Professor Morton participated in the conference “Ernst Haeckel Postcolonial: New Perspectives on His Life and Work,” in Jena, Germany on March 20-22. The purpose of the conference was to examine the work of Haeckel, a renowned Darwinian marine zoologist who coined the term ecology, in terms of his writings on anthropology, race, and colonialism. Morton’s paper explored Haeckel’s representations of the Ceylonese (Sri Lanka) Tamil, Singhalese, and Vedda natives in text, painting, and photography in his books Indische Reiesebriefe (1883, left) and Wanderbilder (1905, right) in order to expose his Eurocentric racism that relied on a “rhetoric of vision” (Johannes Fabian). Her paper located Haeckel’s work within the context of the German Lebensreform (life reform) movement, Victorian travel writing and British colonialism, and the picturesque, a Western visual mode that privileged aesthetics over social-political concerns and muted any signs of social injustice and the modern, industrial, or urban.
