Abstract
When passing through King William’s Town on an 1884 expedition through British southern Africa, the ethnologist and collector Wilhelm Joest encountered a troubling scene that would later return to haunt him. Fixing his acquisitive gaze on an elaborately ornamented article of traditional Xhosa leatherwork worn below the waist, Joest repeatedly tried and failed to purchase a particularly desirable exemplar from an elder member of the community. Six months later, one of Joest’s British allies managed to secure him such an item at roughly the price of “an entire European suit."2 Within several weeks, Joest received five more by mail and lamented how his demand for the object had likely effected the production of multiple “spurious” works no more valuable to him than the “Zulu curios” crafted for travelers in Natal or the increasingly numerous artifacts decorated entirely with European glass beads.3 Voicing the familiar concern of nineteenth-century salvage ethnographers over the loss of an idealized authenticity, Joest, with a degree of preemptive nostalgia, anticipates the day when “all originality will be lost.”4 The autochthony of African artifacts – whether identified by their design, purpose, or intended market – is nevertheless not the only form of lost originality haunting this encounter.
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Notes
Thomas Digges and Dudley Digges, Foure Paradoxes or Politique Discourses (London: H. Lownes for Clement Knight, 1604), 4.
Wilhelm Joest, “Verzeichniss der in Afrika im Jahre 1884 gesammelten und dem Museum für Völkerkunde als Geschenk überwiesenen ethnog- raphischen Objecte von Wilhelm Joest.” Original-Mittheilungen aus der Ethnologischen Abtheilung der Königlichen Museen zu Berlin 2/3 (Berlin: Verlag Spemann, 1886), 146. All translations by author unless otherwise indicated. The Cologne-born ethnologist and natural scientist is perhaps best known for the ethnological museum in his city of birth that bears his name – the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum. Joest’s extensive ethnographic collection was donated to the city in 1899, two years after his death, and the museum was founded in 1901. Berlin’s Ethnological Museum opened to the public as an individual institution in 1883.
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 74.
Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 88.
Bill Brown, “Object Relations in an Expanded Field,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 17, no. 3 (2006): 88–107.
Harold F. Searles, The Nonhuman Environment: in Normal Development and in Schizophrenia (New York: International Universities, 1960).
Mary H. Kingsley, West African Studies, 3rd edn (1899; New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1964), 377. Hereafter cited in text as Studies.
J. B. (Jeffrey Brian) Peires, House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa People in the Days of their Independence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 100.
Michael Stevenson and Michael Graham-Stewart, “Both Curious and Valuable": African Art from Late 19th-Century South East Africa (Cape Town: Hansa Reproprint, 2005).
Clifton C. Crais, White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-Industrial South Africa: The Making of the Colonial Order in the Eastern Cape, 1770–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 109.
Literary and cultural critics like Sanjay Krishnan are beginning to make comparable claims about uses of British realism distinct from metropolitan forms in former colonial territories like the Malayan Peninsula. See Sanjay Krishnan, “History and the Work of Literature in the Periphery,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 482–9.
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 195.
Meditating on the nature of value, generally, Saussure identifies a comparable “paradoxical principle”: “Values always involve: (1) something dissimilar which can be exchanged for the item whose value is under consideration, and (2) similar things which can be compared with the item whose value is under consideration.” Following his example of the five-franc coin exchangeable for “a certain quantity of … bread,” and, by extension, for other commodities, he turns to the paradoxical relation between signs and referents: “Similarly, a word can be substituted for something dissimilar: an idea. At the same time, it can be compared to something of like nature: another word.” See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (1916; La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Press, 1986), 113–14. This analogy admittedly grows increasingly tenuous, however, when we attempt to elaborate the dual nature of the linguistic sign in relation to that of the commodity form. The relation between the “more abstract” signified and the comparatively more “physical” signifier does not directly parallel that of “use-value,” the “physical body of the commodity,” and “exchange-value,” the more abstract “form of appearance” of value at the moment of exchange, since it is the signifier that enters into circulation with other signifiers. For Marx, “the exchange relation of commodities is characterized precisely by its abstraction from their use-values” and, consequently, from their physical properties. See Saussure, 66, and Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (1861–7; New York: Penguin, 1990), 126, 127. In poststructuralist linguistics, moreover, this very distinction between signifier and signified breaks down, as signifieds in the absence of a stable point of reference (namely, a transcendental signified) constantly turn into other signifiers.
