Inscribed Distances: Picturing Human Difference and Scientific Discovery Between Europe and Oceania, 1768-1822

Abstract/nInscribed Distances: Picturing Human Difference and Scientific Discovery/nBetween Europe and Oceania, 1768-1822/nBy/nKailani Polzak/nDoctor of Philosophy in the History of Art/nUniversity of California, Berkeley/nProfessor Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Chair/nThis dissertation examines the graphic and printed works created in relation to so-called “Voyages of Discovery” conducted by the British, French, and Russians in Oceania in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and how they were marshaled in arguments on the origins of human difference. Over three chapters, each dedicated to a specific voyage, I discuss how racial theorists and natural history draughtsmen attempted to make race visible, how they strove to replicate in pictures the perceived empirical authority of cartography, and how their many conceptual variables of race ultimately exceeded their pictorial formulae./nChapter One follows Captain Cook’s first voyage of 1768. It considers Sydney Parkinson's drawings of tattooed Maori men and the reproduction of these studies as engravings in the context of the intellectual debates regarding racial classification. The prints after Parkinson’s drawings, thoroughly replete with engraved lines meant to indicate skin tone, shadows, and tattooed marks were visually striking, but could not be reconciled conclusively with the complexion-oriented rubrics of late-eighteenth century notions of variety. Thus, the material limitations and conventions of printmaking affected how eighteenth-century Europeans interpreted their first engraved encounters with the Maori and bore important implications for the distribution of pictorial data./nChapter Two looks at representations of Aboriginal Australians by Nicholas-Martin Petit from the French expedition to Australia of 1800. The expedition was provided with two methodological memoirs on the observation of foreign people and this chapter traces Petit’s attempts to represent the physical and cultural features deemed important by these two texts furnished by the Society of the Observers of Man. In so doing, I uncover significant gaps between racial theories that require pictorial data and the actual practice of picturing race. Racialist studies of cranial contours were seemingly easier to reproduce in engraved prints, but proved less straightforward when Petit encountered Aboriginal Tasmanians who were wary of him and his project./nChapter Three focuses on Louis Choris’s depictions of Hawaiians made while traveling on the Russian vessel Rurik between 1815 and 1816. Choris’s book, Voyage Pittoresque Autour du Monde (published in 1822 by Didot in Paris), describes his travels on the Rurik and is generally conventional, but his chapter on Hawai’i stands out for its unusual focus on a particular individual: the Hawaiian king Kamehameha I. After examining several versions of Choris’s portrait of the monarch rendered in watercolor, lithograph, and aquatint, I turn to the artist’s discussion of race. While Choris avoids the question of Kamehameha’s race, his account of the women and laborers in Hawai’i is more explicitly occupied with race and beauty--an important reminder that racial difference cannot be severed from notions of class and gender./nThe pictures produced on these voyages manifest encounters between differing ideologies and aesthetics. Moreover, they do not merely replicate European racialist theories, but also reveal uncertainties and shifts in the visual epistemologies of race. Thus, I contend that race is not something simply seen, but a way of seeing that has been, and continues to be, constituted in pictures.

Advisor: Grigsby, Darcy G.