is to pay scant attention to a whole suite of
issues to do with the construction of Western
identity, the representations of ‘exoticism’, the
inscription of ‘otherness’, the reciprocal con-
stitution of scientificdiscourseand colonial
praxis (see colonialism) and the decon-
structionof cartographiciconography.
culturesof exploration were thus woven
with political, artistic and literary, as well as
scientific, threads. It was, for example, as a
consequence of the European Age of
Exploration/Reconnaissance/Conquest that
the idea of the ‘west’ and ‘Western-ness’
received its baptism.europe’s sense of dis-
tinctiveness from the regions that the naviga-
tors encountered was embedded in a discourse
about identity that represented ‘the West’ and
‘the Rest’ in the categories of superiority–
inferiority, power–impotence, enlightenment–
ignorance and civilization–barbarism (Hall,
1992b). Seen in these terms, Europe’s rendez-
vous with the New World in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries was as much a moral event
as a commercial or intellectual one, and
induced a sense of ‘metaphysical unease’
because it confounded standard conceptions
of human nature (see also Pagden, 1993).
The construction of this ‘discourse of the
West’, of course, depended crucially on the
idioms in which the new worlds were repre-
sented. The categories, vocabularies, assump-
tions and instruments that the explorers
brought to the encounter were, understand-
ably, thoroughly European, and so the worlds
of ‘the other’ were interrogated, classified and
assimilated according to European norms.
That the language of the engagement was fre-
quently gendered, moreover, facilitated the rep-
resentation of newlandscapesin the exotic
categories of a potent sexual imagery intended
to indicate mastery and submissiveness.
If the foundations of Western discourse
were laid during the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, they were reinforced during the
following centuries wheneurocentricmodes
of representation continued to constitute
regional identities. One such construction was
what Edward Said termed ‘orientalism’–a
discursive formation through which ‘European
culture was able to manage—and even pro-
duce—the Orient politically, sociologically,
militarily, ideologically, scientifically and
imaginatively’ (Said, 1978, p. 3). And, indeed,
the idea of the Oriental or Asiatic type certainly
gripped Western imaginations. In nineteenth-
century Britain, for example, what was termed
‘oriental vice’ in the very heart of England –
‘heathenism in the inner radius’ as it was
called – expressed anxieties about the moral
authority of Christian England (Lindeborg,
1994).
The procedures facilitating the marginaliza-
tion of the Oriental realm, and – at the same time- its critical role in European self-definition,
were also perpetuated in other places and in
other terms. The variety of representational
devices that Cook and his coterie of naturalists
and draughtsmen deployed – whether Banks’
abstract taxonomics or Parkinson’s evocation
of anthropological variety – succeeded in
encapsulating the Pacific world within the con-
fines of European epistemologies. Moreover,
their penchant for designating names – the
naming of places (seeplace names), peoples
and individuals – at once invented, brought
into cultural circulation and domesticated the
very entities that were the subjects of their
enquiries (Carter, 1987). That Cook’s team
was engaged in what Salmond (1991, p. 15)
terms ‘mirror-imageethnography’ is beyond
dispute. But just because their modes of cat-
egorization were suffused with the expectations
of eighteenth-century society should not be
permitted to gainsay the remarkable accuracy
of their accounts of physical phenomena.
Thecultural politicsembedded in these
various ventures were further reinforced by the
artistic and literary crafts of Western explor-
ation. The evocation of distant peoples and
places owed much to the supposedly realist
works of visualartproduced by painters such
as Jean-Le ́on Ge ́roˆme (Nochlin, 1991).
Indeed, the standard scholarly practices of
science, history and comparative literature
were themselves profoundly indebted to artis-
tic representation (Smith, 1960; Stafford,
1984). In the tropical world, for example,
travelling artists such as William Hodges and
Johann Rugendas gave visual form to the
changing discourse oftropicalityinwhich
scientificobservationand aesthetic preference
reinforced one another (Driver and Martins,
2005). In similar vein, the use of photographic
technology to ‘capture’ distant sites and sights,
served no less to constitute than to represent
imperial subjects and spaces (Ryan, 1997). At
the same time, overseas escapades provided
writers of fiction with resources to stimulate
readers’ imaginations. In some cases, this took
the form of adventure stories that fostered
new senses of heroic masculinity and projected
European fantasies onto non-European worlds
(Phillips, 1997). In others, evocations of far-
away realms were shaped byutopianor dys-
topian literary tropes, which were deployed by
writers not only to imagine foreigners but
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