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The Anticolonial Snapshot: South Asian Disruptions

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Abstract:
Anticolonialism is trapped in an impossible logic. The opposition to colonialism becomes the means of its persistence. Independence from British rule through the Partition of India and Pakistan is one such failure of opposition where violent repatriation makes colonial and decolonial states comparable. My dissertation, The Anticolonial Snapshot: South Asian Disruptions, analyzes photography and literature in modern South Asia to argue for anticolonialism as the mediation of the antagonists of injury and freedom, rather than as a pure opposition to colonialism. I reground the problem of anticolonialism in the archive, calling attention to little-known materials within the genres of convict, humanitarian, and ethnographic photography, which I bring into relation with British, Anglophone, and vernacular literature from South Asia. Focusing on local and minor acts of freedom that have remained unrecognized, I show that anticolonialism is related to but distinct from the movement for regime change, that disruption is separate from, and, often, an inverse of, the intention to oppose colonialism. Anticolonialism, I argue, cannot be read either as the fight for independent state sovereignty or reduced to assertions of self-determination made by the colonized. Instead, I propose that anticolonialism is a site of contestation that must be traced through subjects who are made superfluous to opposition, the struggles, for example, of transported convicts, of repatriated women, and of ex-untouchables to live with, resist, submit to, and displace the colonial relation and its persistence in both nation-state sovereignty and native claims of otherness.
Notes:
Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2016)

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Citation

Mehta, Rijuta, "The Anticolonial Snapshot: South Asian Disruptions" (2016). Modern Culture and Media Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.7301/Z09W0CW1

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