Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory

Beginning with its January 1896 issue, National Geographic, which originated in 1888 as a specialized journal for American geographers, refashioned itself as an "illustrated monthly" and published its first nude photograph, a wedding portrait of a barechested Zulu bride and bridegroom. In subsequent decades, National Geographic's place in the cultural imagination has persistently been identified with a primitivist photographic genre: the photographs of far-flung places and peoples its early twentieth-century readers came to associate with the magazine's ethnographic authority and aesthetic visual appeal. "Give us the romance of geography—the lands and the peoples, in little or unknown places," demanded a reader in 1921, expressing a common sentiment among Geographic readers, in which the "romance" of cultural difference and its aesthetic appreciation was understood as entirely compatible with the magazine's scientific mission (Claflin). Cultural critics have continued in this same vein, long identifying National Geographic with an imperialist sexual politics in which images of the far-flung and exotic predominate.¹ Nonetheless, there are a number of significant ways in which early twentieth-century National Geographic photographs and texts can be understood to complicate this reception. For one, articles on such home-spun subjects as native grasses, backyard insects, and the Indians of North America were as much a staple of the "romance" of geography in National Geographic as its more exotic—and erotic—content. In this regard, National Geographic had just as much in common with its literary contemporary, local-color fiction, and with [End Page 33] the aesthetic dictates of pictorial photography as it did with the conventions of ethnographic representation. National Geographic's iconic force in the popular imagination is in large measure a result of its masterful management of textual and visual signifiers of cultural difference.

In what follows, I examine how National Geographic photographs and texts drew upon the literary features of local-color fiction, specifically the figurative and visual dimensions of synecdoche and metonymy, in ways that powerfully spoke to prevailing cultural anxieties regarding race and immigration, the nation's most pressing domestic concerns in the fin de siècle and early decades of the twentieth century. The magazine's function was largely pedagogical. From its inception, the National Geographic Society (NGS) founders envisioned the magazine's purpose as one of inculcating an "enlightened patriotism" in its readers (Hyde 2). Thus its efforts to popularize geography drew upon aesthetic representations that would encourage its readers to identify with the nation's concerns and goals. In so doing, National Geographic frequently blurred the boundaries between the "local" and the "exotic." To encourage settlement in the Southwest, for instance, the state of Arizona was dubbed "America's Egypt." The African nation of Liberia, and its capital, Monrovia, named after the fifth U.S. President James Monroe, conversely, became part of a system of signification in which the capitol's Southern architecture was wed to American patriotism and economic enterprise. National Geographic, as I will argue here, produced a far more complex and nuanced portrayal of what constitutes the "local" and the "exotic," as well as of regional, racial, and cultural difference. Although National Geographic's genre of ethnographic photographs reinforced popular late nineteenth-century racial stereotypes, its recourse to popular literary and visual representations calls attention to the role of metaphor and its strategic placement within the narrative systems mobilizing such representations. Taking a closer look at how National Geographic deployed popular literary and visual cultural genres reveals how cultural institutions promote certain ways of visualizing the world.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, National Geographic was one of a handful of national institutions in the business of displaying culture. The Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Natural History, the popular midway attractions that featured reconstructed native villages at national and international expositions, the Chicago World's Fair (1893), and the Pan American Exposition (1901) held in Buffalo, [End Page 34] NY, contributed to the vogue of putting the primitive on display for popular entertainment and scientific edification. Local-color fiction was one other cultural institution that joined their esteemed ranks. Visibly mainstream between 1880s and...