Material Culture, Memory, and Mobility: Emily Georgiana Kemp's Travels in China

Juanjuan Wu

《Concentric： Literary and Cultural Studies》 48卷2期 (2022/09) Pp. 69-95

https://doi.org/10.6240/concentric.lit.202209_48(2).0005

摘要

This essay examines the texts, images, and collected objects of Emily Georgiana Kemp (1860-1939), an artist, traveler, and author, to consider the complex interplay of material culture, memories, and women's mobility. It draws on theories of object and memory, as developed by Walter Benjamin and others, to explore Kemp's professional desire and self-fashioning and account for the complexity, ambivalence, and conflicting moves in Kemp's representations of her travel in China within the fraught context of semi-colonialism. As such, I position Kemp's travel texts, watercolor paintings, and the collection of indigenous objects she donated to Oxford's Ashmolean Museum as both material objects and acts of memory. I argue that material objects, which aid travel memories in complex ways, can be understood as involved in a double movement. On the one hand, they enable women travelers to measure, frame, and professionalize the authentic experiences mobility can offer. On the other hand, they facilitate a reflexive re-evaluation of the hierarchical cultural relations upon which British imperialism depended. As an alternative to automatically privileging an Orientalist mode as a means of interpreting women's oriental travel writings, attention to objects and memory offers an opportunity for better understanding, rather than limiting, women travelers' shifting positions across cultures.

關鍵字

Emily Georgiana Kemp ； travel writing ； material culture ； objects ； memory ； collection ； China

參考文獻

Bassnett, Susan. “Travel Writing and Gender.” The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, edited by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, Cambridge UP, 2002, pp. 225-41.

Baucom, Ian. Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity. Princeton UP, 1999.

Benjamin, Walter. Berlin Childhood around 1900. Translated by H. Eiland, Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2006.

Benjamin, Walter. “Excavation and Memory.” Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: Part 2: 1931-1934, translated by Rodney Livingstone, et al. and edited by Michael W. Jennings, et al., Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. 1955. Translated by Harry Zohn and edited by Hannah Arendt, Schocken Books, 1968.