Colour, Art and Empire: Visual Culture and the Nomadism of Representation (International Library of Visual Culture)

__Colour, Art and Empire__ explores the entanglements of visual culture, enchanted technologies, waste, revolution, resistance and otherness. The materiality of color offers a critical and timely force-field for approaching afresh debates on colonialism. Located at the thresholds of nomenclature, imitation, mimesis and affect, this book analyses the formation of color and politics as qualitative overspill. Here color can be viewed both as central and supplemental to early photography, the totem, alchemy, tantra and mysticism. From the 18th-century Austrian empress Maria Theresa, to Rabindranath Tagore and Gandhi, to 1970s Bollywood, color makes us adjust our take on the politics of the human sensorium as defamiliarizing and disorienting. Color wreaks havoc with western expectations of biological determinism, objectivity and eugenics. Beyond the cracks of such discursive practice, color becomes a sentient and nomadic retort to be pitted against a perceived colonial hegemony. Its alter materiality's and ideological reinvention as a resource for independence struggles, makes color fundamental to multivalent genealogies of artistic and political action and their relevance to the present. "Colour, Art and Empire explores the entanglements of visual culture, enchanted technologies, waste, revolution, resistance and otherness. The materiality of colour offers a critical and timely force-field for approaching afresh debates on colonialism. This book analyses the formation of colour and politics as qualitative overspill. Colour can be viewed both as central and supplemental to early photography, the totem, alchemy, tantra and mysticism. From the eighteenth-century Austrian Empress Maria Theresa to Rabindranath Tagore and Gandhi, to 1970s Bollywood, colour makes us adjust our take on the politics of the human sensorium as defamiliarising and disorienting. The four chapters conjecture how European, Indian and Papua New Guinean artists, writers, scientists, activists, anthropologists or their subjects sought to negotiate the highly problematic stasis of colour in the repainting of modernity. Specifically, the thesis of this book traces Europeans' admiration and emulation of what they termed 'Indian colour' to its gradual denigration and the emergence of a 'space of exception'. This space of exception pitted industrial colours against the colonial desire for a massive workforce whose slave-like exploitation ignited riots against the production of pigments - most notably indigo. Feared or derided, the figure of the vernacular dyer constituted a force capable of dismantling the imperial machinations of colour. Colour thus wreaks havoc with Western expectations of biological determinism, objectivity and eugenics. Beyond the cracks of such discursive practice, colour becomes a sentient and nomadic retort to be pitted against a perceived colonial hegemony. The ideological reinvention of colour as a resource for independence struggles make it fundamental to multivalent genealogies of artistic and political action and their relevance to the present."-- Provided by publisher 'colour, Art And Empire' Explores The Entanglements Of Visual Culture, Enchanted Technologies, Waste, Revolution, Resistance And Otherness. The Materiality Of Colour Offers A Critical And Timely Force-field For Approaching Afresh Debates On Colonialism. Located At Thresholds Of Nomenclature, Imitation, Mimesis And Affect, This Book Analyses The Formation Of Colour And Politics As Qualitative Overspill. Introduction: Chromo Zones And The Nomadism Of Colour -- Alchemy, Painting And Revolution In India, C.150-1860 -- Supplement, Subaltern Art, Design And Dyeing In Britain And South Asia, C.1851-c.1905 -- Part 1: Still Dreaming Of The Blue Flower? Race, Anthropology And The Colour Sense -- Part 2: Creole Laboratory: Anthropology And Affect In The Torres Strait -- Swadeshi Colour Throughout The Philtre/filter Of Indian Nationalism, C.1905- C. 1947. Natasha Eaton. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 297-395). Contents 5 List of illustrations 7 Acknowledgements 9 Introduction: Chromo Zones and the Nomadism of Colour 11 1. Alchemy, Painting and Revolution in India, c. 1750-1860 29 2. Supplement, Subaltern Art, Design and Dyeingin Britain and South Asia, c.1851-c.1905 75 3. Part 1: Still Dreaming of the Blue Flower? Race, Anthropology and the Colour Sense 145 3. Part 2: Creole Laboratory: Anthropology and Affect in the Torres Strait 189 4. Swadeshi Colour Through the Philtre/Filter of Indian Nationalism, c.1905-c.1947 238 Postscript with a Rag and a Knife 299 Notes 307 Index 407