After Images: Visual Cultures and Subaltern Pasts

Rycroft, Daniel (2011) After Images: Visual Cultures and Subaltern Pasts. Visual Culture in Britain, 12 (3). pp. 367-386. ISSN 1941-8361

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Abstract

In February 1856, the Illustrated London News published a wood-cut print of Sido Murmu, as a captured leader of an anti-colonial rebellion in India led by indigenous Santal headmen. Known as the Hul, this movement has been re-visited by exponents of subaltern historiography in an effort to understand insurgent consciousness, and the parameters of ‘minority’ history. Working across these parameters, this paper employs a visual and historical ethnographic methodology, in order to question whether the interplay between colonial-era and post-independence representations of the Hul may inform a new understanding both of British scopic regimes and of Santal (tribal) and Adivasi (Indigenous) assertion in India. The concept of ‘after-image’ is used metaphorically, to trace how a seemingly imperialist portrait of Sido Murmu has assumed multiple afterlives. I question how these afterlives intersect with the intangible heritage of the Hul especially in the new state of Jharkhand (eastern-central India), to generate an approach to heterotopian encounters that has applicability in both visual studies and subaltern studies.

Item Type:	Article
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Art, Media and American Studies
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Art History and World Art Studies
Depositing User:	Daniel Rycroft
Date Deposited:	06 Jul 2011 09:18
Last Modified:	21 Jul 2023 09:21
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/26010
DOI:	10.1080/14714787.2011.609398

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