Title Information
Title
The Untimely Image: On Feminist Inactivism and Postcolonial Ethics
Name: Personal
Name Part
Padmanabhan, Lakshmi
Role
Role Term: Text
creator
Name: Personal
Name Part
Gandhi, Leela
Role
Role Term: Text
Advisor
Name: Personal
Name Part
Rooney, Ellen
Role
Role Term: Text
Advisor
Name: Personal
Name Part
Azoulay, Ariella
Role
Role Term: Text
Reader
Name: Personal
Name Part
Schneider, Rebecca
Role
Role Term: Text
Reader
Name: Corporate
Name Part
Brown University. Department of Modern Culture and Media
Role
Role Term: Text
sponsor
Origin Information
Copyright Date
2018
Physical Description
Extent
xiv, 144 p.
digitalOrigin
born digital
Note: thesis
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2018
Genre (aat)
theses
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.
Subject (fast) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/00915833")
Topic
Ethics
Subject (fast) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/01061714")
Topic
Photography
Subject (fast) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/01073032")
Topic
Postcolonialism
Subject (fast) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/00798702")
Topic
Aesthetics
Subject (fast) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/01244520")
Topic
South Asia
Subject
Topic
temporality
Subject
Topic
Critical Race Studies
Subject (fast) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/00922816")
Topic
Feminist theory
Subject (fast) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/00918452")
Topic
Experimental films
Subject (fast) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/01904327")
Topic
Postcolonialism in motion pictures
Subject (fast) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/01178818")
Topic
Women's rights
Subject (fast) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/00810343")
Topic
Anti-imperialist movements
Subject (fast) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/01737382")
Topic
Neoliberalism
Language
Language Term (ISO639-2B)
English
Record Information
Record Content Source (marcorg)
RPB
Record Creation Date (encoding="iso8601")
20180618
Identifier: DOI
10.26300/xjjq-nj71
Access Condition: rights statement (href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/")
In Copyright
Access Condition: restriction on access
Collection is open for research.
Type of Resource (primo)
dissertations