Coral empire : underwater oceans, colonial tropics, visual modernity

Author(s)

    • Elias, Ann

Bibliographic Information

Coral empire : underwater oceans, colonial tropics, visual modernity

Ann Elias

Duke University Press, 2019

  • : hardcover

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. [261]-275) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

From vividly colored underwater photographs of Australia's Great Barrier Reef to life-size dioramas re-creating coral reefs and the bounty of life they sustained, the work of early twentieth-century explorers and photographers fed the public's fascination with reefs. In the 1920s John Ernest Williamson in the Bahamas and Frank Hurley in Australia produced mass-circulated and often highly staged photographs and films that cast corals as industrious, colonizing creatures, and the undersea as a virgin, unexplored, and fantastical territory. In Coral Empire Ann Elias traces the visual and social history of Williamson and Hurley and how their modern media spectacles yoked the tropics and coral reefs to colonialism, racism, and the human domination of nature. Using the labor and knowledge of indigenous peoples while exoticizing and racializing them as inferior Others, Williamson and Hurley sustained colonial fantasies about people of color and the environment as endless resources to be plundered. As Elias demonstrates, their reckless treatment of the sea prefigured attitudes that caused the environmental crises that the oceans and reefs now face.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Part I. The Coral Uncanny 1. Coral Empire 15 2. Mad Love 29 Part II. John Ernest Williamson and the Bahamas 3. Williamson and the Photosphere 49 4. The Field Museum-Williamson Undersea Expedition 68 5. Under the Sea 83 6. Williamson in Australia 97 Part III. Frank Hurley and the Great Barrier Reef 7. Hurley and the Floor of the Sea 117 8. Hurley and the Australian Museum Expedition 131 9. Pearls and Savages 147 10. Hurley and the Torres Strait Diver 165 Part IV. Hurley and Williamson 11. Explorers and Modern Media 185 12. Color and Tourism 199 Part V. The Great Acceleration 13. The Anthropocene 217 Conclusion 230 Notes 235 Bibliography 261 Index 277

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