of the composition, in mortal danger from the ferocity of the storm, the heaving sea and the waterspouts. The shoreline is dark and ominous. Nothing could be further from the poetics of calm reflection and connoisseurship of a Neoclassical composition. The combination of dramatic atmospheric effects noted by Smith and, for me, the strong sense of foreboding has shifted the poetics from that inspired by the classical world to one that we now recognize as the poetics of Romanticism. The desired aesthetic effects sought by Hodges required a very different stylistic approach, a different visual grammar. What is extraordinary, perhaps, is that William Wordsworth was only six years old when Hodges painted these two compositions in 1776, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was four years old and J.M.W. Turner was one year old, John Constable was born that year and Byron, Keats and Shelley were all yet to be born. The ‘gods’ of British Romanticism were either mere infants or beings of the future. Smith’s achievement was to suggest that Romanticism was influenced by the European voyages to the South Pacific and that Romanticism was as much informed by careful empirical observation mediated by the scientific discourses of the time as an appeal to emotions and to affect. Indeed, in later Romanticism, it was often the sheer power of ‘Nature’ and the relative insignificance of humans in the face of this power that gave certain forms of Romanticism – especially the Sublime – its particular aesthetic potency. The paintings of J.M.W. Turner are, probably, the standout examples of pushing painting to the extreme limits of expressiveness in order to communicate the terrifying awe produced by nature in convulsion (storms, avalanches, volcanic eruptions and floods). Turner, in his late landscapes, took the poetics of painting as far as he possibly could and only halted at an almost excruciating tipping point just before the subject became totally lost to abstraction (Wilton 2006). And Turner, like the artists of Cook’s expeditions, was an artist traveller, but one who controlled the poetics of painting so brilliantly that he could, at will, produce the desired effect/affect on the viewer. For Smith, an essential ingredient of this narrative of English Romanticism had its genesis in the South Pacific. While we can make these connections in retrospect, at the time Hodges’ achievements looked anything other than successful. He was criticized for his atmospheric effects (his paintings were deemed unfinished) (Smith 1989: 75) and despite being the first professional

Russell Staiff • 109

artist to visit India in 1778 and to publish favourable descriptions of Islamic architecture (he was much impressed by the Taj Mahal), he gave up painting and died a pauper, possibly by his own hand (Smith 1989). Nevertheless, Hodges had begun articulating something that was highly significant in the next century in European painting: the elevation of the landscape as an artistic entity that had at least as much moral authority as other genres of painting, especially history painting, and he had introduced a mode of representation that heralded a shift in the poetics of painting, a shift that was fuelled by the experiences of the voyagers in the South Pacific. The evolution of what Smith called the ‘typical landscape’ reached its most complete expression, he argued, in the nineteenth century. James Cook’s expeditions, as Smith relates, initiated something of a ‘diaspora’ of artist travellers intent on not only travelling the world (the entire globe now the new Grand Tour), but recording their experiences in word and image. This was further fuelled by the publishing houses of Europe eager to satisfy the growing public taste for stories of ‘exotic worlds’ (Smith 1989: 199ff) by publishing the works of the journeyers. ‘Views’ and ‘Travel’ (or ‘Voyage’) were common words in the titles of these publications. What is now clear is that the typical landscape was the dominant way in which the visual records were executed by these travellers (and European settler-travellers in the case of Australia and New Zealand) (cf. Staiff 1995). The poetics of the picturesque and the romantic were extended to include the detailed empirical descriptions that lovingly recorded the vast variations to be found in the natural world. Indeed, the enormity of the diversity of God’s Creation became a source of affect: one marvelled, even swooned, at inestimable distinctions. Romantic landscapes in the Antipodes meant carefully including detailed observations of the world being depicted (and charged with the discourses of the natural sciences): empiricism and affect were conjoined in a poetics that had emerged, in the South Pacific, under the sign of travel.

Journeying, Poetics and the Artistic Record: From ‘Noble’ to ‘Ignoble’ Indigenous Subjects However, the story was not so straightforward with regard to the representation of the peoples of the South Pacific. How did the Indigenous peoples of the South Pacific come into view? In what ways were they made legible entities to European eyes? How should the ‘native’ populations be represented? As Smith notes in his somewhat gendered language: ‘During the first half of the 19th century one aspect of faithfully

110 • Bernard Smith and Imagining the Pacific

recording life and nature in the Pacific continued to present ­difficulties: the portrayal of man himself [sic]’ (Smith 1989: 317). Purposeful representations, especially those that were executed under sets of instructions to voyagers to report back on the peoples of the Pacific and their customs, would inevitably be the result of a process of ‘seeing’ inextricably bound to knowledge or what has now been fashionably termed the ‘colonial gaze’. In the late eighteenth century, Smith argued, it was almost impossible to represent the Indigenous peoples of the South Pacific in any way except through contemporary discourses (aesthetic, ethnographic, historical, theological, colonialist and so forth) and modes of expression that were subject to taste and the idea of the so-called cultivated and educated mind. In a sense, portraying Islander peoples ‘as they were’ was not possible (and the very idea of doing so is fraught because all perception is culturally inscribed) (Staiff 1995, 2014). However, Smith was acutely aware of the breakdown of what he termed the generalized notion of the ‘noble savage’, a figure of seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century literary and philosophical discourse, and strongly associated with Enlightenment thinking where humanity, deemed essentially good, would, in a ‘natural’ state, be uncorrupted by civilization.1 European contact with Polynesian society, in the beginning, seemed to affirm the existence of such a subject, people intimately aligned with ‘Nature’ and free within ‘Nature’; peoples therefore free from restrictive and constrictive (urban) social mores that inhibited the liberty of the human spirit and their behaviour. These observations, not confined to Cook’s journeys but made by French voyagers as well, saw in the people of Tahiti a Neoclassical vision of Elysium, Tahiti transformed into and compared with the world of ancient Greece (Smith 1989: 40ff). The comparisons with ancient Greece were explicit in the writings and the drawings of the voyagers. Joseph Banks gave Tahitian chieftains names from Greek mythology: Hercules, Ajax, Epicurus and Lycurgus. He claimed that ‘Nature’ had bequeathed the people with bodies of such beauty they could be copies of Grecian sculptures of the deities wrought by none other than the famed fifth-century BCE sculptor Phidias. Sydney Parkinson’s drawing of two ‘New Holland’ natives advancing in combat, with its conscious modelling based on the so-called ‘Borghese Gladiator’, a Hellenistic sculpture discovered in 1611, extols, as Smith writes, the classical virtues associated with Indigenous people and, in this case, the Australian Aborigine (Smith 1989: 170–71). But this vision of the peoples of the South Pacific was relatively momentary and what Smith documents is the decay of this idea/ideal and its replacement with something much less benign: the ‘ignoble

Russell Staiff • 111

savage’. The poetics of Neoclassicism were constantly challenged by a vast array of empirical observations and deeply affecting experiences that indicated a ‘dark’ side to Tahitian life. There was much about Tahitian society that was challenging to the European visitors: sexual promiscuity, immorality, infanticide, paganism and cannibalism (Smith 1989: 44), and none of these fitted easily with Tahiti as some sort of late eighteenth-century conception of a Grecian ‘Golden Age’. Eventually, especially after the death of Cook in Hawaii in 1779 (initially represented as a type of classical tragedy), the idea of the peoples of the South Pacific being vicious, uncivilized, brutal, harsh and intrinsically immoral came to dominate the representations (cf. Thomas 1994; Thomas and Losche 1999). The reasons for this shift, as Smith explains, were numerous and involved debates about the nature of humanity in the metropolitan centres of Europe as much as the experiences of voyages and the arrival of European settlers and missionaries into the South Pacific at the end of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century. Of course, these were entangled: debates about ‘humanity’ tinctured with travel accounts and vice versa (Thomas 1994). One of the contributing factors was the geographical enlargement of the empirical/imperialist project of recording the peoples of the South Pacific. It became increasingly apparent to travellers, missionaries and colonial officials that there was enormous diversity within the region in terms of languages, social organization, beliefs, rituals, customs and, importantly to these early anthropological urges, recording different physiological characteristics and racial types. With the passing of time and the extension of the empirical record, the generalized abstraction of ‘noble savage’ made no sense to the voyagers and other travellers. Indeed, the establishment of a penal colony in New South Wales in 1788, with its associated machinery of representation, generated a very different account of the Eora people of Sydney Cove compared to that of the ‘noble savage’. The convict artist Thomas Watling described the original owners as irascible, ferocious, cunning, treacherous, filthy and immodest (quoted in Smith 1979: 187). Indeed, it was only one opinion, as Smith duly notes, but it heralded, at the end of the eighteenth century, a shift in attitudes that stood in stark contrast to the ‘noble savage’ construction of Indigeneity. Watling’s sketches of the people in the environs of Sydney Cove bear no imprint of classical influences; they stand out, as Smith notes, for their ethnographic focus on the daily life and rituals of a peoples being colonized (Smith 1979: 185–87). A generalized conception of the inhabitants of the South Pacific was therefore increasingly impossible in ‘scientific’ terms and especially

112 • Bernard Smith and Imagining the Pacific

when the ‘science’ was built on European observations. A new poetics of representation was emerging, but Smith’s account makes it clear that this was neither sudden nor even. Indeed, the rise of the ‘ignoble savage’ was just as much a stereotype as the ‘noble savage’ – two generalized images/abstractions jostling side by side, over many decades, both in the Antipodes and in Europe. For Smith, it was the ‘triumph of science’ by the mid nineteenth century that had a formative effect as the emerging disciplines of anthropology, biology and geology began to increasingly assert themselves and began to increasingly record almost infinite diversity: generalized abstractions of peoples in the South Pacific became untenable. For writers like Foucault, the crucial enabler was the epistemic shifts that occurred in Western thought in the middle of the nineteenth century, when ‘man’ was ‘invented’ as the subject and horizon of knowledge (Foucault 1973). The positions of Smith and Foucault are not antithetical. From my perspective, what is of interest is the way in which travel continued to be at the forefront of the problematics germane to the question of how to represent humanity and the poetic devices used in the communication of journeys across an increasingly shrinking, but infinitely diverse, globe. Nevertheless, whatever the guise of these representations, and whether they were framed by empiricism, science, romanticism, colonialism, theology or history (etc.), they were always a process of ‘Othering’, European constructions that effaced Indigenous culture and identity. These modes of making the Indigenous peoples of the South Pacific legible and intelligible to European travellers was, in its actions, a type of silencing of Indigenous voices (Staiff 1995) and, paradoxically, giving colonial visibility to Oceanic peoples and their cultures (Thomas 2016). It is therefore apt to describe the poetics of late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century travel in the South Pacific with regard to the representation of non-Europeans as ‘killing Artfully’, the controversial phrase that Ian McLean used so powerfully in his study of identity politics in Australian art (McLean 1998).2

Conclusion: Reading European Vision and the South Pacific as Journey It was Louis Marin who powerfully suggested, albeit in an aside, that travel was configured into representation: to read a book, to look at a map, to watch a film or to look at a painting was to ‘go somewhere’ (Marin 1993). And so it is with European Vision and the South Pacific.

Russell Staiff • 113

Smith takes us on a journey. The question, then, is how does Smith employ poetics to achieve this effect/affect? What is remarkable is the way in which Smith’s account mirrors the journeys of the voyagers. Like his voyagers, he begins with questions; there are puzzles to be solved. This is perhaps unsurprising. In his study of culture, theory and the visual in Smith’s work, Beilharz (1997) notes the influence of Arnold J. Toynbee, who, in his twelve-volume A Study of History, was interested in big questions about the rise and fall of civilizations. When Smith was in London on a scholarship in the late 1940s, Toynbee was at his most influential. And the question that was foremost in Smith’s mind was why the history of art in Australia was quite independent of art movements elsewhere in the Western sphere of influence (Smith 2002). In the preface to the first edition of European Vision in the South Pacific, he put it this way: ‘This book arose, in the first instance, from an enquiry into the origins of European art in Australia . . . That enquiry revealed the need to investigate the beginnings of European art in the south Pacific . . . beginnings that may be traced from 1768 when professional artists first began to voyage in the South Seas’ (Smith 1989: xi). In turn, this more general question was fuelled by another question. Why were modernist artists obsessed with the past (Beilharz 1997) when Modernism, generally, was an artistic movement that embraced change, eschewed tradition, was fascinated by the new, the future and was often identity-driven (Levenson 2011)? Smith, utterly convinced by a material culture conception of history, thought that the answers lay in the very beginnings of the narratives of Europeans in the South Pacific. The answers would be found in a historical and, indeed, a historicist approach to the enquiry (see Hamilton 2003). So, from its inception, Smith’s study is framed as a quest to understand. He too is a voyager/ traveller into what was only partially known in the 1950s. Famously, in his work Poetics, Aristotle makes distinctions between myth and history, between poetry and drama, between comedy and tragedy, and between epic poetry and lyric poetry. For him, it was the devices employed and the intention of their employment that made for the differences in these genres. Of course, there have been intense debates down through the ages about Aristotle’s typology, but the notions of underlying structures and the use of devices in literary theory still has wide currency, even when the structural nature of the analysis is under scrutiny. It is with underlying structures and the employment of artistic devices that Smith creates his narrative. Beilharz (1997) called Smith a ‘typological thinker’, but Smith was never interested in structures and devices for their own sake. He was engrossed by the historical conditions under

114 • Bernard Smith and Imagining the Pacific

which the prevalence of a dominant landscape poetics is challenged and eventually replaced by a new poetics of landscape representation. His analysis was not about paradigmatic shifts in the Kuhnian sense – although by the second edition of European Vision in the South Pacific, he was fully aware of Kuhn’s work – nor was it about epistemic shifts in the Foucauldian sense (Foucault 1973). Smith’s work does not exhibit the search for general ‘rules’ or ‘laws’ or historical schema that might emerge from his analysis (despite his reading of Marxist theory), but was more interested in the sociocultural-­intellectual and quotidian conditions that offered artists choices in their practice and what may be observed in the historical record about the particular artistic choices painters made. The emergence of a new type of representation – the typical landscape – is as close as Smith gets to a programmatic conclusion, because, in the end, he was faithful to a history-making agenda of understanding the particular. At the heart of Smith’s intellectual journey is historicism, the assertion of the poetics of history (its devices, its rhetoric and its interpretative strategies) (cf. Hamilton 2003) as a mode of thinking and analysis in the visual arts (and in opposition to the widespread practice of an ahistorical approach focused on connoisseurship, style and the aesthetics of masterpieces) (Smith 1989: ix). To this degree, he was undertaking a type of history of art that was itself experimental. Historicism was the ‘main game’ and the images produced by European travellers in the South Pacific were his rich, already historicized, archive (Bennett 1991). His was, first and foremost, a history that took seriously the visual record of travellers as much as the journals, logbooks and cartographic charts that recorded these voyages. The ‘journey’ of European Vision in the South Pacific is arranged chronologically and historical time is the locus of the analysis. However, what I find absorbing is the manner in which, to a degree, Smith’s historical method emulates the approach of his subject, the voyager scientists-cumartists. The careful recording in a number of modes of representation was and is a distinctive feature of the archive. The massed, imperially sanctioned documentation of the voyages and the early years of British colonization is notable for its sheer diversity and the wealth of information to be found there. Smith’s reference list provides a clue to this cornucopia of published and unpublished ­material: maps, logbooks, sketches, paintings, prints, botanical specimens, meteorological records, navigation records, journals, diaries, letters, poems, scientific and artistic treatises, proceedings of various societies and travel descriptions. In Smith’s narrative, the particularity of individual sketches, drawings and paintings in the visual record he appraises is interpreted through the ‘surrounding’ primary material that in some way pertains to aspects

Russell Staiff • 115

of the visual record or the artist’s actions. Contextualization is thus a primary mode of interpretation, as it is for much of history as a practice (Jenkins 1995), yet not one where ‘art’ is considered distinct from ‘society’ (that is, ‘society’ as a sort of historical background and the image privileged in the foreground), but where the image is a node in a web of supporting and linked materials. I will give but one example. Sydney Parkinson’s botanical drawings undertaken on Cook’s first voyage exemplify Smith’s approach. He begins with Parkinson’s original botanical pencil drawings. The material then brought into the analysis includes the writings of Joseph Banks, the specimens still held in the British Natural History Museum, the finished drawings by Parkinson (coloured and labelled with their botanical names), other complete drawings made for Banks based on Parkinson’s sketches and the engravings that ensued. Smith notes in the record of Banks a conflict between Neoclassical ideals in art and the empirical process of scientific observation. Other writings from the first voyage are introduced into the analysis, along with material from the French expeditions to the Pacific and writings by members of the Royal Society. Carefully, the analysis extends outwards along these various paths of investigation and what delights is what these various juxtapositions reveal. In addition, what makes it work is the poetics of history: the ways in which context is constructed/imagined from a record already ­sanctioned/authorized by the institutions that house them and then how these are converted into a narrative as though that narrative can (re)construct the historical circumstances of their production. The rhetoric of history, as White (1978) may call it (imagining and articulating context, narrative form, chronology, literary devices and so on), mimicked the attempt by the South Pacific voyagers to represent their experiences, but they were representations that were governed by a host of instructions, expectations, cultural perceptions and presumed audiences, and were therefore highly selective and so can only ever be a trace of the corporeal travels in the South Pacific. And, in turn, these records can, in themselves, only be a trace of the past Smith seeks to understand and present in his own intellectual journey. At every turn, however, poetics was both a vital substrata and a constitutive element of the voyage/travel/representation relationship, whether they be the embodied travels of the voyages into the South Pacific or the ­intellectual ‘voyage’ of scholars like Bernard Smith. Russell Staiff is an adjunct fellow in the critical heritage and tourism programme at Western Sydney University and an adjunct professorial

116 • Bernard Smith and Imagining the Pacific

fellow in the architectural heritage and tourism programme at Silpakorn University, Bangkok. His research interests are twofold: the various intersections between cultural heritage, communities and tourism with a particular emphasis on Southeast Asia, and heritage as a sociocultural phenomenon. He has recently co-edited a volume Heritage and Tourism (with Robyn Bushell and Steve Watson, Routledge, 2013) and is the author of Re-imagining Heritage Interpretation: Enchanting the Past/Future (Ashgate, 2014).

Notes 1 Ellingson (2001) disputes the use of the term in the eighteenth century even by Rousseau, who is often associated with it. 2 In more recent museological explorations, with the hindsight of postcolonial theory and discourse, attempts to counter this ‘Othering’ process have been attempted. The 2010–11 Bonn, Vienna and Bern exhibition James Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific, for example, mixes together the cultural productions of both the voyagers and the peoples visited (Kaeppler 2009).

References Alpers, S. 1984. The Art of Describing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Anderson, J., C.R. Marshall and A. Yip (eds). 2016. The Legacies of Bernard Smith: Essays on Australian Art, History and Cultural Politics. Sydney: Power Publications and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Anfam, D. 1990. Abstract Expressionism. London: Thames & Hudson. Beilharz, P. 1997. Imagining the Antipodes: Culture, Theory and the Visual in the Work of Bernard Smith. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Bennett, T. 1991. Outside Literature. London: Routledge. Bryson, N. 1986. Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ellingson, T. 2001. The Myth of the Noble Savage. Berkeley: University of California Press. Foucault, M. 1973. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books. Gaston, R. 2016. ‘My Greatest Debt: Bernard Smith. The Warburg Institute and the Evolution of European Vision in the South Pacific’, in J. Anderson, C.R.  Marshall and A. Yip (eds), The Legacies of Bernard Smith: Essays on Australian Art, History and Cultural Politics. Sydney: Power Publications and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, pp. 39–54. Gibson, J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Gombrich, E. 1977. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Oxford: Phaidon.

Russell Staiff • 117

Hamilton, P. 2003. Historicism, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Jenkins, K. 1995. On ‘What is History’? London: Routledge. Kaeppler, A. (ed.). 2009. James Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific, exhib. cat. London: Thames & Hudson. Levenson, M. (ed.). 2011. The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levine, G. (ed.). 1993. Realism and Representation. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Marin, L. 1993. ‘Frontiers of Utopia: Past and Present’, Critical Inquiry 19(3): 397–420. McLean, I. 1998. White Aborigines: Identity Politics in Australian Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, B. 1989. European Vision and the South Pacific, 2nd edn. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. ———. 1992. Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. ———. 2002. A Pavane for Another Time. South Yarra: MacMillan. Staiff, R. 1995. ‘Imaging Felicitania: The Visual Culture of Early Colonial South Australia’, Ph.D. Thesis. Melbourne: University of Melbourne. ———. 2014. Re-imagining Heritage Interpretation: Enchanting the Past/Future. Farnham: Ashgate. Thomas, N. 1994. Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. ———. 2016. ‘History, Art History and Museology in the Pacific’, in J. Anderson, C.R. Marshall and A. Yip (eds), The Legacies of Bernard Smith: Essays on Australian Art, History and Cultural Politics. Sydney: Power Publications and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, pp. 55–70. Thomas. N., and D. Losche (eds). 1999. Double Vision: Art Histories and Colonial Histories in the Pacific. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wartofsky, M. 1979. ‘Picturing and Representing’, in C. Nodine and D. Fisher (eds), Perception and Pictorial Representation. New York: Praeger, pp. 314–35. ———. 1980. ‘Cameras Can’t See: Representation, Photography and Human Vision’, Afterimage 7(9): 8–9. White, H. 1978. Tropics of Discourse. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Wilton, A. 2006. Turner in His Time, revised edn. London: Thames & Hudson.

T6 Searching for the Spirit of Bluegrass Cynthia J. Miller

Each November, as autumn begins to give way to winter, two women, both getting on in years, hike without a sound through the pine needles and fallen leaves that cover Jerusalem Ridge, Kentucky, trying to avoid notice, and keeping a watchful eye against the bows and guns of local hunters. They arrive at an old abandoned homestead, boost themselves through a window that hasn’t seen glass for some forty years, and settle into a corner, easing the cold sting of their fingers with warm breath. As their circulation returns, they draw mandolins out of their backpacks and begin to play, until the strains of old-time melodies echo through the pines. They have come here for years, from Canada, to the rural boyhood home of the Father of Bluegrass, Bill Monroe. Leaving their car miles away, they hike the hilly path he walked each day, to make music in the house where he was raised – to hear the birds and the coyotes that gave rise to his ‘high lonesome’ sound – to add their strains to the diversity of music that arises from the place, with Monroe always at the centre (McLuhan 1960: 281). Their story is not unique. Community members in nearby Rosine spin tale upon tale of travellers who venture from near and far to look, listen and play in the ‘house that music built’. Each year, they arrive in the thousands: a musician from Israel flies to the United States and takes a cross-country train; a bluegrass band from Russia, whose members learned his music from bootlegged cassette tapes, travel with their rough-hewn instruments to connect with the ‘source’ of their music; an Australian radio host makes a journey halfway around the world to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of the icon’s birth. They come, not seeking to consume a tourist experience, but to pay homage,

Cynthia J. Miller • 119

feel Monroe’s presence and be transported back to the birth of a genre. Monroe’s music, visitors are told, was fuelled by home, family and place – this place – in a way that no other could. They have, as the county brochures beckon, ‘come home to bluegrass’. This chapter will explore these journeys – as they are offered, sought and found – examining the ways in which memories, chronicles and tall tales emerge and intertwine until, like a jigsaw puzzle nearing completion, the story of the birthplace of bluegrass music and the lives that have shaped and shared in its heritage begins to take shape.1 Travel here creates more than simply ‘romantic geographies’ where visitors construct dramatic imaginings of people and their places – it facilitates engagement with the local past in ways that create relationships in (and with) the global present (see Gilroy 2000; Tuan 2014). There are ‘poetics and politics’ at play in this interplay, as Rosine’s past is celebrated, contested, embodied and continually expanded (see Bauman and Briggs 1990). The boundaries of time, space and identities are blurred and erased for some, and are reinforced and emphasized for others.

The Birthplace of Bluegrass Music Countless small towns across the United States claim association with a nationally recognized ‘native son’ (or daughter), whose birth, homestead or death enhances local identities and invites celebrity tourism. Few, however, are framed and celebrated quite as pervasively, or with as extensive an affirmation of traditional lifeways, as Bill Monroe. Monroe’s status as an icon of American music and grassroots identity, and the legacy of his lengthy and well-documented career with his band, the Bluegrass Boys – including inductions into both the Country Music (1970) and Rock and Roll (1997) Halls of Fame, and awards including a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (1993) and the National Medal of Arts (1995) – have led to numerous forms of commemoration and re-enactment, from musical tributes to museum exhibits and documentary films, each with complex layers of meaning. His life, music and birthplace are inextricably interwoven with not only traditional down-home American music, but also with local, regional and national identities and the promotion of Americana as well, all of which speak to a very specific American past. For the town of Rosine (with a population of forty-one),2 that specific reading of the past has successfully displaced all others in popular memory. The homestead on Jerusalem Ridge, the Rosine town barn, where Monroe’s band began the tradition of weekly jamborees, and the

120 • Searching for the Spirit of Bluegrass

Figure 6.1 The life of Bill Monroe, inscribed on the landscape

singer’s gravesite at the nearby town cemetery all inscribe Monroe’s life onto the landscape and serve to craft a multilayered text that joins past and present, and draws community members and visitors alike into a complex dialogue of history and identity (see Figure 6.1). Memorials, markers, images and architecture have been reproduced and repurposed in a range of material culture that has, in turn, been marketed across the globe in the form of maps, books, magazines, graphic art, record and compact disc covers and liner notes, and, of course, sheet music and instruments. Competing histories – of its status as a oncethriving railroad town and its lucrative role as a wood supplier for Louisville Slugger bats – have long been forgotten. Incorporated in 1873, Rosine was originally called Pigeon Roost after the large flock of passenger pigeons that roosted on the hill east of town. The town was developed by banker and Kentucky state legislator Henry D. McHenry, and was named after his wife’s (poet Jenny Taylor McHenry) pen name. McHenry used his political influence to secure an east-west main line of the Elizabethtown-Paducah Railroad in the area, after which he, and his associates, purchased the surrounding land, in the hope of creating an urban transportation centre that would rival Chicago and Pittsburgh, with its traffic in coal, tobacco and crops (Smith 1996: 29). Rosine was, indeed, a boomtown for a period of time, boasting

Cynthia J. Miller • 121

hotels and pool halls, along with a gristmill, creamery, tobacco drying houses, stave and hoop mills, a shingle mill and Herbert Woosley’s Bat Mill – one of the leading suppliers of the milled ash timber ‘blanks’ that became the world-famous ‘Louisville Slugger’ bats (Bits of Rosine History n.d.; Smith 2000: 6–7). The town, however, ultimately failed to live up to McHenry’s ambitions and faded into relative obscurity until Monroe’s musical heyday in the mid 1940s. Since that period, Monroe’s career and the Rosine area have been viewed as mutually constitutive, as evidenced through the landscape, rhetoric and material culture of the area. Historian Tom Ewing notes that this strong musical tradition, embodied in Monroe’s life and legacy, and its willingness to create an industry of musical heritage based on that legacy have distinguished Rosine from other rural towns in decline (Ewing 2000: 277). Instead, the social and cultural heritage of the community has persisted and has been revitalized in the service of a robust programme of tourism focused on Monroe and his music. Most of Rosine’s current citizens are direct descendants of the town’s founders, and narratives of the town’s history continue to be passed down through generations, creating a body of oral history that is deeply embedded in the story of the homeplace (Bits of Rosine History n.d.). As travellers enter present-day Rosine, the sign says simply: ‘Hi There. Welcome to Rosine – Home of Bluegrass Music.’ Tours of Bill Monroe’s boyhood home link the places and times of Monroe’s early life not only with family and community dynamics, but also with the development of bluegrass music itself. Guides instruct that: ‘When you look at the home, unlike other famous homes, you are not only seeing where a famous person, or in this case, three famous persons, were raised, but you are seeing where an art form flourished and a new one was formed’ (Tour of the Monroe Homestead n.d.; see Figure 6.2). Monroe’s music, visitors are told, was fuelled by home, family and place – this place – in a way that no other could. While the commemoration of Monroe’s birthplace begins at the homestead and Jerusalem Ridge, it does not end there. The fabric of Rosine is tightly knit with Monroe’s legacy. As Aaron Hutchings, former producer for the Kentucky Network (KET) and restoration volunteer, observed, ‘this entire hamlet is Bill Monroe’s monument’ (Bragg 1996: A14). As visitors leave the homestead, they are encouraged to drive two miles up the road into town to the cemetery, where the icon and other family members are buried. Monroe’s life, music and birthplace are inextricably interwoven with not only traditional down-home American music, but also with local, regional and national identities and the promotion of Americana – all

122 • Searching for the Spirit of Bluegrass

Figure 6.2 The Monroe family homestead

of which speak to a very specific American past. As his birthplace and homestead, Rosine and the surrounding area have become key elements in Western Kentucky’s Americana identity. Departing from what Edward Alexander has noted as the ‘anecdotal great man, great events approach to history’, which fails to consider ‘economic, social, and cultural factors’, as well as from stereotypes about the roots of bluegrass ‘which might lead some to assume that Rosine is a little mountain hollow filled with barefoot, anti-social hillbillies who rouse themselves only to check on their whiskey stills’, remembrances of Monroe draw much of their strength from being firmly situated in the social and economic contexts of the Rosine community in the early twentieth century, when the town was economically depressed, but rich in spirit and cultural creativity (Alexander 1979: 89; Smith 1996: 28). The town is a noted site on the state’s Bluegrass, Blues and Barbecue trail, and one of the most highly elaborated, in comparison to other ‘trail’ birthplaces, such as the Everly Brothers (Brownie) and W.C. Handy (Henderson). Jerusalem Ridge, the site of the Monroe family homestead, the Rosine barn, where Monroe’s band began the tradition of weekly jamborees, and the singer’s gravesite at the nearby town cemetery all inscribe Monroe’s life onto the landscape and serve to craft the town’s residents’ sense of identity and community, creating

Cynthia J. Miller • 123

a multilayered context in which the poetics of place are narrated and performed. Intimate tours of the homestead are offered by long-time community-member volunteers who recall and re-create ‘back when’ for tens of thousands of tourists and fans annually, while a weekly radio show, staged at the homestead and hosted by bluegrass band The Cumberland Highlanders, revisits the tradition of ‘front porch music’ on which Monroe was raised. These ongoing re-creations and commemorations are part of the fabric of everyday life for the community of Rosine, but as the Monroe legacy radiates outward to the surrounding area and the region, these events take on greater – and sometimes spectacular – ­proportions. The town’s association with Monroe has endowed it – and Ohio County, in which it is located – with status as the cradle of bluegrass music. County-sponsored promotional materials beckon travellers to: ‘Come home to bluegrass music in Ohio County! The birthplace of Bill Monroe.’ Monroe’s image has also become an icon of the area’s down-home values, celebrated in many of his songs. Rosine itself plays host each year to the Jerusalem Ridge Bluegrass Festival – ‘At the Birthplace of American Bluegrass Music’ – in addition to hosting a weekly ­‘jamboree’ at the town barn, and other Monroe-inspired events, which draw ­travellers from all over the nation and around the world.

