| At the end of the sixteenth century, nearly a hundred years after Columbus landed in the West Indies, a European artist for the first time focused his sustained visual attention on Native America. In July of 1585, the English painter John White arrived on Roanoke Island, off the coast of Virginia (present-day North Carolina), with an exploratory expedition under the patronage of Sir Walter Raleigh. As the official artist of the expedition, White created a remarkable collection of watercolor drawings depicting the villages, customs and physical appearance of the Algonquian Indians of the region. Through the eighteenth century, engraved reproductions of White's watercolors served as the visual prototype of the North American Indian, and today scholars continue to consult this collection as a valuable source of both ethnographic and historical knowledge.; Insofar as these ethnographic images have been the subject of interdisciplinary scholarship in the humanities, they have been loosely conceived as cultural “texts” and approached through the categories of myth, gender, and ideology. My own analysis, in contrast, attends to the importance of specific visual practices for the history of this collection. To understand its cultural significance, I argue, we must ewe the ways in which a knowledge-making enterprise responded to the constraints of particular visual media.; The dissertation is organized into four chapters, each of which is at once a localized historical episode and a paradigmatic case study in the production, dissemination, and reception of New World images. The chapters consider White's watercolors at their original moment of production in 1585, the first reproductive engravings by Theodor de Bry and his workshop in 1590, several borrowings from and adaptations of de Bry's work during the first half of the eighteenth century, and the first modern reproductions based directly on White's original watercolors, which appeared in Century Magazine during the 1880s. Uniting the chapters are two basic questions of American visual culture: what are the visual practices that have been involved in the production of New World knowledge, and how might an investigation of those practices contribute to a broader understanding of the ways in which America entered into Western consciousness?... |
