*Note Special Time*
"Figuring Racial Difference in Early Nineteenth-Century France"
Stephanie O'Rourke (St Andrews)
Response: Suman Seth (Cornell)
As framing for the piece, Stephanie says:
This text is the fourth and final chapter of my current book manuscript. This book argues that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, picturing landscape functioned as the primary means through which European artists grappled with an enormous transformation in how humans relate to the natural world, characterized by the management and extraction of “natural resources” on an unprecedented scale and within a global network. This entailed, among other things, employing novel systems for measuring, analyzing, and manipulating natural phenomena across vast distances. The challenge for artists during this period lay in creating pictorial modes that could be commensurate with such procedures. Multi-national in its scope, this book explores how European landscapes pictured the natural environment in relation to specific extractive industries such as mining and timber harvesting as well as emerging concepts about race, climate, and waste operative within the continent and its colonial networks.
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