Creole Europe: The Reflection of a Reflection

‘Enchanted Traps?’ The Historiography of Art and Colonialism in Eighteenth‐century India

“…In his article ‘Creole Europe: Reflection of a Reflection’, Christopher Pinney provides an intriguing interpretation of Bernard Smith’s first book Place, Taste and Tradition (initially published in 1945) where Smith argues that neo‐classicism was not only curiously accompanied but also informed by imperial expansion to such an extent that 18th‐century European art was ‘the reflection of a reflection’ (Smith, 1945:16). Pinney pushes this further to assert that whilst we have come to accept this enunciation as a process of hybridization we have yet to acknowledge that ‘this colonial enunciation is a double splitting of an originary Europe that is itself already creolized or hybridized’ (Pinney, 2003:123–6). He suggests that Europe is never a self‐present unity and that other places and times lurk as a shadowy presence in British art.…”

“…Partially informed by Latour, Pinney points out Europe is creole at so many levels. His own mixed method draws attention to the transhuman and sensuous power of artworks which have unpredictable forms of agency (Pinney, 2003).…”

“…those complex trajectories which enable their passage from one regime of value to the next, or ‘are there other forms of animism in imperial objects’ at stake (Mitchell, 2005:146)? Several scholars have traced the movement, translation and activation of art objects through and beyond colonial space in Britain, the Pacific and India (Davis, 1997; Pinney, 2003; Thomas, 1991). This adaptation and expansion of Appadurai’s ‘methodological fetishism’ shows how objects are the agents of history (Appadurai, 1986:15).…”

Anthropology and Heritage Regimes

“…Yet, the purification of the ancient past into a modern imagined community rested on several paradoxes. As in Pinney's (2002) account of Creole Europe or in Thomas's (1999) book Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture, an exploration of understandings of Empire and the indigenous in Australian and New Zealand art and craft, the incorporation of the ancient past into the present or of indigenous flora into modernist iconography is best understood as a "reflection of a reflection" (Pinney 2002). Butler's (2007) exploration of the development of different models of heritage around the Mouseion and Library in Alexandria starts with the observation that "Alexandria's wider foundational values-its cosmopolitanism, it universalism, and its humanism-have been essentialized as core heritage values and the motivations behind modernity's ongoing 'heritage crusades'" (p. 18).…”

In search of pearlescence: Pearls, empire and obsolescence in South Asia

“…This value is inextricably entangled with histories of colonialism. Aside from their singularity and lustre, pearls can be thought of in terms of what Christopher Pinney (2002) has termed 'the xeno-figure'. The xeno-figure, as I shall explain below, encompasses the mysterious, sometimes threatening alter agency of exotic things in relation to empire.…”