Description
Book SynopsisIn
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 visibil
Trade Review“Bakirathi Mani demands that we expand the geographic and temporal frame through which to grasp South Asian American representation so that we can engage with the processes of U.S. settler colonialism and racialization.
Unseeing Empire makes an outstanding contribution to Asian American and South Asian diaspora and visual culture studies.” -- Gayatri Gopinath, author of * Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora *
“Beautifully written, meticulously crafted, and combining powerful personal reflection with rigorous scholarship,
Unseeing Empire brings various sets of photographic archives and practices of the early twenty-first century into conversation, from fine art photography and vernacular images to ethnographic pictures. This impressive book makes a vital contribution to several fields, including contemporary art and visual culture studies, museum and curatorial studies, postcolonial theory, and Asian American and American studies.” -- Nicole R. Fleetwood, author of * Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration *
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Unseeing Empire joins an exciting body of scholarship that examines the intersections of visual culture, racial formation, and affect.... [It] implores us to remember the colonial legacies of documentation, surveillance, and display that continue to haunt the images we hope to see.” -- Manan Desai * Journal of American Studies *
Table of ContentsList 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
