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Lines of Inquiry: Partition, Historiography and the Art of Zarina Hashmi
Full text linkThis paper examines Dividing Line (2001), a woodcut print by the contemporary Indian artist Zarina Hashmi, in relation to a history of Partition, the division of the Indian subcontinent in August 1947 that gave rise in part to the Islamic state of Pakistan. An abstracted rendering of the Indo-Pakistani border, Dividing Line, as this paper argues, not only presents an important pathway into the discussions around the place of Partition in the overall analysis of modern and contemporary South Asian art, but also raises significant questions around what the artist or the visual arts can uniquely contribute to the writing and understanding of Partition history in the present, a vexed and fragile historical terrain. This paper posits that Dividing Line can be understood as a historiographical threshold, a space upon which divergent and marginal histories of Partition converge. I argue, more specifically, that Zarina's use of cartography and her tendency towards abstraction in Dividing Line not only exhibits a unique capacity to both recognize and `map' the tensions and contradictions inherent to the historiography of Partition but also enables an endless dialectic around Partition `history' and `memory' through which fixed understandings of Partition can then be challenged and unsettled in powerful and productive ways
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Inventing the South: Regional Tourism After the Civil War
Full text linkThis dissertation argues that tourism exerted a transformative impact on the American South following the Civil War, functioning as a space of contestation where Southerners of different backgrounds contributed to the development of distinct iterations of the region and various ideas of Southern-ness. It explores how tourism played a pivotal role in modernizing parts of the Southern economy; shaping prevailing ideas of regional heritage, culture, and identity; spurring urbanization and creating unique place-images for Southern cities; effecting the forms and institutions of artistic production in the region; and exacerbating socio-economic disparities at the same time as providing opportunities for marginalized subjects to access and influence the public sphere. Focusing on the Southeastern states of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, this dissertation conducts in-depth research on four case studies from Charleston, Savannah, Jacksonville, and St. Augustine. Employing interdisciplinary methodologies from art history, the history of architecture, visual studies, and tourism studies, this dissertation investigates a diverse array of materials - from paintings and photographs to guidebooks, souvenirs, newspapers, travelogues, exhibitions, museums, and built and natural environments
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Reconsidering G�r�me: The Private Life of The Snake Charmer in The United States
Full text linkThis paper is a study of Jean-L�on G�r�me’s The Snake Charmer, 1879 in context with its yet examined life within the United States in the collection of the Clark family. This painting rose to prominence upon publication of Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism, where it was featured as its cover image. Since then, subsequent art historians have sutured the image to post-colonial methodologies, failing to acknowledge the material contexts with which it was collected and displayed. By examining these key contexts and players, new understandings about American orientalism and the role of race, class, gender and sexuality begin to emerge. Consequently, this paper seeks to unmask hidden readings of G�r�me’s artwork, while re-orienting questions about the painting away from its depicted subject matter towards the owner as subject. By examining the mode of its private display next to G�r�me’s Pollice Verso, 1872, and its relationship to Alfred Corning Clark, an alternative reading outside of existing art historical inquiry comes into view
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Art, Democracy, and the Culture of Dissent in 1950s Turkey
Full text linkArt, Democracy, and the Culture of Dissent in 1950s Turkey tracks the emergence of a modern Turkish art world of unprecedented size and dynamism between 1950 and 1960, a period during which Turkey first experimented with multi-party democracy. The scholarship on modern visual culture in the Middle East has often focused on the moment of nation-formation, emphasizing the determining role played by nationalist ideologies in shaping modern lifestyles in the new states that formed across the region in the twentieth century. In contrast, this dissertation analyzes what postcolonial scholarship has called the “moment of maneuver”: the transitional time when a young nation-state begins to rethink its nationalist past, while articulating a new vision of an international future through subscription to Western forms of liberal democracy. Cold War ideologies of democracy were a key reference for the members of the Turkish art world who inaugurated novel forms of institution-building, exhibition-making, and written critique. Drawing on Turkish, French, and English-language archives and interviews, the dissertation examines how artists and writers used exhibitions, painting, and art criticism to promote the democratic principles of popular participation, freedom of expression, and dissent. Throughout, it demonstrates that art was shaped by transnational intellectual currents, global organizations like UNESCO, and international exhibitions. This research troubles existing accounts’ portrayal of the West as a generative center from which modernist artistic currents and democratic political ideals radiated outwards, as if transmitted to a series of passive, “peripheral” receivers after World War II. Instead, it demonstrates that Western artistic and political ideologies were simply one component within a complex constellation of forces that shaped the development of modern art worlds across the globe. Furthermore, it argues that it is only by engaging with art worlds like Turkey’s—simultaneously in dialogue with the West and forged through processes of decolonization and nationalization—that we can fully understand the fundamental transformation that ideologies of modernism underwent in the post-war period
