"Picturing Time: Temporality and US Imperialism in Oceania"
Tuesday September 24th, 2024 at 4:45 PM
Goldwin Smith Hall G22
Abstract
How might art history reveal the epistemological contours of nineteenth-century US imperialism? This talk examines painter and designer John La Farge’s travel sketches of Oceania and the concept of time, arguing that his paintings, like those of other foreign artists, imposed a colonizers’ system of knowledge upon Indigenous subjects. Many of La Farge’s sketches, produced on a privileged tour of the Pacific with US historian Henry Adams in 1890-91 (shortly before the US took control of what is today American Samoa), depict Indigenous dance—an artform not just predicated upon keeping time but also associated with history and memory. La Farge’s renderings reveal the incompatibility of the artist’s colonial system of knowledge with the Indigenous ways of knowing he struggled to picture. Colonial temporality had a lasting effect in Oceania, and its epistemological effects have been the subject of work by contemporary Samoan artist Yuki Kihara. By manipulating the Western mediums most associated with the controlling and ordering of time—photography and video— she contests time as a source of colonial power on both human and planetary scales. By placing these artists in conversation, this talk considers the long history of imperialism and concepts of time in Oceania.
Biography
Maggie Cao is an associate professor of art history and David G. Frey Scholar of American Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on the history of globalization with particular interest in intersections of art with histories of technology, natural science, and economics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is the author of The End of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century America (2018) and a forthcoming book, Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and its Legacies, which will be the first synthetic treatment of art and early US imperialism around the world. She has also published on global material culture including China Trade export art and prints about financial bubbles.
