Jean-François Staszak

Primitivism and the other. History of art and cultural geography

The article advocates an articulation of cultural geography and art history, and in this perspective focuses on the analysis of the primitivist movement and particularly on Gauguins work and personal itinerary. Primitivism introduced artefacts of ‘primitive’ people into the history of Western art and signalled a change in the relationship between the West and the ‘Other’ and ‘Elsewhere’. This reversal of values has a major geographical dimension. Primitivism manifests the contradiction-rife colonial ideology, but can also challenge colonization. Tourism, which is, in the case of Tahiti, directly linked to Gauguin and to his myth, inherited a lot from primitivism, in terms of hopes and ambiguities. Conversely, primitivism casts light on geographical features of these places, instituted as ‘Elsewheres‘ by the West, and visited, even transformed by painters, colonizers and tourists.

Geography before geography : pre-hellenistic meteors and climates

Ancient greek geography has been much studied both by hellenists and historians of sciences, especially by those interested in geography. Nevertheless, very few has been written about the pre-hellenistic period, i.e. the Aristolelian and pre-Aristotelian geography. Merely a bibliography about the Historia written by Herodotus is available, which is at the same time plentiful and very enlightening.

Performing race and gender: the exoticization of Josephine Baker and Anna May Wong

Josephine Baker and Anna May Wong are two exceptions to white hegemony in early show business. They became the first Afro-American and Chinese-American stars in the 1920s and reached international stardom in spite of their ethnicity but also because of it. Their careers and success were based on their exoticization. Baker and Wongs exoticism has much to do with ethnicity, but also with sex and gender. Their exotic dances on stage or on screen can be considered to be forms of erotic shows. This article shows how sex, gender, and race are entangled in their movies and burlesque shows. It also discusses the ways in which the agency and the audience of the performer should be taken into account, and analyzes how these performances were both rooted in Western imaginative geographies and connected to symbolic and material spaces.

Framing Coloniality: Exotic Photographs in Swiss Albums, Museums, and Public Spaces (1870s–2010s)

Abstract This article examines how displaying colonial photographs determines their meaning. Our study is based on a historical analysis of the social life of a photographic collection made by the Swiss traveler Alfred Bertrand (1856–1924), which was exhibited in different contexts. First, it was shown by the collector himself in his museum and at his lectures. Then, in 2007, it was exhibited in the Geneva Ethnography Museum. Finally, we discuss the problems of mounting an exhibition of the photographs, which we are planning to do in the Parc Bertrand. These three different framings give a colonial meaning (or not) to the photographs, through a series of ideological and curatorial agendas.

Book Reviews : Ancient natural history: histories of nature. By R. French. London, Routledge. 1994. xxii + 362 pp. £50.00, cloth. ISBN 0 415 08880 1

This book, by the Director of the unit for the history of medicine at Cambridge, is published as part of a series dedicated to the sciences in antiquity. ’The ways in which people in the ancient world thought about nature’ are here analysed, through the study of various texts by Ancient Greek, Roman, and Jewish authors. In Chapter 1 French shows that the Greek word for ’Nature’ ( physis) has not much to do with one of the meanings we today give to this term. Indeed, physis has never meant ’natural world’, understood as a collection of non-artificial liv-