Sample Abstract

Below you will find a copy of the sample abstract Priya distributed in class.

Visualizing Architectures of Insurgency

A few aspects of the anti-colonial Indian uprising of 1857 are immediately evident when we turn to records of the event. It attracted international attention for its magnitude of violence against the occupiers, interpreted through various political lenses including the vision of Karl Marx, who treated it as an exposure of the "barbarism of bourgeois (European) civilization" in his articles for the New-York Daily Tribune. The event produced a definitive rupture in the form of global empire, as the British government assumed authority over the corporate East India Company, beginning an era of colonial administrative rationalities worldwide. Equally significant, the uprising marked photography's widespread use in managing the resistant colonial body, inaugurating photography as a political tool.
While attention has been paid to Britain's photographic staging of dead colonial bodies to commemorate the terrible vengeance wreaked upon those who would be insurgents, shots of ruined cities central to the insurgency are treated as incidental backdrop. Arguing that ruins bearing the shock of recent violence constitute a rupture in the picturesque aesthetic of British "follies" (monuments deliberately constructed to appear whittled by time, to cultivate a contemplative spectator), I study the production of space and spectatorship in a photographic album of Lucknow's architecture in 1859, published shortly after the city was demolished for playing a key part in the insurgency. During the early to mid nineteenth century, when diverse objects were referred to as "albums" (including scrap books of Victorian gentlewomen and Englishmen's private collections of public images), the Lucknow album is distinct in offering a pre-cinematic narrative, structured like an early travelogue in auto-ethnographic mode, addressing a modern viewer by using a kinetic sense of movement across pitted buildings with deep historical residues. A dual hermeneutic operates as the "anti-aesthetic" of destruction annihilates the classic contemplative viewer, and the image of a ruin--Lucknow in this instance, but proleptically also Ayodhya, the World Trade Center, Faluja--mobilizes a voyeuristic tourist while enacting the phantom presence of a menacing mob, a key figure of phobia for modern technological mediation worldwide. Placing the Lucknow album in relation to two films with the same locational referent--the Edison silent Relief of Lucknow (USA, 1912) and the Urdu Chaudhvin ka Chand (India, 1960), both of which move location from an "unconscious optic" to a foregrounded terrain--I describe how opposing spatial concretizations of insurgency lead to differing but comparable modes for consuming a violent history and politics through the visual.

Bibliography:

1. Bruno, Guiliana. ATLAS OF EMOTION: JOURNEYS IN ART, ARCHITECTURE, AND FILM. New York: Verso, 2002.
2. Chakravarty, Gautam. INDIAN MUTINY AND THE BRITISH IMAGINATION. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
3. Chaudhary, Zahid. "Phantasmagoric Aethetics: Colonial Violence and the Management of Perception." CULTURAL CRITIQUE 59 (Winter 2005):63-119.
4. Eisenstein, Sergei. "Montage and Architecture," (c.1937), ASSEMBLAGE 10 (1989):111-31.
4. Oldernburg, Veena Talwar. THE MAKING OF COLONIAL LUCKNOW, 1856-1877. NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
5. Lloyd, David. "Ruination, Partition, and the Expectation of Violence (on Allan deSouza's Irish Photography)," SOCIAL IDENTITIES 9, no.4 (December 2003): 475-509.
6. Sturken, Marita. TOURISTS OF HISTORY: MEMORY, KITSCH AND CONSUMERISM FROM OKLAHOMA CITY TO GROUND ZERO. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

Biography:
Priya Jaikumar is Associate Professor at the School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California. She has published articles on colonial and postcolonial cinemas, questions of state power, feminism, and transnational cultural formations. Her book CINEMA AT THE END OF EMPIRE details the intertwined histories of British and Indian cinema during the late colonial period.

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Shorter Version

Title: Visualizing Architecures of Insurgency

The anti-colonial Indian uprising of 1857 produced a definitive rupture in the form of global empire, beginning an era of colonial administrative rationalities worldwide. Equally significant, it marked photography's widespread use in managing the resistant colonial body, inauguating photography as a political tool. While attention has been paid to Britain's photographic staging of dead colonial bodies to commemorate imperial vengeance, shots of ruined cities central to the insurgency are treated as incidental backdrop. Arguing that ruins bearing the shock of recent violence constitute a rupture in the picturesque aesthetic, I study the production of space and spectatorship in a photographic album of Lucknow's architecture, published shortly after the city was demolished for playing a key part in the insurgency. With "albums" referring to diverse objects (including scrap books of Victorian gentlewomen), THE LUCKNOW ALBUM is distinct in its pre-cinematic narrative, structured like an early travelogue in auto-ethnographic mode, addressing a modern viewer in a public space, paced kinetically across pitted buildings with deep historical residue. A dual hermeneutic operates as the image of a ruin--Lucknow in this instance, but proleptically also Ayodhya and Faluja--mobilizes a voyeuristic consumer while enacting the phantom presence of a menacing mob, a figure of phobia for modern technologized mediation worldwide. Placing THE LUCKNOW ALBUM in relation to two films with the same locational referent--Edison's RELIEF OF LUCKNOW (USA, 1912) and the Urdu CHAUDHVIN KA CHAND (India, 1960)--I describe how the circulation of opposing spatial concretizations of insurgency produce a violent history through the architectural visual.