Britain's Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (review)

The eye, Roland Barthes points out, is the anatomical metonym of the Asian body. In spite of such embarrassing Orientalism and racial objectification in his essay on the Asian eyelid, anyone familiar with Empire of Signs (1982) knows that Barthes's book is actually a sophisticated critique of Western preconceptions of Asian difference. A similar analytic subtlety typifies Elizabeth Hope Chang's history of literary and visual engagements with Chinese objects in British culture. In Britain's Chinese Eye (whose title announces a physiognomical interest akin to Barthes's), Chang explores the ocular objectification of the Celestial Empire. Chang shows how nineteenth-century British interest in Chinese things did not merely reflect visual pleasures but also shaped Western notions about how the Chinese saw; she contends that, in this conflation of perception and presupposition, China influenced Western sight itself.

Elegantly organized into four themed chapters on "Garden," "Plate," "Display Case and Den," and "Photographs," Chang identifies the most obvious material signifiers of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western interest in China (that is, chinoi-serie gardens, blue and white porcelain, museum exhibitions and opium parlors, and travel photography). While specific examples and many of the literary texts or historical episodes involving those items may be well-known, Chang invests into each new connections and greater theoretical sophistication. For example, like most histories of Sino-British relations, the introduction begins with George Macartney's failed 1793 mission to the Qing court; but rather than read Macartney's refusal to kowtow as merely characteristic of East-West misunderstanding, Chang emphasizes the theatricality—and hence the ocularity—of the episode, an embassy "carefully visually stage-managed" by both governments (10). The deliberateness of these encounters are then repeated, Chang shows, in other, occasionally more private—but no less significant—histories. As one excellent instance, Chang examines Robert Fortune, the mid-century horticulturalist who introduced tea plants from China to India and who believed that donning Chinese robes so successfully transformed him into a Chinese as to enable him to appreciate (and eventually steal) Chinese plants with native acuity.

Chang's subsequent chapters are equally well chosen and written. Scholars of Charles Dickens will benefit from her analysis of Edwin Drood (1870), which situates its portrait of opium addiction amid Dickens's journalism on Chinese exhibitions; and Chang's reading of George Meredith's "epigrammatic and densely allusive" evocation of willow ware in The Egoist (1879) is particularly fine (92). The book's biggest contribution, however, lies in its illustration of vision's inextricable relationship to power, an observation often implicit but always worth reiterating and historically contextualizing. Foucauldian criticism has long recognized visibility's role in Western epistemology; but in the abundance of interdisciplinary imperial studies and visual-culture-influenced specialties, such as museum studies, the particularities of individual cases can sometimes overshadow broader arguments concerning the meaning of cross-cultural encounters for Western thought. Britain's Chinese Eye never loses sight of this objective. Building upon Jonathan Crary's germinal argument about modernity and vision, Chang demonstrates China's centrality to British notions of sight, and hence how Western sight was inseparable from experiences of Eastern visuality and the visions those forms of visuality encompass. Importantly, this is a claim about time as well as space. As do the best imperial and museum studies, Chang shows that "home" worked dialectically with "away" (what Chang terms the "exotic familiar" [6]), and that narratives about sights and seeing were as crucial in shaping perception as the images themselves. Chang thus localizes Crary's claim about the gradual emergence of modern visibility and contends that British views of China, the Chinese, and Chinese things were in place long before China opened to British exploration and continued long after power within the region was established.

With such a well-argued book it seems disingenuous to suggest additional topics, but one wonders what more Chang might do more with George...