Dominant accounts of the history of photography center the invention of the camera and the novel possibilities of representation that the mobile technology offered in Europe, invariably positioning the Global South as a site of its outward spread. This course challenges this narrative by highlighting South Asia's critical place in photography's plural histories. The topics it covers includes an exploration of how colonialism made South Asia central to the development of photography as a tool of surveillance. Additionally, it addresses the many ways South Asian practitioners in the 19th and early 20th centuries mobilized and undermined its documentary potential, thereby addressing photography's departures from and continuities with South Asian image cultures. Further, the course focusses on photography's role in regional processes of decolonization, it's place in postcolonial modernism and popular culture, and recent developments in photography's exhibitionary and published forms in contemporary South Asia, exploring all these topics in a global and comparative framework.

Textbooks/Other Materials: All readings for this course will be scanned and posted on Canvas.

HISTART Concentration Distributions: Early Modern, Modern and Contemporary, Asia and Europe and the U.S.