Introduction: Collecting and/as Cultural Transformation

The three comparative and interdisciplinary essays in this section treat collecting in the historical context of imperialism and range over the geographical spaces of France, North and South America, New Caledonia, and Japan. Shorter papers on which the essays are based were presented in a three-day panel organized and chaired by the Guest Editors entitled “Collecting Actual and Metaphorical,” the idea for which originated with Helen Asquine Fazio, for the annual conference of the American Comparative Literature Association.

We are grateful to the Editor for extending us the opportunity to explore the notion of collecting in the context of this journal.

Collecting as the Appropriation of Identities

Material collecting, or the systematic accumulation of material objects by individual and museum collectors, has been widely theorized from the 1980s by historians, art historians, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and literary and cultural critics. Although the Guest Editors’ approach to collecting in the following essays builds on scholarship that views material objects as having a simple material existence, it extends that scholarship to consider collected objects as part of a broader symbolic system. Following Susan M. Pearce, we consider collecting as a process of communication between subject and object. Pearce argues that “objects are our other selves; the better we understand them, the closer we come to self-knowledge” (vii). Pearce goes on to argue that objects, like language, are “social ideas” (22); that they are “signs and symbols, creating categories and transmitting messages which can be read” (15). In light of her comments, we consider collecting, then, to be a process that mediates between subject (the collector) and object (that which has been collected), whether that object be tangible or an abstract idea or image. We further consider the process of collecting as an appropriation that builds on a systematic gathering and interpretation of objects—whether a person, a people, or a country—within a certain symbolic code. As such, we envision collecting to be a metaphor for a practice of transformation that has profound material and symbolic consequences in various cultural registers.

Finally, we consider collecting as the building of a narrative—a narrative of identity. Walter Benjamin, in “Unpacking My Library” (1931), suggests that, in the process of building up a collection of material objects, the collectors become authors, constructing a narrative that links the objects they have collected to their identity as it has unfolded in time. Extending that idea, narratologist Mieke Bal argues that collecting is “a process consisting of the confrontation between objects and subjective agency informed by an attitude. Objects, subjective agency, confrontations as events: such a working definition makes for a narrative” (100). In line with that logic, Pearce, perhaps the foremost theorist of European collecting in all its ramifications, argues that: “[C]ollections are essentially a narrative of experience; as objects are a kind of material language, so the narratives into which they can be selected and organized are a kind of fiction” (412). She further argues that collecting, whether of objects, images, or ideas, is “part of our effort to construct an intelligible world-view” (vii). Consequently, in the practice of collecting, subjects “subjectivize” the objects they have acquired by assembling them to construct a narrative that resonates with their perception of themselves; this narrative reflects their personal desires as they are informed by the temporal, spatial, and cultural contexts in which they construct and express them. As this narrative is framed by their desire, its edges are indefinite and its meaning ambiguous, as the narrative includes both their representation of their past self and their articulation of a future self that does not yet exist and that they do not know.

Incorporating those ideas, the essays by Kelly Austin, Linda M. Steer, and Janet A. Walker examine the act of collecting with regard to literary and other sorts of texts, including visual art and photography. They contextualize European and Latin American writers,’ artists,’ and photographers’ acquiring and appropriation of material objects, images, and identities as acts of memorializing, possessing, organizing, imagining, and envisioning; through those acts, and in their specific contexts, the...