Imagining Imperial modernity in British colonial West Africa: Gerald Spencer Pryse's work for the Empire Marketing Board

• Autores: Tim Buck
• Localización: Art history: journal of the Association of Art Historians, ISSN 0141-6790, Vol. 38, Nº. 5, 2015, págs. 940-963
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This essay focuses upon images made by Gerald Spencer Pryse in 1927/28 that were the outcome of a commission from the British government's Empire Marketing Board for him to convey positively colonial West Africa as an integral element of a modern, economic empire. As this essay argues, though, his watercolours and lithographic posters fail to celebrate the region's imperially driven economic activity. Instead, they highlight West Africa's natural aesthetic appeal, and, what Spencer Pryse believed to be, the heightened aesthetic perception of its indigenous population, to suppress, or negatively position, industrialized process that had been introduced there. In valorizing West Africa's exoticism, Spencer Pryse, however, ignored imperial modernities then being independently forged by some West Africans and consequently, as this essay maintains, his images offer only a limited account of West Africa's imperial identity in the late 1920s.