The realism of colonial displays doubled the distance between observer and observed

Evidence

The remarkable realism of such displays made a strange civilisation into an object the visitor could almost touch. Yet to the observing eye, surrounded by the display but distinguished from it by the status of visitor, it remained a mere representation, the picture of some strange reality. Thus there were, in fact, two parallel pairs of distinctions, between the visitor and the exhibit, and between the exhibit and what it expressed. The representation was set apart from the real political reality it claimed to portray as the observing mind was set apart from what it observed. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 72

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The doubled pair of distinctions — visitor/exhibit and exhibit/reality — is the core move of Mitchell’s argument about how Orientalism’s realism produced the very separation it claimed merely to observe. Dense enough to sit with.
• XREF: Connects directly to Edward Said’s Orientalism thesis about representation producing its object, and anticipates Homi Bhabha’s later work on colonial mimicry.