Hallowed Ground But for most travellers to Ohio County, Rosine exists as far more than a music destination or a heritage site. While music and heritage abound, the tiny community is inextricably linked to the homeplace of the Father of Bluegrass. It stands as a geographical and cultural touchstone for down-home Americana3 – a living, breathing homage to the man who set a way of life to music – a sacred centre for the genre and its followers: ‘This is holy ground’, as one observer related, ‘the epicenter’ (Henningsen 2002). For bluegrass fans, the journey to Rosine is often framed as a pilgrimage – an experience that replaces the notion of mere travel or tourism with one of devoted followers connecting with the source of the genre and paying homage to its patriarch – a conceptualization that finds support in the Ohio County Tourism Commission’s website invitation to ‘Plan a Pilgrimage to the Homeplace’. And plan, they do, by the thousands each year. In an era of digital communication, Monroe’s bluegrass fans are found worldwide, and many individuals, families and groups from across the United States, Europe, Asia and elsewhere come to visit Monroe’s birthplace each year. Local residents

124 • Searching for the Spirit of Bluegrass

recall a visit by the Red River Valley Boys, a bluegrass band from Russia, who played Monroe’s music, memorized from black market audiotapes, on rough-hewn instruments they had made themselves: ‘They played out there on the porch [of Rosine’s General Store]. Our regular [weekly] musicians were there, and they exchanged instruments. There was only one that could speak English, but those guys almost cried when our musicians offered their expensive instruments to let them play. And man, did they play!’ (interview with Eleanor Bratcher, 13 September 2011). Travellers such as these, who come to Rosine from around the world, lend support to Juan Eduardo Campo’s (1998) suggestion that, rather than displacing pilgrimages, globalization increases them, diversifying the reasons why those journeys are made. However, drawing together these diverse reasons is the notion of proximity to greatness – to walk the ground of Jerusalem Ridge, to stand in the rooms that echoed with Monroe’s early music and leave feeling connected, inspired and, perhaps, changed. This notion of pilgrimage, of identifying with, approaching and, perhaps, touching artefacts associated with the divine, has deep roots in religious tradition, and yet offers a framework of interest for thinking about the poetics of the journey to Rosine. It is, indeed, a ‘transmigration from one world to another’ – a shift in subjectivity, knowledge and perception (Eliot 1960: 163). Historically, pilgrimages were made to the final resting places of spiritual patrons in order to celebrate and commemorate their lives and works (Thacker 2002: 1–2). In this tradition, the pilgrim’s sights are fixed on the individual, as a locus of power, and so the focus of the journey becomes that spiritual figure’s physical remains. In Rosine, Monroe’s life comes full circle, as both birthplace and resting place, and while ‘pilgrims’ visit both the homestead and the cemetery, it is the historic house – the site of birth and life – that serves as the focal point and locus of power. The patriarch of bluegrass is felt more deeply in place, in the context of the landscape, built environment and relationships that fostered and animated his music, than in his physical resting place, which, although highly revered, holds his remains separate from his spirit. For visitors, the day-to-day life of the town offers a performance of identity – an enactment of the poetics of place – that is seen, heard and felt in ways that are both shared and uniquely individual and reflexive (Bauman and Briggs 1990: 73). These experiences of Monroe’s homeplace and community create for travellers a poetics that resonates on a deep, existential level, merging geography, art, history and emotion with Monroe’s life and legacy. There is an element of reverence here. The Monroe farm may not be not sacred space, but it is, perhaps, hallowed ground. It ‘provides

Cynthia J. Miller • 125

opportunity for reaffirmation of the faith, it is a place for private and intimate experience, although it is shared with many others; it is, in concept, the temple of the muses’ (Cameron 1971: 17). For many who travel to Rosine, this imagery is particularly meaningful. The claim to music that permeates the historic house and the landscape that surrounds it suggests that there are, indeed, muses at work – or that, as a writer for The New York Times attested: ‘The dirt has music in it’ (Bragg 1996: A14). Or, as Monroe insisted: ‘I never wrote any songs. The music was all around me in the air and I was just the first to reach up and pull it down’ (Tour of the Monroe Homestead n.d.). The interpretative framework that surrounds Monroe’s birthplace invokes a deep sense of place as it joins the essences of landscape, vernacular architecture and local culture with the early life of a man and his music. If Monroe’s gifts were a blending of man and place, then it is a blending that many who come to the homestead long to share, casting it as a kind of locus sanctorum (Thacker 2002). Prior to the homestead’s restoration, one ‘pilgrim’ removed a door from the historic house and crafted a mandolin from its wood, a relic residing in the space between the cultural and the sacred. To visit the homeplace then, to hear (or play) bluegrass at its source, is not only an experience of a lifetime, but a participation in the fabric of history – of the homestead, the town and bluegrass itself. Citing the ties to place that so closely inform Monroe’s music, Campbell Mercer, Executive Director of the Jerusalem Ridge Foundation, argues that ‘that ridge, that farm, that view had more to do with forging this style of music than anything else could’ (interview with Campbell Mercer, 12 September 2011). Referring to songs like ‘On My Way Back to the Old Home’, ‘Jerusalem Ridge’, ‘Little Cabin Home on the Hill’ and ‘Rose of Old Kentucky’, Mercer affirmed these already acknowledged ties between place and identity, urging community leaders to preserve the homeplace – road, hill and all, insisting that: ‘you can’t just go into a museum and have photographs or paintings depict this . . . You’ve got to let people get out there and walk around those ridges and see how hard life was for the Kentucky hill farmer’ (Cardwell 2001: 24).

Sunlight in a Bottle Travel to the Birthplace of Bluegrass Music is, for many, a merging of past and present, inner and outer worlds – an evocative experience that touches the heart in ways that defy description and holds a quality of what might be considered ‘nostalgic synergy’ – simultaneously embodying and subverting what Carmen Andras (2006: 159–60)

126 • Searching for the Spirit of Bluegrass

outlines as the characteristics of the poetics of travel. For Andras, such poetics resist the nostalgia of traditional narratives and yet, for many of Rosine’s visitors, that nostalgia is a conduit to something more expansive and dislocating in time and space: This brings back a lot of the old memories of what it was like when I was a kid and we’d go to the Opry to hear Bill Monroe play, back in the days when it was Ruby Lyle playing banjo and Joe Stuart, way, way, way back, and the music had a magical thing . . . It’s hard to describe – it’s like trying to put sunlight in a bottle, or describe a rainbow to a blind man. It’s spiritual, an emotion; it becomes a synergistic thing. It’s almost sacrilege to try to explain it. It just is; it happens. And those magic moments, they happen occasionally. I call them golden moments. And that’s what this is. (Interview with Rodney Dillard, 14 September 2011)

For some, the journey is inextricably interwoven with the creation of community and camaraderie. Martha Adcock, who performs in a duo with her husband, renowned banjo-picker and former Bluegrass Boy Eddie Adcock, affirmed: ‘The bluegrass community is a family. I love them as dearly as I love my own family’ (interview with Martha Adcock, 14 September 2011). Monroe, both during his life and after, occupied several social roles and intersected with, and belonged to, multiple communities – as a resident of Rosine and member of one of its early families; as a musician, songwriter and bandleader; as the ‘Father of Bluegrass Music’; and as Kentucky icon – and so his public persona may be viewed as a site of multiple meanings and interpretations. All of these are, to varying degrees, reflected (and contested) in the everyday life of Rosine and, occasionally, in the experiences of those who journey there. Each calls forth memories that are a complex mixture of public and private, and often, in unexpected ways, as locals and visitors approach the bluegrass icon from a range of understandings, histories and relationships. Travellers from near and far share reminiscences and stories such as those related here, intertwining lives, communities and journeys. And through those journeys, musicians, fans and local residents become participants in – and performers of – Rosine’s poetics of place and are, at least temporarily, bound together by the place, the man and the music. Eleanor Bratcher, co-owner, with her husband Hoyt, of the tiny hamlet’s General Store, recalled earlier times, when travel to Rosine was a more active part of the region’s bluegrass tradition. Her remembrances, like those of so many others, hold locals and visitors alike spellbound. In the process, each becomes part of the lived poetics of the community’s history, transformed as they witness tales of the past, and experiencing a present that will become a similar tale for those who come after:

Cynthia J. Miller • 127

We fired up the stove when it was cold in the wintertime – and honey, let me tell you somethin’: People’d start comin’ in and comin’ in. They’d see that we was open at night – they’d stop in there for gas, and listen to music . . . We’d have eight, maybe twelve, champion bands out in the parking lot . . . We knew every one of’em personally, and I would send out cards and letters if they didn’t show up and let’em know that they were missed. We had the best, best music. They were just like family to us. They enjoyed gettin’ out there and playing – in the backyard, on the tailgates of trucks, anywhere they could find a seat, back up against a wall. (Interview with Eleanor Bratcher, 13 September 2011)

Musician Rodney Dillard also reminisced about the intangible power of gathering in this place made vibrant by down-home music and tradition, further contextualizing the experiences and ongoing performances of identity grounded in Monroe and his music: There’s a real sense of community here. And why do we need that? It’s because in these dangerous times, we’re like chickens in a rain storm, we all want to huddle together and be comforted by each other and by the music, and know that we’re all touching the stone at the same time. That’s very important now. (Interview with Rodney Dillard, 14 September 2011)

Another musician, who had travelled to Western Kentucky from the hills of Appalachia, put it even more simply: ‘I think this is a great music, and I think it don’t only tell a story, we live this way, and that’s what it’s about’ (interview with Raymond Huffmaster, 12 September 2011). For others, however, the journey is more intimate and personal, a quiet thing, almost reluctantly shared with others. This became clear one sunlit September afternoon, as a tall, barrel-chested figure moved slowly through the crowd gathered on the lawn of the Monroe homestead. Amidst the festivities commemorating the icon’s one-hundredth birthday – the eight-foot mandolin-shaped birthday cake, ‘kitchenmade’ by one of the women of the town, the paper cups filled with fruit punch, disappearing as fast as they could be filled, and the halting stanzas of ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’ bravely sent forth by a band of schoolchildren from across the state – the visitor was thoughtful and quiet, stopping every now and again to shake a hand, smile shyly and share a few words. He was both a musician and also a sojourner; one of their own, yet a stranger: He was Monroe’s son. For James Monroe, this was a journey of memory – or of ­‘postmemory’ – to a family homeplace from which his own life was far removed, known largely through his father’s stories of a difficult childhood and his own occasional returns for concerts or commemorations (Hirsch 2012). For the younger Monroe, a former member of his father’s

128 • Searching for the Spirit of Bluegrass

Bluegrass Boys and leader of his own bluegrass band, The Midnight Ramblers, this was a rare visit to Rosine, as were his father’s visits to the town during his career. This gave his presence at the festivities an added sense of renewing his relationship with his own heritage and with Rosine as place. Monroe, who would participate later that day in another celebration of his father’s life in the nearby city of Owensboro, described the difference, for him, between the two commemorations with one sentence: ‘That’s a performance; this is personal’ (interview with James Monroe, 14 September 2011).

Shaping Community, Shaping Lives If, as Susan Robertson suggests, we consider travel to be a metaphor ‘by which we discuss other fundamental activities of life’ (Robertson 2001: xi), then the experiences of those who are drawn to Rosine, as well as the experiences of those who encourage and receive them, offer opportunities to deeply consider the ways in which lives become intertwined with place, as well as the ways in which those relationships are known, understood, embraced and contested. As we consider Monroe’s life and legacy, the emerging picture of the ties binding the man, the place and the music become not only more robust, but also more complex. On the one hand, the powerful influences of his birthplace are undeniable; on the other hand, those ties to place became more symbolically powerful as they became less binding in reality. Monroe was not the first gifted musician, or the last, to call Rosine home, and he suggested years later that the seeds sewn in him, as in so many others, by life in the small town would not have flourished without room to grow: ‘I guess if I hadn’t left Rosine and gone up North, I’d probably be just like the other folks who live here now, farming and raising a family’ (Cantwell 2003: 36). The tiny hamlet’s residents recognize the complexities of their town’s relationship with Monroe and respond to them with a wide range of sentiments, some with deep and abiding fondness, others with careful reminders of the other voices and talents that were hidden in the icon’s shadow, such as thumb-picking guitarist Arnold Schultz and fiddler Tex Atecheson, and still others, who reflect pragmatically: ‘If for no other reason, you have to appreciate that when people mention the name Monroe, they also mention the name Rosine in the same breath. That’s meant a lot to this town’ (McBride, cited in Ewing 2000: 244). Their memories complicate debates about which identities are held close and which are discarded, and infuse the relationships between the town and those who

Cynthia J. Miller • 129

Figure 6.3 One stop on the Mandolin Trail

travel across its borders with richness and diversity, and as countless visitors journey to ‘The Birthplace of Bluegrass’ each year. Individual life stories are continually mapped onto the wider cultural history of down-home Americana, with its closely held values of community, industry, spirituality and sense of place. One such journey was guided by Ohio County’s ‘Come Home to Bluegrass’ Mandolin Trail, inaugurated to honour the anniversary of Monroe’s birth (see Figure 6.3). The trail featured individually decorated

130 • Searching for the Spirit of Bluegrass

eight-foot mandolins, placed at businesses and attractions throughout the county, with prizes for those visitors who found them all. One was adorned with dozens of photographs of Monroe at various points in his life; others were painted with his likeness; still others were decorated as symbols of rural life, such as the patchwork quilt mandolin on the wall of the Rosine Jamboree Barn. A similar visual journey was created through the efforts of countless artists who, inspired by Monroe’s songs and their connection to rural Kentucky, translated his musical imagery into more visible form by creating works in other media. Typically found in local homes and small shops, many of these were commissioned and brought together for the Bill Monroe Centennial Art Exhibit. The exhibit featured fifty visual interpretations of Monroe’s songs – in formats including canvas, metal sculpture, tabletop art and mixed-media constructions – mounted on walls behind familiar-feeling couches and armchairs or placed on tables in small, casual spaces. As musicians from around the country moved in and out of these informal spaces to play, the paintings, sketches and sculptures lent imaginative form, texture and colour to the times and places invoked by his songs. Each represented the artist’s own rendition of Monroe’s ‘down-home’ melodies and lyrics, translating the history, emotion and identity communicated through his songs for those unfamiliar with the man, the music and the lifeways they represent. Thus, music, memories and imaginings are joined in imagery, making manifest the poetics, history and emotions they evoke. But while the stages for each of these heritage experiences were set by the promotional rhetoric of the county, it was at the local level where the poetics of travel were truly enacted. The works of art represented refrains of the everyday – local lives, places and histories – heard through local ears and re-envisioned through local eyes; landmarks, personalities and traditions, each bearing markers of recognition, but translated into a medium that would, perhaps, speak more clearly to those from ‘outside’. Similar voices were present on the Mandolin Trail as well. Each mandolin was accompanied by a single sheet of recollection about Monroe and his role in the life of the Rosine community, related by one of its long-time citizens, such as this memory of Monroe and Rosine Baseball by resident Bill Burden: I remember when Bill Monroe came and brought his team to play Rosine, and of course, beat’em bad. Bill’s band played baseball – they were baseball players, too . . . and then, when they got through playin’ the game, they had a wagon set up out there, and they all got up out there and played music for a while. That was back in the forties – I was a kid at the time of it. It impressed me that they all played baseball and then they played music. (Burden 2011)

Cynthia J. Miller • 131

These memories paint pictures of a Rosine long forgotten by most. Shared with travellers, they create a warm, rich and lyrical narrative story of Monroe and his community – a rural, working-class poetics of place. For the town’s inhabitants, Bill Monroe was a public figure whose life and demeanour set him apart from those around him. Yet, he was also one of them – a man with a foot in each world – and so is remembered with an easy intimacy. Their stories blend public and private, myth and memory, yet do so in ways that reflect their enduring relationships with the life and legacy of the man whose history is inextricably intertwined with their own. For some, these tales provide a time to reflect and remember Monroe; for others, it is a time to ­remember themselves. Tour guides, local merchants, residents and local musicians all craft similar narratives that transcend simple local oral history, inextricably linking the informal history of the community with the practice of travel and with the travellers who have now become part of that history. Remembrances of the visitors who have sought out the ­homeplace – the women who risked getting shot during hunting season to follow, quite literally, in Monroe’s footsteps; the Russian band with their homemade instruments; the Israeli who mistakenly arrived in Seattle and backtracked across the country to Kentucky by train – have all been polished through years of repetition and performance, like tales told on the front porch from one generation to the next, becoming part of the poetics infusing the community. Chronicles of those sojourns continue to shape the identity of the community for ‘insiders’ as well as visitors. These stories are evocative – performances more than ­retellings – reminders of a shared history that have become interwoven into the lives of individuals and the community, yet illustrating the tension and multiplicity of perspectives found in contemporary notions of the poetics of travel.

Conclusion: Making and Translating Memories Walter Benjamin suggests that travellers are inherent storytellers, and each of these recollections is, in its own way, an act of ­‘storytelling’– performing, participating in and (re)creating history and cultural life – an act that both demands and creates community (Zilcosky 2008: 3–4). While the circulation of these stories is typically informal and subject to shifts over time, they exhibit individuality and creativity and, taken together, form a dynamic body of narratives. Similar stories and remembrances emerge in conversations, gatherings and tributes all along Jerusalem Ridge, and throughout Rosine’s commemorations of

132 • Searching for the Spirit of Bluegrass

Monroe’s life, career and relationship with the community, each giving rise to the next. Not all are positive – Monroe was headstrong, singleminded and ‘a funny person to get to know’, and stewardship of his memory and heritage is sometimes hotly contested – but all are fuelled by a deeply personal investment in the tales and the telling. Whether they are fact or fiction, experienced or appropriated, these memories matter, and making them known to others also matters. For the residents of Rosine, this is not simply Bill Monroe’s history, it is their town’s – stories of grandparents, parents, neighbours and friends – it is their own. It is, as James Monroe had said, ‘personal’, with remembrances of Monroe and the travellers who continue to pay tribute serving as catalysts and touchstones for recalling and celebrating individual and collective heritages, as well as serving as reminders that the music also travels, connecting local lives with a much wider community. As bluegrass musician and Yale University Professor Peter Salovey observed during the Monroe Centennial: ‘To be associated, of course, with Bill Monroe is something that everyone here knows about deeply, but to remind folks just how important this part of the world is to an art form that is distinctly American, but has travelled the world, is just so ­important’ (Salovey 2011). Within the space of those travels, local narratives meet those created by the travellers themselves – ­letters and journals are written, stories are handed down, photographs are taken, works of art and music are created – as they seek to capture their experiences and render them visible and comprehensible to others. Typically, as James Duncan and Derek Gregory suggest, these various renderings, if considered at all, become the objects of specialist study – removed from their context, codified and drained of both their energy and ­synergy: ‘journals, letters and published writings are assigned to literary scholars and historians; sketches, watercolours and paintings to art historians; and photographs and postcards to historians of photography’ (Duncan and Gregory 1999: 4). However, brought together and allowed to interweave, they become vibrant and robust – ­simultaneously public and private, political and spiritual, graceful and rough – ‘sunlight in a bottle’, as Rodney Dillard mused. We are able to ‘attend to their different valences and silences’ (Duncan and Gregory 1999: 4), as they convey the tensions, perspectives, resonances and imaginings of those who have experienced the social, material, historical and symbolic significance of Rosine and the Monroe homeplace on Jerusalem Ridge in relation to the poetics of travel and memory. The stories, melodies and imagery evoked by Monroe’s birthplace and legacy permeate relationships, the built environment and the sounds

Cynthia J. Miller • 133

that fill the air, so that travellers might not just see and hear, but also live and feel the place where bluegrass was born. Cynthia J. Miller is a cultural anthropologist specializing in popular culture and visual media. She serves as Director of Communication for the Center for the Study of Film and History, and Scholar-in-Residence at Emerson College. She is the editor or co-editor of twelve scholarly volumes and her writing has appeared in a wide range of journals and anthologies, including Post Script, the Journal of Popular Film and Television, the Journal of American Culture and Film & History. She is also Film Review Editor for the journal Film & History and series editor for Rowman & Littlefield’s Film and History book series.

Notes 1 Interview material cited throughout this chapter is the result of interviews carried out in September 2011 with Martha Adcock, Eleanor Bratcher, Rodney Dillard, Raymond Huffmaster, Campbell Mercer and James Monroe, during the three-day-long celebration of Bill Monroe’s hundredth birthday in Rosine, Kentucky. 2 Rosine population courtesy of the office of the Ohio County Judge Executive. 3 In other words, traditional, rural, heartland American values and lifeways.

References Alexander, E.P. 1979. Museums in Motion. Nashville: American Association for State and Local History. Andras, C. 2006. ‘The Poetics and Politics of Travel: An Overview’, Philologia Jassyensia 2(2): 159–67. Bauman, R., and C. Briggs. 1990. ‘Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life’, Annual Review of Anthropology 19: 59–81. Bragg, R. 1996. ‘A Balladeer of Bluegrass is Now Gone, Yet Lives on’, New York Times, 4 November, p. A14. Cameron, D. 1971. ‘The Museum, a Temple or the Forum’, Curator: The Museum Journal 14(1): 11–24. Campo, J.E. 1998. ‘American Pilgrimage Landscapes’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 558: 40–56. Cantwell, R. 2003. Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Cardwell, N. 2001. ‘I’m on My Way to the Old Home: The Bill Monroe Bluegrass Music Foundation’. Bluegrass Unlimited, November, pp. 22–26.

134 • Searching for the Spirit of Bluegrass

Duncan, J., and Gregory, D. 1999. Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing. London: Routledge. Eliot, T.S. 1960. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen. Ewing, T. (ed.). 2000. The Bill Monroe Reader. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Gilroy A. (ed.). 2000. Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel 1775–1844. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Henningsen, R. 2002. ‘Bill Monroe’s Birthplace is Hallowed Ground for Bluegrass Fans’, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 28 July, p. 45. Hirsch, M. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. McLuhan, H.M. 1960. Critical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson. New York: Barnes & Noble. Robertson, S.L. (ed.). 2001. Defining Travel: Diverse Visions. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Smith, R.D. 1996. Returning to Rosine. Bluegrass Unlimited, November, pp. 28–32. ———. 2000. Can’t You Hear Me Callin’: The Life of Bill Monroe, Father of Bluegrass. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. Thacker, A. 2002. ‘Loca Sanctorum: The Significance of Place in the Study of the Saints’, in A. Thacker and R. Sharpe (eds), Local Saints and Local Churches in the Early Medieval West. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–44. Tuan, Y. 2014. Romantic Geography: In Search of the Sublime Landscape. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Zilcosky, J. 2008. ‘Writing Travel’, in J. Zilcosky (ed.), Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 3–24.

References for Unpublished Materials Bits of Rosine History. n.d. [brochure] Courtesy of the Ohio County Tourism Commission. Burden, B. 2011. Bill Monroe and Baseball. [mandolin storyboard sponsored by Ohio County High School and Ohio County Board of Education] Courtesy of Ohio County Tourism Commission. Salovey, P. 2011. Welcome address presented at the Pioneers of Bluegrass Recognition Ceremony, Bill Monroe Centennial Celebration, International Bluegrass Museum and Hall of Fame, Owensboro, Kentucky, 13 September. Tour of the Monroe homestead. n.d. [brochure] Courtesy of the Monroe Homeplace.

The Transient Gaze: Perambulist Somnambulist

T7 The Transient Gaze Perambulist Somnambulist (Sensual, Sonic and Aural Photographic Narratives) Peter Day

That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again. —A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad, 1896

I walk landscapes. I make journeys. Landscape, journey: each is essentially a work of the imagination, brought into being by human interpretation and through the constructed languages of painting, poetry, photography and film. They are even more powerfully evoked in our memories. In art, travel – or more specifically the nature of journeying through specific landscapes – leads to the creation of individual narratives that describe personal transition, even a sort of metaphysical trauma. This chapter describes being in a landscape as an empirical and also an objective experience: it offers an analysis of the familiar, banal and anonymous in the everyday environment, which, through walking and serial revisiting, creates images. These images can be perceived as material evidence of being there or, alternatively, as a record of an emotionally expressive experience, essentially about the walker’s state of being while involved in the act of travelling. Perambulist Somnambulist (2011–14), my project based on a series of walks twenty minutes from my home, is presented in images – images that create place-conscious narratives of the familiar, the ordinary. Each image records what is objectively there, what is being experienced, with its date encoded and recorded. However, simultaneously, these images are visually expressive recordings of the photographer’s own inner narrative, as mediated through chronological time in photographs that

136 • The Transient Gaze: Perambulist Somnambulist

are recorded and as expressed by serial revisiting. So, in Perambulist Somnambulist, both ‘being there’ and ‘being’ are expressed in each image, in each metronomic journey. The images are partnered with poetry, poetry that also has the same sense of distance and closeness. I am concerned, therefore, not only with the nature of walking, with the definitions of walks in themselves, but also the creative practices that describe this journeying. Describing the landscapes, as well as remembering the landscapes in writing, is a way of mediating the process of walking. What makes a specific journey significant is its commitment to memory and the resulting self-definition. The writings of Rebecca Solnit, Jim Perrin, Marc Augé and Ian Sinclair are used in defining types of walking and the experience of journey. In analysing the photographic works of Robert Frank in The Americans (1959) and Alfred Stieglitz in Equivalents (1925–35), I explore two very different  approaches towards bearing witness through ‘the journey photograph’. Image-makers and poets create a particular language and distil memory that evokes a sense of place and belonging in the world: often nostalgic, idyllic, romantic and fantastical, but also personal and potentially timeless. While some journeys more readily evoke a response and more readily lend themselves to embodiment, others do not and remain disembodied and forgotten. In this chapter I am interested in why certain journeys and geographies are seen as significant enough to record and convey difference, while others are not. I define these respectively as the ‘disembodied journey’ and the ‘embodied journey’. The disembodied journey is routine, automatic and divested of significance: it does not collude in the knowing of the present or of the self. It is an experience that signifies nothing. The disembodied journey measures the body indexically throughout the journey and is an unremembered walk set against time (not distance). It is a journey from A to B, expressed as routine, and it has its universality in its constants, which are not unique. The disembodied journey is not usually in a natural landscape, but might include a park or river (Solnit (2001: 84) refers to ‘nature’ as ‘[meaning] the timeless truth we have found, not the historic specific we have made’, and this ‘nature’ is surely more distinctive than a park or river, which are very often shaped, almost artificial). By contrast, the embodied journey is one where the continually reflexive nature of a disembodied journey is either heightened or translated. It is a reflective examination of the ‘knowing’ of a present experience set against its later remembering and memory (personal, misremembered, nostalgic). It acquires significance and relevance, while at the same time defining the interplay between the body, the imagination and the world around the walker. It gains its significance through interpretation.

Peter Day • 137

Everyday walking by itself does not seem to possess the meaning that belongs to the places we go to walk. The constantly familiar places seem to contain significance only when viewed as unfamiliar scenes and scenery. This chapter explores the paradoxical notion that the banal and everyday are essentially the significant journey and in terms of travel the source of greater artistic significance.

The Dynamic Synchronicity: How to Walk and an Introduction to Walking And everything is going to the beat. It’s the beat generation, it’s beat, it’s the beat to keep, it’s the beat of the heart, it’s being beat and down in the world and like oldtime lowdown and like in ancient civilizations. —Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels and ‘San Francisco Scene’ from The Beat Generation, Verve Records, 1959

Pace measures and deconstructs each environment and place as the walker crisscrosses them. Every journey is divided and subdivided by route, path and direction; walking is geographically and geometrically measuring a space that exists within the limits of human time. Each journey represents a passage of time marked by each departure and each return. In walking, each transient scene – each landscape – is experienced. However, while this experience may be sensual, it is rarely recorded or remembered as so, remaining abstract and not signified. Each walk is an act of determination, and the body familiarizes itself so that its position, tone and motion is constantly monitored and adjusted (Sacks 1986: 42). En route, the eye shapes and sharpens the insignificant and the indeterminate by mapping them against determinate landscapes – determinate, even beatific. The body’s search for ­meaning – looking, being, experiencing – is transitory, moving from past to present and place to place in an act of becoming and knowing. As the present becomes the past, the body responds by making a sequence of image or images. The synchronicity of legs, mind, pace and space creates an ideal method by which to analyse conceptually that which is experienced by the body. The flow of the body (muscle, bone, tendons and joints) is automatic and unconscious, sensing only its limits and capacity for exertion. Nonetheless, each step forward creates a new view of each landscape; it reconstitutes it. Walking has a rhythm, a tempo and a beat that can be transcribed and described, using a sort of retrospective choreology. Movement is dynamic and has a momentum that the stationary body and being does not. It is this movement, the graduation

138 • The Transient Gaze: Perambulist Somnambulist

of one moment moving into the next – a ceremony of change, transmission and transformation – that make this tempo, this beat pulse in time with our thinking and be ‘a crucial element of [the] engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world’ (Solnit 2001: 29). This knowing in any meaningful sense, of ‘where I am’, is measured by reflecting upon the journey as it is in the past – not as it passes. Knowing is always looking back. New knowledge is continually being created, knowledge that is both temporary and transient. Ian Sinclair, in Ghost Milk, describes the link between humans and nature; it recounts the discovery of nature within humans, since humans have their roots in locality or region. In such localities, suggests Sinclair, ‘you find you have a link to all the great poets in all languages . . . this is the key: we translate everyone into ourselves’ (2011: 157). Phenomenological approaches to walking and journeying describe a liminal progression in which a process of becoming is described and the space is defined as ‘a state of being between one’s past and future identities’ (Solnit 2001: 51). For Sinclair (2011), walking is essentially the microhistorical moment coming into being when set against the historically significant and greater background. Walking familiarizes, refamiliarizes and defamiliarizes the sensual and receptive body by continually moving the present sensory continuum into the past, regularly shifting points of reference. This rhythm and human beat measures time, as walking is essentially a human measure of time. These individual empirical strides form the traces of the individual, form objects as well as subject. Walking is not a fundamental quantum constant, but a temporal and transient constant, the momentum between the time of now compared rhythmically and chronologically to the times of before and after. Walking is an individualized, subjective experience, both personal and present. A walk has a narrative that takes place in the here and now, and is defined and described by the walker, like an ethnologist or anthropologist, describing what (s)he is observing or seeing at that moment as a ‘direct witness to a present actuality’ (Augé 1995: 8). In all these ways, the act of walking resembles the definition of ‘beat’ as in ‘beat ­generation’, which occurs in a passage of Kerouac’s novel Desolation Angels and that heads this section. Significantly, this section of prose makes an appearance as a poem, ‘San Francisco Scene’, on a Verve LP The Beat Generation, a recording of a Kerouac performance in 1959. Walking has the precise, repetitive rhythm of beat poetry, but it can also have a further, emotional core. The issue is under what circumstances does that pronounced beat have a deeper resonance?

