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

Full text not available from this repository.

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 (former - to 2024)
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: 24 Sep 2024 09:06
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/26010
DOI: 10.1080/14714787.2011.609398

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item