A.2.1 A Persian Prayer Lamp on Tite Street: Oscar Wilde’s Collections and Homi Bhabha’s Third Space

• Katrina Manica, University of York

In 1885, Oscar and Constance Wilde moved into their Tite Street home in Chelsea, London. Their home was designed collaboratively between them, with guidance from E.W. Godwin and J.A.M. Whistler. In addition to significant Aesthetic figures, Oscar’s son, Vyvyan Holland, claimed that his father was advised to decorate his “North African” themed smoking room on the upper level by the journalist Walter Burton Harris, who lived and worked in Tangier, Morocco from 1885. From 1887, Harris was a correspondent reporter for The Times in London, and following other white Britons such as Richard Burton, William Holman Hunt, and J.F. Lewis, he dressed in local clothing to assimilate to local culture to earn cultural capital.

Among Oscar’s collections, he had an antique Persian mosque lamp to authenticate the so-called North African aesthetic of his smoking room. Although the exact mosque lamp that Oscar owned is unknown, this paper makes use of similar lamps in Britain at the time to re-vision and assert the significance of the lamp as religious and art object within Wilde’s Aesthetic interior. I, thus, make use of Homi Bhabha’s concept of a third space to conceptualize the mosque lamp both as an object displaced in Wilde’s Aestheticism, and as a diasporic object which asserts itself, its history, and its significance into a queer and homoerotic London interior. Finally, in centring the art-object history of the mosque lamp, the object, in and of itself, becomes a historical subject with historical agency within multifaceted, religious-decorative-queer spaces.

keywords: aestheticism, mosque lamp, Persian art, nineteenth-century, Oscar Wilde

A.2.2 The colonization of media

Brandon Sward, University of Chicago

My paper, The colonization of media, considers the impact of colonization on the creation and use of images, specifically as manifests in European social science. I focus on Franz Boas, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Pierre Bourdieu, all three of whom made many photographs while conducting fieldwork in Indigenous communities relatively early on in their lives and who also went on to engage with many other visual mediums as well. I find a predisposition to see images produced through lens-based technologies as what I call “self-evident” images, capable of being used as data without attention to their character as created and mediated images. I then turn to how Lévi-Strauss and Bourdieu discuss painting. Far from viewing this medium as similarly self-evident, they provide exhaustively detailed readings of paintings that refuse to reduce that medium to some more fundamental social reality. Rather than attribute these differences to technology, I offer another account that links them to their experiences photographing Indigenous peoples, which they believed could be “captured” through photography in a way they wouldn’t believe their own cultures could.

Once made, this association exerts its own influence, shedding light on Bourdieu’s disdain for others lens-based mediums like television, which for him lacked the aesthetic “autonomy” of painting. I explain Lévi-Strauss and Bourdieu’s preference for French painters depicting French subjects in French settings like François Clouet and Édouard Manet by suggesting that thus freed of the expectations of a self-evident medium, painting could accordingly hold open a metaphorical space in which the French and other Europeans could reflect upon their own subjectivity. Although he also relied upon photographs, Boas would himself perform Indigenous practices as an option of last resort. While it’s sometimes assumed to have lower verisimilitude than lens-based mediums, I find these performances are less exoticizing than the photographs I discuss.

keywords: photography, postcolonial studies, history of science, Indigenous studies, media studies