Peter Day • 139

The Disembodied Journey: The Prosaic Journey an Objective Correlative Estragon: Well, shall we go? Vladimir: Yes, let’s go. They do not move. CURTAIN —Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Disembodied journeys are familiar, automatic and topographical. They are material journeys that attach us to the land or landscape. They are often urban pedestrian journeys of routine, like those of necessity for work or pleasure, journeys that create a break or discontinuity between the traveller, between ‘the spectator-traveller and the space of the landscapes (s)he is contemplating or most likely rushing through’ (Augé 1995: 84). These journeys represent walks where time is significant and distance commutable. The individual’s various reflections are not essential and are not usually for pleasure, considered as they are in relation to how long the journey will take rather than how far it will go. The journey’s purpose is pure destination, punctually measured and within which each space is particular to the journey’s requirements. Its objective is functional, a case of showing or describing it, enduring it – through the need for the traveller to be somewhere and to get somewhere, each of which outweighs and displaces any individualized narrative of the journey itself. The journey fulfils a need without an expected narrative; it is not and will not become individuated with significance. These journeys will follow the same or similar routes and it is only chance events or traumas that will impact on any description of this walk in a theatrical or creative way. The journeys are along what are in essence travel routes and are not travel stories in themselves. Robert Macfarlane in The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot says that we easily forget that ‘we are track-makers, though, because most of our journeys now occur on asphalt and concrete – and these are substances not easily impressed’ (2012: 13). The journey itself, by being familiar and familiarized by repetition, does not lend itself to the theatrical or anecdotal story unless there is something that interrupts this journey: an event, accident or personal trauma. It is this absence of autobiographical experience that Solnit (2001: 37) refers to as the ‘missing subject’, in that what we expect to see corresponds to the external existential facts or truths of the journey, not an autobiographical perception; it is literally the journey as an objective and in its own timeframe. We are not present or mediated in the

140 • The Transient Gaze: Perambulist Somnambulist

disembodied journey. In Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Augé (1995: 92) describes this absence as ‘a simultaneous distancing from the spectator and the spectacle’ from which any originating impressions or feelings seem to have been eliminated or deemed unnecessary. Similarly, Macfarlane (2012: 79) writes about the interfusing of the journey and self as metaphysically hallucinatory or, more plainly, ‘how we easily get lost in spaces that appear much the same in all directions’. The disembodied journey then is the study not of how people move, but of what necessity motivates them to move and what their experience of the subliminal consists of. When journeying, the body’s continual experience, as in stasis, is of that which is ‘here’, but because the body is in motion, moving forwards to a destination, it has a parallel experience of that which is ‘there’. The motion causes a dynamic change from the sensation of being in a continuous ‘here’ and ‘can be a way to experience this continuity of self amid the flux of the world’ (Solnit 2001: 27). This is to say that, physically and chronologically, the body moves, and it is the act of walking that is paramount to the experience, whether familiar, sensory or both. Augé (1995: 84) argues that it is the ‘plurality of places, the demands it makes on the powers of observation and description (the impossibility of seeing and saying everything) and the resulting feeling of disorientation (but only a temporary one)’ that defines journeys. For Sinclair, it is the dizzying and disorientating manifestations of transition in the landscape created by government, planners and business that confuse and alienate. The neurotic swirl of activity around the grandest of projects – building, destroying and ­promoting – is reductive, impersonalizing the experience. The constantly changing geography and geometry produce a ‘dystopian realism at its most extreme’ (Sinclair 2011: 108). The definition of space and place has become greater than human experience and concept, so much so that experience is now effectively shaped and circumscribed. The potential for representation in the city or urban environment is problematic. Our urban spaces, those that we travel through, are abstract, temporal and interfused, unlike place, which is often a ­chimera  – somewhere we experience vicariously through representation and virtual screens. And unlike a natural landscape (romanticized, idyllic and poetical), which adapts itself naturally to the created image, the urban spaces do not translate so readily to representations. We inhabit these spaces through which we journey and bypass any wonder into the natural that is preloaded. Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities wrote that ‘the eye does not see things but images of things, which provide the evidence of the senses’ (1997: 11). In urban journeys, this is what occurs:

Peter Day • 141

a series of images, hardly visually distinguishable, and quickly overlaid or overdubbed by others so that the experience is dimmed and diminished by repetition and similarity. The experience is one of diminishing perspectives. Sinclair describes ‘how in each present experience you are only aware of that experience. You can never separate the thinker from the thought or the knower from the known’ (2011: 40). Yet these journeys, hypnagogically undertaken, are simply not seen ‘as being memorable’ and are different from those walks we make for ­pleasure; they are not of any autobiographical substance and experience. In an embodied landscape we connect the earth, the lowest and most fundamental material, to the most high and ethereal (Solnit 2001: 49). The indexical nature of walking within the landscape is superseded – and the being-there becomes redolent with the experience, becomes therapeutic, epiphanic, even spiritual. The embodied landscape and journey are transformed by interpretation into a subjective experience: this process is described by Perrin (2010) as transcribing a journey in which the story becomes more important than the actual experience, through the processes of selection, characterization, rhetoric, structure, pacing, chiasmus and subtext. This describing and transcribing to a contextual remembering, Perrin concludes that ‘all human testimony is in some measure unreliable’ (2010: 149), like the recollection of the experiences of the journey as it is mapped out, but neither socially, ­geographically or culturally recognized but is simply personified. Meaning and significance vacillate between experience, remembering and reconstruction, and there is no way you can frame it; you just have to experience it. As Smithson suggests: One’s mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of gritty reason. (1997: 40)

The Embodied Journey: The Individuated and Described Journey Thus the walking body can be traced in the places it has made paths; parks, and sidewalks are traces of the acting out of imagination and desire. —R. Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

The embodied journey has significance because the walk involved creates narrative, in a spontaneous reaction to the environment. These walks and journeys are valued, worthy, more than merely verifiable

142 • The Transient Gaze: Perambulist Somnambulist

and worth remembering in the ‘poetical’ sense. They define individuality and autobiography, and their resulting stories are often shaped and created with an audience in mind. We make these journeys out of conscious choice and they therefore resemble other creative practices: they are not atavistic memory maps, but are more like performances or installations, in that ‘these mythologies function as a kind of performance history for each walk and for the artist as an individual’ (Johnson 2010: 2). Each walk is an experience that has to be transported, and mediated, and recorded as important and significant, as an event to which we can ascribe meaning or to which meaning can be applied. The embodied journey shares many aspects with the disembodied journey in terms of motion. However, these embodied walks will result in remembering and the creation of artifacts (images, language), and will be reconstructed through conversation at a later stage. The journey becomes a performance, the walker acting as the performer, creating idiosyncratic changes in direction or route, aberrations that art later records. The walk, or journey, is staged to accommodate the transcribing of the walk for an audience to view, and other walks will inform these journeys as it will them; they will, consciously, lead to an interpretation. Kaprow noted that happenings ‘[are] measured by the stories that multiply, by the printed scenarios and occasional photographs of works that have passed on forever – and altogether . . . evoke an aura of something breathing just beyond our immediate grasp rather than a documentary record to be judged’ (2003: 62). These objects – ­reminiscences, recordings and documentations – are alive and make the ‘most ordinary of activities extraordinary, transforming walking from prosaic to poetic’ (Johnson 2010: 2). The embodied journey is one of personal solitude, reflective and quietude. It is transformational. For Solnit (2001), walking can also magnify a sense of being, a sense of separation bordering on alienation from the world, in that the walker is often alone, deep in thought and processing feelings of being. In these states, the walker is simultaneously present and anonymous, surrounded by the familiar (experienced, finite, definite) and the new (experiential, infinite, indefinite). Here we see difference inherent in the embodied journey: it lends itself to theatrical elaborations and stories, to greater narratives than the journey itself. The psychic temporality of the subject reflected upon by journeying is perceived differently from the biological temporality of the body. The heightened sense of self, purpose and meaning that is a feature of an embodied journey and its landscape finds its expression in literature and art. It is not that the disembodied journey lacks meaning, but simply that we are acclimatized to its lack of significance.

Peter Day • 143

As Perrin notes: ‘Memory attaches itself to a place and not time’ (2010: 300). In places of significance we can recall individuals, conversation, presence and existence. It is from here that we extrapolate meaning by translating experience, unlike an experience that is lived through, as in a journey that is technical and necessary. The embodied journey is memorized by our desire to return to places and locations, and by serial revisiting. We are searching for meaning and identity, for escape and the potential for regeneration of the significant and signified. Here the journey becomes individuated, informed and illuminated by the subjective, but it is not necessarily the journey itself that we remember, even though the journey is necessary in differentiating the experience from the ordinary. The embodied journey is liminal (Solnit 2001: 51), a state of being between one’s past and one’s future identities. It is also characterized by an awareness of loss, on which the traveller broods. As a result, the landscape becomes metaphysical, since it is often by a return to nature that we make some sense of our loss. Taylor talks about the ‘scenario’, a method by which the walk or journey, as a repeated metaphor, carries meaning. Scenarios are made up of actions, ‘gestures, attitudes, and tones not reducible to language’ (Taylor 2003: 28). These scenarios, when recorded, are metaphors for time and place in that particular moment. The experience is recorded and is partially present and mediated photographically through an ‘infinitely varied set of site-specific records’ (Dyer 2005: 185). The photograph’s objective truth, whilst considered mimetic, is a partial and subjective truth in its recordings of time. A serial representation of the partial and fragmentary, that offers objective impermanences, in a celebration of the momentary and fleeting. Photographs are constructions that not only seem to mirror the passage of real time, but also chart the change and flux of the subjective time within a chronological time, each and any image acting as an objective correlative in the journey-narrative.

Perambulist Somnambulist, 2011–14 In my work Perambulist Somnambulist, the notion of fixing that which is transient and banal – the evanescent happenings of a walk – are key to the work. It describes short walks in irregular circumnavigations of Spring Gardens, Shrewsbury, a park a few minutes from my home, between 2011 and 2014. Spring Gardens is municipal, ordinary and representative of many other unloved parks in the United Kingdom.

144 • The Transient Gaze: Perambulist Somnambulist

In the making of the art works, I am quite literally walking in circles, revisiting whilst serially capturing the same image and images. The transient photographic images, taken impulsively, are sometimes presented next to texts that record presentness. Serially walking, through unplanned and never-considered routes, I am wandering and experiencing the aural, sonic, sensuous and disembodied paths to create fixed embodied outcomes. The experience, the body’s motion, each individuated walk and movement are the methods for each measurement. Narratives are created where there are ‘missing subjects’ – those not represented, including the photographer, and those who walk this landscape appearing accidentally. They walk through the artworks in these docu-landscapes – timed, dated and present. The appropriate model for this writing is the loose but steady rhythm of poets like Kerouac, whose slangy but heartfelt ‘pomes of all sizes’ are constantly ‘On the Move’ (the title of a famous but more formal poem by Thom Gunn, from the same era, who wrote of motorcyclists: ‘A minute holds them, who have come to go’). Each walk is defined and interrupted by each regular and irregular representation and the intrusion of time, season, light and everyday incursion. The project examines the experiential, the arbitrary collusion of its subjects, as outside phenomena and the presence and present as a subjective experience in both the date and time recorded (I was there) and the reflective writing (I am here).

Life’s Crazy Dances: 10.20 it’s Monday Flat on my back I store the time my idleness drew. Hours spent describing a motionless peak, pencilled into a faultless crescendo, the endless nothing of a summer moments drawn scrawled and scribbled over by the endless tick tocking eraser, time and too much time my architect of blank space consultation and ponderance I’d had a skin-full of each minutes shuffling to and fro to the numb-limb dead-weight boogaloo.

Peter Day • 145

Figure 7.1 28 March 2013 – 10:23 am Stay a while, stay a while and be with me Such a small life, such a little tear I gazed upwards, I didn’t move alone, and empty as the vastnesses exploded above me showering cloud seeds, devouring grief eaten insides out, I feel molten tears tear toward the pupils’ spark and the long drawn minute-hour measures the exhalation of superficial sighs, an afternoon in the memory’s spaces, the melodies traces soft focus faces where you should be? I build and rebuild disembowelled melodies, aural sculptures from this bittersweet and toxic (ref)rains

146 • The Transient Gaze: Perambulist Somnambulist

Stay a while, stay a while and be with me Such a small life, such a little tear Whistling out Insides out the discordant bladderworks bellow a tune Here, where you left me. Oh Little Darling, Little darling! is carcass – drunkards percussion thoompf KAAAAHboom is body, beat out of time (and just beat) You are no longer before me, but I see You in my eyes. In the sky. Asking me those useless questions – Are you the measure of all you see? Do you know who holds the measures and it’s you they see? No answer, but ‘I found myself here all the same’ It is in my head to say ‘stay’, unsaid. No lyrics, a day without melody.

Figure 7.2 28 March 2013 – 10:39 am

Peter Day • 147

How often is fate contorted by a word or simple phrase. Stay a while and be with me? Such a small life and such a little tear In the past, but not even the past but a bone’s beat of a while oral stopped, a blooped glottal not exactly described just a recollection thrown up like the time I hurt you but I couldn’t measure your pain who now holds the measures and who measures that pain? Both voyeurs to the memories, so the grief is intended and interned. but generally to my left in the 1970s Sun sparkles, spangles off parked cars Blinding My time ripens in a single twist of fate in the heat Youth runs and above me in Wellhome Park (Brighouse) – Some clouds kiss and tease the sun while others flirt afar, dappled land shapes accessorised, scaped, some size zeroed into ill-fitting choreographies while I am describing them even I wonder if they exist or it existed? tight moves at the Rainbow’s end we were crazy dancers, radiant by the night-light glitter-balling faces the More Bashful composing sentences s-w-a-l-k-e-d, voiceless airbags who change places with bubble-gum disaffections while the cha-cha-chas, cha cha cha leave cumulus rhumbas and traces Beautifully, as each space opens up Each move measures the last, lost (Love) And lost last time Lives so similar that they begin to resemble one and other A squint of difference

148 • The Transient Gaze: Perambulist Somnambulist

Figure 7.3 16 June 2013 – 11:54 am Exhale, and I have lost You, are gone to the love dance immemorial, and these crazy dancers Disco-ers, glissading toward a last dance solo The memories peek-a-booers Now you see them now you don’t making rapturous moves smiles that last forever in teenage ariettes. Stay a while, stay a while and be with me. Its Such a small life, such a little tear That tears The Others, plump themselves fat for the task the long lean days of loveless laments Whose staves they keep-sake trapped butterflies in musical boxes, fluttering arpeggios the faintest melody For slow smoke-drawn charcoal-dark tempos of future Sunday evenings

Peter Day • 149

Figure 7.4 16 June 2013 – 12:00 pm A winter’s timbre, where lost loves are counted in the ticking womb Crazy dancer, at least measure your rhythm To its length Arching through the grandest gesture of youth, Thrown by our finest body shape, its supple and finest hour I am dancing! Toward the spun dried largesse of age Where we trespass into dementia And forget the moon but howl at the spoon Stuck into a glitch where we meet again, again and again Then again some I know you, I know you I know you Stay a while, stay a while and be with me. Its Such a small life, such a little tear Five minutes ago? It feels like it was yesterday, like it never happened We hold the measure with shared love undiminished by our time Where, we are all sun slippers Faces in shades, lives in darkness our octogenarian’s cool

150 • The Transient Gaze: Perambulist Somnambulist

UV daubed, screened and creamed Oh you ebullient Crazy Dancers do not be shaded and trespass once more And stay.

The writing is formed in each walk from words, sounds and fragments remembered after each journey. Each piece is an impulsive recording of the banal monumentality of the everyday journey – its potential lost significances, which ‘naturally’ form themselves into sections of writing similar to poems or notes. I allow the form of the writing to shape itself. The poems are the subjective recollection of the journeys represented in each series of images – a walk in words. Each relies on the subjective energy, recollections and remembering, chance and reflexive writing to create in the rhythm and dynamic the sense of the passing (and loss) in each return. Whereas the images require some technical composure and strategies, the words are freer subjective verses. Not poetry or nonpoetry, but writing and overlayering the same walk with the same walk, in different times and different personal spaces, some writing is immediate and others reworked, just as the images by their serial revisiting are the same images (places described). Everything depends upon energy, colloquial phrasing, the interpolation of snatches of pop song (‘stay awhile’) and a degree of randomness in the ordering that fits with the chance element in the image making. The main theme is of motion (dance, as in the title) and the present photographic experience is set against a written dialogue that recalls it in the past. In part there is a throwback to previous experiences, the remembered awesome and raw melancholically defined and described past: part fiction and part real, exaggeration and truth. The formative nature of being young and unleashed in inner city parks is in part unashamedly sentimental as it reclaims these senses from the banality of being there in the interplay between body and imagination. As each image physically frames my position, the texts emerge to freely flow around them. Both are a ‘knowing’ of the present experience.

The Photographic Journeys of Robert Frank and Alfred Stieglitz: Anything Can Happen and Nothing May Happen Photographs confirm our visual orientation within the world and reaffirm, or verify, our sense of the nature of the world itself. The act of looking at photographs is akin to our physical occupation of the

Peter Day • 151

photographic space, and we inhabit the space as completely as if it were the experience we have of ourselves. Sontag (1979: 126) wrote that ‘photography is the paradigm of an inherently equivocal connection between self and the world – its version of the ideology of realism sometimes dictating an effacement of the self in relation to the world, sometimes authorizing an aggressive relation to the world which celebrates the self’. Frank, in The Americans (1959), and Stieglitz, in Equivalents (1925–35), offer two seemingly different representations of journeying by using photography as an indexical and geographical referent to look at (and photograph) the spaces in-between their transitory selves. Both works describe the photographers’ ‘presentness’ in radically different visual records. One is Frank’s dizzying 20,000 frames of everyday America, a heroically ambitious project containing visceral images of the landscapes and individuals Frank encountered; the other is Stieglitz’s 220 recordings of distant ambivalent and ambiguous clouds. The motifs in The Americans and Equivalents concern the problem of transience in the process of creating an indeterminate narrative within a determinate space. Frank set off in 1955 to photograph ‘the kind of civilization born here and spreading everywhere . . . I speak of things that are there, anywhere and everywhere – easily found, not easily selected and interpreted’ (Frank 1994: 109). He said of The Americans that ‘the project I have in mind is one that will shape itself as it proceeds, and is essentially elastic’, a spontaneous record of a ‘man seeing his country for the first time’. He saw something beyond the instant of that recorded by saying that ‘when people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice’ (Frank 1994: 98). His visual roaming is an expeditionary journey, one that is open and spontaneous. It expects unexpected environments and is driven by a constantly present narrative quest for new surprises. Viscerally present, and with a subliminal power to convey the banal and define the individual’s story in a fraction of a second, he offers a cinematic narrative of an environment singularly and fragmentarily conveyed. The Americans presents the possibility of fixing the real in that fraction of a second recorded by the camera, not into something that is irrelevant and disposable, but something resonant with life – not ‘film stills’ so much as still films (Dyer 2005: 150). Photographs, as Frank demonstrates, represent partial narratives, living fragments that occur in concentrated time as unfinished stories. These images are not attempts to create types, exotica or portraits, but as Gary Winogrand, the documentary photographer, said: ‘I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed’ (cited in Sontag 1979: 121).

152 • The Transient Gaze: Perambulist Somnambulist

Frank, as an outsider, recorded images of the indigenous working classes, bikers and shoe shiners through a journey that had much to do with chance – these scenarios are the stories of nobody and everybody. Allen Ginsberg, the beat writer and poet, said that Frank ‘had invented a new way of lonely solitary chance conscious seeing’, a ‘spontaneous glance – accident truth’ of image making (Frank 1994: 111). Simple, spontaneously fast and raw, Frank is driving wherever the road takes him and he is both inside and outside at once. These images simultaneously record the presence of the image maker while creating the exterior image of the subject. These are images where the photographer is both the ‘observer and the observed’ (Dyer 2005: 150). The Americans has the visual power of the here and now, and it is very much a recording of time. As with Larkin’s (1964) ‘Reference Back’, the poem has the quality of a Frank image – in recalling his mother (with whom he did not get on, although she doted on him), he uses the idea of ‘perspectives’ to capture the melancholy of the instant when she commented cheerfully on a jazz album he was listening to. The poem, like a photograph, fixes the moment for further contemplation – indeed, for serial revisiting. We can once again use the term ‘missing subject’ here to describe the lack of continuity of the subject’s time when represented in Frank’s photography. A place or person recorded fragmentarily in images is one-sixtieth of a second alive. Frank’s subjects are not themselves signifying, or drawing significance to, these daily actions and routines, but merely their having accidental encounters with Frank. The subjects do not perceive these moments as recordable, exceptional or memorable and are ambivalent participants in the recording. In The Americans, both photographer and subjects are outsiders; Frank is journeying and, as such, is vicariously experiencing a momentary relationship with his subjects. He is a participant observer and by showing images of people similar to himself, he images himself. Photography is a complex relay of ‘anticipated futures and reconstructed pasts’ (Foster 1999: 29). It is a defamiliarizing of the familiar (Dyer 2005: 193), an alienation of the framed recognizable space, identities and place that creates types and momentary shapes. The history of photography is one of indexical realism. However, the truth is that the evidence contained in landscape and journey narratives weave places and faces together; they mix geographies and chronologies from the past and present into one seemingly coherent and imaginary vista. What lies outside the image remains not just indeterminate, but lost. Stieglitz’s work Equivalents and Songs of Sky (1925–35) are often described as ‘abstract’ (Warner Marien 2012: xxx) in their nonrepresentational and nonlocational imaging of fragments of sky, clouds and

Peter Day • 153

luminousness. The 220 images are not indexical, in that there is little to anchor the images either to a space or place, or to any time and, as such, their reading in terms of straight imagery is restricted. While Stieglitz is equally present (taking the photograph) and at the same time absent (not imaged), his images of ambience (clouds) are references to himself, his presentness and his being. Equivalents are his surrogate self, in time and definition. However, Equivalents is reductive in terms of visual content. As Greenough and Hamilton (2000: 25) put it, Stieglitz’s works are ‘something taken from within me’. These images are therefore not the real time, journey time, but the subconscious and photographic ‘state’ of the image maker. These four-by-five-inch black-and-white images are printed no larger than their negative and are ultimately about the ‘missing subject’ of Stieglitz, the missing self, recorded through each mercurial, changeable and ever-changing landscape or cloudscape imaged. Stieglitz wrote: ‘about 6 people have seen [the cloud ­photographs] – all are affected greatly and forget photography entirely. Several people feel I have photographed God. Maybe’ (Greenough and Hamilton 2000: 25). The images are not theophanic, but in definition the clouds appear as a spiritual form (or, perhaps, formlessness) that in terms of the indexical in photography have little to anchor them to the reality, the presentness of a space or a photographed place. This transcendence in the photographic image is at the cost of the indexical real of landscapes and its fixities, instead focusing on clouds and sky, what is temporary, transient and open to interpretation. Sky and cloud formations are changeable; they blend and interfuse, and their features are ambiguous. Stieglitz said that ‘through clouds’ he wanted ‘to put down my philosophy of life – to show that my photographs are not due to subject matter’ (Jeffrey 1981: 144). When images do not record the surrounding static objects of any recorded landscapes and journey, the hypothetical conditions of the image multiply and are illustrated and mediated by material illusion (an accepted transitional and transient subject matter), by images that are existence and not experience. The clouds are images, which are limitless, mystical and metaphysical, in interpretation and limited only by recording time, that is, the time and lifetime of the image maker. Equivalents marks the transitional minutes, or seconds, of the artist’s existence being made manifest in the image. His experience is oblique and is not directly recorded in the imaging of clouds that were only seen as being worthy to record by him. To see a world informed by illumination, light and time, to witness these recordings of journeys is like hearing stories of the displaced and dispossessed. It is lyrical and poetical experience. Beck has this to

154 • The Transient Gaze: Perambulist Somnambulist

say about our changing relationship with our ecology: ‘technology has charged the atmosphere with its own vaporous trails, merging itself with the air to the point where it is impossible to tell where nature leaves off and human modification of the environment begins’ (2012: 125). Our everyday environment is impacted upon invisibly by pollutants, industrial waste and the climate. There is an ability in the image to transfigure a fraction of experiential (the mellifluous, emotional and traumatic) into significance through the embodied journey and its relation with landscape – meaning that it can be categorized, edited and reviewed so that we show our inner being.

Conclusion Frank and Stieglitz are both recording the familiar, representations of that which we know, know intimately, even if we are not personally experiencing them. Both travel and record the everyday in order to find themselves or something about themselves, not objectively record what is there, as a record or document. Seeing pictures of landscape and geography is not the same as being in a location: ultimately the experience is not of vicariously sharing pictures of people and things, but of emotion – felt and glimpsed momentarily. That both Stieglitz and Frank are sons of immigrants perhaps underpins their senses of displacement. The images are everyday, ordinary fragments of universality and recorded events in photographic time (taking into account framing and shutter speed). There is the element of infinite possibility in terms of the scope and breadth of these works. Both Frank and Stieglitz bear witness and create silent theatre in the way in which photography measures, records and creates type, and in so doing makes sense of the mesmerizing potential of all that which is potentially the photograph. Frank’s work grows cumulatively as each image refers back to previous images, so that the work grows through accumulation. In Stieglitz, this repetition forces us to look at the difference in images that are the ‘same’. The serial recording of geographies and landscapes creates the journey narrative. This narrative – with its freedom, improvisation and impulse – is the ‘thrill of forever moving forwards beyond bounding horizons into unknown country’ as the ‘actual becomes subservient to the story’ (Perrin 2010: 122). The journey not only reflects that which is out there and outside the self, which is recorded and documented as fixed or a mimetic landscape, but also that which is the inner journey and state of being.

Peter Day • 155

Indexical narratives seemingly record ‘what’s there’, which is the mimetic and chronological documentation of a journey through the people and places encountered. In Stieglitz’s Equivalents, the camera bears witness to the redemptive journey of the photographer by documenting the temporal, immaterial and transient outwardness of (clouds and) his journey. In both Frank and Stieglitz, large numbers of images reveal ‘presentness’, the consecutive liminal time of the artist and, in volume, the photographer’s existence at the moment of recording. However, the path leads forwards without signposts, to be mediated through dislocating and detaching it into prose, poetry or image. And so, being there becomes secondary to the appropriation of being there – the experience gives way to the recording and documentation of the experience. The viewer or reader experiences this landscape vicariously. This sensual distancing, this being removed from the truth and real experience, is disorientating in the artwork. Once it is removed from the actuality, it is no longer an extension of our being in the world, but an occasion or new awe and the opening of new possibility in the journey. Everything is continuously, and in both senses, moving. Peter Day is Course Leader and Senior Lecturer in Photography at the University of Wolverhampton. He has been recognized for his contribution to higher education teaching and pedagogy by being awarded both Senior Fellow (2014) and Teaching Fellow (2009) status by the Higher Education Academy, UK. His artwork and Arts Council England-funded projects analyse the familiar, banal and anonymity in the everyday environment, through walking and serial revisiting. Each impulsive recording is a reflective examination of the ‘knowing’ of a present experience set against its later remembering, and memory through writing (personal, fantastical, misremembered, nostalgia) that defines the interplay between the body, the imagination and the world around the walker. His work has often been described as ‘non’ photography as it records images that are ‘not’ photographic. His recent publications include: Exhibitions: Pictures of My Father (2015) Arts Council England, at the Surface Gallery, Nottingham, March 2015 and the Lighthouse Gallery, Wolverhampton July 2015 that in words and images describes personal loss and grief after the death of his father; Perambulist Somnambulist (2013) Lighthouse Gallery, Wolverhampton 2013, a series of walks twenty minutes from his home that are recorded and documented in images and texts; Published Poetry and Readings: Featured Poet, Blank Media Collective issue 39 Oct 2011and BBC Radio Shropshire Poetry Reading Oct 31 2011; Garden Manifesto (2009) Featured Artist, Blank

156 • The Transient Gaze: Perambulist Somnambulist

Media Collective issue 21 April 2010; a series of personal narratives and photographs that create a backdrop to a disintegrating love and relationship; Published Chapter: The Extraordinary Ordinary – In Everyday Photographs of the Black Country (2014) the Black Country Echoes Festival and Exhibition Catalogue – Wolverhampton Art Gallery.

References Annear, J. 2011. ‘Clouds to Rain: Stieglitz and the Equivalents’, American Art 25(1): 16–19. Augé, M. 1995. Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso. Beck, J. 2012. ‘Signs of the Sky, Signs of the Times: Photography as Double Agent’, Theory, Culture, Society 28(7/8): 123–39. Beckett, S. 1965. Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts, 2nd edn. London: Faber & Faber. Benjamin, W. 1969. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. New York: Schocken Books. Calvino, I. 1997. Invisible Cities. London: Vintage. De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dyer, G. 2005. The Ongoing Moment. London: Little, Brown. Frank, R. 1959 The Americans. Zurich: Scalo. ———. 1994. Moving Out. Zurich: Scalo. Foster, H. 1999. Return of the Real. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Greenough, S., and J. Hamilton. 1999. Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs and Writings. Washington DC: National Gallery of Art. Harvey, S., and K. Fieldhouse. 2005. The Cultured Landscape: Designing the Environment in the 21st Century. London: Routledge. Housman, A.E. 2009. A Shropshire Lad. Ludlow: Merlin Unwin. Jabes, E. 1972. The Book of Questions Vol. 1. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Jeffrey, I.A. 1981. A Concise History. New York: Oxford University Press. Johnson, C. 2010. ‘Wandering through Time: Francis Alys’s Paseos and the Circulation of Performance Liminalities’, A Journal of Performance Studies 6(2): 1–11. Kaprow, A. 2003. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kerouac, J. 1995. Desolation Angels. New York: Riverhead. Knapp, B.L. 1985. ‘Alfred Stieglitz’s Letters to David Liebovitz 1923–1930’, Modern Language Studies 15(3): 3–37. Larkin, P. 1964. The Whitsun Weddings. London: Faber & Faber. Lyotard, J.F. 1984. ‘The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge’, Theory and History of Literature 10: 3–67. Macfarlane, R. 2012. The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. London: Hamish Hamilton.

Peter Day • 157

McCauley, R.N. 1988. Walking in Our Own Footsteps: Autobiographical Memory and Reconstruction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Millard, C. 2010. ‘Walks of Life’, Art Monthly 337: 1–4. Neisser, U., and E. Winogrand. 1988. Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perrin, J. 2010. West: A Journey through the Landscape of Loss. London: Atlantic. Phelan, P. 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge. Rubinfien, L. 2009. ‘Another Trip through “The Americans”’, Art in America 97(5): 136–70. Sacks, O. 1986. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. London: Picador. Sinclair, I. 2011. Ghost Milk. London: Hamish Hamilton. Solnit, R. 2001. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. London: Verso. ———. 2006. A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Edinburgh: Canongate. Smithson, R. 1997. Slide Works. Milan: Carlo Frua Sontag, S. 1979. On Photography. London: Penguin. Stieglitz, A. 1923. ‘How I Came to Photograph Clouds’, Amateur Photographer and Photography 56(1819): 255. Taylor, D. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Thoreau, H.D. 1980. The Natural History Essays: A Walk to Wachusett Layton. Utah: Gibbs Smith. Warner Marien, M. 2012. 100 Ideas that Changed Photography. London: Laurence King. Wilson, K. 2003. ‘The Intimate Gallery and the Equivalents: Spirituality in the 1920s Work of Stieglitz’, Art Bulletin LXXXV(4): 746–68.

T8 Snapshot Photography and a Gendered Poetics of the Beach, 1900s–1920s Nicolá Goc

Introduction Before me is a small rectangle of Velox photographic paper upon which is imprinted a slightly blurred sepia image of two unknown young women cavorting on an Australian beach in the late 1920s (Figure 8.1). One of the young women kneels in the sand on one leg, her other leg at right angles bracing her body as her friend sits astride, her left leg hooked precariously around the young woman’s shoulders. The semiotics of this faded snapshot tell us that these young women caught in the moment are pushing the boundaries of gender identity at the beach in the early twentieth century. They think it is a great hoot – their open-mouthed laughter and direct engagement with the photographer connote young women at ease with themselves and their environment. They are displaying their semiclothed female physicality in ways that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier. These young women were part of a new beach ‘community of ­practitioners’ (Finkelstein 2007: 12) announcing ‘their affiliation with certain values and attitudes’ (van Leeuwen 2005: 145) through the adoption of particular ‘styles and self-fashioning in appearance, manners of speech and bodily gestures’ (Finkelstein 2007: 12). Through costume and pleasurable acts of resistance, the young women in this image, and countless others like them in Western countries around the globe, were rewriting their bodies and transforming the beach into a ‘space of dream’ (Bærenholdt et al. 2004: 52), into a site where they could realize a new way of being female and at leisure in the twentieth century.

Nicolá Goc • 159

Figure 8.1 Anonymous snapshot, sepia gloss Velox photographic paper, Australia, c. 1920s. Author’s collection

The natural beach environment – the hot sand and glistening surf – or at the very least lapping waves and pebbly shores had been attracting people to the beach as a site of leisure for centuries, but it was the development of seaside resorts (see Urry 1998; Metusela and Waitt 2012) in the early nineteenth century and the erection of infrastructures – boardwalks, beach huts, kiosks, changing sheds and signs informing bathers of the beach regulations, along with the presence of the new leisure seeker, the bather, that transformed the beach into a social space, a hybrid public domain, a ‘liminal time-out’ (Shields 1991: 85). In this chapter, drawing from my own archive of snapshot photographs, I look through the camera’s lens at the ways in which female performances recalibrated the beach in the early twentieth century

160 • Snapshot Photography and a Gendered Poetics of the Beach, 1900s–1920s

through the creation of a beach poetics. Through an analysis of six early twentieth-century snapshot photographs from Australia, America and England, countries where the beach leisure culture was firmly entrenched, and also through advertisements and newspaper articles from the period, I will analyse how the power to enforce and to resist patriarchy was invested in the socially constructed zone between sea and land – the beach. I am not claiming that young men did not play their own significant role in re-creating the beach as a modern site of leisure through their costumes and bodily performances, something Christine Metusela and Gordon Waitt have effectively argued in their study of surf life saving and the surfing culture in Tourism and Australian Beach Cultures (2012). Rather, my position is that young men who were challenging social mores were doing so from a position of power that no woman enjoyed. Public spaces were the realm of the male, and when females, particularly middle-class females, entered public spaces, their presence was interpreted as crossing a threshold, as their leaving behind the female domestic space and entering into the public and therefore male domain, a space in which they needed to be chaperoned, protected, surveyed and controlled. The snapshot photographs in this study are viewed as both historical documents and as material objects that at the time of their creation provided a new and highly effective visual medium for young women to communicate the multiple ways in which they were performing leisure at the beach. The camera is crucial for making tourist performances happen (Urry and Larsen 2011: 254). It is a technology that enhances the ‘physicality of the body and enables it to do things and sense realities that would otherwise be beyond its capabilities’ (Haldrup and Larsen 2010: 7). By viewing photography as a ‘performance of representation’ (Frosh 2001: 43) and understanding the power of photography not merely as a technology of visual representation, but as a ‘constitutive type of (visible) action within the social world’ (Frosh 2001: 43), this chapter also looks at the role snapshot photography played in the creation of this new gendered way of thinking about and living the beach as a site of leisure and resistance. Understanding gender from Judith Butler’s perspective as ‘the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being’ (Butler 1990: 33), the bathing bodies of these young women ‘subverted hegemonic sexed, gendered and classed construction’ of femininity ‘and caused “bathing trouble”’ (Metusela and Waitt 2012: 38). In this study we see some of

Nicolá Goc • 161

the ways in which young women, through beach performance, played with and challenged the boundaries between moral and immoral sexualities at the beach (Metusela and Waitt 2012: 38). Seen through Erving Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical metaphor, human performances transformed the beach into a pleasure domain, a theatre of desire, a stage for the ‘scripted and theatrical corporealities and embodied actions’ (Urry and Larsen 2011: 250) of young women and men. The ‘performance turn’ reframes tourism as ‘a doing, something accomplished through performances’ (Urry and Larsen 2011: 251) and ‘highlights how tourists experience places in multi-sensuous ways that involve bodily sensations and affect’ (Urry and Larsen 2011: 250). The ‘performance turn’ allows us to think of the beach not only as a place to ‘escape from the patterns and rhythms of everyday life’ (Urry 1998: 31), but also as a place where ‘the full play of all desires’ (Bærenholdt et al. 2004: 52) can be realized, and for young women, that included the desire to participate in beach leisure on their own terms. John Urry and Jonas Larsen argue that while ‘performances are taught, learned and regulated, they are never completely predetermined’ (Urry and Larsen 2011: 253) and in this study, while the young women taking part in photographic beach performances most likely did so without having consciously pre-scripted their actions, their bodies were ­‘subject to historical construction and stylistic constraint’ (Adler 1989: 8). ‘The very senses through which the traveler receives culturally valued ­experience,’ Judith Adler writes, ‘have been moulded by differing degrees of cultivation and, indeed, discipline’ (1989: 8). The creation of the female bather as ‘the bathing beauty’ through socialization and cultivation will be a theme throughout this chapter. Michel de Certeau’s work on urban space and narrative in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), in particular his work on walking in the city, provides a way to understand a new gendered beach poetics written through the beach and by, through and upon women’s bodies in the first decades of the twentieth century. Importantly, as Urry and Larsen write, the bodies of tourists ‘are not just written upon, they also enact and inscribe places with their own stories and can follow their own paths’ (Urry and Larsen 2011: 252). Through performative acts of leisure – cavorting, running, walking, swimming, sunbathing and physically interacting with young men, the actions of young women created a new gendered way of being at the beach. For de Certeau: ‘The physical act of walking realizes the possibilities of space organized by the spatial order . . . in the same way that the act of speaking realizes a language, its subject and writes a text’ (Collie 2013: 1). De Certeau sees two ways of operating within culture:

162 • Snapshot Photography and a Gendered Poetics of the Beach, 1900s–1920s

strategic uses of culture are associated with social power and the will to power; tactical uses of culture are primarily the domain of the weak, the disenfranchised, the ‘other’ (de Certeau 1984). In the photographic prints in this study, we see the tactical acts of young women, the ‘other’ in a patriarchal society, caught in the camera’s lens ‘intervening in the public sphere’ (Cixous 1976: 89) and re-creating themselves through appearance, performance and a new sociality as they ruptured the old rules of female participation in public leisure at the beach. French feminist Helene Cixous, in her seminal essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1976), written during second-wave feminism, describes a new language written from the female body and gives us a way to understand the creation of a new gendered beach poetics through the acts of young women at the beach during and in the years immediately after first-wave feminism. Cixous exhorts woman to: ‘Write your self. Your body must be heard’ (1976: 880). For her, language plays an active role in creating ‘reality’, so it follows that using language differently can produce different ‘realities’. She argues: ‘censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time’ (Cixous 1976: 880). Woman ‘must write her self’ and that writing ‘will allow her to carry out the indispensable ruptures and transformations in her history’ (Cixous 1976: 880). While Cixous is primarily rallying women to rewrite the female through poetry and prose, she is also exhorting women to rewrite their bodies. For woman, she says, it is through ‘her body that she vitally supports the “logic” of her speech. Her flesh speaks true. She lays herself bare. In fact, she physically materializes what she’s thinking; she signifies it with her body’ (Cixous 1976: 881). In essence, she is performing her self. In this study of unknown young women from Australia, England and America in the 1900s –1920s, captured by the camera’s lens, their performance is ‘an utterance that accomplishes the act that it designates’ (Culler 2000: 503) – the transformation of the beach as a new site of leisure. Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical metaphor of performativity reemerged in the 1990s through the work of Judith Butler (1990) to focus attention on the subject’s (compulsory) performance of gender and the possibilities for performing gender differently. For Butler: Acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performances in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. This also suggests that if that reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that very interiority is an effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse. (Butler 1990: 136)

Nicolá Goc • 163

This study concludes by rethinking the corporeal female traveller and explores the poetics of ‘imagined travel’ or, as Baerenholdt et al. (2004: 149) frame it, ‘imaginative travel’. Not all travel is corporeal (Baerenholdt et al. 2004) and through the adoption of the ‘Hula Girl’ persona, suburban Western women in the early twentieth century metaphorically travelled to exotic imagined tropical beach locations in their own suburban backyards as they fantasized about Hollywood’s tropical beaches as places ‘to release one’s sexuality and heightened sensuality’ (Metusela and Waitt 2012: 69). Women dressed up in Hula Girl costumes and imagined, through popular culture representations, the lush tropical vegetation and pristine golden sands of tropical beaches they would never visit, creating a poetics infused with Hollywood romanticism and with the ‘environmental determinism of primitivism’ (Metusela and Waitt 2012: 69).

The Poetics of Snapshot Photography In January 1900, the launch of the first easy-to-use, affordable Box Brownie camera transformed photography and allowed ordinary people for the first time to visually write and record the stories of their everyday lives. At one American dollar, the Box Brownie in its first year sold 150,000 and by 1906, one million cameras from the Brownie range had been sold (Gustavson 2011: 99). By simplifying the photographic process to: ‘You press the button. We do the rest’ and reducing photography’s motive from an aesthetic artistic pursuit to one of simply recording specific lived experiences, Kodak transformed photography, creating a new everyday human practice – the photographic performance (Butler 1997b; Urry 1998; Barthes 2000; Frosh 2001; Bærenholdt et al. 2004; Urry and Larsen 2011; Metusela and Waitt 2012) as a way of being before the camera’s lens that extended Michel Foucault’s disciplinary gaze (1991) to create a new system of mass self-surveillance. My approach to making meaning of snapshot photographs ­(following Barthes 2000; Bærenholdt et al. 2004; Batchen 2008; and Urry 2011) is to view snapshot photography from the perspective of photographic performance. The notion of performativity also provides a way to look at the role of photography in beach leisure as both a performative practice and as a text documenting performance. Roland Barthes wrote about the process of being photographed as the ‘advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity . . . in front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of

164 • Snapshot Photography and a Gendered Poetics of the Beach, 1900s–1920s

to exhibit his art’ (Barthes 2000: 12–13). Barthes is talking here about the subject of the photograph taking part in a photographic performance, a tripartite photographic performance between the subject, the photographer and the viewer, acknowledging that a photograph is a construction in which the creator, the subject and the viewer all have a part to play. Barthes explored his own subjectivity through photography and wrote eloquently in Camera Lucida of what he felt about being observed by the camera’s lens: ‘everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of “posing”, I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image’ (Barthes 2000: 10–11). This transformation, he writes, ‘is an active one: I feel the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice . . . I lend myself to the social game, I pose, I know I am posing, I want to know that I am posing’ (Barthes 2000: 10–11). This photographic performance is reflected in the snapshot photographs of young women in this study consciously considering their sense of their camera selves as they pose for the photographer. It should not, however, be understood as a singular or deliberate act (Butler 1997b). While the individual female posing before the camera’s lens may be consciously acting in a way that speaks to her awareness of what it means to be ‘female’ in terms of specific social and cultural influences, she has also, over the course of her lifetime, materialized as a ‘female’ through social inscription and through the regulatory norms that are inherent in a patriarchal society. The Kodak company constructed a highly successful marketing campaign through the creation of their independent, freely roaming advertising model, the Kodak Girl, and reinvented amateur photography as principally a female hobby, for the ‘modern girl’, reflecting Pierre Bourdieu’s (1990) point that the desire to photograph is socially constructed and culturally specific. The iconic ‘Kodak Girl’, the personification of the fashionable, independent modern woman, promoted photography as central to the modern woman’s enjoyment of leisure pursuits, in particular the new outdoor activities of swimming, cycling and motorcar driving. Kodak’s advertising rhetoric placed importance on personal holiday snapshots and created the desire for private photographs. The unknown photographers who captured the young women in the photos in this chapter at the ‘crucial instant that bridges the gap between stillness and motion’ (Bergan 1990: 519) have inscribed these seemingly inconsequential summer moments of beach leisure with perpetual significance. Frozen within the photographic frame, these everyday moments have become ‘magnets for significance’ (Bergan 1990: 520): ‘A poem is presumed to have meaning. A photographed moment is presumed to be important. It is, however trivial, always monumental’ (Bergan 1990: 520).

Nicolá Goc • 165

These everyday moments captured by the camera take on an importance that would otherwise have been lost in the flow of time. The notion of photographic realism allows people to employ the camera to create what they regard as immutable documentary evidence of their lives. The attraction of realism is its offer of a ‘fixity in which the signifier is treated as if it were identical with a pre-existent signified and in which the reader’s role is purely that of consumer’ (Tagg 1980: 53). However, as van Leeuwen (2005) writes, the question of photographic truth is also a social question. The photographs in this study provide evidence of real moments in time, but like the notion of evidence itself, the photograph’s unique documentary strength has ‘to be negotiated, learnt and officially established’ (Tagg 1988: 4). That which constitutes ‘photographic evidence – how it is constructed, understood, rendered meaningful – was and continues to be determined by cultural processes, discourses, and power relations that are both specific to and contingent on a particular time and place. The photographic documentary, then, is the product of a communicative process and not an effect latent in photography’ (Pedri 2008: 159). Photography is inextricably linked to language; it ‘impressively triggers the spectator’s speech’ (Louvel 2008: 33), reflecting its social construction. Through this reliance on speech and language and the ability to generate stories, the photograph, an aide-mémoire, is lifted out of the realm of an immutable and static text. The very reading of it becomes part of the meaning it yields (Bal 1996). For Serge Tisseron (1996), there is no ‘frozen’ or ‘static’ subject in a photograph. ‘Instead, the continuity of psychic life produces a body-object or camera-subject-object continuum, bridging the gap between the past moment and the present of the image and language’ (Louvel 2008: 33). Seen through a narrative lens, the moment captured in the frame of a snapshot print is lifted out of obscurity and re-storied, reanimated through discourse. Found in a flea market, a charity shop or at a collector’s fair, anonymous images adrift from their original creators, depicting unknown people at unknown moments, take on a new existence and new narratives are created as strangers view strangers and project meaning upon the bodies frozen on the Velox photographic paper. The young women captured in the early twentieth-century snapshot photographs in this study, long after their mortal existence has ended, continue through their bodies viewed within the plane of the photographic print to be the authors of a poetics of the beach. They continue to tell us stories of their newly found right to travel and to participate in public leisure in ways that challenged old patriarchal orthodoxies about what it meant to be a woman in the early twentieth century. How,

166 • Snapshot Photography and a Gendered Poetics of the Beach, 1900s–1920s

we may wonder, were these photographs received in the times in which they were produced? What stories did people tell each other as they held these tiny prints in their hands almost one hundred years ago? What beach narratives were formed at the time these snapshots came into being? The young girls frozen in the photographic prints may have viewed their snapshot images as evidence of a moment of summer ­freedom; their parents and grandparents may have viewed the same photograph as a reflection of youthful rebellion and ­waywardness; a suitor may have viewed a girl captured in an image as sexually ­desirable; a friend may have read her body and costume critically, competitively for the male gaze. Today in the twenty-first century, we view these faded sepia photographs as historical texts and the women depicted in them as from another time, and project all of the meanings that inscription carries onto these unassuming little snapshots. There is no one absolute ‘truth’, no single story within the photographic frame. Each story holds a different notion of the ‘truth’, ‘born as the real intersects with the imaginary’ (Pedri 2008: 168). The concept of the snapshot photograph as documentary evidence relies on a poetics of photography, on the reader’s imaginary intervention. Photographs, as Nancy Pedri writes, ‘at once inscribe or record the real and partake in its construction through readers who engage in the process of meaning creation’ (2008: 168).

The Modern Woman In the years before the First World War, public space was officially the realm of and for men; for women to enter it entailed unforeseen risks (Pollock 2003: 97). Respectability, which was ‘closely identified with femininity’ (Pollock 2003: 96) for middle-class girls and women in particular meant ‘not exposing oneself in public’ (Pollock 2003: 96). These old rules were irrevocably broken during the First World War, when women became a source of labour and moved out of the private sphere and into the once exclusively male domains of cities, factories and offices. But despite their new presence in public spaces, women still did not enjoy the freedom of invisibility that men enjoyed; they could never be incognito in the crowd (Baudelaire, cited in Pollock 2003: 99), something the new regimes of representation – photography, the cinema and advertising – specifically worked against. With disposable incomes, the modern working woman was a new consumer in the marketplace and in the postwar years, when the advertising industry became an ‘ideological force’ (Hawkins and Nakayama

Nicolá Goc • 167

1992: 61) and women were ‘centred as the focal point of consumerism’ (Hawkins and Nakayama 1992: 61), to be a woman was to be seen and to be admired. Advertisements for beauty and fashion products as key mediators of lifestyle (van Leeuwen 2005: 145) promised to transform a young woman into the fashionable, modern ideal of womanhood, an aesthetic that spoke directly to the male gaze. As rhetorical constructions, advertisements do more than ‘stir up desire’ (Lears 1994: 10), they also seek to manage that desire, ‘to stabilize the sorcery of the marketplace by containing dreams of personal transformation within a broader rhetoric of control’ (Lears 1994: 10). Through ‘elaborate symbolic systems’ (van Leeuwen 2005: 145), advertisements as ‘lifestyle signifiers’ (van Leeuwen 2005: 145), along with new entertainment industries, naturalized woman as image, beautiful to look at, defined by her ‘looks’, best exemplified, Pollock writes, ‘in those twentieth century photographic images manufactured to sell the commodities, cosmetics, by which the supposed nature of our sex can be attained by donning the “mask of beauty”’ (2003: 167–68). After the introduction of the snapshot camera, young women, with access to snapshot prints from their travel and leisure activities, could weeks and months later view their human form frozen in miniature on Velox paper and think about themselves and their bodies in new and different ways – they could carefully examine, scrutinize and critique their form over extended periods of time and at their leisure make judgements about themselves and others. ‘In the perpetual self-­ surveillance of the intimate’, Sandra Lee Bartky writes, ‘lies the genesis of the celebrated “individualism” and heightened self-consciousness that are hallmarks of modern times’ (Bartky 2003: 25–45). Critical self-reflection was informed by the new cultural industries and while the old structures of power – the state, law, medicine, the family and the church – continued to play a pivotal role in managing women’s lives, the new ‘top sergeant’ (Bartky 2003: 70) in the disciplinary regime of femininity in the early twentieth century came from the newly emerging media industries. Cinema and magazines provided the visual cultural training for how young women thought about themselves and the development of their public persona. Foucault’s reconceptualization of ‘modern power’ (2008) as a network of noncentralized forces speaks directly to these new emerging entertainment and information industries, and their highly pervasive and persuasive influence in guiding the modern subject, in particular in tutoring women and girls about how to become a ‘modern woman’. In the pose of the young woman in Figure 8.2 we see her consumption of the new entertainment industries in the fashioning of her body

168 • Snapshot Photography and a Gendered Poetics of the Beach, 1900s–1920s

Figure 8.2 Anonymous snapshot, Velox photographic paper, America, c. late 1920s to early 1930s. Author’s collection

and her pose. Her sexually coded clothing, the fashionable bathing suit, in concert with her sexual pose, mirrors the pretty young starlets in the pages of magazines and on the big screen. Her posture suggests she is playing with her sense of her self through her consumption of popular culture. Her torso reclines backwards, gesturing towards the hot inviting sand, while her shoulders are tilted to expose her clothed shapely breasts. The angle of her head, the dipping of her chin, allows this ‘bathing beauty’ to look coquettishly up into the camera’s lens, a la Clara Bow. A sensual smile forms on her painted lips, communicating a personal message to the photographer and to her imagined audience of admirers. She is courting the male gaze, holding a cigarette, a potent signifier of the modern sexual woman, nonchalantly in her right

Nicolá Goc • 169

hand heightening her performance of sex. Taut and upright between her index and middle fingers, the cigarette puts focus onto her fingers and wrist, areas of the body that have erotic overtones. She is a young modern woman in the late 1920s who has clearly developed a sense of her self as a desirable sexual being, a thoroughly modern woman, enjoying participating in a new gendered beach poetics through the performance of fashion and the ‘shock of the new’ (Simmel 1971: 103). Her costumed gestural form at one and the same time signifies her body both as ‘docile’ (Foucault 1991) and as a site of playful resistance. The beach was also created as a social space in the 1920s through the explicit commodification of the female body with the introduction on popular beaches of the ‘beach bunnies’ (Lencek and Bosker 1989: 44), young female models who paraded on beaches dressed in skimpy swimsuits and advertised cigarettes, bathing suits, make-up, soft drinks and chocolate bars. The beach bunnies were to be seen ‘Flaunting cigarettes and shockingly skinny suits’ and celebrating ‘youth, sex appeal, and modernity’ (Lencek and Bosker 1989: 44). It is not hard to imagine the woman depicted in Figure 8.2 in her fashionable swimsuit with her cigarette held strategically in her hand as she poses for the camera, being influenced by the presence of these animated advertisements of the ideal modern ‘bathing beauty’. Sandra Lee Bartky’s point about contemporary women – that a ‘panoptical male connoisseur resides within the consciousness of most women: they stand perpetually before his gaze and under his ­judgment’ (Bartky 2003: 34) – is relevant here at the beach, where Urry’s male tourist gaze (1998) is omnipresent. A woman ‘lived her body as seen by another, by an anonymous patriarchal Other’ (Bartky 2003: 34). The mere act of posing before the snapshot camera meant that the female subject was internalizing the gaze of the ‘other’ and in doing so, she took up that gaze, thereby surveying herself (Butler 1997a) and conforming to patriarchal ideals. However, as this chapter also argues, the individual woman’s lived experience is more nuanced and complex. At the same time as she is objectifying her body for the male gaze, the young woman in Figure 8.2 is also exploring her own subjectivity and is playing an active role in the redefining ‘of sexuality as a means of self-realization rooted in pleasure and unconnected to reproduction’ (Ullman 1997: 3). Foucault’s notion of ‘modern power’ can be understood through the ascendance of these new cultural industries, which for females played a core role in the rewriting of their lives. Modern power, he posits, is nonauthoritarian, nonconspiratorial and nonorchestrated (Foucault 1991, 2002, 2008), but a power that nevertheless ‘produces and normalizes

170 • Snapshot Photography and a Gendered Poetics of the Beach, 1900s–1920s

bodies to serve prevailing relations of dominance and subordination’ (Bordo 1993: 277–300). It is also a power that constitutes the individual as a source of resistance, a resistance that was central to the new gendered poetics of the beach. Both this normalizing and resistance can be seen in the snapshot images in this study, where women and girls are documented rewriting their bodies as they resist traditional patriarchal power structures while engaging in recreation at the beach.

Beach Leisure as Performance It is through ‘dramaturgical actions that people create an image of who they are to other people as well as to themselves’ (Bærenholdt et al. 2004: 51) and in the beach zone, we are both actor and audience, we are gazing and being gazed at, and aware of being gazed at, as we perform for our friends and companions, for strangers and for the camera’s gaze. Young women in the early twentieth century also began to publicly display their new sense of self at the beach by directly engaging with the geography of the beach – with the sand, the sea and the sun – through immersion, in an intimate tactile sensory experience of hot sticky sand and cool salt water against their increasingly uncovered bodies. The sensuality of this new physical engagement with nature, aligned with the new practices of physical and social interaction between the sexes, spoke to a performative practice that rewrote the beach as an erotic erogenous zone. Douglas Booth (2001) argues that the practice of announcing who we are to the world through our bodies is nowhere more obvious than on the beach: ‘the body is the single most potent cultural symbol there is, and bodies are the principal means by which beachgoers systematically and publicly display their cultural identities, and, in so doing, they make the beach a cultural site’ (Booth 2001: 8). Bærenholdt et al. conceptualize the beach as ‘a place that only comes to life as a stage for leisure and tourism performance’ (2004: 51). The beach for women and girls in the early twentieth century was a threshold between two worlds – the old patriarchal world of oppressive authoritative order and a new world where the breakdown of control opened up new freedoms and possibilities and opportunities for a new beach poetics, at the same time as it prescribed new aesthetic conventions that imposed new ‘rules’ based on the new fashion and beauty ethics. In 1924 the beach ordinances for Atlantic City in America, reported in the Australian press, speak to concerns over the new gendered poetics. The tensions between the beach as a liminal carnival zone for erotic

Nicolá Goc • 171

play and pleasure, and the formality of the adjacent public streets, the formal public sphere, meant that the wearing of bathing suits just one step away from the sand on boardwalks and streets was considered morally offensive: ‘nobody must walk to the beach from a summer bungalow without a robe over the suit. Shopping in a bathing suit and also riding in public vehicles in a bathing suit are prohibited unless a suitable overall acceptable to the local authorities is also worn’ (‘American Bathing Regulations’ 1924). Framed through the new gendered poetics, the beach was now a ‘realm of freedom’, a socially defined zone where women ‘claimed the right to look, to stare, scrutinize or watch’ (Pollock 2003: 99–100) and where, at the same time, as already mentioned, they were presenting their bodies to the objectification of the male ‘tourist gaze’. In Atlantic City in America in 1905, according to the Australian press, ‘a sort of holy war’ was raging against the ‘wearing of bathing suits in the streets and every local promenade. The same old crusade rages every year, but the practice still prevails in some popular towns to an extent that would be hardly deemed credible in England, where the police law on the subject are a trifle more prohibitive’ (‘Bathing Dress in the Street’ 1905). There were complaints that at Atlantic coast beaches, bathers thought nothing of ‘donning a bathing suit indoors, and then walking half a mile to the bathing-station’ (‘Bathing Dress in the Street’ 1905). The Police Superintendent at Bath Beach in Brooklyn, New York, claimed that ‘men and women go through the streets of Bensonhurst in an almost nude state, big, brawny men parading with tights and also some very plain-faced women, who walk up and down in their bathing suits’ (‘Bathing Dress in the Street’ 1905). Such discourse about social rules and conventions and the female and male bather was commonplace in the press throughout the period of this study and, reading these texts against the grain, reflects the concerns over the new gendered beach poetics. This relationship between the beach and its potential as a site of transgression and as a site for voyeurism unsettled public authorities because the voyeurism made ‘manifest the (unstable) construction of private/public boundary’ (Frosh 2001: 49). The beach had been transformed through costume, performance and sociality into a hybrid ­private/public space and because it could not be clearly defined as one or the other, it was seen as a site of social disorder. The gestural talk of the young women in Figures 8.1–8.4 represents this tension between the beach as both a front and back stage (Goffman 1959), a public site for transgressive pleasure and a place to sight, to see, from within and from without, beach performances. The beach stage, even

172 • Snapshot Photography and a Gendered Poetics of the Beach, 1900s–1920s

when ‘carefully stage managed’ (Edensor 2001: 63) by beach inspectors and citizens determined to maintain moral standards, was transformed by mostly young beachgoers into a new leisure zone through their adherence to different norms, reflecting the beach as an ambiguous site where multiple different performances could be enacted. The performance of the young women in this study speaks to Goffman’s conception of ‘actions as reflexive and conscious agents moving between socio-spatial settings’ (Bærenholdt et al. 2004: 52). As a ‘community of practitioners’ (Finkelstein 2007: 12), the young women caught in the camera’s lens are using the beach as a stage upon which to rewrite their bodies through costume and performance. The most contentious issue related to the leisure beach in the first three decades of the twentieth century was the manner in which women – and men – were rewriting their bodies through the adoption of the new streamlined bathing costumes (see Metusela and Waitt (2012) for a male perspective on beach culture in the early twentieth century). At this time, no fashion, according to Angela Latham, ‘aroused more anxiety and strife than did swimwear, nor did any other fashion more concisely signify the widespread cultural dissonance about the display of the female body’ (Latham 2000: 25). At suburban beaches around the world, regulations were often strictly enforced, and girls and women who wore modern bathing costumes exposing their arms and legs (Figures 8.1–8.4) were likened to chorus girls and models who posed for pornographic postcards (Lencek and Bosker 1989). This opposition to women and girls rewriting their bodies reached fever pitch in Atlantic City in 1913 when a woman wearing a short bathing suit was assaulted by an outraged crowd (Lencek and Bosker 1989: 38). Such actions saw women of all ages speak out against the authorities’ attempts to control female beach dress. At a public meeting in Melbourne in 1913, where the stricter enforcement of beach codes was proposed, a Mrs Evans expressed her opposition to the proposed new beach ordinances, asking the meeting defiantly: ‘Suppose we have on our kimonos or Canadians [two-piece bathing costume], are we not allowed to sit on the beach?’ (‘Decorum on the Beaches, Enforcing the Regulations’ 1913). In 1921 in Atlantic City, American novelist Louise Rosine was gaoled for rolling her stockings down below her knees while she sat on the beach. According to the New York Times, ‘Miss Rosine appeared on the Virginian Avenue beach this morning with her stockings rolled below her knees. Beach Policeman Edward Shaw informed her courteously that it was against the regulations here’ (‘Bather Goes to Jail; Keeps Her Knees Bare’ 1921). Miss Rosine’s response speaks directly to her sense

Nicolá Goc • 173

of entitlement to live her own leisure experiences at the beach without the interference of the authorities. Her actions and her voice, reported in the press, reflect how women through the new beach poetics challenged patriarchal assumptions about how women could be and what they could do in their own lives. When the Beach Policeman asked her to roll her stocking up over her knees, the New York Times reported her as saying: ‘“I most certainly will not roll’em up,” she retorted. “The city has no right to tell me how I shall wear my stockings. It is none of their darn business. I will go to jail first”.’ The policeman is said to have responded that he would have to take her to gaol and then: as he took her by the arm she is alleged to have swung a right to the officer’s eye which nearly knocked him down. He recovered and blew his whistle. Lifeguards responded and Miss Rosie was taken to the jail in the patrol. The officer, his glasses broken and his dignity ruffled, has preferred a charge of assault and battery in addition to disorderly conduct against Miss Rosine. (‘Bather Goes to Jail; Keeps Her Knees Bare’ 1921)

This report reflects how the press, as the voice of patriarchy, felt threatened by the new gendered beach poetics. Louise Rosine’s tactical, fragmentary acts are reported in a flippant tone in an effort to diminish her actions and reassert the dominant group’s social rules. The following day, the newspaper headlines continued the story of her resistance: ‘Keeps Her Knees Bare in Atlantic City Jail’ the headlines reported. The story told readers that the ‘authoress’ appeared to have forgotten her address, so she was ‘left with no other wardrobe than the bathing suit in which she was arrested’ (‘Keeps Her Knees Bare in Atlantic City Jail’ 1921). From her prison cell, she ‘issued the statement that she still believed bare feminine knees to be allowed under the rights guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States’. The story of Louise Rosine’s arrest and imprisonment became news around the globe because of her status as a public figure and the reportedly shocking manner in which she publicly resisted patriarchal authority. One report in the Australian press (‘Woman’s Bare Knees’ 1921) painted a salacious picture of a half-naked woman being publicly manhandled by two male police officers. In this report her speech and gestural acts again speak directly to the new gendered beach poetics: When a policeman reminded her of the regulations and requested her to cover her knees she is alleged to have replied: ‘Most certainly not. My knees are none of the town’s business.’ When taken to the police station she still refused to roll up her stockings and would not give her address or accept bail. She announces her determination to remain, and will take the case to the Supreme Court, if necessary, as a protest against ‘stupid restrictions of women’s freedom’. (‘Woman’s Bare Knees’ 1921)

174 • Snapshot Photography and a Gendered Poetics of the Beach, 1900s–1920s

Louise Rosine’s actions and speech communicated to a global audience emboldened the new generation of young women to also defy the patriarchal rules about how a woman should present herself to society in the beach leisure zone. The legal outcome of her actions was not reported in the press, suggesting the sensational, salacious moment of female transgression at the beach had lost its newsworthiness as the case devolved into a mundane legal procedure. While the role of fashion in women’s lives is often framed as problematic because fashion ‘purports to accentuate individuality and ­personality’, but ‘it bases its logic on convention’ (West 2000: 134). However, as Georg Simmel argues, fashion in the early twentieth century was ‘one of the few avenues open to women for participation in the shaping of modern culture’ (Simmel 1971: 103). He sees female preoccupation with fashionable dress as related to the limitations women experienced in other parts of their lives and thus ‘is an ambiguous cultural phenomenon that may function as a form of compensation and as an act of resistance’ (Simmel 1971: 103). Women adopting the new beach fashion in the early twentieth century were, as previously mentioned, asserting their individuality by rewriting their beach bodies through fashion and transforming the beach into a site of resistance at the same time as they were buying into the new mass-produced fashion industry, where to be fashionable meant being a perpetual consumer. Wearing the latest skimpy bathing suits, exposing their naked flesh to the world, publicly displaying their bodies as sights of resistance was an act of empowerment, an act that at the same time was placing females, willingly or unwillingly, ‘on display for him’ (Kuhn 1985: 41).

Sociality We have come to understand the beach as a cultural space as much through our interaction with others as through our interaction with the physical properties of sand, sea and sun. And at this new site of public leisure in the early twentieth century, the ‘freedom to pursue male companionship and cross-gender camaraderie’ was ‘just as important as dress to a woman’s vision of female modernity’ (Soland 2000: 91). Mixed bathing, which was introduced at selective holiday beaches in the late nineteenth century, was ‘understood as having some sexual component’ (Metusela and Waitt 2012: 169) and therefore was seen by many as a threat to social order. One commentator writing to the press claimed that ‘exposure of any part of the female body works more erotically than exposure of the corresponding part of the male’ (Flugel

Nicolá Goc • 175

Figure 8.3 Anonymous snapshot, Velox photographic paper, America, c. late 1920s to early 1930s. Author’s collection

1930: 107). As young women dressed in scant clothing began to informally socialize with young men, without parental or adult supervision, their behaviour alarmed many social commentators. At Atlantic City in 1924, in an attempt to protect what was seen as a decline in public morality, the regulators issued the season’s bathing rules. Reported in full in a Queensland newspaper (perhaps because the Queensland coast is Australia’s pre-eminent beach tourist location, a region that has attracted hordes to its golden beaches since the nineteenth century), the rules included: ‘forbidding petting parties on the beach, and also providing that ladies and gentlemen must keep six inches apart–whether in the water or on the beach’ (‘American Bathing Regulations’ 1924). In Figure 8.3 we see a group of relaxed young Australian women and men at an unknown beach location in the early 1920s enjoying the new sociality of the beach, lounging on a boardwalk, basking in the sun and enjoying a relaxed familiarity with members of the opposite sex. At the moment the shutter captured this image, they were conforming to the ‘six inch’ rule, but their casual relaxed bodies speak to their sense of themselves as entitled to socialize with young men with an overt familiarity previously taboo. The free-flowing long hair of three of the young women, an age-old sexual signifier of fertility, was at the time required

176 • Snapshot Photography and a Gendered Poetics of the Beach, 1900s–1920s

by beach regulations to be covered with a bathing cap. Within a few years, these young women most likely adopted the new hairstyle of the modern woman, the bob, which was to become by the mid 1920s the universal signifier for the modern woman. From the young girls in the background (far right) candidly caught enjoying the summer sunshine, we can also see how easily young women flouted stocking rules – one young woman has completely removed her regulation stocking, while the other has casually rolled hers down below her knees as she enjoys participating in the new mixed-gender sociality on the boardwalk. In 1915 two young Australian sisters, Lily and Violet Taylor, were exemplars of the new beach poetics in their defiant actions at a Melbourne beach that reflected their sense of entitlement to occupy the beach unencumbered by oppressive regulations. The sisters arrived at Beaconsfield Parade Beach in Melbourne at 6.15 am on Christmas Day, where they were approached by the female beach inspector, the guardian of public morality, Mrs Esther Walsh, whose evidence was reported in the local press: They said they had disrobed in their buggy and she directed them to the area wherein bathing was permitted. As she was leaving, a male friend of the girls came up and asked what she was doing there. Witness said she ‘was doing her duty’, and he replied, ‘Clear out, and do not interfere with the sea, which nature has given us.’ (‘Bathing Regulations’ 1915)

Later that evening, at 8.25 pm, Mrs Walsh again saw the girls in the prohibited area where, according to the social rules of the day, they were pushing the boundaries of acceptable female behaviour to the limits. This time Violet Taylor was ‘astride a horse in the water. Witness conducted them to the dressing shed’. The young women were arrested and were brought before the courts and fined two shillings and six pence plus costs – a not inconsiderable fine for the time. At the same time as Lily and Violet Taylor were wearing cumbersome neck-to-knees bathing suits and challenging social norms as they rewrote the Australian beach through their disruptive tactical acts, the two young women pictured in Figure 8.4 were no less disruptive as they performed for the camera enjoying themselves at the English seaside in 1911. These young women may have been adhering to the strict dress ordinances of the day, but their gestural acts, bodies intertwined at the edge of the sea, suggest their visual presence, like the visual presence of Lily and Violet Taylor in Australia, publicly challenged the feminine ideals of the well-behaved young woman of the day. Their bodies talk of their rejection of the acceptable ideals of femininity (legs spread open rather than tightly clasped together at the knees, etc.) and

Nicolá Goc • 177

Figure 8.4 Anonymous black-and-white gloss snapshot, Velox photographic paper, England, 1911. Author’s collection

speaks to Margaret McLaren’s Foucauldian argument that ‘an articulation of feminine disciplinary practices’ also reveals a certain tension – ‘if being feminine is not “natural” for women, but rather the result of social and cultural practices, then insofar as women do not conform to stereotypical gender roles they resist feminine disciplinary practices’ (McLaren 2002: 99). Through this photograph and through the newspaper accounts of Lily and Violet Taylor, we can read these young women as being a part of the emerging community of female practitioners (Finkelstein 2007) rewriting their identities as they participated in the creation of a gendered beach poetics by resisting social norms through their tactical and fragmentary (de Certeau 1984) performances.

Fantasy Travel: The Hula Girl In this final section I address the entanglement of the corporeal with representation, of the ‘real’ and the ‘imagined’, the empirical with the fictive, through an analysis of the Hula Girl as a portal into a poetics

178 • Snapshot Photography and a Gendered Poetics of the Beach, 1900s–1920s

of fantasy travel. The experience of travelling to ‘exotic’ locations, the use of the snapshot camera to capture a visual record of overseas travel and the later dissemination of the visual record have been recognized as ‘important elements of the social and political structures that reinforced imperial and/or colonial control of distant lands’ (Hanavy 2008: 1407). For working-class girls and women in Western societies at the beginning of the twentieth century, without the resources for distant travel, that colonizing took place through their adoption of the Hula Girl persona in their own backyards. With the freedom to adopt the exotic sexualized Hollywood Hula Girl persona through costume (see Figures 8.5 and 8.6), they were complicit in colonizing the ‘exotic other’ and they were also compliant in their own commodification and sexualization as they created imaginary worlds for themselves in their backyards. The Hula Girl persona was also a locus for party leisure. Fancy-dress parties were popular in the period of this study and this socially acceptable activity allowed Western women to adopt the Hula Girl persona as one of the multiple ways in which they found self-expression. Through the influences of the cinema, magazines, Tin Pan Alley and tourist marketing, Western women stripped themselves of their Western garb and dressed in grass skirts and skimpy tops, adorning their bodies with layers of (artificial) floral leis. In their Hula Girl personas, standing in the back garden, on the front porch or underneath the date palm in the frontyard (Figures 8.5 and 8.6), these young women struck poses before the snapshot camera that reflect their adoption of the stereotypical sexually provocative Hollywood hip-swaying Hula Girl. The poetics of play is clearly evident in the adoption of the Hula Girl persona in the ‘backstage space’ of the private backyard. It was here in this urban space that the poetics of exotic tropical travel offered young women a place to experiment, to test their bodies and to imagine sexual narratives free from the public gaze. While the inert figure of the Hula Girl frozen in the photographic frame (see Figure 8.5) fails to capture the mobility of her performance, the young woman poses ready to launch into her own fluid version of a Hula dance and to rhythmically move her limbs and hips to a Tin Pan Alley singer crooning one of the dozens of Hawaiian-inspired tunes of the day. The Hula Girl provided Western women with the opportunity to fantasize about the romantic perils of tropical beaches as wilderness and imagine possible liaisons with savage half-naked men as portrayed in the cinema and in fiction. In her photographic performance with an imagined audience in mind (Goffman 1959; Butler 1990), she could rewrite her body as ‘wild’ and ‘natural’, as precultural and therefore as untamed, and thus she

Nicolá Goc • 179

Figure 8.5 Anonymous sepia snapshot, unknown photographic paper, America, c. 1920s. Author’s collection

could rewrite herself in her own mind as a potently erotic, sexualized being. The attractions of the Hawaiian Hula Girl persona were multiple: she only ever existed in the public imagination as occupying an idyllic tropical beach location, a site that has had such a powerful grip on the Western imaginary (Shoat and Stam 1994). She also appealed to Western men and women through a racial stereotyping that framed her as overtly sexually desirable and sexually available. The Hollywood rendition of the Hula Girl framed her invariably as highly sexed, as Shoat and Stam’s (1994) Arab/Black/Latin Hollywood stereotype that was driven by a raging libido.

180 • Snapshot Photography and a Gendered Poetics of the Beach, 1900s–1920s

Figure 8.6 Anonymous sepia snapshot Velox photographic paper, Australia, c. 1920s. Author’s collection

In 1930 the introduction of the Production Code of the Motion Picture Producers and Directors of America Inc. ruling restricted the depiction of sexually provocative women on the screen. However, through the visualization of Hawaiian culture and the use of the Hula Girl racial stereotype, Hollywood producers could continue to bring sexually provocative women to film audiences. In 1926, the Paramount picture Aloma of the South Seas, with the Polish-born Gilda Gray, was a box-office hit. Gray played the part of an exotic dancer, Aloma, who performed a sensuous version of the hula. This film was the most successful film

Nicolá Goc • 181

of 1926, grossing three million dollars in the United States alone, and it was the fourth most successful film of the 1920s and played a significant part in the Hula Girl phenomenon. In 1927 the ‘It’ girl, the silent era’s greatest sex symbol, Clara Bow, brought the fashion for the hula to a fever pitch when she played the part of Hula Calhoun, the happygo-lucky daughter of a Hawaiian plantation owner who would stop at nothing to win the love of a married English engineer. She appears on screen provocatively wearing a grass hula skirt and bandeau and playing a ukulele. The Hula Girl and Hawaii became the focus of dozens of Hollywood films, with more than fifty feature films being made in or about Hawaii from 1920 to 1939 (Desmond 1999: 109). During the Great Depression, films with Hawaiian themes were produced by most of the main studios: RKO, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox, MGM and Universal. Hollywood’s highly charged sexual renditions of the hula created a potent binary for the Western understanding of the Hula Girl. It allowed a woman to outwardly conform to society’s expected model of female respectability by dressing in a modest version of the Hula Girl costume (see Figure 8.6) and presenting her modest self for appropriate male visual consumption, and at the same time allowed her to internalize the sexual taboos inherent in Hollywood’s Hula Girl, offering her the space in which to create her own personal poetics. Hollywood’s Hula Girl also allowed unworldly young women with limited opportunities for travel the ability to travel in their imaginations, creating a dreamy, romantic and sexually charged poetics of an imaginary idyllic tropical South Sea island beach where the sun always shone and waves seductively caressed golden sands as bronzed Adonises seduced beautiful maidens. Through the body of the Western female posing for the snapshot, the exotic ‘other’ is commodified at the same time as the young woman posing for the camera transforms herself into a sexual commodity, reflecting the complexities embedded in these seemingly simple social texts. Sensualized and exoticized through the cinema and popular culture, the young Western woman dressed in the hula costume participates in the creation of a powerless, vulnerable, pristine semi-naked beauty. She creates a complex poetics in which she presents herself as one of the ‘dusky’, voluptuous girls of the cinema, occupying a liminal space between reality and fiction, between suburban Western backyard and a tropical Pacific Island beach. The Western Hula Girl in melding the real and the virtual becomes the new modern consommatrice. Through her imagined tropical beach poetics, influenced by Hollywood’s cinematic destinations, she is a traveller in an imaginary world and the agent of her own imaginary transformation.

182 • Snapshot Photography and a Gendered Poetics of the Beach, 1900s–1920s

Conclusion In this chapter we have seen how young women at the beach – real and imagined – in the early twentieth century employed what Foucault called the ‘technologies of self’ (Foucault 1988) to put forward and police their ‘selves’ at the beach. They adopted new fashion and leisure practices to overwrite old beach discourses and to create a new poetics of the beach that reshaped their female beach identity. The unknown young women from Australia, England and America can be seen captured in the camera’s lens participating in an interplay between conflicting social and ideological agendas about what it was to be the ideal female at the beach in the 1900s–1920s. At a time when the female body was ‘continually seen as a threat to social order – a disorder – and female pleasure was itself an integral and unsettling part of this’ (Grosz 1994: 203), the beach held an attraction as a site for resisting patriarchal conventions because, in part, it resonated ‘as a place where the body (temporarily) wins the struggle between nature and culture, between social constraints and unspoken desires’ (Webb 2003: 77). The beach bodies of young women in the early twentieth century were a critical site of a social and political contest, a place where patriarchy tried to control and discipline females as they boldly resisted what they regarded as oppressive laws and conventions. These young women were on one level also entering the beach, like everyone else, as a place to escape the pressures of everyday life, a place to simply enjoy the pleasurable sensory experiences of sun, sea, sand and sociability, and to have fun. But as we have seen in this chapter, they were engaged in a strategic fun that involved tactical, fragmentary and brazen gendered performances (Latham 2000) that challenged the old orthodoxies. In the early twentieth century, Kodak transformed photography, creating a new everyday human practice, the photographic performance, and young women employed the new snapshot camera technology as a tool in their exploration of self. They consciously used the camera as part of their performance of the new beach poetics and through the camera’s lens, we can still see these young women today engaging in their exploration of self as the bathing beauty, the liberated young bather, the exotic Hula Girl. By adopting the new beach fashion in the early twentieth century, these young women were asserting their right to claim the beach as a place for the public expression of gender. Through their bodies and through that potent fashion device – the ‘shock of the new’ (Simmel 1971: 103) – they vitally supported the ‘logic’ of their speech (Cixous 1976). They

Nicolá Goc • 183

physically materialized what they were thinking; they signified it with their bodies (Cixous 1976). In essence, they were writing their selves. The distinction between the personal and the political or between private and public is, according to Judith Butler, itself a fiction designed to support an oppressive status quo: our most personal acts are, she writes, in fact continually being scripted by hegemonic social conventions and ideologies (Butler 1990). And at the same time as these young women were rewriting their bodies and the beach as a cultural site through their bold performances of resistance and disruption, they were also eagerly adopting the new social rules and conventions of consumerism and fashion. And in adopting the new fashion ethic, they were also engaging in the power play of the look, persuading others to look at them and presenting their bodies to ‘the gaze’. Young women of the Flapper age, with the newfound freedom to vote and to participate in the workforce, diverted their energies from politics and wage equality into leisure activities and consumption, and expanded the opportunities for all women to inhabit public leisure spaces in new and liberating ways. At the beach, through their gendered beach poetics, their radical gestures and actions not only shaped their individual destinies as modern women, but also recalibrated the beach as a cultural site. These ordinary young women boldly flouting ordinances and defying beach inspectors influenced women everywhere to become part of a new global community of female beach practitioners who claimed the right to enjoy beach leisure on their own terms. Nicolá Goc is Senior Lecturer in the Media School  at the University of Tasmania. Prior to joining the university, she was a news journalist, feature writer and social historian, and is the author of several social history books. Her research focus is female identities and the media. She has published widely  on female representation and the media, popular culture and the press, media ethics and visual media. Her book Women, Infanticide and the Press 1822–1922 (Ashgate, 2013), which draws on Foucault’s theories of discourse and power, has been widely reviewed. She is the Director of the  Gender Policy Strategy Group at the University of Tasmania and was  a  2014 fellow of the Australian  National Film and Sound Archive.  She is the President of Convict Women’s Press Inc., which publishes histories of women transported to Australia during the colonial period.  Her current research is focused on migrant women and snapshot photography. She  has a passion for vernacular photography and her Facebook page Is This You? Reuniting Lost Photographs has a large global following.

184 • Snapshot Photography and a Gendered Poetics of the Beach, 1900s–1920s

References Adler, J. 1989. ‘Origins of Sightseeing’, Annals of Tourism Research 16(1): 7–29. Bærenholdt, J.O., M. Haldrup, J. Larsen and J. Urry. 2004. Performing Tourist Places. Aldershot: Ashgate. Bal, M. 1996. Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis. New York: Routledge. Batchen, G. 2008. ‘Snapshots: Art History and the Photographic Turn’, Photographies 1(2): 121–42. Barthes, R. 2000. Camera Lucida. London: Vintage. Bartky, S.L. 2003. ‘Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power’, in R. Weitz (ed.), The Politics of Women’s Bodies and Sexuality, Appearance, and Behaviour. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 25–45. Bergan, B. 1990. ‘A Wedge in Time: The Poetics of Photography’, The Antioch Review 48(4): 509–24. Booth, D. 2001. Australian Beach Cultures: The History of Sun, Sand and Surf. London: Frank Cass. Bordo, S. 1993. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bourdieu, P. 1990. Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. Cambridge: Polity Press. Butler, J. 1990. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge. ———. 1997a. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1997b. ‘Excerpts from “Introduction to Bodies That Matter”’, in R.N. Lancaster and M. Di Leonardo (eds), The Gender Sexuality Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 531–42. Cixous, H. 1976. ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. K. Cohen and P. Cohen, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1(4): 875–93. Collie, N. 2013. ‘Walking in the City: Urban Space, Stories and Gender’, Gender Forum: An Internet Journal for Gender Studies 42. Retrieved 7 December 2016 from http://www.genderforum.org/issues/gender-and-urban-space/walking-​ in-the-city-urban-space-stories-and-gender. Culler, J. 2000. ‘Philosophy and Literature: The Fortunes of the Performative’, Poetics Today 21(3): 503–19. De Certeau, M. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Desmond, J. 1999. Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Edensor, T. 2001. ‘Performing Tourism, Staging Tourism (Re)producing Tourist Space and Practice’, Tourist Studies 1(1): 59–81. Finkelstein, J. 2007. The Art of Self Invention, Image and Identity in Popular Culture. London: I.B. Tauris, Flugel, J.C. 1930. The Psychology of Clothes. London: Hogarth Press. Foucault, M. 1988. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. ———. 1991. Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin.

Nicolá Goc • 185

———. 2002. Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge. ———. 2008. History of Sexuality Volume 1. London: Penguin. Frosh, P. 2001. ‘The Public Eye and the Citizen-Voyeur: Photography as a Performance of Power’, Social Semiotics 11(1): 43–59. Goffman, E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Anchor. Grosz, E. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gustavson, T. 2011. 500 Cameras: 170 Years of Photographic Innovation. New York: George Eastman House. Haldrup, M., and J. Larsen, 2010. Tourism, Performance and the Everyday: Consuming the Orient. New York: Routledge. Hanavy, J. 2008. Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, Volume Two. New York: Taylor & Francis. Hawkins, M.A., and T.K. Nakayama. 1992. ‘Discourse on Women’s Bodies: Advertising in the 1920s’, in L.A.M. Perry, L.H. Turner and H.M. Sterk (eds), Constructing and Reconstructing Gender: The Links among Communication, Language and Gender. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, pp. 66–71. Kuhn, A. 1985. The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality. London: Routledge. Latham, A.J. 2000. Posing a Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls, and Other Brazen Performers of the 1920s. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Lears, J. 1994. Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. New York: Basic Books. Lencek, L., and G. Bosker. 1989. Making Waves: Swimsuits and the Undressing of America. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. Louvel, L. 2008. ‘Photography as Critical Idiom and Intermedial Criticism’, Poetics Today 29(1): 31–48. McLaren, M.A. 2002. Feminism, Foucault, and the Embodied Subjectivity. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Metusela, C., and G. Waitt 2012. Tourism and Australian Beach Cultures. Bristol: Channel View Publications. Pedri, N. 2008. ‘Documenting the Fictions of Reality’, Poetics Today 29(1): 155–73. Pollock, G. 2003. Vision and Difference. London: Routledge Shields, R. 1991. Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity. London: Routledge. Simmel, G. 1971. ‘Fashion’, in D. Levine (ed.), On Individuality and Social Forms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shoat, E., and R. Stam. 1994. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London: Routledge. Soland, B. 2000. Becoming Modern: Young Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tagg, J. 1988. The Burden of Representation. Essays on Photographies and Histories. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2009. The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

186 • Snapshot Photography and a Gendered Poetics of the Beach, 1900s–1920s

———. 1980. ‘Power and Photography’, Screen Education 36(8): 17–55. Tisseron, S. 1996. Le Mystere de la Chamber Claire. Paris: Flammarion. Ullman, S. 1997. Sex Seen: The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Urry, J. 1998. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage. Urry, J., and J. Larsen 2011. The Tourist Gaze 3.0, 3rd edn. London: Sage. Van Leeuwen, T. 2005. Introducing Social Semiotics. London: Routledge. Webb, J. 2003. ‘Beaches, Bodies and Being in the World’, in J. Skinner, K. Gilbert and A. Edwards (eds), Some Like it Hot: The Beach as a Cultural Dimension. Oxford: Meyer & Meyer Sport, pp. 77–90. West, N.M. 2000. Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

Newspaper References ‘American Bathing Regulations’. 1924, Western Star and Roma Advertiser, Queensland, 23 August, 7. Retrieved 22 August 2013 from the Trove database. ‘Bather Goes to Jail; Keeps Her Knees Bare’, 1921, New York Times, 4 September, 4. Retrieved 22 August 2013 from the Trove database. ‘Bathing Dress in the Street’, 1905, Adelaide Advertiser, 11 September, 8. Retrieved 22 August 2013 from the Trove database. ‘Bathing Regulations’, 1915, Record, Emerald Hill, Victoria, 23 January, 2. Retrieved 22 August 2013 from the Trove database. ‘Decorum on the Beaches, Enforcing the Regulations’, 1913, Argus, 3 November, 7. Retrieved 22 August 2013 from the Trove database. ‘Keeps Her Knees Bare in Atlantic City Jail’, 1921, New York Times, 5 September, 15. Retrieved 22 August 2013 from the Trove database. ‘Woman’s Bare Knees’, 1921, Daily News Perth, Western Australia, 12 October 1921, 2. Retrieved 22 August 2013 from the Trove database.

T9 Mediating Mythic Origins and Lived Localities Connecting and Distancing on Roots/Homeland Tours Jillian L. Powers

Introduction This chapter examines the experiences of diasporic tourists, individuals without direct connections to homelands abroad who hire guides and travel with tour agencies. Homeland tourism is a growing industry where organizations representing a variety of American diasporic communities now sponsor group tourism in order to provide further context regarding unknown, lost or broken ancestral linkages. While on these structured tours, tourists visit standard homeland landmarks commonly seen by all tourists and places of particular interest to those looking for connections to heritage and ancestry. There are homeland tours to many locales, including tours to Scotland (see Birtwistle 2005), Israel (Kelner 2010; Powers 2011), China (Louie 2001, 2002), Armenia (Darieva 2011), the Philippines (Garrido 2010) and Ghana (Bruner 1996; Ebron 1999; Holsey 2008) among others only beginning to pique the interest of researchers (Newland and Taylor 2010). The mission is intentionally transformative, combining group leisure travel with pilgrimage. However, viewed as both ‘mythic places of origin’ and sites representing ‘the lived experience of locality’ (Brah 1996: 192), the affective spaces of home(lands) are full of contradictions. In these travels, in order to connect to the past, tourists ultimately encounter the people of the present. How tourists understand this liminal space requires poetic acts of translation (Clifford 1997). Focusing on processes of identification and categorization and the affective experiences of dislocation and territorialization, this chapter thus works to

188 • Mediating Mythic Origins and Lived Localities

understand the intimate links between people and places by asking the following question: how do tourists understand homeland natives and what are the strategies used to define the boundaries of belonging in order to narrate a collective selfhood? Ethnographic material of two tour experiences from two diasporic tourist populations – African Americans travelling to Ghana on a ­slavery/ heritage tour and adopted Chinese children and their American families travelling on an adoption/roots tour – demonstrates how tourists creatively modify kinship and adopt a Western gaze when describing their experiences with homeland natives.1 Diasporic tourists bring with them the baggage they carry from home and craft new identities and boundaries based upon pre-existing signs. Contributing and working within ‘a larger tradition of imaginative encounters between Western and primitive others’ (Stasch 2011: 8), participants from both tours call attention to economic, cultural and social differences and romanticize rural poverty by emphasizing the value of humble or ‘simple’ lives. Travellers envision homeland natives nostalgically, as present-day representatives of a pre-modern time; intimately connected to the places they inhabit thus freezing both China and Africa ‘into some timeless zone of the primitive, unchanging past’ (Hall 1990: 231). However, this process of identification and categorization accomplishes different goals. For families with Chinese children, these narratives provide the necessary distance that affirms that their child belongs firmly within the American family. They do, however, make an ­exception; original caregivers and orphanage employees can be included because they engaged in one of the defining characteristics of familial membership, childcare. Therefore, for families travelling to China, the actions of individuals determine kinship and belonging. For middle-class African Americans travelling to Ghana, kinship is based upon a shared racial consciousness that connects those living in the diaspora with the homeland. While the inhabitants of the homeland are frozen in time, they are viewed as lost relatives personifying the positive and noble characteristics of a strong and wise people. These romantic narratives of simplicity become positive examples of a shared racial identity, combating oppressive domestic understandings of blackness. While one tourist group connects despite the unequal global positions between the Western tourist and the ‘primitive’ homeland native, the other group distances. However, in both of these cases where tourists mediate mythic origins and lived localities, they redefine essentialist and foundational frameworks of belonging in order to reconcile domestic experiences of exclusion and feelings of outsiderness. By first presenting each case then providing an analysis of the relational,

Jillian L. Powers • 189

processual and dynamic nature of identification (Bourdieu 1991), this chapter demonstrates how travel encourages the creative, or poetic, modification of larger organizing frameworks. Composed through bricolage, the meanings of homeland journeys reflect the entanglements of representation.

Ghanaian Slavery/Ancestry Tours While only 9.7 per cent of slave exports occurred from Ghanaian ports between 1700 and 1809 (Richardson 1989: 17), Ghana has attracted the most diaspora repatriates (Dunbar 1968; Jenkins 1975: 152) and diasporic tourists due to its economic stability and claim as the ‘gateway to the Homeland’ (Ghana Tourist Board n.d., GBN 2009). Inspired by Alex Haley’s Roots, the aptly named Ghanaian Ministry of Tourism and Diasporan Relations began capitalizing on the increased interest and financial success of the diaspora and began organizing activities, events and constructing memorials designed to attract African-American and Afro-Caribbean tourists by focusing on pan-African heritage and the transatlantic slave trade (Ghana Ministry of Tourism n.d., GBN 2009). Forty castles and lodges (as described in the official tourism material) used for the slave trade are located in Ghana, with three sites designated by UNESCO as World Heritage Sites. According to estimates, 10,000 African Americans visit Ghana each year (Zachary 2001). In 2007 I travelled with Sankofa Travel, a tour agency based in the capital city of Accra, and joined roughly six hundred members of the African diaspora as they travelled for the Ministry of Tourism’s diasporan events. These tours involve trips to landmarks, treks of natural wonders, visits to traditional native villages, and guided tours and ceremonies at slave castles and memorials. Consistent with recent literature, those travelling with Sankofa represented a well-educated middle class segment of the African-American population (Bruner 1996; Ebron 1999; Holsey 2008). Sankofa relies on trip organizers to plan and recruit participants. Barbara Jones, the coordinator of my Sankofa homeland tour, organizes tours to Africa every two years (interest permitting). This trip was around two weeks, and my tour group consisted of twenty-one African Americans. While most of the tour was made up of retired women, there were two husbands and two single men. Sankofa tours had multiple groups travelling during our voyage and we were frequently grouped together for meals, lodging and daily activities. Among these groups were two alumni organizations from two universities, a loose-knit

190 • Mediating Mythic Origins and Lived Localities

family reunion/church group, a group of retirees and another group consisting of young professionals. Travellers on all of these tours ranged in age from twenty-one to ninety. At first, my fellow travellers had reservations about my involvement. Yet, by the end of our journey, my outsider status led to close bonds. Since my tour group consisted of mostly older women, I became a sort of adopted child. Gender worked to my advantage as well. The women on my tour made a concerted effort to watch over me in order to mitigate my obvious difference. For example, I was directed to keep close to the group when we stopped to shop at craft markets. If I showed interest in an item, someone would engage with the vendors on my behalf, acting as mediator and elder. Therefore, as an outsider both by age and race, I was allowed to ask ‘naïve’ questions engaging with my fellow travellers as an inquisitive and respectful pupil.

Chinese Adoption/Heritage Tours Between 1971 and 2001, U.S. citizens adopted 265,677 children from other countries, and more than one-quarter of those adopted came from China.2 Parents of adopted foreign-born children are generally white, in their late thirties to early forties, college educated, and have high levels of income (see Register 1990). There are many child psychologists, social workers, academics and experts contributing to research and praxis regarding best practices for families with adopted children as they navigate the cultural meanings around ethnicity, race, family and identity.3 Transnational adoptive parents engage in what sociologist Heather Jacobson (2008) has called ‘culture keeping’ – the practice of incorporating aspects of the child’s culture of origin into family rituals and activities. Exploring what it means to be Chinese primarily through the international adoption community, families attend heritage camps, participate in activities sponsored by groups like Families with Children from China (FCC), eat at Chinese restaurants, watch films and television shows about China, and celebrate holidays like Chinese New Year. While the level of involvement in these communities and activities varies, the homeland tour is seen as a natural extension and the ultimate form of familial engagement with China. Families embark on heritage tours lasting for seven to fourteen days, when their children are roughly between the ages of six and fourteen. Psychologists and social workers specializing in transnational adoption encourage travelling at this time as these girls are at the age where they still enjoy family holidays (see Jacobs et al. 2010). Accompanied by

Jillian L. Powers • 191

English-speaking guides, families visit tourist sites like the Great Wall, the Summer Palace, the Terra Cotta Soldiers and adoption-specific sites like the child’s orphanage/welfare centre and iconic adoptions cities like Guangzhou. Homeland tours also schedule age-appropriate activities and performances. While private tours do occur, as with other cases of homeland tourism, specialists encourage group tours since it is understood that excited travellers develop close bonds from the reflexive conversations around issues of significance and subjectivity (Turner 1966). I travelled to China with three families in 2008 with Panda Tours. In total, there were five Chinese daughters, two birth children and five parents. The children on this trip ranged in age from eight to twelve. Only one family visited the orphanage/welfare centre where their daughter spent her first few months, and I was able to accompany one family travelling with Panda Tours, the Elms; family, during their time in Farah’s home city. Because I was younger than the parents, but older than the children, I existed as both an older kid and a younger adult. As an adult, I was tasked with watching children and holding hands. However, since I was younger and unattached, I was also not quite seen as a fully fledged authority figure, so I could joke, share in the private cultural worlds of children, and play and tease with ease. I conducted in-depth and semistructured interviews with seven of the participants travelling to China (both children and adults).4 To supplement such a small sample size, I also analysed news articles with user comments, adoption blogs and list-serves, homeland tour brochures and printed material provided by tour agencies. Within this comparative framework, each case has a very different relationship to the global market, different histories of trauma, and varying experiences with dislocation and oppression. Glossing over case-specific particularities obscures the complex class and cultural differences domestically (Omi and Winant 1994). For example, race and ethnicity can intersect in different ways for different social groups. Within the United States, while race and ethnicity are interactive systems, ethnic categorization primarily focuses on culture, whereas power and domination are central to the historically based and structurally entrenched process of racialization (see Andersen 1999). In addition, homecomings and homelands can have very different meanings. However, tourists choose to participate and tour agencies actively deploy similar symbolic and essentialist ethnic frameworks. Furthermore, tours are similar in structure and general purpose and, in both of these examples, homelands are presented and discussed as places for discovery of essential aspects of the self.

192 • Mediating Mythic Origins and Lived Localities

The ‘Other’ That is Also the Self Homeland tourists are similar to leisure tourists. They too travel away from home for short periods of time in order to experience something outside the confines of the everyday (Bruner 2004). Interacting as excited observers, tourists search towns and cities for classic examples of their already preconceived notions of place using the ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry 1990), which combines the tourist experience with their commercial and previously known assumptions and ideas regarding the places they visit. The gaze must be directed upon something; objects, vistas and indigenous people are all deemed extraordinary. Therefore, there is inherent meaning when one looks at the world as a tourist. However, these are not just any places. These are places of primordial, ancestral and natal origin; these are travels to roots. Primordial ties are discussed as ineffable, a priori and affective (Geertz 1973). Homeland tourists therefore look at an Other that is also a representation of the self. I call this the diasporic tourist gaze, where homeland tourists observe and view the homeland relying upon pre-existing assumptions of not just quintessential difference, but intrinsic similarities. More than just a journey to witness sights and sites, the homeland tour invites tourists to discover commonality and articulate a natural and ineffable connectedness. As Allison, a young African-American woman travelling to Ghana, explained: ‘I made a point to really try, to really see connections. I was very observant . . . I looked at the food and tried to see the ­connections . . . And you listen to the music and you see how the people dance . . . It’s become the backdrop to a lot of black music in America.’ While travelling with a group of young alumni, she uses her ‘culturally appropriated body’ (Brady 2005: 981) to make sense of her experiences. She specifically looks at cultural aspects of Ghanaian life in order to confirm her connection to contemporary inhabitants. She observes commonalities in food, dance and music, and attributes this to a shared affinity and similarity that confirms essential, natural and pre-given connection. The perceived shared practices she observes fundamentally and intimately connect her to a larger collective. However, these exploratory journeys of identity must first reconcile or at least come to terms with the divergent lived realities between homeland natives and travelling diasporic subjects. Below, I discuss each case in turn and chart the travels and processes of translation for each group in order to focus on the contexts that shape these embodied experiences with an Other that also reflects the self (Brady 2005).

Jillian L. Powers • 193

Family Ties Transforming perceptions of family and kin, the transnational and transracial adoptive family is a common sight in the United States. With their growing visibility, the meaning of family is moving past definitions based solely upon genetics and biology (e.g. Collier, Rosaldo and Yanagisako 1997). However, families still rely upon these commonly known biological and genetic frameworks to explain belonging. For example, when Chinese adoptee Farah was younger, she would claim familial membership by pointing out how both she and her grandmother had black hair. Similarly, Carole, Anna’s adoptive mother, would create familial bonds by focusing on the similarities Anna has with other family members: ‘My mother, for example is surprisingly swarthy for an Ashkenazi Jew . . . at the end of every summer, she loves to compare her tanned arm to Anna’s and say, “At last, I have a member of my family who tans like me!”‘Parents therefore rely upon standardized kin/family narratives and use common hair colour, similar senses of humour and even tanning ability to describe familial connections that biology seems to produce naturally. Undermining these attempts, transnational adoptees and their families frequently and publicly field prying questions regarding the legitimacy of their familial bonds. As this comment by an adoptive mother on a New York Times article explains: ‘As a proud mother of four adopted children and three biological children, the only question that offends me is when people ask, “Which are your real children?” My standard reply is, “Which child looks imaginary to you?”‘(Gammage 2007). The incident described above is familiar to many adoptive families; genealogically (and racially) dissimilar children are dismissed, revealing ‘the impossibility of ever being fully integrated’ (Yngvesson 2005: 36). Without blood-based ties, as this adoptive parent explains, adoptees are not even seen as real children, thus challenging the attempts by parents to include adoptive children within the smallest social unit thought to provide grounding, rootedness and comfort – the family. Compounding this, adoptees are also understood as subjects ‘cut off from their ancestral past’ (Zerubavel 2011: 7). Removed from natal origins, they experience ‘genealogical bewilderment’ (Sants 1964; Triseliotis 1973), leading to confusion over their racial and ethnic identity, which in turn results in feelings of isolation (see Bergquist et al. 2007). Attempting to address these concerns, parents work to include and incorporate their child’s birth culture. Where other forms of cultural education (like Chinese culture camps or the celebration of Chinese holidays) set up the child as a passive vessel, homeland

194 • Mediating Mythic Origins and Lived Localities

travels give them direct experiences – a sort of ethnic and racial understanding/becoming through osmosis. These are seen as fully immersive opportunities with spaces already deemed significant. As one adoption specialist explained, ‘a Chinatown in the west, isn’t the same as a town in China’ (Macrae 2006). Considered meaningful as the originating point of Chinese-American culture and history, a homeland tour allows adoptees to speak with authority since they have been to the source and can speak from embodied experience – as Anna explained, ‘now when I see things relating to China, I can say, “ooh I’ve been there”‘. Paradoxically, while social workers, child psychologists and transnational adoption specialists encourage homeland tours based upon an ‘assumed psychological need for the adopted child to return to where he or she “really” belongs’ (Yngvesson 2005: 26), the natural connections and blood-based rights to land and community encountered on these tours challenge and contest the constructed bonds of family. How then do families celebrate and include China, when by definition it pushes their children further away and into the arms of their ‘natural’ place of connection? Using symbols and images of mythic primitivity and romanticized rural China, adoption tour participants imagine Western and Oriental nations (and national identities) in opposition (Louie 2002, 2009). China is rooted in a premodern present where America is fluently modern. By contrasting rural household labour with middle-class American childhood, families instrumentally use differences between Chinese citizens and their (Chinese) child in order to narrate the boundaries of belonging in ways that affirm and confirm the adoptee’s position within her American family. For example, halfway through the tour, the group travelled by open-air bus through the rural city of Yangzhou. Signalling its presence with a laborious cough, the bus passed concrete houses with rusty farm equipment now repurposed and covered in drying laundry, a small-batch distillery, a hog farm and a rural farmer atop a water buffalo – an instantly recognizable example of the iconic Chinese pastoral. As Louie (2009: 307) observes, ‘while people in mainland China have for some time been riding bicycles, wearing blue jeans, and even going to church and eating at McDonald’s’, these practices do not reflect the desires and gaze of tourists. Contrary to this modern China, our tour of Yangzhou ended at the home of an older woman who was encouraged to continue to live in a traditional fashion for the sake of visiting tourists. In the front of her home was a large stone pestle and mortar used to make soymilk, she showed us how to pull and push the lever in order to grind the beans down into a liquid.

