• DOI:10.1057/9780230294769_2
• Corpus ID: 130907331

Beyond Imperial Eyes

@inproceedings{Lindsay2011BeyondIE,
  title={Beyond Imperial Eyes},
  author={Claire Frances Lindsay},
  year={2011}
}

• C. Lindsay
• Published 2011
• Art

The influence of Mary Louise Pratt’s 1992 study, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, has been far reaching. That Pratt was persuaded to update and expand her original book in a recently published second edition (2008) is indicative of its canonical status. That a number of the book’s key tenets and terms – such as the ‘contact zone’, ‘autoethnography’ and ‘anti-conquest’ – have been widely appropriated in anthropology, geography, history, philosophy, cultural and literary studies, further testifies to its authority. Nevertheless, while certain ideas articulated in Imperial Eyes have proved especially attractive to scholars of travel writing, some of its central propositions have been contested in other quarters: whether it be the particular interpretation of Alexander von Humboldt and more general ‘naturalization’ of the colonial traveller, the apparently ‘misplaced’ assertion of a Linnaean watershed, or the absolutist character of some of the book’s theoretical vocabulary. In addition to its recent re-edition and the broad dissemination of its distinctive terminology, therefore, the volume and breadth of such (re)interpretations are a further significant indication of the study’s impact.