Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India

(Paperback)

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Afterimage of Empire provides a philosophical and historical account of early photography in India that focuses on how aesthetic experiments in colonial photography changed the nature of perception. Considering photographs from the Sepoy Revolt of 1857 along with landscape, portraiture, and famine photography, Zahid R. Chaudhary explores larger issues of truth, memory, and embodiment.

Chaudhary scrutinizes the colonial context to understand the production of sense itself, proposing a new theory of interpreting the historical difference of aesthetic forms. In rereading colonial photographic images, he shows how the histories of colonialism became aesthetically, mimetically, and perceptually generative. He suggests that photography arrived in India not only as a technology of the colonial state but also as an instrument that eventually extended and transformed sight for photographers and the body politic, both British and Indian.

Ultimately, Afterimage of Empire uncovers what the colonial history of the medium of photography can teach us about the making of the modern perceptual apparatus, the transformation of aesthetic experience, and the linkages between perception and meaning.

Reviews

"An ambitious and theoretically challenging study of how photography shapes a new sensory and governmental apparatus of modernity in the colonial context, Afterimage of Empire succeeds in transforming the ways we think about the histories of photography and of colonialism." David Lloyd, University of Southern California

"Afterimage of Empire is a significant and original work of cultural analysis, and an important intervention in our understanding of the sensory and rhetorical dimensions of nineteenth century colonialism." Iftikhar Dadi, Cornell University

"Afterimage of Empire is an astute analysis of photographic material, from the early days of the medium. It is impressive in its ability to move with care through the different scales of analysisfrom the minutiae of scattered skulls in the foreground of one photograph to the question of whether a technology transforms both aesthetic form and the viewing subject." Ranjana Khanna, Duke University

Author Bio

Zahid R. Chaudhary is assistant professor of English at Princeton University.