Make Yourself at Home
Victorian Colonial Spaces and Aristocratic Places : White Colony and Country House Hospitality View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Julie Codell
In two series in the 1880s, the Magazine of Art visually endorsed a relationship by contiguity between two entities, colonial landscape space in the white colonies and privileged English places in country homes, a para-heritage industry series. Through issues of perspective, boundaries, filled or empty spaces, scale and the material page, the magazine’s two series proposed to determine where culture resided, who controlled nature, and the hospitality of these two extreme domestic spheres to entire Britons to visit both of them. Pairing colonial space and English aristocratic place through specifics of habitability, imperial and national inscriptions on the picturesque and the sublime, the magazine presented aristocratic country homes as a national heritage for everyone and “wild” colonial landscape as tamed and inviting through shared anti-urban and anti-modernist nostalgic values. I argue that the visual organization of country houses and white colonies’ images and their texts independently and in conjunction were joined through the magazine’s illusion of its presumed aesthetic “neutrality” and service as offering these sites to the general public for consumption, travel and sociability. The magazine could deploy its cultural authority to represent these two spaces as unified and representative of the nation to stabilize these places’ dynamic social relations and erase their classed and colonial histories by invoking aesthetic principles: vast colonial landscapes (sublime) that symbolized domination of nature (including indigenous peoples) and country houses (picturesque) whose interiors’ prolific objets d’art symbolized accumulated English culture.
Hospitality and the City: Marketing Berlin
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ulrike Zitzlsperger
Berlin's history is characterized by ruptures and divisions throughout time. Nonetheless, since the city became the capital of the Kaiserreich in 1871, advertising for tourists has been an important economic factor for the metropolis. Despite its conflicted history and across democratic republics and dictatorial regimes, Berlin's attempts to attract visitors by means of inclusive posters, catchy slogans and colourful brochures have been characterized by variations on being a hospitable city for all most of the time. This paper traces a range of examples across the twentieth century, analysing approaches to being a welcoming metropolis and considering, when such attempts backfired.
