Go-Between Portraits and the Imperial Imagination circa 1800

Abstract

This dissertation examines representations of Native peoples during the British Imperial Age of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It concentrates specifically on diplomatic Go-Between figures, individuals who performed a mediating role between their own indigenous communities and the colonizers. The dissertation examines images and objects within a postcolonial framework, engaging notions of hybridity and mimicry in order to interrogate more traditional readings of colonial power and representation. The images of Native peoples that appeared in ethnographic studies, paintings, and prints, as well as in objects of material culture such as games, books, and toys, reveal a dislocating indigenous agency within their colonial contexts. By offering new considerations of artistic process and the role of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British theatrical culture, the dissertation suggests that these Native figures were mediated by the tropes and conventions of contemporary theater through pose, gesture, and other dramaturgical allusions. In its exploration of the theatrical dimensions of imperial diplomacy and Go-Between representation, including evidence of performative mimicry by Go-Betweens themselves, my dissertation reveals an even more subtle interplay of identities in the context of colonial image-making than art historians have hitherto recognized. In addition to using theater history and performance theory to situate Go-Between images in relation to the contemporary English stage, the study also implicates the creative process and resulting artifacts themselves in the Go-Between status, affording the material object itself a hybridity that can become the site of ideological dislocation.