Theoretical Musings

Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Mary Louise Pratt. London and New York: Routledge. 1992. 257 pages.

In the introduction to her thorough investigation of the ways in which travel writing helped to produce subject positions for diverse individuals within imperialism, Mary Louise Pratt relates two stories: the first, the story of her strange rural Canadian connection to Dr. David Livingstone, the infamous English missionary, through a letter hanging on her pharmacist’s wall; and the second, the story of the early 20th century discovery of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Quechua and Spanish-language 1,200-page political and historical manuscript to the King of Spain in the Danish Royal Archives in Copenhagen. At first glance, these two stories seem to hold little in common aside from a very broad relationship to imperial history. However, throughout this seminal work, Pratt manages to bring such disparate experiences of imperialism together to forge a meaningful engagement with and re-assessment of “the vast, discontinuous and over-determined history of imperial meaning-making,” (4) the major goal of her work. As such, she positions herself politically in the burgeoning movement to decolonize knowledge with a marked commitment to a de-centering of the Western eye and a rethinking of the relation between centre and periphery.

The starting point for the book is the mid-18th century, a moment, Pratt claims, that denotes a shift in European consciousness, when bourgeois forms of subjectivity and power were consolidated and a new territorial phase of capitalist expansion began. The theoretical lens she develops to accomplish this task is that of “transculturation,” a concept she borrows from ethnography. For her, this concept demonstrates how metropolitan cultures were shaped by the periphery: “…[the metropolis] habitually blinds itself to the ways in which the periphery determines the metropolis- beginning perhaps, with the latter’s obsessive need to present and re-present its peripheries and its others continually to itself” (6). This was undoubtedly a groundbreaking approach to the study of imperialism at the time of publication, since it promised to shed light on resistance and the productive nature of imperial discourses.

As such, this framework provides a meaningful encounter with the diverse forms of data Pratt tackles throughout this book. In particular, her discussion about the process of “creole self-fashioning” (113) that she develops in Part II stands out as a strong theoretical contribution and re-working of the relationship between the centre and the periphery, since it illustrates some of the ways in which the metropolis and periphery work in an unequally structured dialectic relationship. However, I would argue that overall, the concept of transculturation remains relatively under-developed. As an example, much of Pratt’s focus is on canonical European travel texts, an aspect of her work that limits her ability to engage with forms of resistance in the periphery and the constitutive dimensions of such configurations in forming European subjectivities. When she does explore such instances, as in the case of creole self-fashioning, she focuses primarily on European colonists’ influence on European subjectivities, thereby marginalizing the role of indigenous and African peoples’ resistance in reformulating the metropolis. I believe a more sustained focus on such counter-narratives, especially for their potential in contributing to Pratt’s goals of de-centering the European imperial eye, would have proven fruitful.

In my opinion, her strongest contribution comes in Part I, where she traces the development of a new version of what she calls Europe’s “planetary consciousness,” one that develops through interior exploration and the rise of universal categories of natural history. She argues persuasively, through an analysis of Linnea’s The System of Nature and writings from Europe’s first major international scientific expedition (the La Condamine expedition), that these new forms of bourgeois knowledge (e.g. science) displaced old forms and became basic elements constructing modern Eurocentrism (15).

She does so in Chapter 3, for instance, by laying bare the relationship between the development of natural history writing, the systematizing of nature, and imperial expansion, through a juxtaposition of the pre-Linnaen travel writing of Peter Kolb and the writings of three prominent 19th century natural history writers: Anders Sparrman, William Paterson and John Barrow, all of whom wrote about their travels in South Africa. She proceeds to demonstrate how, by their very objective and disembodied stance, the latter writers facilitated imperial expansion.

Subsequently, this analysis allows Pratt to build on her key concept of “anti-conquest,” which she defines as “the strategies of representation whereby European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony” (7). It is in the figure of the naturalist that Pratt is able to most effectively illustrate how the protagonist of the anti-conquest is most often surrounded by an aura not of authority but of innocence and vulnerability. This comes across most clearly in the ways that natural history formed a particular style of travel writing that aimed at territorial surveillance, appropriation of resources, and administrative control. In this way, Pratt masterfully demonstrates how one must consistently read seemingly innocent forms of knowledge production for what they produce, including in this case, how they form European subjectivities.

Part II, “The Re-Invention of the Americas,” also stands out as a strong piece building on Pratt’s attempt to decolonize knowledge. In it, she points to the ways that knowledge about the Americas underwent a significant transformation following the writings of Alexander von Humboldt in the early 19th century. Through his work, America was re-defined as young, new and ready for development, as a way to legitimize Europe’s neo-colonial project. At the same time, creole elites, such as Andrés Bello and Domingo Sarmiento, refashioned metropolitan understandings of the periphery to meet their own interests, drawing heavily on Humboldt’s writings. In this way, Pratt calls Humboldt a transculturator, since he transported to Europe knowledge American in origin, thus producing European knowledges infiltrated by non-European ones. In the end, Pratt argues convincingly that such reformulations facilitated capitalist expansion in Latin America at a time when Europe was searching for new markets, not coincidentally enriching the creole elite whose interests this process of transculturation solidified.

Pratt’s consideration of the gendered dimension of travel writing in this section is also noteworthy. On the one hand, male “capitalist vanguardists” wrote primarily about exploitable natural resources and focused on how European capital could help elevate the Americas out of its atavistic past. On the other hand, female “exploratrices sociales” often undertook more overtly political concerns, such as labour issues, but still from an imperial vantage point, even though in the case of the exploratrices, this meant a return to domestic space as one of safety and grounding, a feature clearly not common among the male vanguardists. However, besides these telling observations about the outward-looking, disembodied and purposely apolitical male writers and the inward-looking, unabashedly political and embodied female writers, Pratt has very little to say about what effect these gendered forms of knowledge production had on imperial meaning-making. Other notable works, such as Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather (1995) and Sara Mills’ Discourses of Difference (1991) have engaged with the ways that gender impacts on both male and female imperial subjects in a much more sustained manner. This could have also been a very fruitful direction for research and analysis here, but remains relatively unexplored.

Perhaps part of the reason this gesture towards gender is lacking is the sheer magnitude of Pratt’s undertaking. While her impressive grasp of a wide array of documents leads to a scope and breadth usually unseen for such works, it nonetheless translates into a notable lack of depth, which is particularly evident in the last part of the book (Part III), which stands out as a mixed bag of analysis providing very little theoretical continuity with the previous sections.

Despite this, the reasons why Imperial Eyes still remains an important work in contemporary cultural theory, 15 years after its initial publication, are quite clear. Pratt’s major theoretical contributions include the widely used concepts of the ‘contact zone’ and ‘anti-conquest,’ both of which are staples in fields as diverse as literary, post-colonial and cultural studies, as well as in anthropology, geography, and history. While her concept of transculturation has not caught on in quite the same way, I would argue that her general approach to understanding imperial relationships between centres and peripheries has made an indelible intellectual mark. What stands out most for me in considering her intellectual contribution is the way she meaningfully contributes to debates about the formation of subjectivities and selves in relation to imperialism, all while keeping her eye on unmasking discourses often understood as anti-imperial, or in the very least, altogether neutral. This can understandably be a difficult task, but Pratt approaches it with vigour and aplomb.