Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-x4r87 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-28T16:50:35.099Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The (Mis)Representation of Reality: ‘Knowledge’ and Image-Making in Glass Lantern Slides of China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 December 2020

AMY MATHEWSON
AMY MATHEWSON*
Affiliation:
School of Oriental and African Studiesam134@soas.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The Royal Asiatic Society in London houses a collection of magic lantern slides of China dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By investigating a selection of lantern slides, this article explores their epistemological nature and their wider relations to socio-cultural and political systems of power. These lantern slides highlight the complexity of our ways of seeing and representing that are embedded into particular historical and ideological systems in which meaning is both shaped and negotiated. This article argues that images are powerful conduits in disseminating and, if unchallenged, maintaining particular notions and ideas.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , April 2021 , pp. 303 - 319
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ankersmit, Frank. Sublime Historical Experience. (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2005).Google Scholar
Auerback, Jeffrey A. The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display. (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1999).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. (London, British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972).Google Scholar
Bickers, Robert. The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832–1914. (London, Allen Lane, 2011).Google Scholar
“Boxer Rebellion” tin toy, Lehmann's Toy Collection online: https://lehmanntoycollection.com/?s=boxer+Rebellion. Accessed 13 August 2019.Google Scholar
Brook, Timothy, Blue, Gregory, Bourgon, Jérôme. Death by a Thousand Cuts. (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2008).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chang, Elizabeth Hope. Britain's Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain. (Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 2010).Google Scholar
Cheang, Sarah. “Selling China: Class, Gender and Orientalism at the Department Store” Journal of Design History, Vol.20, No.1 (Spring 2007), pp. 1–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chen, Shih-Wen. Representations of China in British Children's Fiction, 1851–1911. (Burlington, Ashgate, 2013).Google Scholar
Cody, Jeffrey W. and Terpak, Frances. “Through A Foreign Glass: The Art and Science of Photography in Late Qing China” Brush & Shutter: Early Photography in China (eds) Cody, Jeffrey W. and Terpak, Frances, (Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 2011), pp. 33–68.Google Scholar
Crangle, Richard. Personal Correspondence. 1–6 August 2019.Google Scholar
Dunn, Nathan and Langdon, William B. “Ten Thousand Chinese Things”: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Chinese. (London, 1843).Google Scholar
Fraser, Sarah E. “The Face of China: Photography's Role in Shaping Image, 1860–1920” Getty Research Journal, No. 2 (2010), pp. 39–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frayling, Christopher. The Yellow Peril: Dr. Fu Manchu & The Rise of Chinaphobia. (London, 2014).Google Scholar
Harris, David. Of Battle and Beauty: Felice Beato's Photographs of China. (California, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1999).Google Scholar
Hayes, Emily. “Geographical Projections” on The Royal Geographical Society, online: www.rgs.org/about/our-collections/collaborative-research-on-the-collections/geographical-projections. Accessed 13 August 2019.Google Scholar
Hevia, James L. Cherishing Men From Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793. (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1995).Google Scholar
Hevia, James L. English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China. (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hevia, James L. “The Photography Complex: Exposing Boxer-Era China (1900–1901), Making Civilization” in Photographies East: The Camera and Its Histories in East and Southeast Asia, (ed.) Morris, Rosalind C.. (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2009).Google Scholar
Historical Photographs of China. University of Bristol, 2019. www.hpcbristol.net. Accessed 13 August 2019.Google Scholar
Humphries, Steve. Victorian Britain Through the Magic Lantern. (London, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1989).Google Scholar
Johnson, Ryan. “European Cloth and ‘Tropical’ Skin: Clothing Material and British Ideas of Health and Hygiene in Tropical Climates”, in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Fall (2009), pp. 530–560.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
“Lantern History” on The Magic Lantern Society, online: www.magiclantern.org.uk/history. Accessed 13 August 2019.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno. ‘Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together,’ in Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present (ed.) Kuklick, H. Vol. 6 (1986), pp. 1–40.Google Scholar
Pagani, Catherine. “Objects and the Press: Images of China in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” Imperial Co-Histories (ed) Codell, Julie F., (Madison, N.J.and London, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), pp. 147–166.Google Scholar
Rappaport, Erika. A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2017).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rauch, Alan. Useful Knowledge: The Victorians, Morality, and the March of Intellect. (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rose, Gillian. “On the Need to Ask How, Exactly, Is Geography ‘Visual’? Antipode 35 (2003), pp. 212–221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ryan, James R. Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire. (London, Reaktion Books, Ltd., 1997).Google Scholar
Said, Edward. Orientalism. (New York, Vintage Books, 1979).Google Scholar
Samuel, Raphael. Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture. (London and New York: Verso, 2012).Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978).Google Scholar
Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays of Photographies and Histories, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Taking of Canton” by Bommier & Jannin (1858) Plate 12, in Brush and Shutter: Early Photography in China (eds) Jeffrey W. Cody & Frances Terpak. Los Angeles, USA: Getty Research Institute, 2011, p. 132.Google Scholar
The Royal Asiatic Society, “General Meeting, 10th February, 1983, President in the chair” Meetings and Lectures at the Society, pp. 368–369.Google Scholar
Thiriez, Régine. “William Saunders, Photographer of Shanghai Customs” in Visual Resources 26:3 (2010), pp. 304–319.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thorington, J. Monroe. Mont Blanc Sideshow: the Life and Times of Albert Smith. (Philadelphia, The John C. Winston Company, 1934).Google Scholar
Walker, Kenneth. “Obituary: Joseph F. Ford, CMG, OBE” Asian Affairs, 25:1 (1994), p. 125.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Witchard, Anne Veronica. Thomas Burke's Dark ’Chinoiserie’: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown. (Farnham, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009).Google Scholar