Images of Labour and Cultural Politics of Colonialism - Einzelansicht

Imagine an ayah, a nurse who was engaged as a governess for British children, perched uneasily along with her colonial master’s family as she awaited her turn to be photographed for the family portrait. How did colonial empires perceive and portray her, along with the extensive entourage of domestic servants who constituted the colonial household?

In what ways did colonial visual texts represent colonial cities and produce images of urban  workers? In what ways does the analysis of travel sketches, paintings, photographs, various other cultural materials on the lower orders of the colonial social order- agricultural labour, domestic servants, slaves, fishermen, and various occupational groups from South Asian colonies help us complicate our ideas about colonial encounters and identity formations? What are the visual imaginaries used to categorize and classify social groups? This course will reflect on questions of objectivity, representation, ideology, the politics of seeing and how caste, gender, and racial hierarchies inform the classificatory categories, aesthetics, and production of colonial imaginaries. The course will expose students to a range of visual materials and will involve a discussion of some key works of postcolonial theorists, as well as perspectives drawn from literary studies, anthropology, and historians' engagement with the visual turn in South Asian colonial history. Students will be encouraged to analyze photographs, make notes on people, objects/artifacts and draw their own conclusions.

Students are expected to familiarize themselves with the following texts:

1. Bernard Cohn Colonialism and Forms of Knowledge- Introduction

2. Visual histories of South Asia (Foreword by Christopher Pinney)

3. Pinney “ The Material and Visual Culture of British India” in India and the British Empire. Ed. Douglas M. Peers, Oxford University Press, 2012

4. Claire Lowe What a Picture Can Do’: Contests of colonial mastery in photographs of Asian ‘houseboys’ from Southeast Asia 1880s–1920

3 ECTS (ungraded): class participation + response paper

3 ECTS (graded): class participation + response paper + presentation

6 ECTS (graded): class participation + response paper