John White and the Invention of Anthropology: Landscape, Ethnography, and Situating the Other in Roanoke (original) (raw)

John White's New World

Kim Sloan (ed.), A New World: England’s First View of America , 2007

John White's ethnographic drawings of North Carolina Algonquians discussed in the context of the history of ethnographic illustrations of the Americas in the sixteenth century and their merits as ethnographic documents.

American bodies and landscapes in early English colonisation

Studies in Travel Writing, 2018

The illustrations of sixteenth-century Algonquian-speaking peoples of present-day North Carolina by Theodore de Bry and John White are among the most recognisable images associated with European colonisation, and reading the differences between the two sets in the light of contemporary travel literature clarifies the commercial interests of England's colonisation promoters. De Bry attenuated "native" characteristics like ritual tattooing and made his female subjects appear healthier and more robust by emphasising their youth. Explorers like Thomas Harriot and Arthur Barlowe reinforced de Bry's images, and reports and pictures of flora and fauna indicated that Algonquian women were as fertile as their lands. Depictions of Native American women as underclothed and uncivilised allowed Europeans to cast colonisation as a religious endeavour to "civilise" and clothe them. Native American bodies and lands were distorted to convince English people to leave their overpopulated and deforested island for a better home across the Atlantic.

New visions of a new world: the conservation and analysis of the John White watercolours

2000

Summary Th e exhibition A New World: England's First View of America, held at the British Museum in 2007, provided an opportunity for conservators and scientists to examine, analyse and treat a unique collection of drawings by the sixteenth-century English artist John White. Before entering the Museum's collection the drawings had suff ered fi re and water damage, which caused

Visualizing "race" in the eighteenth century

2011

This paper looks at the conditions of the emergence of "race" as a new scientific category during the eighteenth century, arguing that two modes of discourse and visualization played a significant role: that on society, civility, and civilization -- as found principally in the travel literature -- and that on nature, as found in natural history writings, especially in botanical classifications. The European colonizing enterprise had resulted in an extensive flow of new objects at every level. Visual representations of these new objects circulated in the European cultural world and were transferred and transformed within travelogue and natural history writings. The nature, boundaries, and potentialities of humankind were discussed in this exchange within the conceptual grid of classifications and their visual representations. Over the course of the century the discourse on society, civility, and civilization collapsed into the discourse on nature. Humans became classified a...

Hidden history?: examination of two patches on John White’s map of ‘Virginia’

Technical imaging and non-invasive analysis of the areas covered by two paper patches on an Elizabethan map of the coast of North Carolina ('La Virginea Pars': P&D 1906,0509.1.3), drawn by the gentleman artist John White, has revealed a number of changes made to the original design. One patch was used to make minor alterations to the representation of the coastline. The second patch covers a large symbol, which apparently represents a fort or fortification, and bears on its surface a faint version of a similar symbol.

'Envisioning the peoples of "new" worlds: early modern woodcut images and the inscription of human difference'

The woodcut images that were deployed within early geographies and on maps helped to establish the racialised imaginary within which the people of the south become known. One of the first sets of images of the peoples of Africa and the ‘new’ world was the woodcuts by Hans Burgkmair, published initially as an independent wall frieze (1508). Their reappearance within varied textual forms over the next century provides an intriguing case study of the impact of textual structure and context on imperialist intelligibility. Arranged within a single broadsheet, De Novo Mondo, the Burgkmair images helped to fuel a partisan ‘new world’ discourse and establish equivalences between regions of the global south, many of them long known to Europeans.