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Partition and the Historiography of Art in South Asia
Full text linkThis dissertation investigates the impact of the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 on the development of art, art institutions, and aesthetic discourse in India and Pakistan in the twentieth century. At the core of this study is the history of the Lahore Museum, whose collections of art and archaeology were divided between the emerging nations of India and Pakistan beginning in 1948. My analysis traces the contours of this division of movable art and heritage, against the broader spirit of madness of the period, to bring forth the crisis of dispossession that the Lahore collections endured in response to this unprecedented process of bifurcation. I argue that the fate of the Lahore collections in the twentieth century dramatizes the partition’s empirical and epistemological ramifications for art and art writing across South Asia both then and now. It exposes the forms of physical and ideological violence imposed on art and culture in the course of this process of decolonization and nation-building; it elucidates the pivotal role that museums have played in negotiating the ruptures of place, history, and identity concomitant to the experience of partition in South Asia; and, it unravels the dialectics of non-belonging and nationalization that entangle India and Pakistan into the present. I contend, moreover, that the case of the Lahore Museum stands as an allegory for the partition as an unfinished process of cultural fragmentation in South Asia. Methodologically, this dissertation combines extensive archival records, formal analysis of art objects, and histories of archaeology and museum spaces, with debates in Indian historiography and post-colonial criticism to weave a cross-border history of art and museums. It uproots the nationalist logic at the center of prevailing art historiography in South Asia by foregrounding repressed art histories of division, displacement, and dispossession. By writing on and across the Indo-Pakistani border, my analysis further emphasizes the continued ties between archives and museum collections in India and Pakistan, and seeks to intertwine these resources otherwise isolated by virulent national divides. In the process, this dissertation asserts the necessity of the visual arts to any writing of partition history in South Asia, and ultimately exposes how the experience of partition in South Asia has, through either memory or representation, perpetuated a pervasive ethos of division that continues to structure the art history of modernism in India and Pakistan today
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Intimate Durations: Reimagining Contemporary Indian Photography
Full text linkThis dissertation examines a mode of photographic practice in contemporary India marked by intimate, long-term engagement between artist and subject. I argue that the aesthetic of intersubjectivity embodied in this work lays claim to a sophisticated, progressive politics of gender and alterity through attention to complex negotiations of social hierarchy within contemporary India. In exploring the under-examined role of photography in the development of recent South Asian art, I further argue that this work anticipates the participatory paradigm that came to prominence in South Asia in the early 2000s, and that the unique history of photographic practice in the subcontinent opened significant possibilities for more substantially relational engagement between artist and subject. Building on this history allowed the three photographers at the heart of my project to develop a form of quiet activism, exemplary within the trajectory of contemporary art in South Asia.My analysis is grounded in the work of three Delhi-based photographers: Sheba Chhachhi (b. 1958), Dayanita Singh (b. 1961), and Gauri Gill (b. 1970). Each embraces a mode of social outreach across boundaries of cultural difference over long periods of time, often more than a decade. Chhachhi began her work with women activists, and later explored the lives of female sadhus (Hindu religious renunciates). Singh photographed Mona Ahmed—a member of the highly insular hijra (transgender/eunuch) community in South Asia, and later focused on the equally insular communities of India’s social and economic elite. Gill pursued relationships with several rural communities in Rajasthan, and spent more than eighteen years photographing girls and their families as they negotiated harsh conditions of survival often beyond the purview of the state. This dissertation proposes a framework for understanding the intersubjective aesthetic embodied in these works on the basis of three interrelated qualities: a long temporal duration that enables complex representations of time within the work; a struggle for personal and cultural recognition on the part of both photographer and subject within South Asia’s complex social hierarchy; and ethical agency on the part of the photographer to represent her subjects responsibly and bear witness to the complexity of their lives
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Mother Figure: Art and the Palestinian Dream-State, 1965-1982
Full text linkMother Figure: Art and the Palestinian Dream-State, 1965-1982 considers the development of new aesthetic and philosophical currents in Palestinian art between the launch of the Palestinian Revolution in 1965 and its defeat in the Siege of Beirut in 1982. During this brief, tumultuous, and radically hopeful period, Palestinians in exile gained unprecedented agency over their fate, emblematized in the Beirut-based pseudo-state of the Palestine Liberation Organization. In the visual and literary arts, the dynamic, forward-looking optimism of the revolutionary moment wrestled with the ongoing traumas of exile, creating tension that materialized in the related figures of the dream and the maternal body. Placing established nationalist aesthetics in conversation with understudied imaginaries of fantasy and science-fiction, this dissertation traces the emergence of the “dream-state,” an extranationalist framework for conceptualizing Palestine that simultaneously indexes the nightmarish uncanny in its present and fosters multidirectional modes of anticipating its future. This framework marks Palestine’s difference from nations