Envisaging ‘colonial modernity’: The 1914 Semarang International Colonial Exhibition

According to an advertisement in the British newspaper The Independent, the Semarang International Colonial Exhibition, running 13th August to 15th November 1914, was designed 'to give a comprehensive picture of the Dutch Indies in their present prosperous condition.'[1] Deliberately coinciding with the centenary anniversary of the post-Napoleon return of the East Indies to Dutch rule,...

Théodore Géricault’s ‘Portraits of the Insane’ and the health of the French body politic

In Robert Edge Pine’s 1771 engraving Madness, the subject confronts the viewer with wide set, unfocussed eyes which are not fully aligned. Her hair is dishevelled by twigs and the chains used to restrain her portray her as an uncivilised subject. Her bare shoulder and exposed breast allude to the established discourse of the madness of...

The continued dominance of scopophilic pleasure in contemporary ‘feminist’ film industry

Sofia Coppola’s recently released reinterpretation of Thomas Culllinan’s 1966 book and Clint Eastwood’s 1971 film, The Beguiled (2017), has been praised as a feminist statement on the repression and claustrophobia of life in the Confederate South. Subverting the male fantasy of female care and attention, yet denying that the film centres on the Freudian ‘basic...