Dissertation

China on the Horizon: German Orientalism in the Visual Field, 1859-1914

Cheng, Mimi

2022

Overview

This dissertation reopens the study of visual orientalism from the vantage point of the German imperial project by analyzing how cartographers, geographers, and photographers depicted China during the long nineteenth century. Orientalism is treated as a process of observation in addition to being a representational style, the visual expression of which takes on functional meaning. This research is situated within a set of historiographical and analytical folds. First, it traces the locations of orientalist critique—if “Orient” and “Occident” are not only analytically unstable, but forms of what Edward Said calls “imaginative geography,” how do we address the specificity of its German manifestation? Second, it considers the utility of orientalist critique in China—what does it offer this terrain, and where are its limits? This dissertation takes on these questions in turn. The first two chapters historicize the geography of orientalism by examining maps and drawings of China’s landscape and coastlines. I argue that Germany’s ability to see and know this territory during the second half of the nineteenth century hinged not only on the systematic fieldwork of German surveyors, but was reliant upon sedimented and trans-imperial knowledge created decades prior. The third and fourth chapters analyze photographs created by German bureaucrats and diplomats of China, focusing on how they stress visual perception and personal response, while being conditioned by both technical means and latent cultural understanding. Taken together, this dissertation reformulates visual orientalism from a static mode of dominating representation to account for more fluid and contingent processes of perception and encounter.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Art history / European Studies / Geography
• ISBN: 9798352900093