Revisioning the Pacific: Bernard Smith in the South Seas

BORN IN Sydney in 1986, Bernard Smith is today widely considered to be Australia's preeminent art historian and a major cultural theorist.¹ While working as a school teacher and artist during the late 1930S and early 1940s, he came under the influences of surrealist aesthetics and communist politics, especially as mediated by refugee intellectuals from Hitler's Europe. During this period his principal literary inspirations were the Bible, Marx, and Toynbee; it was their different takes on history, especially of its unfolding over long durations, that most impressed him.² As an academic and writer through the next half century, Smith produced numerous historically oriented studies of Australian and modernist art, which broadly can be divided into two periods of publishing activity.³ His most acclaimed achievement, however, is European Vision and the South Pacific 1768-1850: A Study in the History of Art and Ideas, first published in 1960 and a work that has continued to grow in stature and influence in the four decades since its original appearance. It is the history of this text, and of its companion-piece, Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages, published in 1992, and the contexts in which they were produced and have been consumed, that are the main concerns of the present essay.

Dewey on Arts, Sciences and Greek Philosophy

[no abstract provided]https://fount.aucegypt.edu/faculty_book_chapters/1032/thumbnail.jp

Religious Tensions in Early Modern Torun, a History of War and Peace?

The history of acute inter-confessional conflict in Poland began with Martin Luther in 1517 and the presentation of the declaration of faith by the Protestants at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530. Those events became a turning point, which introduced a period of tension and war into an apparently rationalized Europe. However, it was not only the great cultural centres of the contemporary world that were affected by this new conflict. In many cases, smaller centres of regional importance were plunged into a period of confusion and bloodshed, due to tensions between the representatives of different Christian denominations. This is what happened in Toruń, one of the major cities of Royal Prussia. In 1724, despite efforts to reconcile the faiths, the city experienced turbulent riots that had widespread repercussions not only across the Kingdom of Poland but also throughout the rest of Europe. In fact, this provoked a powerful reaction from Prussia, England and Russia, which were disturbed by that religious intolerance so contrary to Enlightenment ideals. The Polish King and Lithuanian Grand Duke, Augustus II the Strong, saw in this an opportunity to reform internal and external policy, but these were not well received internationally. The situation between Protestants and Catholics in German Toruń thus remained unresolved for a long time. The event is often dealt with by historians as isolated from the earlier history of Toruń. However, the omission of references to that earlier period gives the impression that the bloodshed was merely a local social disturbance caused by individuals. Without claiming to offer a detailed comprehensive account of the phenomenon, this study nevertheless considers important events that preceded the riots and were closely connected with it, namely the spread of Lutheranism throughout Royal Prussia, religious education in the high schools of Toruń and a failed attempt at inter-faith dialogue in 1645

Subverting the racist lens: Frederick Douglass, humanity and the power of the photographic Image

Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, the civil rights advocate and the great rhetorician, has been the focus of much academic research. Only more recently is Douglass work on aesthetics beginning to receive its due, and even then its philosophical scope is rarely appreciated. Douglass’ aesthetic interest was notably not so much in art itself, but in understanding aesthetic presentation as an epistemological and psychological aspect of the human condition and thereby as a social and political tool. He was fascinated by the power of images, and took particular interest in the emerging technologies of photography. He often returned to the themes of art, pictures and aesthetic perception in his speeches. He saw himself, also after the end of slavery, as first and foremost a human rights advocate, and he suggests that his work and thoughts as a public intellectual always in some way related to this end. In this regard, his interest in the power of photographic images to impact the human soul was a lifelong concern. His reflections accordingly center on the psychological and political potentials of images and the relationship between art, culture, and human dignity. In this chapter we discuss Douglass views and practical use of photography and other forms of imagery, and tease out his view about their transformational potential particularly in respect to combating racist attitudes. We propose that his views and actions suggest that he intuitively if not explicitly anticipated many later philosophical, pragmatist and ecological insights regarding the generative habits of mind and affordance perception : I.e. that we perceive the world through our values and habitual ways of engaging with it and thus that our perception is active and creative, not passive and objective. Our understanding of the world is simultaneously shaped by and shaping our perceptions. Douglass saw that in a racist and bigoted society this means that change through facts and rational arguments will be hard. A distorted lens distorts - and accordingly re-produces and perceives its own distortion. His interest in aesthetics is intimately connected to this conundrum of knowledge and change, perception and action. To some extent precisely due to his understanding of how stereotypical categories and dominant relations work on our minds, he sees a radical transformational potential in certain art and imagery. We see in his work a profound understanding of the value-laden and action-oriented nature of perception and what we today call the perception of affordances (that is, what our environment permits/invites us to do). Douglass is particularly interested in the social environment and the social affordances of how we perceive other humans, and he thinks that photographs can impact on the human intellect in a transformative manner. In terms of the very process of aesthetic perception his views interestingly cohere and supplement a recent theory about the conditions and consequences of being an aesthetic beholder. The main idea being that artworks typically invite an asymmetric engagement where one can behold them without being the object of reciprocal attention. This might allow for a kind of vulnerability and openness that holds transformational potentials not typically available in more strategic and goal-directed modes of perception. As mentioned, Douglass main interest is in social change and specifically in combating racist social structures and negative stereotypes of black people. He is fascinated by the potential of photography in particular as a means of correcting fallacious stereotypes, as it allows a more direct and less distorted image of the individuality and multidimensionality of black people. We end with a discussion of how, given this interpretation of aesthetic perception, we can understand the specific imagery used by Douglass himself. How he tried to use aesthetic modes to subvert and change the racist habitus in the individual and collective mind of his society. We suggest that Frederick Douglass, the human rights activist, had a sophisticated philosophy of aesthetics, mind, epistemology and particularly of the transformative and political power of images. His works in many ways anticipate and sometimes go beyond later scholars in these and other fields such as psychology & critical theory. Overall, we propose that our world could benefit from revisiting Douglass’ art and thought

Scanning Saint Amandus: Medical Technologies and Medieval Anatomies

Anatomy -- the practice of stripping back the body and revealing it, part by part, for discussion and debate -- is a process much explored by the medical humanities, and it presents rich intellectual and practical potential for medieval studies. Tracing anatomical tendencies in the actions of both modern practitioners and inhabitants of the medieval past, this article advocates for anatomy’s addition to the rostra of bodily discourses at the disposal of historians of medieval culture. Posited as a critical framework in its own right, notions of anatomy, autopsy, and a literal bodily reading offer us new ways of opening up medieval studies today in much the same way as medieval bodies were once opened on the slab

Learning to Imagine

For the purpose of this discussion, we posit that there are essentially four overarching reasons we educate. They are: preparing students for democratic participation, providing access to knowledge and critical thinking, enabling all students to take advantage of life's opportunities, and enabling students to lead rich and rewarding personal lives. None of these can be achieved fully without attention to the role of imagination. While we acknowledge that not all would agree with our definition of purposes, our comprehensive vision, we believe, can serve our children and our society well

China's Forgotten Kingdom - Exhibition Catalogue

Exhibition catalogue for 'China's Forgotten Kingdom', a touring exhibition of work focusing on the visual identity of the Naxi ethnic minority people from Yunnan province in China

The art of tropical travel, 1768-1830

Book synopsis: Georgian Geographies provides an innovative interdisciplinary examination of the geographical nature of culture and society in eighteenth-century Britain and the British world. The book's introduction identifies the key areas of study as the geographical constitution of empire, the Enlightenment and the public sphere. These themes are explored by examining the connections between space, place and landscape in the eighteenth century in relation to the emergent empire in the Caribbean and north-west America, and in Britain itself. The topics considered include landscape painting, London's art world, geography's book, mapping, the geography of erotic fiction, provincial science, and the production of domestic space in the early English novel. It will be an essential contribution to eighteenth-century studies for research and teaching staff, postgraduates and advanced undergraduate students in geography, history, literary studies, the history of art, postcolonial studies and the history of science