'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Lille, London, the art of global conquest

I'm in Lille, in northern France, where I'm teaching a two-week course on Transitional Justice at the city's Institut des Etudes Politiques (Sciences-Po). It seems like hard work but the students all seem strongly engaged in the topic, which is good.

And I've been running around quite a bit over the past couple of weeks... London., Wales, Dorset, and now Lille. Where Bill and I are in an apartment in the middle of a sometimes unnervingly Corbusieresque cityscape... We look out of the windows at extensive, sloping roofscapes clad in metal, boxy apartment blocks clad in metal... a whole swathe of the view brutally clad in the same, with beyond it some hints of an older city and beyond that again, trees, countryside.

However, the city also has an incredibly efficient metro system: sprightly, two-car trains that zip around town with great frequency and rapidity. Only after a day or two did I discover they are completely driverless. In mounting one, the rider puts herself at the mercy of a machine, and becomes perhaps also a part of that machine herself.

H'mmm.

Anyway, before leaving London, I did write nearly the whole of a post for JWN about some exhibits I saw in London. Just now, I tried to finish that post up. So even though there's been a delay of some days in posting it, let me put it in here:

Europe's conquest of the world: Some reflections in art

I have now been here in London for nearly a month, and I've had a number of opportunities to wander around this great city and see some of the many fine exhibitions and museums within it.

One of the most arresting art galleries was the National Portrait Gallery, where by chance I walked into the small room containing this collection of small-ish black and white photographs titled Blair at War: Photographs by Nick Danziger.  Basically, sometime in early 2003 as the invasion of Iraq drew closer, someone in Tony Blair's entourage (Tony himself, perhaps?) decided that what the PM needed was a small reportorial team to chronicle these approaching days of "Churchillian" decisiveness...  And thus, from mid-March to mid-April of that year, as the blurb for the exhibit puts it, "photojournalist Nick Danziger and Times Literary Supplement editor Peter Stothard were given thirty days of unprecedented access to the Prime Minister and his closest aides."

Unprecedented, perhaps-- but pretty certainly not "total" access.  Still, what we do see in these two dozen or so stills is intriguing enough: mainly, Blair trying desperately hard to look "Churchillian" as he pregressively realizes that a lot of his own Labour backbenchers are against the war... his Foreign Secretary Robin Cook will resign... most European leaders will be against the war, etc.

I found the first image-- and its caption-- particularly tragic.  Blair is shown in a distant, sunny corner of his "den" in Number 10 Downing Street (and also, artfully reflected in a large wall mirror there.)  He is on the phone-- to Yasser Arafat, as it happens.  And in the caption, Stothard recalls the Blair end of this conversation.  It is March 14, 3:30 p.m. London times, and Blair is saying,

I'm assuming that the "this" in question was the very imminent invasion of Iraq, in which Blair was so heavily involved along with his friend and master, George W. Bush.

Did Arafat really believe at the time that the point of the war was "precisely to end the suffering of the Palestinian people"?

Did Blair?

... Anyway, equally as interesting as looking at the photos themselves, there in that small, enclosed room, was watching the faces and close attentiveness of the dozen or so visitors who at any one time were closely examining the images and their captions.  These people seemed mainly to be Brits.  They were quiet and thoughtful as they peered at each image...  There, four years into the war in question...  I wish I'd whipped out my notebook and interviewed some of them as they left.

So much for the vanity of Tony Blair, huh?  I imagine he thought at the time that the photos would show him leading Britain at another of its "finest hours"....

Instead of which-- ?

... Well, I had found that room only by happenstance.  What I'd really gone to the NPG to look at was this exhibit, titled Between Worlds: Voyagers to Britain 1700-1850.  Note the painstakingly chosen word "voyagers" there.  I guess they couldn't use the word "visitors" because that would imply that the individuals in question had all come to London voluntarily, wouldn't it?

It's an interesting exhibit, because it shows images of 14 distinctly non-European individuals who visited Britain in that period... and in most cases, those individuals had been the first representatives of their respective peoples to do so.

The exhibit, which runs through June 17, is prefaced by a large oil portrait of Michael Alphonsus Shen Fu-Tsung, 'The Chinese Convert', painted in 1687.  We are told that Shen had been converted to Catholicism by the Jesuits; then he came and spent some years in England where he helped to catalogue some of the Chinese-language materials in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.  (So the Bod had just scooped up bunches of such manuscripts over preceding years without even being aware of what they had??  Interesting.)

The oldest portraits in the exhibit itself are those of the "Four Indian Kings"-- political leaders from four portions of the Iroquois Federation who in 1710 came to London, as the printed brochure said, "to forge a lasting military and political alliance with the British." 

The four men are named on that web-page as:


The printed brochure states,


Along with the formal oil portraits, the exhibit includes some of the cheap, and very derogatory and racist representations of these four leaders.

I have to say that as a naturalized US citizen of British origin I found these paintings tragic to look at and reflect on.  These four men were sent to London by their peoples to conclude an honorable alliance with the British sovereign... And then, what did the British do to their people over the decades that followed?

