Short Essay title: To what extent has the study of visual culture enriched our understanding of \u2018imperial history\u2019?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As I\u2019ve previously mentioned on these blogs, whilst I have never been particularly artistic, \u2018art\u2019 or \u2018visual culture\u2019 have always fascinated me as a window to how a certain time or place would have\u00a0looked<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0felt\u00a0<\/em>like. In spite of this I have always been more comfortable with words. When presented with the option between \u2018a project\u2019 and an essay, I will hands down pick the essay every time. Furthermore \u2013 somewhat hypocritically \u2013 in the hierarchy of primary source material in my head, I would always place a textual source \u2018above\u2019 a visual source. Up until now, visual sources have only ever served to illustrate to me as evidence, a point raised by a textual source. So, before undertaking this Short Essay assignment, I found myself in this curious position where I was about to examine mostly visual sources for my Miss World project and yet still regarded them as accessories to textual sources.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n And apparently I\u2019m not alone. Edward Said, who has done so much to inspire the analysis of visual regimes as part of the postcolonial project, once said he found himself \u201csomewhat tongue-tied\u201d when he had to talk about the realm of the visual.[1]<\/a>\u00a0Even looking back at my St Andrew\u2019s historical career, I struggled to remember the few times when we were asked to\u00a0analyse\u00a0visual materials as primary sources. Why was this the case?\u00a0If indeed the study of history is meant to help us understand the present, then how is it we have largely neglected this central part of our everyday lives?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n The more I researched for this essay, the more it became shockingly clear how visual our culture really is. According to David Ciarlo, \u201cadvertisements were seen by far more Germans than any colonialist\u2019s talk on tropical hygiene or any museum\u2019s painstaking ethnographic construction\u201d.[2]<\/a> This made me consider, for example, the quantity of advertisements I see on a daily basis; how many movies I\u2019d seen this year; how often I used Google Maps; even how often I see the Queen\u2019s face on a coin. Although I realise that we now live in a world where we are constantly surrounded by visual media, what really struck me was how frequent these encounters were and how little attention we pay to them. Studying visual culture opens us up to analysing new cross-sections of society, which may have previously been ignored and it is in analysing what <\/em>these people saw that we might be able to discern how <\/em>they saw.[3]<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n However, the difficulty still lies in bridging these two together \u2013 the source and ones interpretation of it. Scholars are still grappling with the epistemological challenges of a \u2018linguistic turn\u2019 that called into question the meaning of words and language, so to challenge the limitations of images is going to raise even more questions than it answers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Furthermore from my reading, if one thing is clear it is that we cannot apply the same tools of textual analysis to examine visual sources. Whilst scholars debated the methods of analysis themselves, they were all in agreement that the power of the visual lies in its disorder – that images capture something words can’t. It is precisely in the disorder of the visual that we are required to ask whether there are in fact elements of human experience that we cannot express in words. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It is in dealing with this existential crisis that I began to take visual culture more seriously and realised the monumental task that I have in front of me. I’ve never studied art history so I’m not too sure what they would think of my amateur visual analysis techniques or my infringement into ‘their’ discipline, especially if I’m likely to consciously or unconsciously borrow from my textual analysis techniques. I am treading on very unfamiliar terrain when I look at video reels and photographs and if Edward Said isn\u2019t really sure what to do here, how on earth am I supposed to? <\/p>\n\n\n\n [1]<\/a> Mitchell, W.J.T, \u2018The Panic of the Visual: A Conversation with Edward W. Said\u201d in Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power,<\/em> ed. Bov\u00e9 A. Paul (Durham, 2000), p. 31. <\/p>\n\n\n\n