Empires of light: Vision, visibility and power in colonial India

by Niharika Dinkar, Amelia Jones (Editor)

Overview

Light was central to the visual politics and imaginative geographies of empire, even beyond its role as a symbol of knowledge and progress in post-Enlightenment narratives. This book describes how imperial mappings of geographical space in terms of 'cities of light' and 'hearts of darkness' coincided with the industrialisation of light (in homes, streets, theatres) and its instrumentalisation through new representative forms (photography, film, magic lanterns, theatrical lighting). Cataloguing the imperial vision in its engagement with colonial India, the book evaluates responses by the celebrated Indian painter Ravi Varma (1848-1906) to reveal the centrality of light in technologies of vision, not merely as an ideological effect but as a material presence that produces spaces and inscribes bodies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781526139658
Publisher:	Manchester University Press
Publication date:	09/19/2019
Series:	Rethinking Art's Histories
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Niharika Dinkar is Associate Professor of South Asian Art History and Visual Culture at Boise State University

Table of Contents

Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire

Part I: Technologies of illumination

1 Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta

2 Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination

Part II: 'Visibility is a trap': battles of the veil

3 'Purdah hai purdah!': proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism

4 Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed

Part III: Chiaroscuro, portraiture and subjectivity

5 Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma's scholar paintings

6 Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows

Postscript

Index