Wtrettien: /* Valerie Traub, Mapping the Global Body (44-) */

2016-08-25T01:50:32Z

Valerie Traub, Mapping the Global Body (44-)

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	"Race, for instance, seems not to have existed in the sixteenth century as a stable category of biological difference, but only as one concept among parallel an overlapping concerns of lineage, civility, religion, and nation. Rather than relying on the phenotypic characteristics -- skin color, bodily structure -- promoted as the basis of race in modern science, concepts of race in the early modern period drew from various, albeit exorcized, notions of social allegiance and geographical affiliation. Gender appears to have been conceived, at least within the influential discourses of medicine, science, and theology, as a hierarchical manifestation of a normatively male bodily form. Men and women were not viewed as two opposite sexes, with incommensurate natures. Rather, they were thought to exist on a hierarchical continuum, differentiated by their relative moral capacities and humoral balances, with men being more perfect, more rational, hotter, and more active than women." (44)		"Race, for instance, seems not to have existed in the sixteenth century as a stable category of biological difference, but only as one concept among parallel an overlapping concerns of lineage, civility, religion, and nation. Rather than relying on the phenotypic characteristics -- skin color, bodily structure -- promoted as the basis of race in modern science, concepts of race in the early modern period drew from various, albeit exorcized, notions of social allegiance and geographical affiliation. Gender appears to have been conceived, at least within the influential discourses of medicine, science, and theology, as a hierarchical manifestation of a normatively male bodily form. Men and women were not viewed as two opposite sexes, with incommensurate natures. Rather, they were thought to exist on a hierarchical continuum, differentiated by their relative moral capacities and humoral balances, with men being more perfect, more rational, hotter, and more active than women." (44)


			"what seems to be a superfluous aesthetic convention conveys a strategy of spatialization that brings significantly new ethnographic, racial, and gendered relations of knowledge into view" (45)

			"This essay examines the function of the cartographic body in the marking of nations, and in so doing, reframes nationality as an implicitly gendered and erotic, as well as incipiently racial, phenomenon. I argue that along with the inauguration of new forms of subjectivity and the growth of national consciousness came new terms of intelligibility for the body." (46)

			"In thus linking spatializing strategies with historical change, I hope to illustrate the synchronic coordinates within which terms of embodiment are articulated, while charting the diachronic process whereby these terms alter under the pressure of new ideological exigencies." (46)

			16-17c -- "bodies on maps proliferate" (46)

			"Miming the grammar of latitude and longitude that organizes the cartographic idiom itself, maps in this period begin to imply that bodies themselves may be terrain to be charted." (49)

			cartes a figures

			on world maps, 4-6 ethnographic groups; city/country maps focus instead on status/rank hierarchy

			"on pattern predominates: that of husband and wife"

			''habit'' -- Latin for holding, having; the way one holds oneself or displays oneself outwardless in dress; haibt of mind, character, mental constitution -- "synthesizes the separate yet closely related concepts, ''costume'' and ''custom'', ''manners'' and ''morals''" (51)

			"habit functions as a static metonym for national character, status hierarchies, and gender and erotic relations" (51)

			Asia, Europe, Africa, America (Mexicana is North America; Peruana is South America); Magallanica is South Pole

			"classical visual topoi were not particularly well suited to the further specification of cultural difference" -- so an "ethnographic idiom emerges that accords more fully with the 'scientific' pretensions of the new geography" (57)

			"ethnographic idiom": "not only the further specification of ethnic and racial differences through the depiction of skin color, costume, and custom, but the location of bodies on a geometrically proportioned graticule which offers them for comparative viewing and potential categorization. Spatialized on hierarchical coordinates, ordered according to physical and cultural differences, bodies on maps become available as objects of protoscientific inquiry. That is, the abstraction of bodies from a landscape correlates with their geometric rationalization; and both accord with an increasing tendency to view bodies as potentially classifiable objects of an epistemology organized according to ethnographic and gendered imperatives." (57)

			Christianity -- men all part of the same race -- modulated early European attempts to differentiate themselves from alien people they encountered

			concept of race are "inchoate, unstable, and malleable" in early 17c -- "associated variously with lineage, genealogy, and civility, often referring to a tribe, people, or nation"; "ethnic" was used to describe "heathens" outside of Christiandom; "complexion" not referring to skin tone but to four elements that governed the humoral body

			"ethnographic idiom" does not refer to "emergence of full-fledge taxonomy, much less scientific racism with its focus on phenotypic skin color and its noxious justifications drawn from biology" (58) -- rather "the spatial plotting of cartographic bodies in the early seventeenth century depended on and fostered a delineation of difference not wholly circumscribed by notions of true and false religion, civility and barbarism. Other concepts, themselves qually unstable, infringe upon and complicate such binaries. Ideas of lineage bleed into notions of nation; ideas of nation evolve out of complexion and clime. Through such convergences, the specification of difference begins to take on an increasingly racialized cast." (58)

			example from Juan Huarte, "The Examination of Men's Wits" (1594) -- climatological explanations of men's souls morph into nationalist and racialized meanings

