Susie Protschky, Images of the tropics: Environment and visual culture in colonial Indonesia. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2011, 184 pp. [Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 270]. ISBN 9789067183780. Price: EUR 39.90.
Year: 2013
Type: book-review
Abstract: Academic studies on paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs made by artists in the Netherlands Indies often tend to regard these images simply as mirroring the colonial world or as framings of specifijic events, and reduce them as such to historical sources.Other publications focus on their origins and provenance or relate them to the biographies of particular artists or photographers involved, in other words, follow the art historical methods.Images of the tropics by Susie Protschky offfers an innovative analysis of the same corpus of images.The author studies representations of nature and landscape in colonial Indonesia made from the start of the nineteenth century until the end of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia.In the book she uses these images as a means to reconstruct how Europeans during this period understood the tropics and their own place there, by adopting, as the title of the book announces, the approach of visual culture studies.In consequence, the chosen time frame is much broader as she also has to include how earlier modes of representing Indonesian landscapes from the VOC era were integrated in nineteenth century depictions of the Dutch East Indies.Protschky's book builds strongly on Denis Cosgrove's notion of 'tropicality' in order to connect colonial representations of landscape with colonial mentalities, attitudes, and experiences.From the awareness of the fact that Europe possessed more than one concept of 'otherness', this notion aims to be both a variety and specifijication of the discourse of orientalism.In her use of the term, Protschky refers to such European notions of the tropics as a geographically distinct entity whose social and cultural forms were constrained and determined by the tropical uniqueness in climate and topography.Protschky argues that images of tropical landscapes should be regarded as essential parts of the social, political, and economic modes of Dutch imperialism.In the chronological order of the book, this argument is examined by means of two related questions.How are colonial claims for territorial and political sovereignty represented in colonial images of Indies landscapes of the fijirst half of the nineteenth century?And, why did the naturalistic and realistic style of painting peaceful tropical landscapes, developed in the
Author: Martijn Eickhofff
Language: Dutch
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2053816969