Jillian L. Powers • 195

Each child was then encouraged to try for themselves, with parents posing and laughing while the children struggled. With most adoptees hailing from rural and humble beginnings without direct connections to any specific village or family, interactions with rural life become ways to imagine ‘what could have been’. As one child explained in a tour testimonial: ‘It was a really great trip and we learned a lot about ourselves, like what it’d be like growing up there. It’s likely we’d be working on a farm’ (Jazz 2012). In order to understand what that would entail, parents and adoptees spoke in contrasts. As another adoptee explained in a tour testimonial, ‘the farmhouse and . . . the rice paddies . . . are so different than our garden at home’ (‘Macci Family Testimonial’). Interactions at specific tour attractions, and how they are understood, demonstrate how tourists conceive ‘the world of nations as a discrete spatial partitioning of territory’ (Malkki 1992: 26). This strict distinction, where Western modernity stands in stark contrast to Chinese primitivity, opens up a space to question primordial pulls. Finding meaning in national differences, poetic translations challenge key organizing frameworks of belonging. In a post-trip interview, Karen, Farah’s mother, described this life as simple, the counter to Farah’s life in America. Because Farah is unfamiliar with the hardship of a rural lifestyle, she could never belong to China: I couldn’t help but think about the stark contrast between this kind of life and the life Farah is living with us in the US. Not that one is better than the other – I’m sure there’s peace and simplicity to that rural lifestyle – but that she just didn’t look like she belonged. Even though she’s Chinese, she’s so American. (Karen)

Karen works to sensitively understand the social and economic realities of China and the Chinese, but deploys overly sentimental signifiers. In contrast to the hectic pace of modernity, rural lives are romantically peaceful and admirably simple. For Karen, the ‘stark contrasts’ between these two nations cannot be reconciled – the differences are far too great to overcome. She pauses to take stock of her experiences and uses the tourist gaze to translate her encounters into familiar yet distinct spheres of belonging. In her travels, she encounters difference and confirms that Farah can never belong to China because she is unfamiliar with ‘simplicity’. In sum, contrasting rural household labour with middle-class American childhood allows Karen to see differences between Chinese citizens and her (Chinese) child, thus reaffirming the bonds of constructed kinship and challenging primordial belonging and ancestral pulls.

196 • Mediating Mythic Origins and Lived Localities

Exposing and detailing contrasting lives and realities, Farah fits into her American family because she has been socialized as a ‘typical’ (white and upper-middle-class) American child. As Karen continued: ‘I guess it was important because I’ve always kind of wondered if Farah would feel more at home in China. And she totally didn’t. So I guess it just proved that despite her actual heritage/race she totally belongs with our family more than anywhere else.’ Karen negotiates the boundaries of belonging relationally in the moment. By drawing from familiar frameworks, she demonstrates how the position, and repositions, of the individual/family is processual and shaped by the ‘asymmetrical gazes that define relationships between different parts of the globe’ (Louie 2004 739). She uses socioeconomic inequalities and centre/periphery hierarchical models of global interconnectivity to contest primordial allegiances and root her adopted daughter firmly within her family. Articulating the boundaries of belonging based upon lived experience and shared activities, she places only slight significance on heritage and ancestry. When approaching Chinese heritage, families reference and align themselves with aspects they are comfortable with (usually the ­symbolic; see Gans 1979; Waters 1990) while distancing themselves from the strange and different. But what we see happening on homeland tours is that the ‘strange’ and ‘different’ become the ‘poor’ or the exaggerated Asian stereotype. During the homeland tour, family members (including adoptees) would point out practices of the everyday or symbols of culture that they found too exotic, but were perfect for separating. At dinner one evening at a McDonald’s, for example, Karl, Carole’s husband, told me about his parent’s concerns over his choice to adopt internationally. Anna’s grandparents worried that once Anna was old enough, she would choose to return to China and forsake her American parents and life. To the chagrin of her father, and exposing her American standpoint, Anna responded: ‘If I marry a Chinese man, he can come to New York and open a nail salon here.’ In this exchange Anna situates herself within her American family by distancing herself from China through stereotypical perceptions of contemporary forms of Asian immigrant labour. While both parents blushed embarrassingly and made sure to comment about how these are not the views they teach their daughter, I highlight this exchange to demonstrate how Western orientalist perspectives can unintentionally continue even within the well-intentioned attempts of parents. While the examples above demonstrate the process of distancing, caregivers and adoption specialists are included since they engage in one of the activities ­defining family – the care of children.

Jillian L. Powers • 197

At Farah’s orphanage we were able to meet with the nanny who had originally cared for her twelve years ago. Through our interpreter, Farah’s nanny shared stories about her first year of life. The nanny spoke fondly of Farah; she would bring her home to play with her own children. She smiled as she reminisced, remembering how Farah would follow her son around, mimicking his actions and pestering him like any younger sister. As Karen and Farah’s nanny communicated through the interpreter, cultural and language barriers broke down. Both Karen and Farah’s nanny valued and cared for her, and therefore were able to find some common ground. As Karen explains: The best part for me was meeting Farah’s nanny. I didn’t expect her to remember Farah, yet it turned out that she remembered quite a bit about her and was able to answer some of the questions we’ve always had about those first several months of her life. It helped us make sense of her story. It was also wonderful to see that there is someone in China who really cares about her – someone who is emotionally attached to her.

For Karen, shared obligations make some aspects of China approachable. Unlike the rural visit in Yangzhou, she can envision Farah in this place and with these people. The stories this woman shared were not extraordinary; there were no large revelations or sensational accounts, yet her fond recollections of the banality of family routine were familiar. Tourists then selectively extend belonging across racial, ethnic and national divides if intimate relational connections can be articulated. As Molly, Karen’s biological daughter, explains: I have never had a personal connection to someone in China before. It seemed like everyone there was like strangers to me, and that we didn’t have very much in common. However, meeting the nanny and her family showed me that I did have a connection with China, that a family there actually shared a sister with me, at least for a short while.

In China, Molly is an outsider – she does not possess any perceived inherent connection to China, nor can she overlay her American lived experience to understand the people and culture she encounters. However, the frames and signs associated with kin and caretaking allow her to selectively extend the boundaries of belonging across national borders and cultural differences. Farah’s nanny might also be ‘strange’, or a stranger, because she is Chinese, but she can also be understood and incorporated through the duties and obligations associated with kin and family. Actions, not biology thus define belonging. Through the relational web of kinship that Molly articulates connection, she imagines a bond through a shared sister since both kin groups have taken on the responsibilities of caretaking.

198 • Mediating Mythic Origins and Lived Localities

These examples from one homeland tour excursion demonstrate how parents and children contest the perceived fundamental pulls of ethnic origins by pointing out divergent lived experiences and unequal global positions. By imagining a mythic primitive present, China is placed in the past and ‘American’ lives stand in stark contrast. These practices of connecting and distancing separate the child from the homeland and support the rights of nonbiological ties and kinship through acceptable (symbolic and Orientalist frameworks) and easily understood ­romantic/nostalgic representations of China and the Chinese. However, the emotional and affective bonds of kinship selectively create connections across these biological, ethnic and national divides. Homeland tourism to China cannot reconcile traditional understandings of family based upon blood and genetics or affirm the economic realities that brought the Chinese child to America in the first place. It does, however, validate these new family constructs by maintaining existing hierarchies and reaffirming American identities. As Farah explained, she didn’t feel more of a connection to China, but her trip ‘helped bring our family closer together’. Racial Consciousness While families experienced moments where their familial legitimacy was questioned, tourists to Ghana explained exclusion from the nation itself. Using language similar to Omi and Winant’s (1994) view of ethnic and racial groups, Nina, an older black woman who travelled with Barbara Jones, referenced the different historical trajectories and current realities between voluntary and involuntary American migrants: ‘[America’s] supposed to be a melting pot but my ancestors were brought here against their will but we survived and made it. However, the system is still against us. We’re the only people who have to petition the government for basic rights that others are given’. Nina explains how the history of racial exclusion in the United States bars large domestic populations from key American master narratives. Confirming Nina’s sentiment, Allison, a graduate student travelling with her undergraduate institution, explained that ‘America likes to think of themselves as this country of immigrants’. Yet racial classification has historically excluded African Americans from ethnic assimilation models (Alba 1990; Alba and Nee 2003; Glazer and Moynihan 1970; San Juan 1992). America’s ‘supposed to be a melting pot’, yet African Americans, as Nina details, really have not ‘melted’ – they remain domestic outsiders. The eventual incorporation of white Europeans outsiders that shape and define the melting pot ideal as meritocratic,

Jillian L. Powers • 199

does not reflect the experiences of ‘colonized minorities’ (Steinberg 2007). Therefore, the level playing field of American multiculturalism is an illusion (e.g. Alexander 2001; Bell and Hartmann 2007; Steinberg [1981] 2001; Zelinksy 2001). Unable to access American multicultural models that value and celebrate diversity and detail paths of social mobility, Nina and Allison are domestic outsiders, further subjugated by these colour-blind frameworks and structures, as Allison explains: A lot of us really don’t feel at home, you feel like an immigrant, you feel like a first generation, second generation – although most of us don’t know anything but America. We can’t trace anything or anyplace except America. In addition, because you don’t have ownership to this country, like a lot of white Americans do, you sometimes get the feeling like you’re on the fringes. Travelling to Ghana gave me something to feel a part of since I don’t always feel a part of this. It gave me this sense of connection.

Allison feels like a new immigrant – someone out of place, disconnected from America, and excluded from belonging even though all she can trace and all she knows exists within the borders of the nation. She sees herself and her social group as perpetual newcomers, domestic strangers and foreigners in their own land. Unlike migrants of European descent, her feelings of dissonance and experiences with exclusion are not temporary. They do not slowly fade with each generation. Unable to trace her ethnic origins in a country that reifies ethnic heritage and glorifies immigrant assimilationist success stories, Allison cannot help but feel ‘on the fringes’ of society. Constantly aware that her historical traces are missing, devalued and dismissed, she is unable to access the value and import imbued within America’s immigrant ethos. Excluding large segments of the population from celebrated discourses of multicultural diversity maintains the racist myth of black cultural inferiority (Pierre 2004). Homeland travels can possibly intervene, offering agency instead of complacent acceptance. Discovering links to ancestral homelands and commonalities with homeland natives can recast traumatic legacies of forced migration, counter perceptions regarding the pathological nature of blackness and facilitate the reimagining of race domestically. Imagining Africa and return journeys is a way to reclaim heritage and discover one’s place within a nation constructed upon a discourse of immigration. These tours therefore provide ­tourists with ‘someplace where I could really connect to’. However, while on the homeland tour, without direct links/­ connections to particular regions, nations or bloodlines, tourists articulate a mystical sense of belonging (Holsey 2008). Connecting to a larger

200 • Mediating Mythic Origins and Lived Localities

pan-African imagined community, tourists deploy the diasporic tourist gaze and use cultural practices, physiological traits and a shared history of racialized oppression to describe extended and imagined kinship and belonging. For example, one traveller frequently referred to his larger transnational imagined community as the ‘African World Family’, an articulation of groupness based upon how all people of African descent have historically, and still remain, in positions of subjugation due to white/dominant actors/nations. At other moments, however, he relied upon visual cues and phenotype. Between Accra and Elmina, as the bus navigated the winding dirt roads of urban Ghana, he peered out the window while commenting on the facial similarities between the Ghanaians he observed and his family back home in Mississippi. For many homeland tourists, physical and behavioural similarities became definitive examples of ancestral/primordial kinship ties. As this comment from Barbara Jones suggests: ‘This is the place that my ancestors lived and died. Many of them were also taken away and brought to the Americas as slaves. The people in Ghana, they look like me; and many of the foods, dance, and folkways . . . are similar.’ For Barbara, there is no tension between unattainable ethnic specificity and symbolic racial kinship. Unlike tourists to China interested in dismissing essentialist connections based upon physical and racial similarities, Barbara understands and perceives a shared culture with the people she encounters because she shares physical characteristics. In addition, as the quote from Barbara demonstrates, tourists blend time while in the homeland. She uncovers present-day similarities in a location already significant because of its symbolic representation of the past. This is where, as she explains, her ‘ancestors lived and died’. People encountered thus become links to unknown lineages, living memorials to lost kin, and evidence of positive and valued cultural attributes. Gazing upon Ghanaians, tourists speak of poise and wisdom. They see locals as ‘authentic’ embodiments of the shared ‘core’ values seen in all people of African descent. By witnessing shared cultural practices, Africa is confirmed as the motherland and Ghana becomes an entry point, full of present-day examples of a shared racial consciousness. Yet in the process, Africa is often reduced to a static romantic birthplace, a living example of a prehistory and a remnant of a distant era. Travels provide opportunities for mobile and rooted articulations. As Ashley, another member of the alumni group, explains when describing her experiences at a religious service: ‘I had the opportunity to hear the voices of people in worship on that Sunday and I feel the same exact way every time I sing on Sunday in the U.S. The service was different

Jillian L. Powers • 201

because it was basic. There was an emphasis on only what was necessary to please God and here in America we often lose sight of that.’ Ashley finds commonality with Ghanaians through religious worship and the indescribable feeling of spirituality. Yet she cannot ignore the visible differences affecting her ability to relate to the Ghanaian people. Romantic simplicity constructs difference in admirable frames. Unlike the familiar wooden benches of home, these plastic chairs can be easily repurposed or moved, called to service for any activity or event. While this might connote the instability of this congregation, Ashley finds comfort and envisions connecting to a more humble and fundamental form of worship. She presents the Ghanaians as a people valuing simplicity rather than lacking the mechanisms for development. Ghanaians are ascetic, choosing authenticity over excess. By keeping it simple (actively), the Ghanaian church service and the people who attend it possess something Ashley lacks – a deeper connection to the purpose of worship. Romanticizing poverty through the lens of mythic primitivity, Ghanaians live more ‘authentic’ lives, untouched by ­modernity’s complications. As Ashley further details: ‘What is a spoon other than your hand cupped together, what is a fork besides your fingers that are separated to bring things up? There are certain things you say, “oh that’s so backwards”, no, it’s so simple. Life doesn’t have to be as complicated as you make it.’ Ashley gazes upon Ghana and sees a more authentic way of being where the use or absence of utensils becomes evidence of a reality unsullied by modernity’s technocratic and bureaucratic contamination. Using her knowledge of one space to comprehend what she sees in another, she translates her affective experience using a poetic articulation of preexisting signs. Romanticizing and rooting Ghana through flatware, she conceives of a ‘primitivist dream . . . ­outside international capitalism and mass consumption’ (Stasch 2011: 86). Unfortunately, the idealized past materializes in Ghana’s present. The desires of the traveller thus fix the homeland in time and reflect existing power relations. Nostalgic approaches to development and simplicity root homelands in the past while explaining transnational connections within divergent economic realities. While these encounters maintain existing global hierarches, these connections across time and space provide grounding and offer knowledge capable of transforming stigmatized racial identities. For example, while in Ghana, Anita explained how she encountered an older woman she called a ‘grandmother’, a poised and self-aware elder. Her reading of this moment demonstrates the power of extended and imagined racial kinship:

202 • Mediating Mythic Origins and Lived Localities

During a festival in Ghana, thousands of miles away from my home . . . I met my ‘grandmother’ . . . [she] could hardly speak English and we could not make out [her] language either. But in that moment, I showed [her] a necklace I had recently purchased for my [real] grandmother . . .  At that moment, the tears fell. They fell not because I was sad or happy or angry but just because it was one of those moments where your spirit is full of joy because something so unexpected becomes expected. At that moment, my grandmother asked a question that rattled my soul. She asked where were my handkerchiefs to wipe my tears. In that moment, the tears flowed even more because in a country that holds my ancestry but is viewed by those in my own country as inferior, weak, and ­uncivilized – my grandmother taught me what it truly means to be a lady.

Through kinship, like adoption tourists to China, Anita is able to articulate a fundamental connection despite language barriers. She blurs the distinction between literal and imagined family and thus envisions connections regardless of differences. Far from home, yet only a few days into her tour, she discovers that she can feel grounded ‘thousands of miles away from home’. The selective reimagining of kinship seen on homeland tours thus makes the unfamiliar accessible. Yet, in this encounter, Anita also uncovers something deeper. For Anita, like other diasporans who have travelled before her, Africa embodies racial pride and dignity (see Harris 1992) and this ‘grandmother’ embodies inherent refinement and composure. Anita is able to connect to the positive attributes she believes this woman possesses by selectively expanding the boundaries of kin and claiming this woman as her grandmother. Through her travels, Anita settles into an ‘in-betweenness’ that opens up new possibilities for the articulation of identity. The borders blur between her representations of the other and her representations of the self. The homeland (or Motherland, another intentional articulation of kinship) and, in this case, Ghana empower her with a newfound gendered sense of self, and in the process she redefines racial characteristics thought to be immutable and undesirable. This interaction between Anita and her fictive grandmother thus affirms the values she sees existing within herself and the larger African-American community. As these moments demonstrate, kinship is powerful because it is redemptive. Travels to homelands and encounters with fictive kin become emotionally transformative journeys capable of redeeming domestic experiences of exclusion. As Nina explains: It allows me to understand and embrace so many things that we do here in this country that is looked upon as backwards or ghetto, but then I realize that’s our culture. That’s why we do some of the things we do over

Jillian L. Powers • 203

here . . . We like to sit on the porch, and sweep the dirt until its smooth like linoleum and things like that, we like to live close together . . . ­sharing and looking out for each other. It’s a natural thing, a nurturing thing, we say to one another – who’s your family?

In this exchange, she demonstrates how the history of racial categorization is a history of moral judgements, a division of the world into more or less worthy categories of persons. The misrepresentation of her group identity – described as ‘backwards or ghetto’ – limits Nina’s ability to belong in American society. For her, homeland travels allow her to embrace behaviour denigrated in the United States since she sees it occurring regularly, and without contempt, in Africa. She therefore uses a shared racial consciousness to extend her kin network and affirm these maligned characteristics. Jennifer, a woman in her twenties, one of the youngest travellers with Barbara Jones, also expressed similar sentiments: The only thing we knew about black people is that we were niggers. ‘Shut up nigger, sit down nigger’, that’s all we knew. If we were to be informed about black people they were always the indigenous people, no brassiere, half-dressed, looking ashy. So we thought that to be true . . . I am leaving here with a pride that I have never known before.

Acts of homeland tourism are thus understood as ways to rewrite racist ideologies depicting blacks as inferior, uncivilized and a people without a significant history (Gordon and Anderson 1999). Through corporeal travel and embodied experiences, they discover a connection to a worthy and valuable shared culture. As Jennifer explains, unlike forms of primitivism that show contempt, tourists’ versions romantically honour the homeland. However, articulating connections through a shared racial consciousness overlooks, and even dismisses, the regional forces at play in Ghana and the larger African continent (Hasty 2002; Holsey 2008) and commodifies heritage and culture (Ebron 1999). Homeland tourism to Ghana cannot reconcile the dispersal of slavery or truly connect the diasporic subject with Africa. It does, however, validate black American experiences for middle-class African Americans on the basis of racial kinship and gives tourists agency when denied access to traditional American heritage narratives. Travels thus bring tourists to heritage and primal origins in order to counter and combat structural racial oppression and a history of migration based upon force and subjugation. Homeland tours, as I demonstrate, are not return visits by separated family members, but exploratory journeys in racial kinship where locals are gazed upon with diasporic agendas and for the purpose of domestic objectives.

204 • Mediating Mythic Origins and Lived Localities

Conclusion This chapter details how people work within larger global frames of signification to understand homeland spaces. Both examples of homeland tourism show how diasporic tourists deploy a tourist gaze based upon romantic narratives of simplicity and development to understand the homeland. The baggage they bring to bear reflects the desires they travel with and the deeply entrenched hierarchies that shape social life. Yet these narratives have different results. One is used to counter claims of primordial essentialism, while the other is used as proof of it. Both, however, are used to define the boundaries of belonging and membership in communities to redeem domestic experiences of exclusion. By creatively modifying the relational web of kinship, travellers uncover a symbolic and ideological resource. Travel offers opportunities for agentic translation. Regardless of whether diasporic tourists connect to, or distance themselves from, the homeland, they construct other cultures as premodern, fixed and timeless examples of traditionalism. Perceptions of Africa and China by Western cultures that are romanticized and essentialist in nature, while not so inherently disparaging, still perpetuate stereotypical understandings of global others. The culture embodied within the homeland is understood as territorially bound and moored to place (Caplan 1996). These strategic acts of heritage consumption therefore unfortunately reinforce global power imbalances. Homeland tourists regularly constructed hierarchical relationships between homelands and ‘the West’, as seen, for example, in how Karen roots China in a premodern past by romanticizing the primitive and rural, and how Anna, in her nail salon comment, reduces the experiences of all Asian immigrants to a simplistic working-class migrant caricature. Homeland tourists do not intend for their comments and explanations of foreign difference to come off as critical, demeaning or disrespectful. How we make meaning and understand differences are shaped by the knowledge we carry, our previous experiences and our positions within global sociostructural systems. Portraying foreign others as subordinates, as Dean MacCannell explains, is ‘a lingering diffuse effect of the arrogant old Western ego’ (2011: 8). Homeland tourists work from a shared cultural script reflecting their American tourists’ perspective. While American minorities remain relegated to the status of ‘Other’ in the United States, they adopt a Western gaze when interacting with foreign others, thus demonstrating how global processes and power relations are not contested, but adopted. By relying

Jillian L. Powers • 205

on forms of cultural essentialism that collude with Western understandings, homeland participants are engaging in a practice that reifies the very categories globally that they are combating domestically. While both cases use similar structuring frameworks, the construction, selection and representation of homeland is a reflexive process that reveals the desires and anxieties that diasporic tourists bring with them from home. Rendered meaningful in a variety of ways, the embodied experiences of diasporic tourists thus involve the poetic articulation of pre-existing signs. With the growth of global travel, populations now have new pathways to ease contemporary forms of malcontent and dislocation. By actively travelling back to home(lands), diasporic tourists attempt to creatively resist dominant frameworks. Removed from the confines of the everyday, travels are meaningful because they expand the possible. Mediating mythic origins and lived localities is therefore an embodied practice of experiential discovery where diasporic tourists/­ travellers ‘rework the margins of self and other, native and stranger, old and new’ (Brady 2005: 997). By creatively modifying kinship, diasporic tourists subvert and traverse static boundaries of difference. However, in these attempts, diasporic tourists also reinscribe global narratives of ­inequality and power. Africa and China become nothing more than a stage, a landscape of significance capable of providing roots, where romantic narratives overlook and even dismiss contemporary global forces of inequality in order to articulate and remake belonging domestically. Jillian L. Powers is a rogue academic/people scientist, a consultant at ReD associates, and the 2015–16 Association of Jewish Studies’ Berman Early Career Fellow. Previously, she was a lecturer in American Studies at Brandeis University, a Florence Kay Fellow with a specialization in Immigration and American Society at Brandeis University, and a  Postdoctoral Fellow in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St Louis. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from Duke University  in 2011.  Her work examines issues of American heritage, culture, and racial and ethnic group identity. Currently, she is working on the  book manuscript  Traveling to Belong (under contract with New York University Press) and is editing an anthology on precarious labour, The Precariat and the Professor. She has spoken widely on topics of diversity, immigration, race and ethnicity, travel and tourism. Recently, she gave a TEDx talk entitled ‘The New American Normal’.

206 • Mediating Mythic Origins and Lived Localities

Notes 1 In this chapter I use pseudonyms for respondents and small organizations, and have disguised or omitted identifying details. When citing open source material, I have not changed any of the names, since they are publicly available. 2 Since 1985, there have been a total of 71,632 adoptions from China to the United States (see Bureau of Consular Affairs 2014). 3 Adoption experts and specialists look towards the experiences and socialization patterns of other internationally adopted populations, usually comparing the experiences of Chinese adoptees with earlier waves of Korean adoptees. Historically, Korean culture for adoptees in the United States was silenced and parental approaches limited homeland nostalgia and suppressed even the mention of racial difference. Parents were advised to minimize their children’s difference in order to raise them as Americans. This approach left many Korean adoptees feeling rootless and unseen as they struggled to craft their identities in their all-white home environments. 4 Consistent with current research, despite the fact that I interviewed children, the overwhelming majority of the interview excerpts come from parents, specifically mothers (see Jacobson 2008). Research shows that mothers are primarily responsible for the socialization of young children (Stacey 1997) and with maintaining household ethnic traditions and culture (e.g. di Leonardo 1984; Glenn 1986; Stack and Burton 1993). Therefore, many of the claims made involve how parents approach heritage and their child’s Chinese identity. However, Chinese adoptees are beginning to enter into the conversation and speak about their experiences.

References Alba, R. 1990. Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America. New Haven: Yale University Press. Alba, R., and V. Nee. 2003. Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Alexander, J. 2001. ‘Theorizing the “Modes of Incorporation”’, Sociological Theory 19(3): 237–49. Andersen, M.L. 1999. ‘The Fiction of Diversity without Oppression: Race, Ethnicity, Identity, and Power’, in R. Tai and M. Kenyatta (eds), Critical Ethnicity: Countering the Waves of Identity Politics. Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 5–20. Bell, J., and D. Hartmann. 2007. ‘Diversity in Everyday Discourse: The Cultural Ambiguities and Consequences of “Happy Talk”’, American Sociological Review 72(6): 895–914. Bergquist, K., M. Vonk, D. Kim, and M. Feit. (eds). 2007. International Korean Adoption: A Fifty-Year History of Policy and Practice. New York: Hawthorne Press.

Jillian L. Powers • 207

Birtwistle, M. 2005. ‘Genealogy Tourism: The Scottish Market Opportunities’, in M. Novelli (ed.), Niche Tourism. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, pp. 59–72. Bourdieu, P. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brady, I. 2005. ‘Poetics for a Planet: Discourse on Some Problems of Beingin-Place’, in N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln (eds), Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 979–1026. Brah, A. 1996. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge. Bruner, E. 1996. ‘Tourism in Ghana: The Representation of Slavery and the Return of the Black Diaspora’, American Anthropologist 98(2): 290–304. Bruner, E. 2004. Cultures on Tour. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Bureau of Consular Affairs. 2014. Intercountry Adoption: Statistics: Adoptions by Country. Retrieved 9 December 2016 from http://travel.state.gov/content/ adoptionsabroad/en/about-us/statistics.html. Caplan, K. 1996. Questions of Travel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Clifford, J. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Collier, J., M. Rosaldo, and S. Yanagisako. 1997. ‘Is There a Family? New Anthropological Views’, in R. Lancaster and M. di Leonardo (eds), The Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy. New York: Routledge, pp. 71–81. Darieva, T. 2011. ‘Rethinking Homecoming: Diasporic Cosmopolitanism in Post-Soviet Armenia’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 34(3): 490–508. Di Leonardo, M. 1984. The Varieties of Ethnic Experience: Kinship, Class, and Gender among California Italian-Americans. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dunbar, E. 1968. Black Expatriates. New York: Dutton. Ebron, P. 1999. ‘Tourists as Pilgrims: Commercial Fashioning of Transatlantic Politics’, American Ethnologist 26(4): 910–32. Gammage, J. 2007. ‘A “Normal” Family’, New York Times, 2 December 2007. Retrieved 9 December 2016 from http://relativechoices.blogs.nytimes. com/2007/12/02/a-normal-family. Gans, H. 1979. ‘Symbolic Ethnicity: The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 2(1): 1–20. Garrido, M. 2010. ‘Home is Another Country: Ethnic Identification in Philippine Homeland Tours’, Qualitative Sociology 31(1): 177–99. GBN, 2009. ‘The Emancipation Day Celebration Stimulates Tourism in Ghana’, in MG –Modern Ghana. January 12, 2009. Retrieved 4 March 2013 from https://www.modernghana.com/news/198279/1/the-emancipation-day-cele​ bration-stimulates-touris.html. Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. Glazer, N., and D.P. Moynihan. 1970. Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Glenn, E.N. 1986. Issei, Nisei, Warbride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

208 • Mediating Mythic Origins and Lived Localities

Gordon, E.T., and M. Anderson. 1999. ‘The African Diaspora: Towards an Ethnography of Diasporic Identification’, Journal of American Folklore 112(445): 282–97. Graburn, N. 2004. ‘The Kyoto Tax Strike: Buddhism, Shinto, and Tourism in Japan’, in E. Badone and S. Roseman (eds), Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 125–39. Haley, A. 1976. Roots: The Saga of an American Family. New York: Vanguard Press. Hall, S. 1990. ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in J. Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture and Difference. London: Lawrence & Wishart, pp. 222–37. Harris, E.L. 1992. Native Stranger: A Black American’s Journey into the Heart of Africa. New York: Vintage Books. Hasty, J. 2002. ‘Rites of Passage, Routes of Redemption: Emancipation Tourism and the Wealth of Culture’, Africa Today 49(3): 46–76. Holsey, B. 2008. Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jacobs, D., I. Chin Ponte, and L. Wang. (eds). 2010. From Home to Homeland: What Adoptive Families Need to Know before Making a Return Trip to China. St Paul, MN: Yeong & Yeong Book Company. Jacobson, H. 2008. Culture Keeping: White Mothers, International Adoption, and the Negotiation of Family Difference. Nashville: University of Vanderbilt Press. Jazz. 2012. ‘Finding Ourselves in Our Birth Place’, One World: Chinese Adoptee Links Blog, 23 November. Retrieved 9 December 2016 from http://www.chineseadop​ tee.com/2012/11/finding-ourselves-in-our-bith-place.html. Jenkins, D. 1975. Black Zion: The Return of Afro-Americans and West Indians to Africa. London: Wildwood House. ‘The Joseph Project’, Official Website of Ghana Ministry of Tourism. Retrieved 28 August 2007 from www.ghanatourism.gov.gh/main/advertdetail. Kelner, S. 2010. Tours that Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage, and Israeli Birthright Tourism. New York: New York University Press. Louie, A. 2001. ‘Crafting Mobile Senses of Place: Chinese American RootsSearching in China’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 8(3): 343–79. ———. 2002. ‘Creating Histories for the Present: Second Generation ­(re)­Definitions of Chinese American Culture’, in M. Waters and P. Levitt (eds), Transnationalism and the Second Generation. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, pp. 312–40. ———. 2004. Chineseness across Borders: Renegotiating Chinese Identities in China and in the U.S. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2009. ‘Pandas, Lions, and Dragons, Oh My: How White Adoptive Parents Construct Chineseness’ in the Journal of Asian American Studies 12(3): 285–320. MacCannell, D. [1976] 1988. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Schocken. ———. 2011. The Ethics of Sightseeing. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Jillian L. Powers • 209

‘Macci Family Testimonial’, Gladney China Heritage Tours. Retrieved 9 December 2016 from http://gladneyasia.org/pages/stories/macci.html. Macrae, S. 2006. ‘Emotions and Birthcountry Visits: Cycling through Emotions’, Rainbowkids.com: The Voices of Adoption, 26 July. Retrieved 9 December 2016 from http://www.rainbowkids.com/expertarticledetails.aspx?id=91 Malkki, L. 1992. ‘National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees’, Cultural Anthropology 7(1): 22–44. ‘Ministry of Tourism and Diasporan Relations’, Official Website of Ghana Tourism. Retrieved 16 May 2009 from http://www.touringghana.com/eman​ ciBarbaraion.asp. Newland, K., and C. Taylor. 2010. ‘Heritage Tourism and Nostalgia Trade: A Diaspora Niche in the Development Landscape’, Migration Policy Institute, September. Retrieved 9 December 2016 from http://www.migrationpolicy. org/pubs/diasporas-tradetourism.pdf. Omi, M., and H. Winant. 1994. Racial Formation in the United States: From 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge. Pierre, J. 2004. ‘Black Immigrants in the United States and the “Cultural Narratives” of Ethnicity’. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 11(2): 141–70. Powers, J. 2011. ‘Reimagining the Imagined Community: Homeland Tourism and the Role of Place’, American Behavioral Scientist 55(10): 1362–78. Register, C. 1990. Are Those Kids Yours? American Families with Children Adopted from Other Countries. New York: Free Press. Richardson, D. 1989. ‘Slave Exports from West and West-Central Africa, 1700– 1810: New Estimates of Volume and Distribution’, Journal of African History 30(1): 1–22. San Juan, E. 1992. Racial Formations/Critical Transformations: Articulations of Power in Ethnic and Racial Studies in the United States. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Sants, H.J. 1964. ‘Genealogical Bewilderment in Children with Substitute Parents’, British Journal of Medical Psychology 37(2): 133–41. Stacey, J. 1997. In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in the Postmodern Age. Boston: Beacon Press. Stack, C., and L. Burton. 1993. ‘Kinscripts’, Journal of Comparative Family Studies 24(2): 157–70. Stasch, R. 2011. ‘The Camera and the House: The Semiotics of New Guinea “Tree-Houses” in Global Visual Culture’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 53(1): 75–112. Steinberg, S. [1981] 2001. The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity and Class in America. New York: Beacon Press. ———. 2007. Race Relations: A Critique. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Triseliotis, J. 1973. In Search of Origins: The Experiences of Adopted People. London: Routledge. Turner, V. 1966. ‘Liminality and Communitas’, in V. Turner (ed.), The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing, pp. 94–130. Urry, J. 1990. The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage.