Postmodernism, 195. Jameson is quoting from Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 95.
Annette Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 37, 33.
Bill Brown, “How to Do Things with Things (A Toy Story),” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 4 (1998): 936.
This characterization of objects as transparencies draws further on Brown’s work: “We look through objects because there are codes by which our interpretive attention makes them meaningful, because there is a discourse of objectivity that allows us to use them as facts. A thing, in contrast, can hardly function as a window. We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us.” See Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 4.
William Halse Rivers Rivers, “Adopted Elements in Culture: Importation, Imitation, Teaching,” Anthropological Institute and British Association for the Advancement of Science, Notes and Queries on Anthropology, 4th edn, eds Barbara Freire-Marreco and John Linton Myres (London: Harrison and Sons, 1912), 263–6.
Thomas Gore Browne, “Contact with Civilized Races,” Notes and Queries on Anthropology, 2nd edn, eds John George Garson and Charles Hercules Read (London: Anthropological Institute, 1892), 229–31.
Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 1.
Embedded quotation and paraphrase from Emily Apter, Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 14. Stable referents prove all the more elusive in realist novels attempting to represent the things of colonial life: things that may possess alternative social lives at odds with the meanings colonial authors attribute to them.
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993; New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 51.
See James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 18.
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (1923; Boston: MIT Press, 1972), 84.
Georg Lukács, “Narrate or Describe?” 1936, Writer and Critic: and Other Essays, trans. Arthur Kahn (London: Merlin Press, 1978), 134, 145.
“Narrate or Describe?” 131. Andrew Miller makes an analogous point about the impact of increasingly abstract commodity relations on the mid-century realist novel when discussing Vanity Fair. “Thackeray’s book,” he maintains, “imagines the fetishistic reduction of the material environment to commodities, to a world simultaneously brilliant and tedious, in which value is produced without reference either to the needs or to the hopelessly utopian desires of characters.” The formal result, he concludes, is “an oddly depth- less space; the physical contiguity of objects within relations of perspectival realism is rendered insignificant by the insistence with which those objects refer to unattainable levels of abstract meaning.” See Andrew H. Miller, Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 9–10.
Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 148.
As John Plotz has recently argued, even Victorians’ heightened personal investment in the sentimental or auratic value of objects as represented in realist novels was in fact “a predictable, even a necessary, development in a world of increasingly successful commodity flow.” John Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 17.
Jeff Nunokawa’s The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
Location of Culture, 109. Embedded quotation from Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 175.
Sigmund Freud, “A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis,” 1912, trans. James Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 12, eds James Strachey and Anna Freud (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1966–74), 264.
See Bill Brown, The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economics of Play (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 248.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (1980; New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 87.
See Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 94.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1899, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: W. W. Norton and Co. Inc., 1988), 61. Hereafter cited in text as Heart of Darkness.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 77.
As Peter Logan has persuasively suggested, however, “the critic becomes the fetishist in the act of evaluating the fetish as such, and in this manner, the critique of fetishism produces a secondary fetishization of the critic’s values”; needless to say, I do not wholly manage to escape such fetishism. Peter Melville Logan, Victorian Fetishism: Intellectuals and Primitives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 9.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 1938, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 221.
Joseph Conrad, Letter to William Blackwood, 6 January 1899, The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, vol. 2, eds Fredrick R. Karl and Laurence Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983–2007), 147.
Benita Parry, Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers (London: Macmillan, 1983), 28.
Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa: Congo Français, Corsico and Cameroons, 5th edn (1897; Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), 441. Hereafter cited in text as Travels.
Edward Wilmot Blyden, African Life and Customs (1908; London: African Publication Society, 1969), 39.
David Lewis-Williams and Geoffrey Blundell, Fragile Heritage: A Rock Art Fieldguide (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1998), 29.
Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopœdia; or, an universal dictionary of arts and sciences, volume I, 1st edn (London, 1728), 61.
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), II, § 27, 305.
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© 2012 Deborah Shapple Spillman
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Spillman, D.S. (2012). Introduction: Reading Colonial Realism. In: British Colonial Realism in Africa. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378018_1
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