Lille, London, the art of global conquest

I’m in Lille, in northern France, where I’m teaching a two-week course on Transitional Justice at the city’s Institut des Etudes Politiques (Sciences-Po). It seems like hard work but the students all seem strongly engaged in the topic, which is good.
And I’ve been running around quite a bit over the past couple of weeks… London., Wales, Dorset, and now Lille. Where Bill and I are in an apartment in the middle of a sometimes unnervingly Corbusieresque cityscape… We look out of the windows at extensive, sloping roofscapes clad in metal, boxy apartment blocks clad in metal… a whole swathe of the view brutally clad in the same, with beyond it some hints of an older city and beyond that again, trees, countryside.
However, the city also has an incredibly efficient metro system: sprightly, two-car trains that zip around town with great frequency and rapidity. Only after a day or two did I discover they are completely driverless. In mounting one, the rider puts herself at the mercy of a machine, and becomes perhaps also a part of that machine herself.
H’mmm.
Anyway, before leaving London, I did write nearly the whole of a post for JWN about some exhibits I saw in London. Just now, I tried to finish that post up. So even though there’s been a delay of some days in posting it, let me put it in here:

Europe’s conquest of the world: Some reflections in art

I have now been here in London for nearly a month, and I’ve had a
number of opportunities to wander around this great city and see some
of the many fine exhibitions and museums within it.

One of the most arresting art galleries was the National Portrait Gallery,
where by chance I walked into the small room containing this collection
of small-ish black and white photographs titled Blair at War: Photographs by Nick
Danziger.  Basically,
sometime in early 2003 as the invasion of Iraq drew closer, someone in
Tony Blair’s entourage (Tony himself, perhaps?) decided that what the
PM needed was a small reportorial team to chronicle these approaching
days of “Churchillian” decisiveness…  And thus, from mid-March
to mid-April of that year, as the blurb for the exhibit puts it,
“photojournalist Nick Danziger and Times Literary Supplement editor
Peter Stothard were given thirty days of unprecedented access to the
Prime Minister and his closest aides.”

Unprecedented, perhaps– but pretty certainly not “total” access. 
Still, what we do see in these two dozen or so stills is intriguing
enough: mainly, Blair trying desperately hard to look “Churchillian” as
he pregressively realizes that a lot of his own Labour backbenchers are
against the war… his Foreign Secretary Robin Cook will resign… most
European leaders will be against the war, etc.

I found the first image– and its caption– particularly tragic. 
Blair is shown in a distant, sunny corner of his “den” in Number 10
Downing Street (and also, artfully reflected in a large wall mirror
there.)  He is on the phone– to Yasser Arafat, as it
happens.  And in the caption, Stothard recalls the Blair end of
this conversation.  It is March 14, 3:30 p.m. London times, and
Blair is saying,

I’m assuming that the “this” in question was the very imminent invasion
of Iraq, in which Blair was so heavily involved along with his friend
and master, George W. Bush.

Did Arafat really believe at the time that the point of the war was
“precisely to end the suffering of
the Palestinian people”?

Did Blair?

… Anyway, equally as interesting as looking at the photos themselves,
there in that small, enclosed room, was watching the faces and
close attentiveness of the dozen or so visitors who at any one time
were closely examining the images and their captions.  These
people seemed mainly to be Brits.  They were quiet and thoughtful
as they peered at each image…  There, four years into the war in
question…  I wish I’d whipped out my notebook
and interviewed some of them as they left.

So much for the vanity of Tony Blair, huh?  I imagine he thought
at the time that the photos would show him leading Britain at another
of its “finest hours”….

Instead of which– ?

… Well, I had found that room only by happenstance.  What I’d
really gone to the NPG to look at was this exhibit,
titled Between Worlds:
Voyagers to Britain 1700-1850.  Note the painstakingly
chosen word “voyagers” there.  I guess they couldn’t use the word
“visitors” because that would imply that the individuals in question
had all come to London voluntarily, wouldn’t it?

It’s an interesting exhibit, because it shows images of 14 distinctly
non-European individuals who visited Britain in that period… and in
most cases, those individuals had been the first representatives of
their respective peoples to do so.

The exhibit, which runs through June 17, is prefaced by a large oil
portrait of Michael Alphonsus Shen Fu-Tsung, ‘The Chinese Convert’,
painted in 1687.  We are told that Shen had been converted to
Catholicism by the Jesuits; then he came and spent some years in
England where he helped to catalogue some of the Chinese-language
materials in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.  (So the Bod had just
scooped up bunches of such manuscripts over preceding years without
even being aware of what they had??  Interesting.)

The oldest portraits in the exhibit itself are those of the “Four Indian
Kings”— political leaders from four portions of the Iroquois
Federation who in 1710 came to London, as the printed brochure said,
“to forge a lasting military and political alliance with the
British.” 

The four men are named on that web-page as:

The printed brochure states,

Along with the formal oil portraits, the exhibit includes some of the
cheap, and very derogatory and racist representations of these four
leaders.

I have to say that as a naturalized US citizen of British origin I
found these paintings tragic to look at and reflect on.  These
four men were sent to London by their peoples to conclude an honorable
alliance with the British sovereign… And then, what did the British
do to their people over the decades that followed?

