Transcultural Space and Transcultural Beings (Institutional Structures of Feeling)

Providing a study of intercultural spaces invaded and transgressed upon by explorers, both real and fictional, this book focuses on British East India's exploration of the Andaman Islands, with illustrations, ships logs', and official published reports. However, this is used as a jumping-off point for a wide-ranging discussion of "first contact" experiences such as the Orson Welles radio dramatization of "The War of the Worlds", and western recordings of "endangered" environmental and ethnographic sounds. The author aims to expose the brutality that one group of people can inflict upon another when they attempt to represent them in writing and photographs. He contends that such unthinking brutality continues today, with planes and cars as our sailing ships, transporting people from dominant cultures into spaces that rapidly become destabilized.