The Savage Hits Back

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First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Colour, Art and Empire explores the entanglements of visual culture, enchanted technologies, waste, revolution, resistance and otherness. The materiality of colour offers a critical and timely force-field for approaching afresh debates on colonialism. This book analyses the formation of colour and politics as qualitative overspill. Colour can be viewed both as central and supplemental to early photography, the totem, alchemy, tantra and mysticism. From the eighteenth-century Austrian Empress Maria Theresa to Rabindranath Tagore and Gandhi, to 1970s Bollywood, colour makes us adjust our take on the politics of the human sensorium as defamiliarising and disorienting. The four chapters conjecture how European, Indian and Papua New Guinean artists, writers, scientists, activists, anthropologists or their subjects sought to negotiate the highly problematic stasis of colour in the repainting of modernity. Specifically, the thesis of this book traces Europeans' admiration and emulation of what they termed 'Indian colour' to its gradual denigration and the emergence of a 'space of exception'. This space of exception pitted industrial colours against the colonial desire for a massive workforce whose slave-like exploitation ignited riots against the production of pigments - most notably indigo. Feared or derided, the figure of the vernacular dyer constituted a force capable of dismantling the imperial machinations of colour. Colour thus wreaks havoc with Western expectations of biological determinism, objectivity and eugenics. Beyond the cracks of such discursive practice, colour becomes a sentient and nomadic retort to be pitted against a perceived colonial hegemony. The ideological reinvention of colour as a resource for independence struggles make it fundamental to multivalent genealogies of artistic and political action and their relevance to the present.

This is a brilliant history of anthropology from its origins in 19th century Europe to the present day. Underlying this and closely connected to this meta-narrative is the story of European settlement and colonialization of Australia and the distressing history of Australian official policy towards the Australian aboriginal population (other colonial enterprises are also examined; for instance, the book incorporates a discussion of the late 19th century development of American cultural anthropology and its relation to the European settlement of North America). He shows how anthropological theory emerged from the political and intellectual culture of Victorian England (and to a lesser extent Germany and the United States) and examines its relationship to science, particularly evolutionary science.