I had a similar reaction, today, to the watercolors of the long-house inhabitants in late 16th-century "Virginia" (present-day, North Carolina) that settler-artist John White painted, that are on show at the British Museum, also until June 17.  One of these paintings may be an actual portrait  of the local leader, Wingina, who was courted by the small band of British settlers whom White had helped to bring to this area..  But we are told that when the settlers' food ran out and the local indigenes, who up till then had been helping to feed them, refused to carry on doing so, the settlers summarily chopped off Wininga's head.. For my part, I thought this exhibit had an inappropriately hagiograpohic view of the settlers and their project; and gave far too little acknowledgement of the effects that British settlement had over the decades that followed on the lives of the Indian subjects of White's paintings.

In the London Review of Books, Peter Campbell suggested, about White's paintings, that "what was made as a record was used as advertising"-- presumably, for the settler-inmplanting project itself.  However, since White was also, himself, an organizer and investor in the settlement project, we might surely with equal validity conclude that the paintings were planned from the outset to be both a "record" and part of an advertising campaign for this project.

Irrespective of this distinctly tainted aspect of the paintings, they do still provide a poignant evocation of individual Indians, small family groups of Indians, important occasions in the life of the Indian community, and also-- in near-ethnographic clarity-- the layout of a couple of their very well-ordered villages.

... Well, back once more to the "Between Worlds" exhibit at the Portrait Gallery, it did also include one other Native American, namely Joseph Brant (1742-1807), or Thayendanegea to use his Mohawk name. The NPG website describes him as,

This website description also says this:

Surely though, that wording implies that everyone in America at the time thought of him as "the monster Brant"-- whereas it  certainly seems from the content of the text that follows that it was only among the European settlers in America that he was thought of in those terms, while the native Americans at the time (and perhaps since) have had a very diufferent array of views about him...  So why should the website say "In America he was known as 'the monster Brant'" in this way that implies that it was only the views of the settlers that counted at all?

Ah well, the people who put on this exhibit indulged in some other infelicitous wordings, as well.  As here, when they write about "a much-performed play in which a noble African prince was ... wrongly sold into slavery."  As if there was a right way for people to be sold into slavery??

Anyway, the other "exotic" (i.e. non-European) "voyagers" to Britain who are featured in the show include:

Oh great. "Let's you and him fight", indeed.

* Sara Baartman, a Khoisan woman from South Africa, who was transported from her native land-- where she had been working for a Dutch farmer and thereby  acquired that Dutch name.  (Her Khoisan name is unknown.)  In 1810, Baartman was transported from South Africa to England where she was put on show, nearly naked, and mocked because many English people judged her physical form to be so "foreign".  Wikipedia tells us that "Her exhibitors permitted visitors to touch her large buttocks for extra payment.  In addition, she had a sinus pudoris, otherwise known as the 'tablier', 'curtain of shame', or 'apron', all names for the elongated labia of some Khoisan. It should be noted, however, that some find the term 'sinus pudoris' to be racist because it refers only to the labia of Khoi-San woman when, in reality, all labia vary in size and shape to some degree."

Wikipedia also tells us that,

Her exhibition in London created a scandal and an abolitionist benevolent society (equivalent to a charity or pressure group) called the African Association petitioned for her release... She later traveled to Napoleonic Paris where an animal trainer exhibited her under more pressured conditions for fifteen months. French anatomist Georges Cuvier and French naturalists visited her and she was the subject of several scientific paintings at the Jardin du Roy.

Baartman died December 29, 1815 of an inflammatory ailment, possibly smallpox. An autopsy was conducted and the findings published by French anatomist Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville in 1816 and by Cuvier in the Memoires du Museum d'Histoire Naturelle in 1817. Cuvier notes in his monograph that Baartman was an intelligent woman who had an excellent memory and spoke Dutch fluently. Her skeleton, preserved genitals and brain were placed on display in Paris Musée de l'Homme until 1974.

.. There were a handful of other subjects included in the exhibit, too.  Altogether, I found it extremely disturbing.

Notably more uplifting was "Abolition Trail" that the NPG had created, which was basically just a guided tour around many parts of the gallery's permanent exhibition, which takes you to the portraits of people who were active in the movement to abolish the slave trade back in the later 18th and early 19th centuries.  Among the significant pictures included are this picture of the big Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in 1841, and this one, of the anti-slavery campaigner Hannah More.  What I liked particularly about More's painting is that in the caption there in the gallery it said something like, "Mrs More expressed impatience with the whole process of 'sitting' for the portrait, saying it was taking up too much her time."  I concur!

Anyway, here's a suggestion for a follow-on exhibit at the gallery: a "Slaveowners' and slavetraders' trail" that would highlight all the portraits the gallery holds that are of people who engaged directly  in or profited from their engagement in the slave trade...  Oops, that might end up being a large proportion of the various royals, grandees, and "captains of trade of industry" whose portraits hang there.