Reluctant Biography, or the Visual and Spatial Revision of Key Colonial/Imperial Narratives

Imperial and colonial history has mostly been founded on the tradition of writing biographies of great men, and more rarely, great women. These lean inherently towards the aggrandizement or hagiography of individuals who, particularly in the early decades of life, may deserve no such attention. Yet for postcolonial and decolonial progression, the unattractive necessity of revising the lives of such influential individuals remains. We cannot now change or eliminate the archive’s overwhelming propensity to amplify (and thereby value and embolden) elite voices and experiences, but we can turn down the volume by placing key episodes firmly within an individual’s relevant or entire life experience, by reading the other less explicit motives for travel or collecting and by focusing on silent absences rather than noisy presences. Sara E. Johnson’s 2023 book ‘Encyclopédie Noire: The making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s intellectual world’, is presented as a ‘communal biography’ of one such great imperialist, by intentionally, and sometimes creatively, adding in the actors, voices and narratives missing from the sources and archives of European colonial history. In trying to methodologically undermine how imperial biography has traditionally sidestepped complicity or guilt, Johnson attempted to paint a more complete picture of the societies, enslaved or not, in which such elite men operated. Landscape history and architectural history play important roles in such essential revisionism because they can add provocatively spatial dimensions to colonial lives and experiences. As people are profoundly affected by the environment(s) in which they operate, particularly at key tipping points in their lives, spatial and environmental analysis can undermine traditional biography by focusing on where key life decisions were made, leading to a broader cognizance of why they were made. An individual’s spatial position, whether resident or absentee, at home or abroad, with family or without, reveals nuances in mentality that traditional analysis can miss. Taking the life and letters of Pierce Butler, Irishman, US Senator, signatory of the US constitution and the owner of a substantial estate of land and enslaved people in Georgia, as a case study, this article argues for the creative reimagining of biography as a fundamental postcolonial corrective to colonial and imperial history. Butler’s transnational identity, sometimes Irish, sometimes not, collapses any neat mapping of a grand national narrative onto one man’s life. The extraordinary level of detail provided by the correspondence also demands a more conventional or traditional history, one focused on individual identity, motive and relationships, that cannot be effectively discounted because of a landscape or architectural focus.