UDTR — Radar mondial des droits de la Nature

Susie Protschky, Images of the tropics: Environment and visual culture in colonial Indonesia. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2011, 184 pp. [Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 270]. ISBN 9789067183780. Price: EUR 39.90.

Identification

Clé publique

doi:10.1163/22134379-12340013

Auteurs

Martijn Eickhofff

Année déclarée

2013

Langue déclarée

nl

Type source

book-review

Première détection

2026-11-09T19:16:09.617520+00:00

Dernière observation des métadonnées

2026-11-09T19:16:09.617520+00:00

Dernière vérification HTTP

Non effectuée

Institutions déclarées par la source

NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Résumé documentaire — langue originale

Academic studies on paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs made by artists in the Netherlands Indies often tend to regard these images simply as mirroring the colonial world or as framings of specifijic events, and reduce them as such to historical sources.Other publications focus on their origins and provenance or relate them to the biographies of particular artists or photographers involved, in other words, follow the art historical methods.Images of the tropics by Susie Protschky offfers an innovative analysis of the same corpus of images.The author studies representations of nature and landscape in colonial Indonesia made from the start of the nineteenth century until the end of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia.In the book she uses these images as a means to reconstruct how Europeans during this period understood the tropics and their own place there, by adopting, as the title of the book announces, the approach of visual culture studies.In consequence, the chosen time frame is much broader as she also has to include how earlier modes of representing Indonesian landscapes from the VOC era were integrated in nineteenth century depictions of the Dutch East Indies.Protschky's book builds strongly on Denis Cosgrove's notion of 'tropicality' in order to connect colonial representations of landscape with colonial mentalities, attitudes, and experiences.From the awareness of the fact that Europe possessed more than one concept of 'otherness', this notion aims to be both a variety and specifijication of the discourse of orientalism.In her use of the term, Protschky refers to such European notions of the tropics as a geographically distinct entity whose social and cultural forms were constrained and determined by the tropical uniqueness in climate and topography.Protschky argues that images of tropical landscapes should be regarded as essential parts of the social, political, and economic modes of Dutch imperialism.In the chronological order of the book, this argument is examined by means of two related questions.How are colonial claims for territorial and political sovereignty represented in colonial images of Indies landscapes of the fijirst half of the nineteenth century?And, why did the naturalistic and realistic style of painting peaceful tropical landscapes, developed in the

Identifiants

OPENALEX

W2053816969

DOI

10.1163/22134379-12340013

Repères documentaires

Famille documentaire

Doctrine

Types déclarés par les sources

book-review

Juridictions étudiées — sources explicites

ID

Entités naturelles mentionnées

Paysage · Territoire

Les mentions d’entités ne constituent pas une preuve de reconnaissance juridique. La juridiction étudiée est distincte du pays d’affiliation des auteurs.

Sources

OpenAlex · Document 1 · Document 2

• DOI · https://doi.org/10.1163/22134379-12340013
• OpenAlex · https://openalex.org/W2053816969

Statut documentaire

Pertinence à examiner

Bibliothèque

Cette identité n’est pas encore intégrée à la Bibliothèque juridique.