Alan Paton's sublime: Race, landscape and the transcendence of the liberal imagination

Abstract

Paton's Sublime: Race, Landscape and the transcendence of the Liberal Imagination Hermann Wittenberg, University of the Western Cape "The ill effects of black" on the imagination While theories of the sublime have been used to reexamine phenomena as divergent as sado-masochism, tourism and hypermedia computer technology, surprisingly little https://repository.uwc.ac.za/

Seeing and Doing Conservation Differently

“…While these conditions gave birth to Western conceptions of wilderness some commentators have suggested that the concept of the “sublime” 2 provided much of the conceptual basis of imperial discourses toward nature in Africa (Wittenberg, 2004), where much of the tension between the enactment of wilderness and people has occurred over the past 200 years. This asserts that the “gaze” from the North selectively essentialized African landscapes (using keystones components such as charismatic mega-fauna) as sublime (understood as a powerful, majestic, almost fearful aesthetic experience; Ivanhoe, 2008).…”

“… 2. Although “the sublime” has proved to be a complex and mobile concept (Dickinson, 2007), some postcolonial writers have seen its colonial conception as a form of stability or closure that attempts to establish rational order over dark, immense, and threatening experiences. So in this view, landscapes on the frontier were not only exotic, dangerous, and wild but also represented racial difference and the threatening dangers of colonial otherness (Wittenberg, 2004). …”