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OverviewFrom 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. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Ann EliasPublisher: Duke University Press Imprint: Duke University Press Weight: 0.431kg ISBN: 9781478003823ISBN 10: 1478003820 Pages: 296 Publication Date: 10 May 2019 Audience: Professional and scholarly , Professional & Vocational Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: In Print  This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us. Table of ContentsAcknowledgments 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 277ReviewsThis book is well written and the short chapters make it extremely readable. In addition, the book is beautifully printed, with black-and-white images embedded in chapters and their color counterparts inserted in the middle of the book. It is refreshing to see a book that relies on the reading of images paying such close attention to their reproduction in the text. -- Samantha Muka * H-Net Reviews * Ann Elias' fascinating book couldn't come at a better time. . . . Elias focuses on long neglected images from cinema, dioramas from museums, and illustrations from the press. She cleverly articulates them through a set of unexpected global connections that powerfully mobilise all the transforming ideas of empire, race, technology and nature at the time. -- Martyn Jolly * Australian Historical Studies * [This] book shows that interdisciplinarity is possible. Elias combines the history of underwater cinematography and diving with attention to the surrealist art movement, natural history collecting, colonialism, and the history of tourism, and through this rich patchwork traces shifting popular interpretations of coral imagery in the early twentieth century. -- Antony Adler * Environmental History * Coral Empire's postcolonial jeremiad also registers the joyful endurance of surrealist visions of the submarine as a deliriously consciousness-altering realm. -- James Delbourgo * TLS * Coral Empire's postcolonial jeremiad also registers the joyful endurance of surrealist visions of the submarine as a deliriously consciousness-altering realm. -- James Delbourgo * TLS * [This] book shows that interdisciplinarity is possible. Elias combines the history of underwater cinematography and diving with attention to the surrealist art movement, natural history collecting, colonialism, and the history of tourism, and through this rich patchwork traces shifting popular interpretations of coral imagery in the early twentieth century. -- Antony Adler * Environmental History * Coral Empire's postcolonial jeremiad also registers the joyful endurance of surrealist visions of the submarine as a deliriously consciousness-altering realm. -- James Delbourgo * TLS * """Coral Empire’s postcolonial jeremiad also registers the joyful endurance of surrealist visions of the submarine as a deliriously consciousness-altering realm."" -- James Delbourgo * TLS * ""[This] book shows that interdisciplinarity is possible. Elias combines the history of underwater cinematography and diving with attention to the surrealist art movement, natural history collecting, colonialism, and the history of tourism, and through this rich patchwork traces shifting popular interpretations of coral imagery in the early twentieth century."" -- Antony Adler * Environmental History * ""Ann Elias’ fascinating book couldn’t come at a better time. . . . Elias focuses on long neglected images from cinema, dioramas from museums, and illustrations from the press. She cleverly articulates them through a set of unexpected global connections that powerfully mobilise all the transforming ideas of empire, race, technology and nature at the time."" -- Martyn Jolly * Australian Historical Studies * ""This book is well written and the short chapters make it extremely readable. In addition, the book is beautifully printed, with black-and-white images embedded in chapters and their color counterparts inserted in the middle of the book. It is refreshing to see a book that relies on the reading of images paying such close attention to their reproduction in the text."" -- Samantha Muka * H-Net Reviews *" Author InformationAnn Elias is Associate Professor of the History and Theory of Contemporary Global Art at the University of Sydney, author of Camouflage Australia: Art, Nature, Science, and War and Useless Beauty: Flowers and Australian Art, and coeditor of Camouflage Cultures: Beyond the Art of Disappearance. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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