210 • Mediating Mythic Origins and Lived Localities

Waters, M. 1990. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Yngvesson, B. 2005. ‘Going “Home”: Adoption, Loss of Bearings, and the Mythology of Roots’, in T.A. Volkman (ed.), Cultures of Transnational Adoption. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 25–48. Zachary, P. 2001. ‘Tangled Roots: For African Americans in Ghana, the Grass isn’t Always Greener – Seeking the “Motherland”, They Find Echoes of History and a Chilly Welcome’, Wall Street Journal, 14 March, Section 1A: 1–2. Zelinksy, W. 2001. The Enigma of Ethnicity: Another American Dilemma. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Zerubavel, E. 2011. Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity, & Community. New York: Oxford University Press.

T 10 Road Trip through the Heartland Television Advertisements and the Australian Domestic Traveller Christopher Drew

In his famed text Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson (1991) highlighted the ways in which national identities are made recognizable across a nation not only through embodied experiences, but also through shared stories and representations. In this chapter, such shared representations are examined through the exploration of varied rhetorical, metaphorical and emotive poetics of rural Australian car travel as they are deployed on two recent Australian television advertisements. The chapter considers the ways in which these advertisements, as nationally relevant texts selected as exemplary pieces from a broader corpus of advertisements with travel narratives, might both appeal to citizens-as-consumers, and might also work to produce – through complex and diverse representational poetics – a discursive, recognizable and idealized national identity trope within domestic travel discourse. Throughout the examinations here, I draw upon the work of Sara Ahmed who highlights the ways in which emotions are named and circulated through textual interactions. As she explains, texts name emotions and in doing so invoke ‘different orientations towards the objects they construct’ (Ahmed 2004: 12). The ‘emotionality of texts’, she explains, can be produced through framing strategies such as ­‘figures of speech’ and ‘metonymy and metaphor’ (2004: 12). Texts, she argues, can name discourses of emotions such as fear, nostalgia and happiness, to produce some interactions and narratives as requiring certain emotive responses. By using this theoretical approach, I aim to show the ways in which discourses of national identity tourism are produced through emotive and rhetorical representational poetics in quotidian life, in ways that construct rural parts of the nation in particular as

212 • Road Trip through the Heartland

awe-inspiring, a source of authenticity and inherently great. However, throughout these textual analyses, I recognize that texts are open to multiple subjective readings and rereadings. As Fürsich (2009: 244) argues, ‘it is one of the quintessential assumptions of cultural studies that popular culture is a site of struggle over meaning’. The readings that I make, as a subjective and always partial researcher, provide a particular perspective of the texts that highlights pertinent points about the discourses explored here, without foreclosing others’ readings of the texts. In light of this, I encourage you to consult the texts analysed here and to read the texts with your own subjective and critical eye.

Theorizing National Identities Dominant discourses of national identity have emerged in ways that position the inhabitants of a nation as innately alike in thought and character, both overseas (Anderson 1991; Billig 1995; Edensor 2002) and in Australia (Elder 2007; Hogan 2009; Prideaux 2009). Through shared national stories and images proliferated by diverse media and word of mouth, people of a nation who have never met can come to consider themselves as members of an extended ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991: 27). Commonplace representations of national identity in popular culture and media are increasingly understood as key means by which understandings of national identities are purveyed, challenged and reaffirmed (Edensor 2002; Prideaux 2009). As Butler argues, ­‘nationalism works in part by producing and sustaining a certain version of the subject. We can call it imaginary, if we wish, but we have to remember that it is produced and sustained through powerful forms of media’ (2009: 47). In this sense, commonplace cultural texts such as television advertisements can routinely reiterate and naturalize discourses of national identities through diverse and complex discursive and representational strategies. Without ongoing reiterations of norms of nationhood, or what Butler calls ‘the continuing action of norms’ (2009: 168), national identities cannot be sustained. In other words, the survivability of national identities relies upon the representational poetics of nationhood reiterated again and again in banal (Billig 1995), rhetorical, emotive and metaphorical ways on television, on posters, in popular culture and so forth. Whilst discursive iterations of national identities can provide a sense of belonging and collectivism for members of a nation, it is also understood here that national identities have exclusionary and marginalizing

Christopher Drew • 213

effects. In the Butlerian sense, whenever an identity norm is defined, certain other identities come to be discursively marginalized from the frame of nationhood (Butler 2009). Discourses that produce national identity therefore define the identities that are privileged within the imagined community (Anderson 1991), as well as those that are not.

The Rural Australian Road Trip The rural road trip can be rhetorically framed in both international (Löfgren 2001; Pitchford 2008; Shaffer 2001) and Australian (Elder 2007; White and White 2004) discourse as a way of transforming citizens’ nationalist understandings about the homeland into deeply personal experiences of national identity. Travel through a nation’s rural spaces is often expertly constructed within texts as a time when the revivification and revitalization of an authentic national selfhood can be realized. Discussing iconic rural geographies, Edensor (2002: 40) explains: ‘So ideologically charged are they, that they are apt to act upon our sense of belonging so that to dwell within them, even if for a short time, can be to achieve a kind of national self-realisation, to return to “our” roots where the self, freed from its inauthentic – usually urban – existence, is re-authenticated.’ Whilst the most densely populated areas of Australia are generally located by the coast, a discursive representational poetics of rural Australia has emerged that constructs rural Australia as a place where authentic national archetypes might be found. This narrative can be traced back to the days of white Australian explorers and free settler farmers who attempted to discipline and tame Australia’s rural landscapes via the felling of trees and the erection of fences (Thomas 1996; Ward 2003). Folklore of the harsh climates in rural Australia glorifies the rural Australian male as a rugged and masculine white man who earned his distinctive Australian identity through his battles against the harsh Australian fires, droughts and rains (Ward 2003). Nineteenth and early twentieth-century bush poems about this masculine archetype by the likes of Banjo Patterson and Henry Lawson perpetuated this image (Bellanta 2012). Today, this trope lives on in national stories of men such as Steve Irwin and Crocodile Dundee fighting against Australian animals to earn their credentials as rugged Australian Bushmen (Lang 2010). Thus, a dominant narrative has emerged about the true Australian archetype being white, rugged, masculine and rural. Another perhaps less dominant poetic of rural authenticity has emerged too – the rural Indigenous Australian. This rural Indigenous

214 • Road Trip through the Heartland

character garners authenticity through his or her rejection of the influence of colonial culture in order to go on living a traditional, and therefore ‘authentic’, Indigenous lifestyle in outback Australia (Elder 2007; Healy 2008). Such imaginaries perpetuate the image of rural Australia as the place where Australian authenticity might be found. The imaginary of rural Australian spaces as locales where a more ‘authentic’ Australia might be found is often taken up in Australian tourism discourse (Elder 2007; White and White 2004). For domestic tourism, this imaginary can position travel to rural Australian spaces as a way for Australians to access the ‘authentic’ national discourse. The search for authenticity is a well-worn trope in tourism discourse, associated with the tourist’s nostalgia for truth and wonder. As Wang puts it: [Authenticity] is nostalgic because it idealizes the ways of life in which people are supposed as freer, more innocent, more spontaneous, purer, and truer to themselves than usual . . . People are nostalgic about these ways of life because they want to relive them in the form of tourism at least temporally, empathically, and symbolically . . . Therefore, as a contrast to the everyday roles, the tourist role is linked to the ideal of authenticity. (1999: 360)

Furthermore, domestic travel through Australia’s rural spaces can be read as turning abstract concepts of national identity and national origins into lived experiences (White and White 2004). As Löfgren (2001: 152) states, domestic travel ‘personalize[s] . . . national images and ­clichés’ so that national images become suggestive not only of a national identity, but also of a personal identity that comes to be believed as an authentic and deeply held sense of Self as citizen. In this sense, travelling to iconic Australian spaces serves a vastly different spiritual and emotional purpose than travel abroad. While international journeys are primarily understood as ‘movement[s] away from a person’s home’ (Obenour 2004: 1), domestic journeys through a nation constitute movements within a home. Domestic travellers, then, may be searching for ‘the feeling of being at home’ (White and White 2004: 217) and a ‘greater sense of belonging’ (Franklin 2003: 47). Such tourism has been described as ‘identity tourism’ to explain how, in domestic tourism discourse, ‘collective identities are represented, interpreted and potentially constructed through the use of history and culture’ (Pitchford 2008: 3). By travelling through the nation’s rural spaces, the citizen has time to reflect upon his or her own identity and how it can be situated within both a national narrative and a personal poetic.

Christopher Drew • 215

White and White (2004: 210), for example, found that travellers heading through rural Australian spaces view rural Australia ‘as a source of pleasure and recuperative reverie’. In this sense, rural journeys can be framed as opportunities for ‘refuge from urban life’ and ‘recreation and heal[ing]’ (Daugstad 2008: 403). Road trips through rural Australian spaces have also taken on a gendered aspect, where they come to function as times when masculinity can be learned, reimagined and undone (Biber 2001; Butterss 2000; Thomas 1996). For road trips in particular, the car signifies discursive masculine characteristics of aggression and power, thereby linking it to a particularly masculine form of domestic travel. Australian femininity on the road also emerges in narratives of Australian road trips. The problematic of the signifier of a woman in the car can provide an opportunity for women to explore the potentialities of escape from the feminine trope of passivity (Clarke 2007).

Advertising the Rural Australian Road Trip In this examination of representational poetics that construct discourses of the domestic Australian road trip, I have selected television advertisements as the textual mode under analysis. Television advertisements are commonplace texts in contemporary Australian life, whose narratives are repeated and reiterated over weeks and months, and generally targeted at a broad national demographic (Berger 2004; Hogan 2009). In this sense, they serve as powerful yet banal national texts that both contribute to and sustain narratives about the imagined community of the nation. Furthermore, while television advertising has many representational codes that cross over with other cinematic forms, it also has its own unique agenda – namely, the goal of securing future product consumption. Commercial advertising, defined here as both the art of drawing attention to the availability of products and services, and as increasing the salience of a product within the marketplace (Beasley and Danesei 2002), functions with a distinctly financial purpose. In this sense, commercial advertising is designed in order to position a brand or product within a marketplace in a way that makes it financially viable in the short, medium or long term. The enormous commercial advertising industry has developed many literal and rhetorical devices in its attempts to promote brands and products to the consuming public (Beasley and Danesei 2002; Berger 2004; Messaris 1997). As Beasley and Danesei (2002: 1) argue: ‘The craft of advertising today has . . . progressed considerably beyond the use of simple techniques for announcing the availability of products or services. It has

216 • Road Trip through the Heartland

ventured, in fact, into the domain of persuasion, and its rhetorical categories have become omnipresent in contemporary social discourse.’ In other words, advertisements tell stories, and represent concepts and ideas, in ways that can speak with and contribute to broader discursive, cultural and personal poetics.

Selling National Identity: Road Trips through Rural Australian Spaces The rural Australian road trip is a common feature on Australian television advertisements. My aim in analysing representational poetics within advertisements featuring rural Australian road trips has been to explore how rhetoric such as metaphor, simile and narrative produce a discursive, recognizable and idealized national identity trope within domestic travel discourse. Advertisements that utilize narratives of rural road trips span a variety of products and brands. Car advertisements are a primary type of advertisement that employ the road trip narrative, with advertisers promoting their cars as enablers of Australian road trips and relationships between characters who are on the road (for example, Holden’s ‘Owner’s Grant’,1 Subaru Forester’s ‘Explore Your World’,2 Mitsubishi Pajero’s ‘Change of Atmosphere’3 and Toyota Kluger’s ‘Family Thing’).4 Other advertisements that use domestic road trips include domestic tourism advertisements (for example, Tourism Australia’s ‘Nothing Like Australia’5 and Caravan Industry Association of Australia’s ‘We Love This Country’)6 as well as assorted other advertisements (for example, Big M’s ‘Go Out to Play’,7 Telstra BigPond’s ‘Big Things’8 and ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’).9 The two advertisements focused on in this chapter are Telstra’s ‘Big Things’ advertisement and Toyota Kluger’s ‘Family Thing’ advertisement. Through these two road trip advertisements, I can explore common ways in which advertisements can use travel poetics to promote their products and inform cultural discourses of travel and nationhood.

‘Can’t Help But Smile’: Telstra’s ‘Big Things’ Advertisement Telstra is an iconic Australian telecommunications brand. Formerly government-owned and run under the name of Telecom, in the past two decades Telstra has been one of many government assets that have been privatized. Telstra’s advertising campaigns, such as its ‘We are Australian’ campaign and the ‘Big Things’ advertisement examined here, can be seen

Christopher Drew • 217

in this context as brand management strategies that could be designed to create a perception that Telstra remains an authentically Australian brand despite recent privatization. The ‘We are Australian’ advertisements, released in 2002, 2003 and 2008, focus on stories of Australian people and places. Those advertisements use the ‘I am Australian’ theme song, which was written by Bruce Woodley and Dobe Newton in the lead-up to the 1988 Australian Bicentenary of Australia’s colonization. Telstra’s more recent advertisements have focused on a father-and-son duo, who I will argue represent quintessential, although perhaps cliché, ‘Australian’ characters. The ‘Big Things’ advertisement examined here features these two protagonists touring Australia on their summer holidays. In this advertisement, which aired for several months on Australian television in 2009, a nostalgic, happy narrative of a father-and-son road trip is constructed. Here, road trips to far-reaching spaces within the nation might be used by this brand to highlight the relationship-building capacity of a communication service, to highlight the brand’s connection to place or to emphasize its breadth of coverage. Interestingly, whilst being an advertisement for broadband internet, the product being sold is not mentioned until the final scene. Instead, the advertisement primarily invokes love of rural Australia through a voiceover of a boy narrating the story of his national identity tourism experience: My Dad says Australia’s one of the big countries. He reckons you’ve got to go out and see this thing in action. Dad says the French have the Eiffel Tower, the Chinese have the Great Wall, but Australians? We have the big things. The Big Lobster. The Big Koala. And the Big Chook. People think they’re called big things because of their size, but Dad says they were all designed by one man: Sir. Francis Big. The Big Merino was an official gift from the People’s Republic of New Zealand. Yeah, nice one, Dad. And there’s one big thing in Australia that has never been approached by humankind [footage of a large model dinosaur is shown]. Dad says Australia’s the most amazing country ever and you can’t help but smile when you see it. My mates have all been to the beach for the holidays. But me? I’ve been everywhere. (0:00–0:53)

A male voiceover then reads: ‘In a country this big, you need a fast, reliable wireless network’ (0:54–1:01). As the boy narrates, upbeat acoustic music plays. The advertisement opens with an image of the boy sitting on his suburban veranda waving goodbye to his friends as they run off with body boards, presumably towards the ocean (0:02–0:06). The father is shown getting out of his van and walking towards the son (0:02–0:06). Their road trip holiday then begins. An aerial shot shows the van driving down a highway (0:09). This long aerial shot shows the Australian bush landscape on either side of the open road. Taken from

218 • Road Trip through the Heartland

the air and showing wide open spaces, this could suggest freedom and escape from the suburban home to the Australian bush. The van then stops at various giant statues of animals along Australia’s rural highways, referred to as the ‘Big Things’ (0:13). The van stops at the ‘Big Lobster’ (0:13–0:17), the ‘Big Koala’ (0:18–0:19) the ‘Big Chook’ (0:19– 0:20), the ‘Big Merino’ (0:30–0:34) and a big dinosaur (0:40–0:43). Here, then, the depiction of the father and son in a broad array of national spaces can emphasize the breadth of service coverage across the nation, while also emphasizing the Australian credentials of the brand. The trip ends with the father carrying the sleeping son inside (0:50–0:53). The son is exhausted from his long road trip around Australia. From the keywords and phrases within this advertisement, rural parts of the nation are ascribed positive emotional connotations (Ahmed 2010): awe, amazement, and joyfulness. Here, emotional connections to the nation are ‘effects of the very naming’ of those emotions (Ahmed 2010: 13). The size of objects is one key feature that is frequently mentioned, which might imply an emotive narrative in which rural Australia is awe-inspiring and ‘amazing’; the protagonist ‘can’t help but smile’. This representation of the positive experience of rural Australia can be read as a synecdoche for Australia as a whole: ‘Australia’s the most amazing country ever.’ Rural Australia, in this sense, is produced as the heartland where the authentic truth of Australia might be revealed. This ‘Big Things’ advertisement is one in a series of Telstra advertisements featuring the same father and son (other advertisements featuring the father and son include ‘Great Wall’,10 ‘Bag Pipes’,11 ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’ and ‘Australia Day’).12 The father’s identity is central to the narrative of Australianness produced within the advertisement. The advertisement makes a joke out of the father’s lack of intelligence inasmuch as there is no Francis Big or a People’s Republic of New Zealand. He appears as a simple, unpretentious man who is overly positive and good-natured (Bellanta 2012; Ward 2003). This image of the father could potentially situate him within the identity construct of, in Australian parlance, a white working-class ‘larrikin’ in the vein of famous Australian archetypes such as Crocodile Dundee and Steve Irwin (Bellanta 2012; Lang 2010). This archetype is heavily gendered and raced inasmuch as the larrikin identity functions as a privileged form of white Australian masculinity. The imaginary of a father and son on a national identity tourism road trip across Australia can thus evoke the gendered imaginary of ‘the boys’ on a shared journey, escaping their banal lives to help the son ‘find himself’ whilst on the road under the influence of his larrikin father. The use of this larrikin imaginary can evoke a folksy and humble discourse of white Australian

Christopher Drew • 219

masculine identity and thus positions the brand as sympathetic with this perception of normatively white masculine national identity, while also rendering invisible Indigenous and feminine identity formations. With the dominant Australian credentials of the protagonist established, the road trip continues to evoke Australian imagery in ways that can associate the brand with an Australian identity. The narration seems to frame the road trip as an opportunity for the father to show his son the country and to help him come to appreciate the greatness of Australia. The road trip can be read as a journey where the boy learns to love his country and learns about his nation’s identity. The camera’s long shots of driving down highways, and the distinctly Australian images of the nation’s ‘Big Things’, reveals the importance of experiencing iconic landscapes in the realization of the ‘true’ Australian identity. To understand Australia, it can be read, citizens must ‘see this thing in action’; they must experience it first-hand. This poetic representation of the ‘action’ of Australia as being among iconic rural imagery is revealing of the stratification of Australian spaces within national identity tourism discourse. It seems that seeing Australia’s cities and suburbs is not enough to understand Australia’s true spirit. Rather, seeing the rural homeland and visiting iconic rural landscapes can be seen as a way for Australians to come to know their own nation and develop their own poetics of travel. Ironically, the rural spaces visited in this road trip appear attractive to the father and son because manmade structures have been erected upon them; the natural landscape is superseded by ‘big’ built structures that can function to attract the eye of tourists seeking to see white man’s triumphant structures upon the land. There is potentially a conflict here between a love of rurality and a masculine need to conquer it by erecting glorified statues (Beeton 2010; Stadler 2010). In this sense, the journey might be metaphorically seen a facilitator of the father– son relationship, wherein the duo embark on a pilgrimage where they follow the nation’s white forefathers who conquered and tamed the Australian outback. Nonetheless, the discursive representation of the true Australia as being outside of the city reinforces the value of travel to rural Australia for coming to develop a personal love of national identity (White and White 2004), and relies on the geographical marginalization of suburban and city-dwellers from the frame of authentic Australian identity. I suggest, then, that this advertisement has several promotional functions. In one sense, it can be read that a discourse of national identity tourism is utilized in this advertisement to highlight the Australianness of the brand, so that Telstra could be read as committed to the nation, or at least

220 • Road Trip through the Heartland

a particular, exclusionary, shared poetics of nationhood. Concomitantly, the advertisement can also be read as promoting the breadth of the brand’s internet coverage (‘in a country this big, you need a fast, reliable wireless network’). It can thus be seen as selling brand identity as much as it is promoting the features of its product – it can be seen as a brand that is Australian, invested in an image of the nation that heavily relies upon images of rurality, whiteness and masculinity. Through such a narrative, the brand can differentiate itself within the marketplace as being more attuned to the presumed values of its ‘Australian’ target market than its competitors, and ostensibly more Australian. The representational devices used here – metaphors of strength and humility, the passing-on of knowledge from father to son, as well as the use of camera techniques such as long shots and use of key phrases like ‘see this thing in action’ – can thus be read as contributing to a poetics of the domestic road trip as something manly, personal and necessary for the production of a true Australian selfhood. The rhetorical devices employed in the advertisement frame rural Australian landscapes as representative of authentic Australia, and in so doing naturalize this discursive formation as a part of everyday understandings of what it takes to be recognizably Australian. The predominance of rural images of bushland and iconic ‘Big Thing’ sites is revealing of the landscapes that have been emotionally connected to nationhood (Ahmed 2010) within Australian tourism discourse. Travel to these locations can be read as a way of accessing an ‘Australian’ national identity formation and coming to appreciate ‘true’ Australianness. The emotive resonance within this advertisement through language (‘can’t help but smile’) as well as shots of golden sunsets produces a discursive proximity of rural parts of the nation to greatness. Therein, the representational poetics within this advertisement have the potential to ask the viewer to consider rural Australia as that which is good (Ahmed 2010) and worthy. As Ahmed argues, the ‘orientation that is taken towards [the nation]’ within texts can construct the nation as ‘a shared object of feeling’ (2010: 13) in which the nation, or in this case a particular geographical section of the nation, becomes an object of greatness, admiration and superiority.

‘More Than Just Stuff’: Toyota Kluger’s ‘Family Thing’ Advertisement The second advertisement whose representational poetics I wish to explore is Toyota Kluger’s ‘Family Thing’ (2008) advertisement. Toyota

Christopher Drew • 221

is a global car brand that originated in Japan in 1938. Its Australian branch began in 1958 and has now an established market in Australia.13 The advertisement that will be examined here can thus be seen to be positioning this foreign-owned brand as understanding of Australians and having the potential to facilitate Australian family relationships and, indeed, an Australian way of life. The advertisement opens with a family packed into a hotel room. A teenage girl lies in a bed with her two younger brothers. She raises her head and sighs, asking her parents, ‘can I have my own room?’ (0:00– 0:02). Upbeat acoustic music starts playing, and the scene changes to a car driving down a highway. The song used, ‘Holiday Road’, was made famous by the National Lampoon’s Vacation films. Such an intertextual connection can be read as an Australian parody of the American films, which emphazise the family holidays of a loving yet dysfunctional family group. The car first stops at a petrol station (0:05–0:08) and then at a hotel (0:08–0:13). At the hotel, the father takes bags out of the car, when the teenage girl complains: ‘Where is my bag!? What am I going to do?’ The road trip continues through the Australian Reptile Park at Gosford, New South Wales (0:15–0:17). In the car, the father asks: ‘Who stinks?’ One of the boys replies: ‘He does.’ The teenage daughter responds: ‘Ya both stink’ (0:19–0:21). Continuing along the rural road, the boys and their father go swimming in a pool, playing with a blowup crocodile toy (0:22–0:24). The family then stop at a petrol station and buy meat pies (0:31–0:35). The car then kicks up dust as it drives along a rural, unpaved road surrounded by Australian bushland. The dryness of the dusty road could be an implicit indicator of the Australian outback landscape, notoriously understood to be a predominantly dry and dusty place (Elder 2007). Eventually, the family arrives back at their suburban family home (0:58). By this stage, all three children are sleeping in the back seat of the car (0:54). The advertisement ends with the slogan: ‘Toyota Kluger. You’ll fill it with more than just stuff.’ In this advertisement, banal yet deliberate national (Billig 1995; Edensor 2002) Australian symbolism frames the journey; the Australian Reptile Park complete with rural Australian creatures, meat pies (0:33) and a blow-up crocodile toy (0:23) frame the road trip as more than just a holiday, but rather a national identity experience. The banal Australian images that frame the Australian family road trip are integral to the journey. The caption at the end of the advertisement, ‘You’ll fill it with more than just stuff’, might be read in several ways. From one possible reading, it could suggest that the banal Australian aspects of the road trip are not ‘just stuff’, but actually contribute to the nostalgic and romantic experience of the journey itself. From another

222 • Road Trip through the Heartland

reading, it could be seen to be positioning the vehicle being advertised as an enabler of this journey and the family bonding with which it is associated. The unwillingness of the teenage daughter throughout the journey also plays a significant rhetorical role in this advertisement. The girl’s complaining frames the family as the imperfect Australian family unit as opposed to the perfect, unblemished family – similar to that of the National Lampoon’s Vacation films that the advertisement is potentially parodying. Here, the Toyota brand is constructed as empathetic with and responsive to this supposedly genuine and unglossed family in order to construct the brand as understanding of the everyday folk of Australia. Perhaps the viewers are supposed to sit back and laugh, reflecting endearingly upon the girl, seeing characteristics of people they love in the girl on the screen or potentially reflecting nostalgically upon family road trips from years past. Like the targeted viewers, this depicted Australian family is imperfect and typical, ergo normal. Towards the end of the advertisement, a caption reads ‘It’s a family thing’ (0:59), constructing the car manufacturer as in-the-know about the nuances of the typical Australian family trip, each with its own family feuds and jokes. Like the targeted viewers, this depicted Australian family is imperfect. The brand can thus be seen to have positioned itself as understanding of its target audience in order to project an image as a family-friendly Australian brand in the hopes of attracting the family market segment. Interestingly, Aboriginal culture, with its longevity beyond that of the postcolonial social goods imagined here – meat pies, parklands, motor vehicles – remains outside of the frame of authentic rural national identity constructions. It seems that the national identity formation posited here appeals to nostalgia for a national identity formation that emerged after white settlement, but prior to contemporary conditions of globalization in a time of white Australian dominance. This is not to say that advertisers do not employ Indigenous cultural discourse as an image management strategy (I discuss the Qantas ‘Spirit of Australia’14 advertisements’ use of Indigenous culture elsewhere – see Drew 2011). Rather, it reveals the privileging of a particular discourse of Australian national identity within the depicted road trip that includes images of rural landscapes, family and whiteness, while excluding Indigenous Australian culture. Again, I want to argue that this advertisement can be read as constructing nostalgia (Ahmed 2010) for rural Australia and its associated identity as a less globalized, corrupted part of the nation. In this sense, it can be seen to be reinforcing a poetics of travel that positions

Christopher Drew • 223

domestic rural travel as a way of coming to know the ‘true’ (i.e. rural) Australia. This advertisement, like the Telstra advertisement, positions the identity of the Toyota Kluger as an Australian family vehicle. The images of the car driving along rural Australian landscapes, visiting the iconic site of the Australian Reptile Park and consuming Australiarelated products such as meat pies and a blow-up crocodile can be seen as positioning this Japanese product as compatible with this particular Australian lifestyle narrative and, by extension, consumers who identify with such a narrative. The imagery of the rural landscapes through a gaze of normative whiteness, silencing cultures such as Indigenous culture, reveals the privileging of a particular vision of rural Australia. The travels through the Australian landscape are framed here as nostalgic times for family bonding, while also for exploring the best of what Australia has to offer: reptiles, bushland and meat pies. In Anglo-Australian rural landscapes that globalization and multiculturalism have ostensibly not yet reached, a true Australia might be found. Through representational poetics, this domestic travel experience is not simply framed as an adventure, but as a distinctly Australian adventure where a particular version of Australianness, framed as authentic, is learned and performed.

Conclusion Through the two texts examined here, some of these ways in which a national poetics of travel might be represented in advertisements have been discussed. Whilst these two texts, and others like them that I have listed earlier in the chapter, might utilize road trip narratives for multiple reasons – two obvious ways being to promote a brand’s breadth of coverage or its relationship-building capacity – the texts also work to use and reiterate poetics of Australian travel with which Australian viewers might relate. However, the representational poetics in the advertisements examined here have also worked to reiterate norms about which sites and landscapes represent nationally significant locales and, in so doing, have reaffirmed a particular, normative understanding of prized Australian geographies. The rural spaces in these adventures are not merely backdrops to the travels, but are integral parts of the journey; among the rural spaces, the citizens can attain first-hand experiences of their ‘homeland’ and the ‘true’ Australia. These representations can be seen to have worked to construct rural Australian road trips as journeys where domestic tourists can attain personal and emotionally fulfilling

224 • Road Trip through the Heartland

experiences of the ‘authentic’ and ‘true’ Australia. The arc of the journeys is telling: tourists generally begin and end their journeys in the suburbs, while the bulk of their national identity tourism experiences take place in the rural spaces of the nation. Such representational poetics, whilst attempting to depict those things that make domestic Australian travel desirable such as nostalgia, the search for authenticity and relationship building, represent Australian travel in restrictive and exclusionary ways. It seems that the poetics of travel that circulate in everyday texts – poetics that, I would argue, emerge through shared storytelling such as in everyday media and advertising texts – work to sustain and reiterate particular limited discourses of Australian identity in terms of geography, race and gender, despite the increasing heterogeneity of the Australian demographic. Christopher Drew is Senior Lecturer in Education in the School of Social Sciences and Law at Teesside University. He conducts transdisciplinary research in education, media and cultural studies, and is particularly interested in the intersectionality of discourses of childhood, space and nationality. His research into Australian television advertising involves analysis of television advertisements’ representation of domestic travel and its role in the formation of onscreen national and childhood identities. He holds a Ph.D. from Australian Catholic University.

Notes  1 At the time of writing, the Holden ‘Owners’ Grant’ advertisement could be seen at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq8GdLoJ_XU (accessed 12 December 2016). Holden is a brand of car under the ownership of General Motors. The brand is currently produced and its flagship sedan, the Commodore, is popularly driven in Australia.  2 At the time of writing, the Subaru Forester ‘Explore Your World’advertisement could be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2Q4M8vEb0Yandlr=1 (accessed 12 December 2016). Subaru is an international car brand that originated in Japan.  3 At the time of writing, the Mitsubishi Pajero ‘Change of Atmosphere’ advertisement could be seen at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUe​ MnGUd1LE (accessed 12 December 2016). Mitsubishi is a global car brand.  Its cars for its Australian market were formerly manufactured in Australia.  4 At the time of writing, the Toyota Kluger ‘Family Thing’ advertisement could be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_Ua8-EWSuI (accessed 12 December 2016). Toyota is a global car brand that originated in Japan.

Christopher Drew • 225

 5 At the time of writing, the Tourism Australia ‘Nothing Like Australia’ advertisement could be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82n1PX​ 1hVEY (accessed 12 December 2016). Tourism Australia is a government body tasked with promoting domestic and international tourism in Australia.  6 At the time of writing, the Caravan Industry Association of Australia’s ‘We Love This Country’ advertisement could be seen at: http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=eF433uXzo5k (accessed 12 December 2016). Caravan and Camping is a body that advocates for, and markets on behalf of, caravan and campgrounds in Australia.  7 At the time of writing, the Big M ‘Go Out to Play’ advertisement could be seen at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjQN1TH81Q0 (accessed 12 December 2016). . . Big M is an Australian brand that specializes in flavoured milk products.  8 At the time of writing, the Telstra BigPond ‘Big Things’ advertisement could be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEDIligjXQsandNR=1 (accessed 12 December 2016). Telstra is an Australian telecommunications brand that specializes in internet and phone connections. BigPond is a brand name for Telstra’s internet service.  9 At the time of writing, the Telstra BigPond ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’ advertisement could be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM0osV0L​ E1kandNR=1 (accessed 12 December 2016). 10 At the time of writing, the Telstra BigPond ‘Great Wall’ advertisement could be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvlWQyvEI38andfea ture=related (accessed 12 December 2016). 11 At the time of writing, the Telstra BigPond ‘Bag Pipes’ advertisement could be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uV5Or4U7JakandNR=1 (acce ssed 12 December 2016). 12 At the time of writing, the Telstra BigPond ‘Australia Day’ advertisement could be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddGcDwft8DsandNR​ =1 (accessed 12 December 2016). 13 Information attained from Toyota Australia website. Retrieved 12 December 2016 from http://www.toyota.com.au/toyota/company/history. 14 At the time of writing, the Qantas ‘Spirit of Australia’ 2009 advertisement could be seen at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze6D-59bLX0 (accessed 12 December 2016). Qantas is Australia’s only international airline, which was privatized in the 1990s but remains partially owned by the Australian government.

