Description
- Abstract:
- We are often told that we live in an age of protest, given the rise of political movements such as Black Lives Matter, the Women’s Marches, and the Arab Spring. This political ethos of populist protest is made visible in images of mass mobilization. Images of political movements have been central to how we understand their successes and failures. Through this study, I illustrate how photographic form has shaped our understanding of what constitutes such freedom of movement. The rise of photography as a documentary practice has been coterminous with modern forms of historiography and temporality. Photographic temporality — its ability to capture the past — has been central to representing and managing colonial and postcolonial history. The “Untimely Image,” documents minor, quotidian practices of civil disobedience that are made legible through an aesthetics of passivity; thereby insisting on the potential of inaction as a feminist ethos, and as a method of postcolonial historiography. Each chapter provides close readings of documentary photographs and video art including works by Amar Kanwar, Tejal Shah, Sheba Chhachhi, and Sonia Khurana. I argue for forms of impotentiality — waiting, stillness, silence — as they make visible an existing undercurrent of anti-colonial ethics. Part I, “Then,” reads scenes of rest amid political violence, documenting non-violent confrontations that occur within the photographic frame. Here, I argue for photographs as sites of temporal cohabitation, where past and present blur. I locate photographs of women’s rights movements in India within a longer genealogy of anti-colonialism through the practice of ‘dharna’ or passive resistance. Part II, “Now,” addresses images of postcolonial life amid the ruins of late capitalism. Here, I read postcolonial studies’ potential for addressing our contemporary moment, when the terms of colonial encounter no longer appear relevant to understanding forms of feminist protest. I illustrate the value of waiting as a form of non-violent resistance to the relentless drive for movement. Taken together, this dissertation develops a mode of temporal critique, reading the ‘untimely images’ of rest and leisure as non-violent alternatives to inhabiting our shared present.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2018
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Citation
Padmanabhan, Lakshmi,
"The Untimely Image: On Feminist Inactivism and Postcolonial Ethics"
(2018).
Modern Culture and Media Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/xjjq-nj71
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Modern Culture and Media Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Modern Culture and Media department....