Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
of late nineteenth-century North America and Europe frequently came to
know the world through popular travel and exploration magazines such as
National Geographic
, which brought the planet's diverse cultures into their
living rooms in an ahistorical and uncritical manner, making the distant seem
near (Lutz and Collins 1993). Its photographs “translated distant lands and
complicated scienti
c phenomena into easily discoverable realities” (Schulten
2001:171). Such exoticism simultaneously constructed and demysti
fi
ed the
Other, typically native peoples in colorful clothes situated in impoverished
countries, subjecting people to the Western gaze and rendering them passive
objects of curiosity. In juxtaposing the foreign and the familiar, such outlets
structured the geographical imaginations of the petit-bourgeoisie, uno
fi
cially
serving the political agenda of imperialism by celebrating the progressive
triumph of Western rationality even as they justi
ed inequalities of race,
class, gender. For example, after the Spanish-American war in 1898,
National
Geographic
became an uno
fi
cial voice of U.S. foreign policy, a place where
goals could be safely articulated. For example, Cuba and the Philippines were
often depicted as in dire need of U.S. intervention in order to be developed.
The aural equivalent of the photograph was the phonograph. Edison's
invention in 1877 provided direct access to sounds of the past just as the
camera o
ered a record of its sights. Photography captured space at the
expense of time, of
ff
ering a frozen snapshot; the phonograph did the reverse,
capturing the temporality of sound but without any concomitant sense of
space. The innovation served to expand markets for commodi
ff
fi
ed music: for
the
first time, millions could hear concert pianists and opera singers. Later,
the magnetic tape recorder, invented in 1899, extended the process of captur-
ing sound, not simply recorded music, democratizing the ability to recreate
the recent aural past.
Freed by the camera from its obligation to render reality faithfully, paint-
ing now explored new, more radical, aesthetic means of representing the
world. Late modern art steadily displaced the uniform, linear perspective that
had governed painting since the Renaissance, asserting instead that the possi-
bilities of space were as numerous as the views of the artists. Impressionism,
for example, registered the disruption of urban life generated by the massive
restructurings of the nineteenth century. Impressionists sought to reproduce
the patterns that saturated their retinas, de-emphasizing dimensionality in
favor of
fi
flattened or fore-shortened spaces that appear sensuous and almost
tactile in nature. Impressionism sought to freeze the
fl
fleeting moment of the
ephemeral now, to capture the sense of immediacy that pervades every phe-
nomenological moment with the play of light on the canvas, to change the
purpose of art from rendering a perspective on the world to revealing a
state of mind, overcoming the chasm between observer and observed. The
subject of their paintings was thus often less important than the technique.
Impressionists often painted the same subject at di
fl
erent times, such as
Monet's haystacks in Normandy, or from multiple viewpoints, such as
Cézanne, who sought to represent the
ff
fl
flux of the world in ways parallel to
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