Roger Benjamin Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880-1930 - Book Review

This issue brings up a central question of methodology. As Benjamin describes it, "Although not in itself a contribution to Theory, this book is built on my responses to the intellectual climate of postcolonial theory" (p. 2), naming in particular the works of Frantz Fanon, Said, and Homi Bhabha. Yet, as we have already seen, Benjamin's occasional references to the languages of postcolonial theory and cultural studies have the force of normalizing them. That is, they are folded into the kit along with more traditional tools of art history in a way that obscures their original objective toward much more fundamental discursive transformation, in which concerns both aesthetic and political could be seen as mutually informing, historicized, and dependent. (3) While it is hardly the author's main goal to interrelate the two, it is still something of a lost opportunity, for surely one of the central problems for understanding artistic exoticism today is how to outline a properly art historical approach to this particular subject matter that can deal adequately with politics, aesthetics, and their relation to each other. What is (or could be) a truly postcolonial art history?

Benjamin's own statement of his model seems to give a dominant role to the inspiration of Nicholas Thomas, whom he approvingly cites at length. (4) Indeed, Benjamin's varied lineup of topics and assemblage of artists appear to be most appropriate for a model such as Thomas's. Thomas emphasizes the heterogeneity of different colonial "projects," seeing different times and places as sites of varying interests, capabilities, and instrumentalities utilized in the interaction of differing groups of colonizers and colonized. As Benjamin maintains, clearly with Thomas in mind, "the best models for analyzing [colonial systems] stress precisely the endless mutual inflection of participants, even in situations of unequal power" (p. 5). But almost immediately, while elaborating his own findings, Benjamin rather surprisingly veers away from the position he has just endorsed, again suggesting to the reader a conflict and even contradiction in his own stance.

Benjamin describes his efforts as concentrated along two axes. He first discusses what he calls the institutional approach: dealing with museums, expositions, travel stipends, and so on. In this, he refers not to Thomas's model at all, but rather to the earlier one of Said:

   this emphasis on institutions allows the
   first art-historical test of a provocative part
   of Said's thesis, his Foucauldian insight
   that the links between colonial governance
   and aesthetic production were
   more than just benign and circumstantial,
   that they were constitutive in fundamental
   ways. My research corroborates this part of
   Said's thesis. (p. 5)

Benjamin does not here elaborate on what portion of Said's work he considers himself the first to examine, nor does he even mention the past two decades of art historical writing inspired by Said. (5) As we shall see, though, this is a crucial question, on which Benjamin has indeed taken a position. Even in what Benjamin here claims, however, to endorse Thomas while corroborating Said, one again senses a puzzling slippage. Thomas, after all, carefully distinguishes his conception from that of Said, and in fact addresses himself directly against Said's Foucauldian inflection. (6) Is Benjamin conflating the two models? Attempting to show that they have hidden affinities? It is not clear.