I had a similar reaction, today, to the watercolors of the long-house
inhabitants in late 16th-century “Virginia” (present-day, North
Carolina) that
settler-artist John White painted, that are on show
at the British Museum, also until June 17.  One of these paintings
may be an actual portrait  of the local leader, Wingina, who
was courted by the small band of British settlers whom White had helped
to bring to this area..  But we are told that when the settlers’
food ran out and the local indigenes, who up till then had been helping
to feed them, refused to carry on doing so, the settlers summarily
chopped off Wininga’s head.. For my part, I thought this exhibit had an
inappropriately hagiograpohic view of the settlers and their project;
and gave far too little acknowledgement of the effects that British
settlement had over the decades that followed on the lives of the
Indian subjects of White’s paintings.

In the London Review of Books,
Peter Campbell suggested,
about White’s paintings, that “what was made as a record was used as
advertising”– presumably, for the settler-inmplanting project
itself.  However, since White was also, himself, an organizer and
investor in the settlement project, we might surely with equal validity
conclude that the paintings were planned from the outset to be both a
“record” and part of an advertising campaign for this project.

Irrespective of this distinctly tainted aspect of the paintings, they
do still provide a poignant evocation of individual Indians, small
family
groups of Indians, important occasions in the life of the Indian
community, and also– in near-ethnographic clarity– the layout of a
couple of their very well-ordered villages.

… Well, back once more to the “Between Worlds” exhibit at the
Portrait
Gallery, it did also include one other Native American, namely Joseph
Brant (1742-1807), or Thayendanegea to use his Mohawk name. The NPG
website describes
him as,

This website description also says this:

Surely though, that wording implies that everyone in America at the
time thought of him as “the
monster Brant”– whereas it  certainly seems from the content of
the text that follows that it was only among the European settlers in
America that he was thought of in those terms, while the native
Americans at the time (and perhaps since) have had a very diufferent
array of views about him…  So why should the website say “In
America he was known as ‘the monster Brant'” in this way that implies
that it was only the views of the settlers that counted at all?

Ah well, the people who put on this exhibit indulged in some other
infelicitous wordings, as well.  As here, when
they write about “a much-performed play in which a noble African prince
was … wrongly sold into
slavery.”  As if there was a right way for people to be
sold into slavery??

Anyway, the other “exotic” (i.e. non-European) “voyagers” to Britain
who are featured in the show include:

Oh great. “Let’s you and him fight”,
indeed.

* Sara
Baartman, a Khoisan woman from South Africa, who was
transported from her native land– where she had been working for a
Dutch farmer and thereby  acquired that Dutch name.  (Her
Khoisan name is unknown.)  In 1810, Baartman was transported from
South Africa to England where she was put on show,
nearly naked, and mocked because many English people judged her
physical form to be so “foreign”.  Wikipedia tells us that “Her
exhibitors permitted visitors to touch her large buttocks for extra
payment.  In addition, she had a sinus pudoris, otherwise
known as the ‘tablier’, ‘curtain of shame’, or ‘apron’, all names for
the elongated labia
of some Khoisan. It should be noted, however, that some find the term
‘sinus pudoris’ to be racist because it refers only to the labia of
Khoi-San woman when, in reality, all labia vary in size and shape to
some degree.”

Wikipedia also tells us that,

Her exhibition in London created a
scandal and an abolitionist
benevolent society (equivalent to a charity or pressure group) called
the African Association petitioned for her release… She later
traveled to Napoleonic Paris where an animal trainer exhibited her
under more pressured conditions for fifteen months. French anatomist
Georges Cuvier and French naturalists visited her and she was the
subject of several scientific paintings at the Jardin du Roy.

Baartman died December 29, 1815 of an
inflammatory ailment, possibly smallpox. An autopsy was conducted and
the findings published by French anatomist Henri Marie Ducrotay de
Blainville in 1816 and by Cuvier in the Memoires du
Museum d’Histoire Naturelle
in 1817. Cuvier notes in his monograph that Baartman was an intelligent
woman who had an excellent memory and spoke Dutch fluently. Her skeleton,
preserved genitals and brain were placed on display in Paris
Musée de l’Homme until 1974.

.. There were a handful of other subjects included in the exhibit,
too.  Altogether, I found it extremely disturbing.

Notably more uplifting was “Abolition Trail”
that the NPG had created, which was basically just a guided tour around
many parts of the gallery’s permanent exhibition, which takes you to
the portraits of people who were active in the movement to abolish the
slave trade back in the later 18th and early 19th centuries. 
Among the significant pictures included are this picture of
the big Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in 1841, and this one, of the
anti-slavery campaigner Hannah More.  What I liked particularly
about More’s painting is that in the caption there in the gallery it
said something like, “Mrs More expressed impatience with the whole
process of ‘sitting’ for the portrait, saying it was taking up too much
her time.”  I concur!

Anyway, here’s a suggestion for a follow-on exhibit at the gallery:
a “Slaveowners’ and slavetraders’ trail” that would highlight all the
portraits the gallery holds that are of people who engaged
directly  in or profited from their engagement in the slave
trade…  Oops, that might end up being a large proportion of the
various royals, grandees, and “captains of trade of industry” whose
portraits hang there.