Reviews

James Belich, The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld, 1789-1939 (Book Review)

Robyn Cooper

James Belich’s Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld, 1783-1939 (2009) provides what he describes as a ‘new variable’ in the understanding of the settlement process during the nineteenth century. Taking aspects of frontier theory, Belich argues for the rise of the American West and British West, taking an economic and cultural approach to explain an Anglo-prone settler revolution, leading to the rise of the Angloworld...

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Louise Tythacott, The Lives of Chinese Objects: Buddhism, Imperialism, and Display (Book Review)

Alex Scott

Visible in one of Dickinson’s Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851 is a display case labelled ‘Liverpool.’ The case had been sent to the Crystal Palace by Liverpool town council to advertise the port’s industry and commerce to exhibition visitors, and contained items - a model of the city’s waterfront and a sample of imports - that were later put on show at Liverpool’s public museum, opened in 1853. The London exhibits were just a handful of the many thousands of artefacts from around the world that eventually found their way into Liverpool Museum: for instance, another Dickinson’s plate depicts a different set of objects, five bronze statues of Buddhist deities from China, which today are on show at World Museum Liverpool...

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Abdellatif Kechiche, La Vénus Noire/Black Venus (Film Review)

Nicole Beth Wallenbrock

By introducing the title character as a statue, Adellatif Kechiche denies his audience both the breathtaking finale of his previous film, La Graine et le Mulet (2007), and the romantic hope of another of his lauded films, L’esquive (2003). La Vénus Noire (Black Venus) opens with a historically accurate depiction of a lecture on the Hottentot woman at the Parisian Science Academy in 1815. An audience of white-haired men rub their chins and furrow their brows in concentration while a scholar points to a nude statue. His assistant then passes around a jar containing their sample’s female genitalia, proof of the Hottentot woman’s similarity to orangutans and obvious genetic inferiority. The scene is at once disturbing and austere, there is not a man who does not seem to agree with the scholar’s assertations, and the lecture ends in applause, making the now dated anthropology even more difficult to digest...

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