References Ahmed, S. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Anderson, B. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

226 • Road Trip through the Heartland

Baudrillard, J. 1970. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: Sage. Beasley, R., and M. Danesei. 2002. Persuasive Signs: The Semiotics of Advertising. Berlin: De Gruyter. Beeton, S. 2010. ‘Landscapes as Characters: Film, Tourism and a Sense of Place’, Metro 166(1): 114–19. Bellanta, M. 2012. Larrikins: A History. Brisbane: Penguin. Berger, A.A. 2004. Deconstructing Travel: Cultural Perspectives on Tourism. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. Biber, K. 2001. ‘The Threshold Moment: Masculinity at Home and on the Road in Australian Cinema’, Limina 7(1): 26–46. Billig, M. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage. Butler, J. 2009. Frames of War. London: Verso. Butterss, P. 2000. ‘Australian Masculinity on the Road’, Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy 95(1): 227–36. Clarke, D. 2007. Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in TwentiethCentury America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Daugstad, K. 2008. ‘Negotiating Landscape in Rural Tourism’, Annals of Tourism Research 35(2): 402–26. De Certeau, M. 2002. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Drew, C. 2011. ‘The Spirit of Australia: Learning about Australian Childhoods in Qantas Commercials’, Global Studies of Childhood 1(4): 321–30. Edensor, T. 2002. National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg. Elder, C. 2007. Being Australian: Narratives of National Identity. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin. Franklin, A. 2003. Tourism: An Introduction. London: Sage. Fürsich, E. 2009. ‘In Defense of Textual Analysis: Restoring a Challenged Method for Journalism and Media Studies’, Journalism Studies 10(2): 238–52. Healy, C. 2008. Forgetting Aborigines. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Hobsbawm, E. 1990. Nations and Nationalism since 1870: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hogan, J. 2009. Gender, Race and National Identity: Nations of Flesh and Blood. New York: Routledge. Kaldor, M. 2004. ‘Nationalism and Globalisation’, Nations and Nationalism 10(1/2): 161–77. Lang, A. 2010. ‘Troping the Masculine: Australian Animals, the Nation, and the Popular Imagination’, Antipodes 24(1): 5–10. Löfgren, O. 2001. ‘Know Your Country: A Comparative Perspective on Tourism and Nation Building in Sweden’, in S. Baranowski and E. Furlough (eds), Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 137–54. Messaris, P. 1997. Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Obenour, W. 2004. ‘Understanding the Meaning of the “Journey” to Budget Travellers’, International Journal of Tourism Research 6(1): 1–15.

Christopher Drew • 227

Perera, S. 2009. Australia and the Insular Imagination: Beaches, Borders, Boats, and Bodies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pitchford, S. 2008. Identity Tourism: Imaging and Imagining the Nation. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing. Prideaux, J. 2009. ‘Consuming Icons: Nationalism and Advertising in Australia’, Nations and Nationalism 15(4): 616–35. Robitaille, M. 1992. ‘Humor in Advertising: It’s Funny Business’, in S. Danna (ed.), Advertising and Popular Culture: Studies in Variety and Versatility. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, pp. 115–23. Rose, N. 1999. Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, 2nd edn. London: Free Association Books. Shaffer, M. 2001. ‘Seeing the Nature of America: The National Parks as National Assets, 1914–1929’, in S. Baranowski and E. Furlough (eds), Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 155–84. Smith, A. 1995. Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era. Cambridge: Polity Press. Stadler, J. 2010. ‘The Outback Landscape and Negative Spaces in Australia’s Colonial History’, Metro 163(1): 68–73. Thomas, A. 1996. ‘Camping Outback: Landscape, Masculinity, and Performance in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert’, Continuum 10(2): 97–110. Wang, N. 1999. ‘Rethinking Authenticity in Tourism Experience’, Annals of Tourism Research 26(2): 349–70. Ward, R. 2003. The Australian Legend. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. White, N., and P. White. 2004. ‘Travel as Transition: Identity and Place’, Annals of Tourism Research 31(1): 200–18.

Index

T Index Aboriginal culture, 222 abstract expressionism, 103 adoption, 196, 206n3 natal origins, adoptees and, 193–4, 195 advertising, 164, 166, 215–16, 224 car and caravan advertising, 216 commercial advertising, 215–16 Telstra’s ‘Big Things’ advertisement, 216–20 Toyota Kluger’s ‘Family Thing’ advertisement, 220–23 see also representational poetics, visions of Australian identity in aesthetics, 6, 8, 9, 10, 15, 16, 75, 163, 167, 170 aesthetic ideas, explorer artists and, 104–5, 106, 108, 110, 114 images of Northwest China and, 43, 44, 45, 51, 53, 61 Air and Dreams (Bachelard, G.), 67 Americans (Frank, R.), 136, 151, 152 ancestral origins, 192 Anderson, Benedict, 211 anthropology before anthropology, 85, 88, 95, 97 Arcadian composition, 107 architectural spaces, 28 armchair tourism, 26 art, 3, 6, 15, 44–5, 53, 67, 77, 97, 135, 142, 144, 164, 215 artistic representation, European conventions of, 104 Kentucky, poetics of travel in Bluegrass State, 120–21, 124, 130, 132 South Pacific, explorer artists in, 102, 103, 105, 106, 112, 113, 114, 115

space, technology and, 68–9, 74 virtual and, relationship between, 68 astronomy, 67 Atlas of Remote Islands (Schalansky, J.), 77–8 Augé, Marc, 140 authenticity, 212, 213–14, 217, 218, 219, 220, 222, 223–4 avatars (virtuanauts), 67, 72–3, 74, 77, 80n3 Bachelard, Gaston, 23–4, 67 Banks, Joseph, 106–7, 110, 115 Barthes, Roland, 164 beach bunnies, 169 beach environment, 159 beach fashion, 182–3 beach leisure as performance, 170–74 beach ordinances, 170–71 beach poetics, creation of, 159–60 beach snapshots, community of practitioners and, 158 being-with, ethics of, 43 biopower management, 44 Bluegrass Music. See Kentucky, poetics of travel in Bluegrass State body, 71, 140, 141–2, 144 camera studies, 4, 164–5, 178–9 cultural symbolism of, 170, 192 emotion and, 2 female body, 28, 54, 92, 158, 160, 162, 166, 167–8, 169, 172, 174, 181, 182 imagination and, interplay between, 136–8 performativity and, 8

230 • Index

body (cont.) space, travel and, relationships of, 70, 79 stylization of, repetition of, 160–61, 168–9 synchronicity of space and, 137–8 virtual body, 67, 70, 72 see also walking botanical art, 107, 115 Bougainville, Louis-Antoine de, 85, 86, 87, 88–93, 94–5, 96, 99n12–13 Camera Lucida (Barthes, R.), 164 cartography, 88–90 China’s Northwest, images of, 14–15, 43–64 aesthetics, 43 being-with, ethics of, 43 biopower management, 44 Carolyn Drake’s vision, 48–50 cultural topography, 44 dominant visions, 45–8 dreams, 57 encounters, 53–5 environmental alienation, 43–4 ethnic photography, 44 exotica in Xinjiang, 47 film blockbusters, 47–8 global capitalist networks, 45 images and emotions, 49–50 inhabitant collaboration, 50–51 landscape revision, 45 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee, J. and Evans, W.), 43, 62 lives, realization of, 44 meditation themes, 51–2 objects forsaken, 55–7 paternalism, 50 poetic provocation, 44 politics of photography, call for reconsideration of, 60 power and landscapes, 47–8 regrounding Chinese Central Asia, 51–7 resistance to stereotypes, 50–51 ‘Silk Road’ lore, 44, 45 sketches, 52–3 social poetics, 48, 62 space, material poetics of, 45

Special Economic Zones, 45, 46 state surveillance, 43–4 stereotypes, 48 tourist-photographers, styles of, 47 travel, poetic images of, 44–5, 62 truths, powerful but partial, in texts and images, 49–50 Uyghur language and culture, 49 Uyghur lives, 43–4 Uyghur network, 44 Uyghur subjectivities, 48–9 visions of inhabitants, 50–51 visual anthropology, 60–61 visual language of subjects, 44–5 Xinjiang, 43, 44, 45–6, 47–8, 51, 53, 63n6 Christian art, 103 chronological time, 135–6 cinema, 23–4 cinephilic pilgrimage, 36–7 connections, diasporic tourism and, 188–9, 197, 201–2 Cook, Captain James imaginative travel, 91–2 South Pacific explorer art, 105–6, 107–8, 109, 110, 111, 115 Cook, Thomas, 85 culture, 12, 13, 35–6, 48, 66, 105, 112, 113, 125, 190, 191 Aboriginal culture, 222 beach culture, 172 cultural topography, 44 Hawaiian culture, 180 material cultures, 44, 47, 104, 113, 120, 121 nature and, distinction between, 95, 99n15 popular culture, 163, 168, 181, 212 shared cultures, 200, 203 strategic uses of, 161–2 surfing culture, 160 Uyghur language and, 49 visual cultures, 8, 167 diasporic tourism, 17–18, 187–206 adoptees, natal origins and, 193–4, 195 adoption, socialization and, 196, 206n3

Index • 231

ancestral origins, 192 categorization, process of, 188 Chinese adoption-roots tourism, 188, 190–91 connections, 188–9, 197, 201–2 diasporic tourist populations, 188, 204 dislocation, 187–8, 191, 205 ethnicity, 190, 191, 193–4, 197, 198–9, 200 Families with Children from China (FCC), 190 family ties, 193–8 Ghanaian slavery-heritage tourism, 100–201, 188, 189–90 heritage tours, 190–91, 196 homeland nostalgia, 188 homeland tours, 187–8, 204–5 identification, process of, 188 imaginative encounters, 188 kinship, 188, 195, 197–8, 200, 201–2, 203, 204, 205 lived localities, mediation of, 188–9, 205 mythic, romanticized symbolism, 194 mythic origins, mediation of, 188–9, 205 nostalgia, 188, 198, 201, 206n3 Panda Tours, 191 primitivity, 194, 195, 201 racial consciousness, 198–203 racialization, 191 racialized oppression, 200 romantic narratives, 188 Sankofa Travel, 189–90 self and ‘other’, 192–203 social groups, race and ethnicity within, 191 social mobility, 199 socialization of children, 206n4 territorialization, 187–8, 195, 204 transnational adoptees, 193–4 Diderot, Denis, 87, 89, 93–6 digital arts, 66–7 disappointment, 32–3, 37, 38 dislocation, 187–8, 191, 205 Drake, Carolyn, 14, 43, 45–51, 54, 56, 58, 59, 63n1

dreams, 10, 52, 57, 59, 62, 93, 158, 167, 181, 201 ‘exotic dream’, 83–4 travel forms, new technologies and, 66–7, 71–2, 75–6, 77–8, 80n2 dynamic synchronicity, 137–8 earthly paradise, search for, 85–6 Elizabethtown-Paducah Railroad, 120–21 embodiment, 8, 9, 10, 17, 35, 49, 50, 93, 115, 119, 121, 125–6, 154, 161, 211 diasporic tourism and, 192, 194, 200, 202, 203, 204, 205 embodied journey, 136–7, 141–3 embodied perception, communication of, 103–4 experience and, 11, 13, 14–15, 194 travel forms, new technologies and, 69, 71, 78 emotion, 3–4, 6, 8, 17, 60, 103, 105, 108, 124, 126, 211 body and, 2 emotional expression, 135 emotive resonance, 212, 218, 220 image and, 49–50 England’s North, walks through, 17, 135–56 Augé’s Non-places, 140 chronological time, 135–6 disembodied journey, 136, 139–41 dynamic synchronicity, 137–8 embodied journey, 136–7, 141–3 emotional expression, 135 everyday walking, 137 Frank, photographic journeys of Robert, 151–2, 154, 155 Frank’s Americans, 136, 151, 152 image-makers, language of, 136 image-making, 136, 150 individuated and described journey, 141–3 inner narrative, 135–6 land of lost content, 135 landscapes, embodiment of, 141 landscapes, memories (and narrative descriptions) of, 136 landscapes, travelling through, 135

232 • Index

England’s North, walks through (cont.) ‘Life’s Crazy Dances’, 144–50 memory and memories, 135, 136, 141, 142, 143, 152 metaphysical trauma, 135 Perambulist Somnambulist project, 135–6, 143–50, 155 personal transition, 135, 142 photographic journeys, 136, 150– 54, 155 place, knowledge of, 138 place-conscious narratives, 135–6 poetic language, 136, 150 poets, language of, 136 prosaic journey, objective correlative of, 139–41 repetition, 139–40 representation, potential for, 140–41 rhythm of walking, 137–8 scenarios, 142, 143, 152 sensory continuum, 138 separation, sense of, 142 Stieglitz’s Equivalents, 136, 151–2, 153, 155 Stieglitz’s photographic journeys, 151–2, 153, 154, 155 synchronicity of body and space, 137–8 transient gaze, 135–56 visual expression, 135–6 walking, 136, 137–8 witness, 138 environmental alienation, 43–4 Equivalents (Stieglitz, A.), 136, 151–2, 153, 155 ethnicity, diasporic tourism and, 190, 191, 193–4, 197, 198–9, 200 European Vision and the South Pacific (Smith, B.), 102, 103–4, 105, 112–15 Families with Children from China (FCC), 190 family ties, diasporic tourism and, 193–8 fantasy travel, 177–81 film tourism, 30–33, 36–7

Flapper age, 183 folk art, 77, 80n10 Footsteps in the Fog: Alfred Hitchcock’s San Francisco (Kraft, J. and Levethal, A.), 312 Foucault, Michel on ‘modern power’, 169–70 Frank, Robert, 136, 151–2, 154, 155 gender, 176, 177, 182–3, 224 Butler’s perspective on, 160–61, 162 cross-gender camaraderie, 174 gendered beach poetics, 162 identity, boundaries of, 158 Ghanaian slavery-heritage tourism, 100–201, 188, 189–90 Golden Gate Bridge (and Park), San Francisco, 14, 25, 26, 29, 30 heritage tours, 190–91, 196 historicist approach, sociocultural milieu and, 105–6 Hodges, William, 106, 107–8, 109 homeland tours, 187–8, 204–5 homestead tours, 119–20, 121–2, 123–4, 125, 127 Hula Girl, fantasy travel and, 177–81 idealism, power over empiricism, 106–7 identity, 5, 13, 18, 29, 35, 36, 48, 50, 61, 112, 113 Americana identity, 122 gender identity, boundaries of, 158 history and, complex dialogue of, 120 identity tourism, 211–12, 214, 217, 218, 219, 224 memories, identity and, 128–9 see also national identity; representational poetics, visions of Australian identity in image-makers, language of, 136, 150 imaginative travel, Enlightenment perspective on, 15–16, 83–100 anthropology before anthropology, 85, 88, 95, 97

Index • 233

borders, 89 Bougainville, Louis-Antoine de, 85, 86, 87, 88–93, 94–5, 96, 99n12–13 cartography, 88–90 Cook, Captain James, 91–2 Cook, Thomas, 85 culture and nature, distinction between, 95 Diderot, Denis, 87, 89, 93–6 earthly paradise, search for, 85–6 eroticism and jouissance of Tahiti, 92–3 history-making, process of, 91 Montaigne’s Journal de Voyage, 83 naming, politics of, 91 natural goodness of man, Roussuau’s notion of, 87–8, 94–5 new world, 83–4 noble savage, myth of, 91 Oceania, 89 philosopher-travellers, 96–7 philosophy, travel and, 87 poiesis, 84 politics, travel and, 85, 88, 89, 93, 94–5, 96, 97 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 86–8, 91–3, 94–5 self and other, 88 siren song, 83 social (or solitary) life of man, 88 Tahiti, 84–6, 91–3, 96 travel, Rousseau on educational benefits of, 87 travel accounts, methodology for, 89 travel in age of Enlightenment, picture of, 96–7 Utopia, search for, 85–6, 91–2 Imagined Communities (Anderson, B.), 211 indigenous subjects, 109–12 Journal de Voyage (Montaigne, M. de), 83 Kentucky, poetics of travel in Bluegrass State, 16–17, 118–33 Americana identity, 122

Bill Monroe, Father of Bluegrass, 118–20, 121–4, 124–6, 127–8, 128–31, 131–2, 133n1 Bluegrass Music, birthplace of, 119–23 commemorations, re-creations and, 123 community and camaraderie, interweaving of, 126 down-home American music, 119 Elizabethtown-Paducah Railroad, 120–21 hallowed ground, 123–5 history and identity, complex dialogue of, 120 homage to bluegrass, 118–19 homestead tours, 119–20, 121–2, 123–4, 125, 127 iconic status on Bill Monroe, 119 Jerusalem Ridge, Kentucky, 118, 119–20, 121, 122–3, 124, 125, 131–3 life, music and birthplace, interweaving of, 121–2 local past, engagement with, 119 memories, emergence of, 119 memories, identity and, 128–9 memories, making and translation of, 131–3 musical traditions, 121 nostalgic synergy, 125–6 pilgrimage, globalization and, 124 popular memories of past traditions, 119–20 postmemorial travel, 127–8 reminiscences, 126–7 reverence, 124–5 Rosine, 118–19, 123–4, 125, 126, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133n1 Rosine, historical perspective on, 120–21, 122–3 shaping community and life, 128–31 sunlight in a bottle, 125–8 time and space, boundaries of, 119 trails, heritage and, 122–3, 129–30 kinship, diasporic tourism and, 188, 195, 197–8, 200, 201–2, 203, 204, 205

234 • Index

Kodak Company, ‘Kodak Girl’ and, 163, 164, 182 landscapes, 141 memories (and narrative descriptions) of, 136 power and, 47–8 revision of, 45 travelling through, 135 ‘typical landscape,’ evolution of, 105–9 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee, J. and Evans, W.), 43, 62 ‘Life’s Crazy Dances’, 144–50 lived localities, mediation of, 188–9, 205 location tourism, 24, 29–30, 30–33 ‘MacGuffin’ device, 28, 36, 40n5 masculinity, 215, 218–19, 220 meditation themes, 51–2 melancholia, 38, 39 memories, 119 identity and, 128–9 making and translation of, 131–3 memory and, walking and, 135, 136, 141, 142, 143, 152 popular memories of past traditions, 119–20 metaphysical trauma, 135 mimesis, 104 modern woman, 166–70 modernism, 6 explorer artists and, 103, 113 postmodernism, 9 Monroe, Bill (‘Father of Bluegrass’), 118–20, 121–4, 124–6, 127–8, 128–31, 131–2, 133n1 Montaigne, Michel de, 83, 84 musical traditions, 121 myth history and, Aristotle on, 113–14 origins of, mediation of, 188–9, 205 romanticized and mythic symbolism, 194 naming, politics of, 91 national identity abstract concepts of, 214

imagined community of nation, narratives about, 215–16 selling of, 216 theorization of, 212–13 natural goodness of man, Roussuau’s notion of, 87–8, 94–5 Neoclassicism, 105, 106–7, 111 ‘noble savage’ myth of, 91 notion of, 110 Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (Augé, M.), 140 nostalgia diasporic tourism and, 188, 198, 201, 206n3 nostalgic synergy, 125–6 representational poetics, visions of Australian identity in, 211, 214, 217, 221–2, 223, 224 San Francisco, Hitchcock’s Vertigo and, 23, 24, 35–9 Oceania, 89 opacity, illusion of, 69 optical realism in painting, 104 outer space, travel in, 70–71 past, longing for (and portals of), 28–9 paternalism, 50 patriarchy, 160, 162, 164, 165, 169, 170, 173, 174, 182 Perambulist Somnambulist project, 135–6, 143–50, 155 performance, 160, 161–2 performance art, 72–3 performance turn, tourism and, 161 performativity, 161, 162, 163, 168–9, 170 personal transition, 135, 142 philosopher-travellers, 96–7 philosophy, travel and, 87 photography, 9, 15, 17, 45, 49, 51–2, 55, 57, 132, 135 ethnic photography, 44 photographic journeys, 136, 150–54, 155

Index • 235

photographic language, 165–6 photographic performance, 182 photographic realism, notion of, 165 poetics of, 166 politics of photography, call for reconsideration of, 60–62 see also snapshot photography, gendered poetics and pilgrimage, globalization and, 124 place experiences of, 76–8, 79 knowledge of, 138 place-conscious narratives, 135–6 Platonic ideal of space, 37 poetic language, 136, 150 poetic provocation, 44 poetic shift, 107–8, 110–11 poetics dominant landscape poetics (and challenges to), 113–15 gendered beach poetics, 162 history, poetics of, 115 painting, poetics of, 108–9 of photography, 166 social poetics, 48, 62 Poetics of Space (Bachelard, G.), 23–4 poets, language of, 136 poiesis, 84 politics, travel and, 85, 88, 89, 93, 94–5, 96, 97 postmemorial travel, 127–8 primitivity, 194, 195, 201 prosaic journey, objective correlative of, 139–41 racial consciousness, 198–203 racialization, 191 racialized oppression, 200 realism, exactitude and, 104 recuperative reverie, 215 reminiscences, 126–7 repetition, 139–40 introspection and, 23 representation analytical work of, 5–6 art, expression in, 3–4, 6–7 digital media, 4 graphic representation, 1–2

more-than-representational thinking, 2, 4–5 non-representation, 2 othering, 3 photography, 3–4 poetics of, 112 potential for, 140–41 representational theory, 2–3 South Pacific, explorer artists in, 102–3, 104 travel and, 3, 5, 6–7, 7–13 representational poetics, visions of Australian identity in, 18, 211–25 Aboriginal culture, 222 advertising the rural Australian road trip, 215–16 Anderson’s Imagined Communities, 211 authenticity, 212, 213–14, 217, 218, 219, 220, 222, 223–4 car and caravan advertising, 216 commercial advertising, 215–16 emotionality in texts, 211–12, 218 emotive resonance, 212, 218, 220 femininity, 215, 219 folklore, 213 iconic rural geographies, 213 identity tourism, 211–12, 214, 217, 218, 219, 224 imagined community of nation, narratives about, 215–16 masculinity, 215, 218–19, 220 national identities, theorization of, 212–13 national identity, abstract concepts of, 214 national identity in popular culture, 212 nationalism, 212–13 nostalgia, 211, 214, 217, 221–2, 223, 224 recuperative reverie, 215 representational poetics, 211, 212–13, 215–16, 216–17, 220, 223–4 rural Australian road trip, 213–15 rural Indigenous Australian identity, 213–14 rural spaces, effects of, 223–4

236 • Index

representational poetics, visions of Australian identity in (cont.) selling national identity, 216 symbolism, 221–2 Telstra’s ‘Big Things’ advertisement, 216–20 textual analyses, 211–12 textual interactions, emotions and, 211–12 Toyota Kluger’s ‘Family Thing’ advertisement, 220–23 whiteness, 223 resistance, 158, 160, 169–70, 173, 174, 183 to stereotypes, 50–51 reverence, 124–5 Roman Classicism, 103 romantic narratives, 188 Rosine, Kentucky, 118–19, 123–4, 125, 126, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133n1 historical perspective on, 120–21, 122–3 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 86–8, 91–3, 94–5 San Francisco, Hitchcock’s Vertigo and, 13–14, 23–40 architectural spaces, 28 armchair tourism, 26 Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, 23–4 cinema, 23–4 cinephilic pilgrimage, 36–7 critical obsession with Vertigo, 33–5 disappointment, 32–3, 37, 38 film tourism, 30–33, 36–7 Fisherman’s Wharf, 36–7 Footsteps in the Fog: Alfred Hitchcock’s San Francisco (Kraft, J. and Levethal, A.), 312 glamorous international cities, 24 Golden Gate Bridge (and Park), 14, 25, 26, 29, 30 location tourism, 24, 29–30, 30–33 ‘MacGuffin’ device, 28, 36, 40n5 melancholia, 38, 39 nostalgia, 23, 24, 35–9 past, longing for (and portals of), 28–9 Platonic ideal of space, 37

repetition, introspection and, 23 restoration, 38 San Juan Bautista, bell tower at, 25–6, 27, 28, 32 scene planning, 24 self-destruction, 38 social patterning, 28 space, analysis of representation of, 24–5 space, memory aid of, 28 space, sacralization of, 37 spectator role, film tourism and Vertigo, 30–33 synopsis of Vertigo, 25–6 technologization, 36 tourist sites, viewing of, 27–8, 29–30 touristic fantasies, memorialization of, 27 urban views, de Certeau’s analysis of, 29 Urry’s Tourist Gaze, 26–30 Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock film), 23, 24, 25–6, 26–30, 30–33, 33–4, 35–6, 37, 38, 39 The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (Silver, S. and Jacobs, S.), 26 Sankofa Travel, 189–90 scenarios, 7, 142, 143, 152 Schalansky, Judith, 66–7, 77–8, 79 Second Life (virtual world), 68, 72–3, 73–4, 75, 76, 80n4 self Foucault’s technologies of, 182 other and, 88, 192–203 self-destruction, 38 self-discovery, 66 semiotics, 158 sensory continuum, 138 Sermon, Paul, 68, 71–2, 78 ‘Silk Road’ lore, 44, 45 siren song, 83 sketches of China’s Northwest, 52–3 Smith, Bernard, 16, 102–3, 104–5, 105–7, 107–9, 110–12, 113–15 snapshot photography, gendered poetics and, 17, 158–83 Barthes’ Camera Lucida, 164

Index • 237

beach bunnies, 169 beach environment, 159 beach fashion, 182–3 beach leisure as performance, 170–74 beach ordinances, 170–71 beach poetics, creation of, 159–60 beach snapshot, community of practitioners and, 158 body, repeated stylization of, 160–61, 168–9 critical self-reflection, 167–8 culture, strategic uses of, 161–2 fantasy travel, 177–81 feminism, Cixous’ perspective on female body and, 162 Flapper age, 183 gender, Butler’s perspective on, 160–61, 162 gender identity, boundaries of, 158 gendered beach poetics, 162 hegemonic social conventions and ideologies, 183 Hula Girl, fantasy travel and, 177–81 imaginative travel, poetics of, 163 individualism, 167 Kodak Company, ‘Kodak Girl’ and, 163, 164, 182 leisure performances, 160, 161–2 modern woman, 166–70 patriarchy, 160, 162, 164, 165, 169, 170, 173, 174, 182 performance turn, tourism and, 161 performativity, 161, 162, 163, 168–9, 170 photographic language, 165–6 photographic performance, 182 photographic realism, notion of, 165 resistance, 158, 160, 169–70, 173, 174, 183 self, Foucault’s technologies of, 182 semiclothed female physicality, 158 semiotics, 158 sex appeal, 169 snapshots, poetics of, 163–6 sociality, 174–7

streamlined bathing costumes, adoption of, 172–3 surfing culture, 160 urban space and narrative, de Certeau’s work on, 161–2 voyeurism, 171–2 sociality, 174–7 South Pacific, explorer artists in, 16, 102–16 abstract expressionism, 103 aesthetic ideas, 105 Arcadian composition, 107 artistic representation, European conventions of, 104 Banks, Joseph, 106–7, 110, 115 botanical art, 107, 115 Christian art, 103 colonial gaze, 110 convention, rebellion against, 103 Cook, Captain James, 105–6, 107–8, 109, 110, 111, 115 disparate things, world of, 106 dominant landscape poetics (and challenges to), 113–15 embodied perception, communication of, 103–4 European Vision and the South Pacific (Smith, B.), 102, 103–4, 105, 112–15 Foucault’s notion of ‘modern power’, 169–70 historicist approach, sociocultural milieu and, 105–6 history, poetics of, 115 Hodges, William, 106, 107–8, 109 idealism, power over empiricism, 106–7 ‘ignoble savage’, 110–11 indigenous subjects, 109–12 Italian Mannerism, 103 material reality, ‘wrestling’ with, 103 mimesis, 104 modernism, 103, 113 myth and history, Aristotle on, 113–14 Neoclassical discourses, 105 Neoclassical landscape painting, 106–7

238 • Index

South Pacific, explorer artists in (cont.) Neoclassicism, poetics of, 111 ‘noble savage,’ notion of, 110 optical realism in painting, 104 painting, poetics of, 108–9 poetic shift, 107–8, 110–11 realism, exactitude and, 104 representation, 102–3, 104 representation, poetics of, 112 Roman Classicism, 103 Smith’s travel landscape, 102–3 trompe-l’oeil illusion, 104 ‘typical landscape,’ evolution of, 105–9 space (and spaces) analysis of representation of, 24–5 architectural spaces, 28 art, space, technology and, 68–9, 74 concept of, 68–9 cultural mythology of, 67 material poetics of, 45 memory aid of, 28 rural spaces, effects of, 223–4 sacralization of, 37 spatio-temporal events, 77 synchronicity of body and, 137–8 urban space, de Certeau’s work on narrative and, 161–2 virtual space, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 77, 78–9, 80n4 Special Economic Zones, 45, 46 spectator role, film tourism and, 30–33 state surveillance, 43–4 stereotypes, 14, 47, 48, 50, 112, 122, 177–8, 179, 180, 196, 204 Stieglitz, Alfred, 136, 150–54, 155 photographic journeys, 151–2, 153, 154, 155 symbolism, 51, 221–2 Tahiti, 84–6, 91–3, 96 eroticism and jouissance of, 92–3 technologization, 36 technology and travel, 69–70 Telematic Dreaming (Sermon, P.), 71–2, 78 teleportation, 74, 80n4

Telstra’s ‘Big Things’ advertisement, 216–20 territorialization, diasporic tourism and, 187–8, 195, 204 textual interactions, emotions and, 211–12 time and space, 75–7 boundaries of, 119 spatio-temporal events, 77 Tourist Gaze (Urry, J.), 8, 26–30 tourist-photographers, styles of, 47 Toyota Kluger’s ‘Family Thing’ advertisement, 220–23 trails, heritage and, 122–3, 129–30 transient gaze, 135–56 transnational adoptees, diasporic tourism and, 193–4 transparency, illusion of, 68–9 travel accounts of, methodology for, 89 Enlightenment travel, picture of, 96–7 poetic images of, 44–5, 62 process of, 66 Rousseau on educational benefits of, 87 travel writing, 66 without leaving, 71–5 travel and representation, 3, 5, 6–7, 7–13 imagination theme, 10–11 poetics theme, 9–10 post-representational theme, 11 self theme, 13 thinkability, 7–8 travel theme, 12–13 visual theme, 8–9 world-making theme, 13 travel forms, new technologies and, 15, 66–80 art, space and technology, 68–9 art and the virtual, relationship between, 68 astronomy, 67 avatars (virtuanauts), 67, 72–3, 74, 77, 80n3 Bachelard’s Air and Dreams, 67 digital arts, 66–7 digital materialization, 75

Index • 239

folk art, 77 game space, 69 Golden Thread Gallery, 75 interaction and art, 74 interpretations of space, 67 not travelling at all, 75–8 opacity, illusion of, 69 outer space, travel in, 70–71 performance art, 72–3 places, experiences of, 76–8, 79 Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands, 77–8 Second Life (virtual world), 68, 72–3, 73–4, 75, 76, 80n4 self-discovery, 66 Sermon’s Telematic Dreaming, 71–2 space, concept of, 68–9 space, cultural mythology of, 67 spatio-temporal events, 77 technology and travel, 69–70 teleportation, 74, 80n4 time and space, 75–7 transparency, illusion of, 68–9 travel writing, 66 travelling, process of, 66 travelling without leaving, 71–5 virtual reality, 70 virtual space, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 77, 78–9, 80n4 virtual worlds, virtual travellers and, 67, 68 Wanderingfictions Story, 66, 67, 74–5, 76, 77 zero-gravity conditions, exploration of, 71

urban views, de Certeau’s analysis of, 29 Utopia, search for, 85–6, 91–2 Uyghurs. See China’s Northwest, images of Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock film), 23, 24, 25–6, 26–30, 30–33, 33–4, 35–6, 37, 38, 39 virtual reality, 69–70 virtual space, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 77, 78–9, 80n4 virtual worlds, virtual travellers and, 67, 68 visual anthropology, 60–61 visual expression, 135–6 visual language of subjects, 44–5 voyeurism, 171–2 walking, 136 rhythm of, 137–8 see also England’s North, walks through Wanderingfictions Story, 66, 67, 74–5, 76, 77 whiteness, 223 The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (Silver, S. and Jacobs, S.), 26 Xinjiang, 43, 44, 45–6, 47–8, 51, 53, 63n6 zero-gravity conditions, exploration of, 71