BIROn - Birkbeck Institutional Research Online

    Aesthetic bodies: posing on sites of violence in India, 1857–1900

    Willcock, Sean (2015) Aesthetic bodies: posing on sites of violence in India, 1857–1900. History of Photography 39 (2), pp. 142-159. ISSN 0308-7298.

    [img] Text
    Aesthetic Bodies.pdf - Published Version of Record
    Restricted to Repository staff only

    Download (1MB)
    [img]
    Preview
    Text
    27505.pdf - Author's Accepted Manuscript

    Download (606kB) | Preview

    Abstract

    This article looks at how aesthetic concerns inflected the dynamic of imperial relations during the 1857 Indian Uprising and its aftermath. The invention of photography inaugurated a period in which aesthetic imperatives increasingly came to structure the engagement of colonial bodies with the traumas of warfare in British India. The formal conventions of image-making practices were not consigned to a discreet virtual sphere; they were channelled into the contested terrains of the subcontinent through the poses that figures were striking for the camera. I trace how one pictorial convention – picturesque staffage – had the capacity to engender politically and psychologically disruptive tableaus on the contested terrains of empire, as colonial photographers arranged for Indian figures to pose on landscapes that were marked by disturbing wartime violence.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Additional Information: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis, available online at the link above.
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Historical Studies
    Depositing User: Sean Willcock
    Date Deposited: 21 May 2019 10:26
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:51
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/27505

    Statistics

    Activity Overview
    6 month trend
    530Downloads
    6 month trend
    207Hits

    Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.

    Archive Staff Only (login required)

    Edit/View Item
    Edit/View Item