thoughts on Gikandi's article

Reading Gikandi’s article made me think of a painting we had studied in another module, “Slaves Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying” by Turner (http://www.artchive.com/artchive/T/turner/slave_ship.jpg.html). With reference to this title, the subject of the painting is supposed to be of the slaves drowning in the seas. However, against the grandeur of the sea that Turner had painted, the plight of the drowning African slaves appears almost insignificant. Hence, in the pretext of drawing attention to slavery, Turner appears to foreground and emphasise something else. This has even prompted Ruskin, an English critic to say that the painting depicted “the noblest sea that Turner ever painted… the noblest certainly ever painted by man’. While valorising an English painter’s achievements, Ruskin however only relegates the subject of the painting, the drowning of African slaves, to a brief footnote in his essay, similar to how the slaves occupy an insignificant and almost unnoticeable space in the painting. Here even though it may not have been Turner’s intention to slight the issue of slavery in his painting, Ruskin’s comment shows how the Other could be depicted in an image by his colonial master merely to promote the success and achievement of this very master even at the expense of erasing the history of the slave, the Other. Perhaps, this is where aesthetics converges with politics.

I think this is similar to what is said in Gikandi’s article that “the relation between the modern and the savage was defined by a dialectic of love and loathing, identity and difference” (458) and that the African body and artwork were things that “the modernists wanted to deconstruct and yet secure as the insignia of white, European, cultural achievement” (459).

Hence, in response to one of the questions posed under our course descriptions, “How does the “non-European” world then figure into Modernist texts and images”, I think (based on the Turner painting and the article by Gikandi) that the “non-European” world can be figured in Modernist images to further delineate the slave-master binary and to further define and identify the modern European masters with notions of power and dominance. Despite putting the Other at the forefront and claiming it as a subject, the modern European masters have merely sealed their positions as the one with the power to depict and represent.

I hope I haven’t made too far-fetched a link with Turner’s painting!

-Sarah