			"If phenotype is a concept based on visible characteristics, then what developed in the early modern period was not a phenotype based on the privileging of skin color, but a strategy of marking differences and similarities through a visual mimesis of nation, religion, lineage, costume, as well as skin color -- in a word, ''habit''." (59)

			voyage illustration -- "makes available a more detailed specification of native bodies and modes of dress and life on the interior of non-European continents" (61); "Presenting the native subject as a standard type, these voyage illustrations translate European colonialists' experiences of human diversity into an orderly, systematizing uniformity, while constructing a rationalized measure that encourages classification and comparison." (64)

			Mercator, double-hemisphere map -- "the possibility of a new aesthetic format"

			"impulse to caption" gives way to "the logic of the grid" (76)

			beginnings of domestic heterosexuality and the bourgeois household

			"Patterns of civility and domestic heterosexuality simultaneously create and differentiate the four corners of the world." (78)

			connection between ruler's body and land in Tudor and Stuart portraits' but by the end of 17c, "the analogy between body, nation, and land increasingly is appropriated by and reformulated on maps."

			later, "the visual depiction of bodily and behavioral habits presents heterosexual coupling as holding sway over national, ethnic, and religious difference" (80)

			no longer map as theater but as index, rationalized cartography of nations

			"Extricated from their native homes and reassembled according to a geometric logic, these bodies of the world are plotted as if on a coordinate space of parallels and meridians. In accord with the genre of travel narration, they have displaced topography and become themselves terrain to be charted. And despite their varied ethnic costumes, they are joined togehter by the imagined affinity of their affective and erotic haibts, the custom of heterosexual coupling. Indeed, the marital union here signifies the force linking and homogenizing nations, with companionate dyads seemingly offered as the harmonious resolution to the threat of ethnic, racial, and national difference. Through the repetition of erotic sameness, the naturalness of the heterosexual monogramy is enforced at the same time that its cultural specificity is erased. As a global erotic normativity literally is installed by the deployment of images from maps, national identity and heterosexual marriage are shown to go hand in hand." (82)

			"The new geography and the new ethnography thus mirror one another in their attempts to spatially plot, and thereby render more precise knowledges of, bodies in space. What emerges from the historical implementation of th egrid is the possibility of a representative conceptual model, both geographic and somatic, which implicitly confers a concept of the normative by exploiting the exhibition of alterity." (83)

			"As racial difference threatens to fragment and ramify the globe, and class status demarcates ever more precisely local economies (even as those economies become increasingly mobile), the combined forces of normative gender relations and erotic practices function to glue the globe together." -- like Noah's ark (83)

			"Just as the instability of the gender binary fosters a disavowal of diverse erotic practices, so too the instability of racial divisions enables a disavowal of interracial sexuality. The naturalization of heterosexuality and the unnaturalness of miscegenation emerge simultaneously, as two sides of the same global body. Thus, the production of two ways of construction race: the ethnographic, which depends on the notion of habit, and the biological, which depends on the concept of reproduction. On 17c maps, we can begin to glimpse these two modes of construction articulating themselves in terms of one another. It is almost as if domestic heterosexuality serves as an enabling condition of modern racialization, while race gives order and support to domestic heterosexuality." (84)

			important -- "''every'' individual was submitted to the logic of the grid"; "no master key for unlocking the grid's terms of intelligibility. Rather, in the rationalization of the body that maps helped to instantiate, the ongoing plotting of gradated ''degrees of difference'' authorizes each body's subjection to universalizing norms." (85)

Wtrettien: Created page with "Erickson, Peter and Clark Hulse, eds. ''Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England.'' Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,..."

2016-08-23T16:09:55Z

Created page with "Erickson, Peter and Clark Hulse, eds. ''Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England.'' Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,..."

New page

Erickson, Peter and Clark Hulse, eds. ''Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England.'' Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

== Valerie Traub, Mapping the Global Body (44-) ==

"Race, for instance, seems not to have existed in the sixteenth century as a stable category of biological difference, but only as one concept among parallel an overlapping concerns of lineage, civility, religion, and nation. Rather than relying on the phenotypic characteristics -- skin color, bodily structure -- promoted as the basis of race in modern science, concepts of race in the early modern period drew from various, albeit exorcized, notions of social allegiance and geographical affiliation. Gender appears to have been conceived, at least within the influential discourses of medicine, science, and theology, as a hierarchical manifestation of a normatively male bodily form. Men and women were not viewed as two opposite sexes, with incommensurate natures. Rather, they were thought to exist on a hierarchical continuum, differentiated by their relative moral capacities and humoral balances, with men being more perfect, more rational, hotter, and more active than women." (44)

Erickson and Hulse 2000 - Revision history

Wtrettien: /* Valerie Traub, Mapping the Global Body (44-) */

Wtrettien: Created page with "Erickson, Peter and Clark Hulse, eds. ''Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England.'' Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,..."