Enlightenment canvas: Cultures of travel, ethnographic aesthetics, and imperialist discourse in Georg Forster's writings

This study tram the ambivalent relationships of conjunctions of travel literature, ethnography, anthropology, and aesthetics to European imperialism in the writings of Georg Forster (1754--94). In late-eighteenth-century Europe, particularly Germany, Forster's account of James Cook's second circumnavigation from 1772 to 1775, A Voyage around the World (1777), his subsequent essays and reviews, his translations of travel literature and of the Indian drama Sakuntal by Kalidasa, and his second travel account, Ansichten vom Niederrhein (1791), made him an eminent practitioner and theoretician of travel writing as well as contributor to ethnography, philosophical anthropology, and aesthetic theory.;Based on a conception of discourse as formation of knowledge and power, this study argues that the combinations of ethnographic, anthropological, and aesthetic discourses in Forster's writings engaging with non-European cultures participate ambivalently in European imperialism: these writings contribute to the formulation of European cultural authority and of an imperalist 'civilizing mission', but they also put this authority into question by revealing the contradictory, ambivalent, antagonistic moments involved in formulating cultural difference and authority;A discussion of the theoretical and historical assumptions informing the thesis, based on colonial discourse theory and scholarship of eighteenth-century aesthetics, anthropology, and travel literature, is followed by a detailed examination of the relationships between ethnographic representations of the bodies, arts, and social structures of Pacific islanders, aesthetic discourse, and imperialist power in A Voyage around the World. The study then analyzes the roles of aesthetics and anthropology in formulating European cultural authority in Forster's Ansichten vom Niederrhein and those of his shorter prose writings not directly concerned with imperialism. The final part examines such discursive intersections in those of Forster's essays and reviews that deal with or touch on imperialism explicitly, as well as in his participation in late-eighteenth-century debates about slavery, abolition, and the anthropological concept of 'race' relationships of Forster's writings to imperialist discourse and makes a contribution towards understanding the conjunctions of travel, imperialism, and aesthetic, ethnographic, and anthropological discourses in European culture in the late eighteenth century.