Controlling Colonial Impressions

In the early modern world, how did printed texts convey to European audiences ideas about race and indigeneity in the Americas? What methods, tropes and devices did they employ to introduce, transmit, and perpetuate ideologies? These are just some of the questions prompted by the exhibition Controlling Colonial Impressions: Representations of Race and Indigeneity in the Early Americas. Launched in conjunction with Brown University’s Sawyer Seminar on Race and Indigeneity in the Americas, this exhibition explores these topics through the medium of books, which became a primary vehicle for the dissemination of knowledge about the Americas to audiences in early modern Europe.

Curated collectively by undergraduate students in the History 1954J: History of the Book in the Americas course, it is organized thematically into four sections: Imagining and Imaging Colonial Subjects, an exploration of depictions of race and identity within the realm of the visual; ‘Objective’ Texts: Race and Indigeneity in Scientific Books, which examines the appropriation of science in the service of empire-building; The Iconography of Race in the British Atlantic, which treats race as a way of seeing; and Means of Control, a study of text as an instrument to assert power and dominance. Each section bears witness to conceptions of race in flux, tensions between the exotic and the recognizable, nearness and distance, as well as economic expediency and the erasure of identities.