Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Germane to anyone working in or around postcolonial studies, this is one of the most theoretically useful, accessible texts I've read in the field about representational practice, epistemological control, and material practices at the end of the nineteenth century. Mitchell's a pretty strict Foucauldian, which means it's a fairly top-down, power-oriented model of imagining cultural negotiations. I find some of Foucault's acolytes often come off as both irritatingly paranoid and woefully reductionist, but Mitchell isn't one of them. I admire how he weaves between the particularity of the history at hand and its greater significance for how to conceive of a "colonial" way of seeing (or, rather, expectations of what one would see) in other contexts. Like any good New Historicist, Mitchell has an uncanny ability to use mesmerizing anecdotes to illustrate his points; the introduction about the representation of Cairo at the Exposition Universelle in 1889 is particularly good in this respect. Thinking about the sheer number of hours Mitchell must've spent in French-Egyptian archives digging through materials to come up with slices of narratives like that just plain gives me the willies.