that exist in sovereign, territorialized form; Palestinians do not “imagine” the nation as a subconscious means of belonging to a community, but as a complex act of mourning, resistance, speculation, and survival. This dissertation looks primarily at the visual art of Samira Badran (b. 1954), Mustafa Hallaj (1938-2002), Juliana Seraphim (1934-2005), and Ismail Shammout (1930-2006). It also considers the work of visual artists Mona Saudi (1945-2022), Ibrahim Ghannam (1930-1984), Jumana Husseini (1932-2018), and Abdel Rahman Al-Muzayen (b. 1943), as well as literature by Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), Taha Muhammad Ali (1931-2011), Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972), and Muzaffar al-Nawaab (b. 1934). Across the diverse artistic practices represented by these figures, the dream-state appears most clearly in different iterations of the female form that emphasize its reproductive capacity. Through these iterations––faithful surrogate, loving mother, barren monster, virgin territory––the maternal body articulates the dream-state’s tenacious futurity while indexing its patriarchal parameters. In considering the dream-state through and against its wombs, Mother Figure explores the gendered hopes and anxieties shaping new modes of imagining Palestine at a generative moment in decolonial history
Making Worlds, Making Way: Queer Belongings in Indian Contemporary Art (1980-2000)
Full text linkThis dissertation project concerns photography and painting in India from the long 1980s and ‘90s: decades marked by heightened religious factionalism, the ascendency of the Hindu right, and the country’s increased economic integration with world markets. In this period of flux, metropolitan centers like Mumbai and New Delhi, as well as regional sites such as Baroda, witnessed the emergence of practitioners who had come of age in an independent nation, trained at institutions across the country that were actively attempting to decolonize their pedagogy. While most studies of Indian art in the twentieth century have framed their discussions using a national-cultural model as an interpretative lens, my research asks how artists called the very tenets of democratic secular nationalism into question by pursuing images of daily life, its affects and ephemera, using an analytical frame informed by queer, feminist, and postcolonial theories. By addressing the work of an intergenerational cohort of artists, including Nilima Sheikh, Arpita Singh, Bhupen Khakhar, and Dayanita Singh, I show how these practices imagined relationality, community, and identity outside of state-sanctioned articulations of nationhood. I use the key principles of friendship, kinship, conviviality, intimacy, and belonging to anchor my investigation, providing counterpoints to the civilizational narratives that evolved at independence to ground nationalist sensibilities and ultimately consolidate right-wing support for the Hindutva. Following from recent debates in queer studies, I resist the monumental category of “the national,” searching instead for subnational ties in order to locate disruptive sites of meaning. This includes instances of unexpected collaboration, for example, in Dayanita Singh’s photographs, or representations of tender adoration between queer men in the work of Bhupen Khakhar. In doing so, my dissertation shows how major figures in twentieth-century South Asian art have consistently resisted attempts to shore up a stabilized national identity by creating images that deal with the politics of quotidian life and portray subtle resistances to Brahmanical heterosexist patriarchy
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The Rock Garden: A Study of Memory, Place-Making, and Community in Chandigarh, India
Full text linkThis dissertation disrupts the constructed opposition that has long been integral to scholarly and popular accounts of both the planned city of Chandigarh and the forty-acre artwork and built environment, the Rock Garden, contained within its parameters. The dominant mythology has consistently pitted the city’s architect, Le Corbusier—the heroic mid-century modernist “master”—against the Garden’s creator—the humble villager and “outsider artist” Nek Chand. This work, positioned within colonial and post-colonial studies and urban history discourse, proceeds by analyzing the materiality of both the Garden and the city’s physical structures, the narratives surrounding the international circulation and display of Chand’s sculptures, and the processes of codification and fetishization of the work’s origin narratives. The dissertation excavates the complicated ways in which the work intersects with local, national, and international concerns and illustrates how intricately connected the mechanisms of the Garden are to the central operations of the city. By situating Chandigarh’s complexities as indicative of a contested experience, and by placing the Rock Garden within the field of these complications rather than in opposition to them, this dissertation deconstructs the dominant myth and establishes instead a more carefully connected understanding of artist Nek Chand, the Rock Garden, and of Chandigarh itself
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Wearing an Authentic Arab Body: New Masculinities in Contemporary Photography
Full text linkRepresentations of the veiled woman dominate Western collections of contemporary Middle Eastern art. They are also, however, symbolically inextricable from power structures that propagate derogatory tropes of Arab culture, and their proliferation hinders more incisive inquiries into issues of gender in the Middle East. This paper examines how two Middle Eastern photographers, responding to this predicament, have begun to posit new ways of representing resistant bodies, departing from the tired trope of the veil and, in fact, from the female body altogether. An alternative framework for contesting gender relations in the Middle East and associated Western stereotypes can be found in photographic explorations of masculinity, such as Tanya Habjouqa’s Fragile Monsters (2009) and Tamara Abdul Hadi’s Picture an Arab Man (2009). I argue that these works represent a potential for new and productive inquiries, and innovative means of articulating gendered bodies as resistant to imperialist categories of gender and sexuality
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