Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History of Art
First Advisor
Raab, Jennifer
Abstract
This dissertation asks why, in the long nineteenth century, the desert became a defining American region. As opposed to our modern climatological understanding of desert, nineteenth-century deserts were understood by their settler colonists to be cultural wastelands bereft of “civilization.” By juxtaposing the visual culture of the South American pampas and the North American prairies—two critical hemispheric desert places—I reveal that approaching these grasslands as a shared cultural, political, and artistic zone is essential to writing a more integrated art history of the Americas. Far from being “deserted,” the pampas and the prairies were home to Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities whose presence testified to the ongoing life of these regions. I ground this project in the “desert”—a settler colonial space/place and political construct—in order to reaccount for the co-constitution of slavery, settler colonialism, and their scopic regimes in the Americas. Desert, I argue, always has a politics. Through understudied maps, photographs, prints, and paintings, I analyze interrelated themes such as desertification and Indigenous erasure in transamerican survey photography, racial performativity and pictorial deception in the South American work of U.S. artist George Catlin, and anti-Blackness and racialized vision in hemispheric military visual culture. “Desert Places” thus demonstrates the generative possibilities of reorienting scholarship along a South-North axis and decentering the U.S. within American art.
Recommended Citation
Young, Colin Allen, "Desert Places: Transnational Formations of Race, Region, and Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Pampas and Prairies" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1363.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1363
