Positional note
I am a white, German, able-bodied cis-woman doing a PhD at a university in the South of Europe with the experience of growing up in a working-class milieu. In my work, I commit to the study of visual cultural, critical historiography in education and post-colonial, decolonial and feminist theory. I am particularly invested in images and imaginaries of 'nature' and the ways they are producing a hegemonic relations with the world and its beings.
The constitution of the white subject depends on the constitution of a non-white subject (Morrison, 1992,; Dyer, 1997). Bewell argues, that the European ‘natures’ - in his case study particularly English ‘nature’ - were constructed and negotiated through a similar reflexive movement, i.e. through the contact with foreign, exoticised ‘natures’ local ‘natures’ became articulated. Visual and material culture as well as travel literatures from the colonies flooded into Europe, shaping significantly the imaginaries and discursive formations of ‘natures’ of its populations (Bewell, 2004, p. 14). What was close became defined by what was placed far and outside of that ‘closeness’ (Bewell, 2004, p. 6).
Both Pratt and Mirzoeff emphasize how the notion of the ‘primitive’ was not only constructed on a temporal axis but also along a spatial axis. Evolution of humanity was considered to take place in real time, where the ‘primitive’ were distanced from the civilised only by space (Mirzoeff, 2011, p. 15).
Pratt argues that: “European peasantry came to appear only somewhat less primitive than the inhabitants of the Amazon. Likewise, the system of nature overwrote local and peasant ways of knowing within Europe just as it did local indigenous ones abroad” (Pratt, 1992, p. 35).
The category of race is key to make sense of the spatial axis of ‘primitiveness’ that is invoked in the juxtaposition of images of European, peripheral ways of relating to the more-than-human world and images of colonial tropes such as the jungle mobilizing it as a space of fascination and danger (Pratt, 1992, p. 20).