Unseeing Empire

Photography, Representation, South Asian America

Bakirathi Mani (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

288 Seiten

2020
Duke University Press (Verlag)
978-1-4780-1089-0 (ISBN)

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In Unseeing Empire Bakirathi Mani examines how empire continues to haunt South Asian American visual cultures. Weaving close readings of fine art together with archival research and ethnographic fieldwork at museums and galleries across South Asia and North America, Mani outlines the visual and affective relationships between South Asian diasporic artists, their photographic work, and their viewers. She notes that the desire for South Asian Americans to see visual representations of themselves is rooted in the use of photography as a form of colonial documentation and surveillance. She examines fine art photography by South Asian diasporic artists who employ aesthetic strategies such as duplication and alteration that run counter to viewers' demands for greater visibility. These works fail to deliver on viewers' desires to see themselves, producing instead feelings of alienation, estrangement, and loss. These feelings, Mani contends, allow viewers to question their own visibility as South Asian Americans in U.S. public culture and to reflect on their desires to be represented.

Bakirathi Mani is Professor of English Literature at Swarthmore College and author of Aspiring to Home: South Asians in America.

List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction. The Work of Seeing: Photography and Representation in Diaspora 1
1. Uncanny Feelings: Diasporic Mimesis in Seher Shah's Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force 33
2. Representation in the Colonial Archive: Annu Palakunnathu Matthew's An Indian from India 70
3. Exhibiting Immigrants: Visuality, Visibility, and Representation at Beyond Bollywood 119
4. Archives of Diaspora: Gauri Gill's The Americans 159
Epilogue. Curating Photography Seeing Community
Notes 215
Bibliography 245
Index 261

Erscheinungsdatum	09.11.2020
Reihe/Serie	A Camera Obscura Book
Zusatzinfo	48 illustrations, incl. 16 in color
Verlagsort	North Carolina
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	476 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Fotokunst
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	1-4780-1089-4 / 1478010894
ISBN-13	978-1-4780-1089-0 / 9781478010890
Zustand	Neuware