Landscape and Spatial Imagination in South Asia
Session will present: In-Person
Recent scholarship in South Asian history has documented the enduring physical and psychic trauma of the 1947 Partition through analyses of newspaper reports, speeches and writings by political leaders, novels, short stories, poetry, oral histories, artworks, films, and television shows. But before this turn to the analysis of political history, literature, and culture, Partition was broadly understood in public discourse as territorial loss. This panel focuses on the artistic representation of Partition’s spatial imaginaries and its environmental effects as they are understood through landscape. In these artworks, landscape—distinct from nature by presence of human intervention—is as much about seeing a place and recording a site as it is about constructing ideas about identity and society, making sense of colonialism, and imagining a future after climate change.
The study of landscape revives basic cultural studies questions about how the oppressions of colonialism, caste domination, and environmental destruction are lived, expressed, and negotiated. How do artists reconsider a system of visual representation that had long been in the hands of British colonizers? Landscapes encourage conversations about the artist’s eyewitness seeing. To what extent are such viewpoints fictional, representing what postcolonial subjects hoped to see? How do landscapes help us join with others in a community bereft of the old sources of belonging? Who is the assumed subject who represents the landscapes of colonial and postcolonial South Asia? Who is excluded, repressed, and erased? How can we make and study landscapes to end structures of oppression rather than reproduce them?
Field(s) of Study:
Geographic Area: South Asia
Colonialism
Topics: Landscape
Environmental studies
Media: Time-Based Media
Chairs:
Pooja Sen, Yale University
and
Tausif Noor, University of California - Berkeley
Discussant:
Devika Singh, Courtauld Institute of Art
Abstract Submissions Closed
