The Unsettled Eye: Colonial Voice and Vision in Australia and New Zealand, c. 1770-1830. Bruce Buchan (Griffith University)

Dr. Bruce Buchan's presentation forms part of the open conference, Arctic Voices in Art and Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century, which is a collaboration between UiT–The Arctic University of Norway, Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum and Riddu Riđđu. Please see below for his abstract.

All are welcome! 

 

The Unsettled Eye: Colonial Voice and Vision in Australia and New Zealand, c. 1770-1830

Dr Bruce Buchan

A specially invited study that strategically contextualizes the Arctic focus of the research project in relationship to other colonial spaces of encounter in the same historical period. Under the working title, ‘The Unsettled Eye: Colonial Voice and Vision in Australia and New Zealand, c. 1770-1830’, it addresses how artists struggled to represent European colonization in Australia and New Zealand by means of a preeminent sense: vision. As the transience of colonial travel turned to the permanence of colonial settlement, artists struggled not only to represent the difference of Indigenous peoples from themselves, but to grapple with the placement of both colonized and colonizers within the frame of the emergent concept of humanity in European Enlightenment thought. At the heart of their struggle lay the unsettlement produced by colonization itself: that the humanity of the Indigenous subject was at once both different yet assimilable. Herein lay the artistic challenge of colonization, to see the Indigenous eye that returned the colonizer’s gaze. 

When: 09.07.19 at 14.45–15.30
Where: Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum
Location / Campus: Tromsø
Target group: Students, Guests, Invited, Employees
Contact: Ingeborg Høvik
E-mail: ingeborg.hovik@uit.no
Add to calendar
Attachments / Pictures: