Performing the Primitive in the Postcolony: Nyoni's Kraal in Cape Town. Co-authored with Daniel Hammett. Urban Forum. Vol. 20, No. 1. Feb. 2009) (original) (raw)

a review of a collective of museum exhibits that took place in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1988, correlates the European desire to re-investigate exoticaobjects about "exotic" spaces and people created by and for Europeans; and objects brought back from locations "exotic" to Europeansto the then relatively new field of postcolonial criticism. He surmises that the exhibition catalogues deconstructed "the interpretation of exotic themes by Europeans," reiterating the ideas common in critiques of the colonial gaze: "[I]n creating works of art which refer to exotic themes, Europeans are in fact covertly expressing their own aspirations and prejudices," wherein ""people of other races and the achievements of other cultures [exist] primarily as curiosities"" (Koppelkamm quoted in Conner 1988 43). Within the structure of a museum, where European visions of outlandish peoples and alien lands are projected through prints, paintings, sculpture, and "airport art", a visitor might inevitably experience a "certain schizophrenia" as they view these displays: admiration for the beauty and finesse of many of the objects, and disapproval of the same objects, such as "the images of piccaninnies and hugely grinning negros" in lithographs created for marketing exotic lands and products mined from those lands (Conner 1988 44).

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